Mohave Canyon 
165 
one he was on. It was now January 17, 1858, and it was on 
January 23d that Johnson was at the point where Beale in¬ 
tended to cross. The steamer accomplishing its errand, he left 
on this day for Yuma. He seems then to have gone to the 
head of navigation before meeting Beale. Ives and Johnson 
must now pass each other before the end of this month of 
December, and the meeting of the two steamers took place 
somewhere in this Colorado Valley, for, under date of January 
31st, Ives says: “Lieutenant Tipton took advantage of an op¬ 
portunity afforded a few days ago, by our meeting Captain 
Johnson, with Lieutenant White and party returning to the 
fort, and went back with them in order to bring up the pack- 
train.” He does not mention, however, that Johnson was 
piloting a steamboat larger than the Explorer. Indeed, I have 
been told that he failed to reply to Johnson’s salute. Slowly 
they worked their way up, and on up, toward their final goal, 
though the water was exceptionally low. At last reaching 
Bill Williams Fork, Ives, who had seen it at the time he was 
with Whipple about four years earlier, could not at first find 
it, though, on the former occasion, in the same season, it had 
been a stream thirty feet wide. It was now a feeble rivulet, 
the old mouth being filled up and overgrown with willows. 
Approaching Mohave Canyon, a rapid was encountered, neces¬ 
sitating the carrying forward of an anchor, from which a line 
was brought to the bow, and this being kept taut, with the 
boat under full steam the obstruction was surmounted without 
damage. This was the common method of procedure at 
rapids. This canyon, Ives, says was a “scene of such impos¬ 
ing grandeur as he had never before witnessed,” yet it is only 
a harbinger of the greater sublimity extending along the 
water above for a thousand miles. Mohave Canyon and The 
Needles soon were left behind, and they were steaming 
through the beautiful Mohave Valley, where the patient foot¬ 
steps of the padres and the restless tramp of the trappers had 
so long ago passed and been forgotten. Probably not one of 
that party remembered that Pattie on horseback had covered 
this same field over thirty years before, or that rare old Garces 
guided his tired mule along these very banks a full half century 
