The Colorado River 
170 
twelve years later claims the honour of naming, forgetting that 
Ives uses the name in his report), they visited the Havasupai 
in their deep canyon home, just as Garces had done, and then 
proceeded to the towns of the Moki. Ives was deeply im¬ 
pressed by the repellant nature of the great canyon and the 
surroundings, and remarks: ''It seems intended by nature 
that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely 
and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed/’ 
Late in the same year that Lieutenant Ives made his inter¬ 
esting and valuable exploration, another military post was 
established on the Colorado, and called Fort Mohave, just 
about where the California line intersects the stream. Lower 
down, Colorado City had been laid out several years before 
(1854) under amusing circumstances. The Yuma ferry at that 
time was operated by a German, thrifty after his kind, and on 
the lookout for a "good thing,” A party of indigent pros¬ 
pectors, returning from the survey of a mine in Mexico, 
reached the Arizona bank with no money to pay for the 
crossing, and hit upon the ingenious plan of surveying a town 
site here and trading lots to the German for a passage. Boldly 
commencing operations, the sight of the work going on soon 
brought the ferryman over to investigate, and when he saw 
the map under construction he fell headlong into the scheme, 
which would, as they assured him, necessitate a steam ferry.^ 
The result was the immediate sale of a portion of the town to 
him and the exchange of a lot for the necessary transportation 
to the opposite bank. Afterwards, these parties did what they 
could to establish the reality of the project, but up to date it 
has not been noted as a metropolis, and the floods of 1861-2 
undermined its feeble strength. Another name for it was 
Arizona City. 
The year following the Ives expedition, Captain Macomb 
(1859) was sent to examine the junction of the Green and 
Grand rivers. For a considerable distance he followed, from 
Santa Fe, almost the same trail that Escalante had travelled 
^ Across America and Asia, by Raphael Pumpelly, p. 60. The portion of this 
admirable work relating to the vicinity of the Colorado River will be found of 
great interest in this connection. 
