142 
The Colorado River 
owners. Hobbs employed the Yumas to take his party over, 
the horses swimming, and the arrangement seems to have 
worked very well. 
According to Hobbs, the first steamboat came up the river 
while he was there, frightening the Yumas so that they ran for 
their lives, exclaiming the devil was coming, blowing fire and 
smoke out of his nose, and kicking back with his feet in the 
water. It was the stern-wheel steamboat Yttma, and this is the 
only mention of it I can find. It had supplies for the troops, 
but what became of it afterward I do not know. This was 
evidently before the coming of the Uncle Sam, usually credited 
with being the first steamboat on the Colorado, which did not 
arrive till a year after the reconnaissance of the river mouth by 
Lieutenant Derby of the Topographical Engineers, for the War 
Department, seeking a route for the water transportation of 
supplies to Fort Yuma, now ordered to be a permanent military 
establishment. He came up the river a considerable distance, 
in the topsail schooner Invmcible and made a further advance 
in his small boats. The only guide he had to the navigation of 
the river was Hardy’s book, referred to in a previous chapter, 
which assisted him a good deal. He arrived at the mouth De¬ 
cember 23, 1850. “The land,” he says, “was plainly dis¬ 
cernible on both coasts of the gulf, on the California side bold 
and mountainous, but on the Mexican low and sandy.” There 
could, therefore, never have been any doubt in the minds of 
any of those who had previously reached this point as to the 
character of Lower California. The Invincible sailed daily up 
the river with the flood tide, anchoring during the ebb, and 
they got on very well till the night of January i, 1851, when 
the vessel grounded at the ebb, 
“ swung round on her heel, and, thumping violently, was carried by 
the tide (dragging her anchor) some two or three miles, grounding 
finally upon the shoal of Gull Island. At flood tide sail was made 
on her as soon as she floated, and we succeeded in getting her back 
into the channel. As the vessel grounded at every ebb tide and on 
the return of the water was violently swung around, thumping on 
her bottom and swinging on her anchor, I began to see that it would 
