Evening Republican, Volume 15, Number 269, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 November 1911 — VESSEL WILL CROSS DESERT [ARTICLE]

VESSEL WILL CROSS DESERT

Steamboat Will Navigate Canyon of Colorado River—Built for Use of Mining Company.

San Francisco. —One of the strangest projects of navigation ever known is to be put under way with the completion of a steamboat that Is now being constructed at a local shipyard. The craft is first to cross the desert and then is to be launched on the Colorado river and navigate part of its deep canyons. She will be 70 feet long, of 83 tons, and will be driven by stern wheeL

She Is being built for the use of a mining company which has been conducting some large operations in taking gold from the bed of the Colorado canyon at Lees Ferry, Ariz. This is the only crossing op the river for hundreds of miles, because the stream runs through great sand cliffs which start well up in Utah, and a few miles below the ferry it dips into the Marble canyon, which then leads into the Grand canyon, and the water goes through the Buckskin mountains Tar below their summit

Although the river throughout most of its course is wild with rapids and falls, there is a long stretch in the vicinity of the ferry house where it runs smoothly, and the curren is not too strong. It is for the purpose of taking workers and supplies up and down stream in the gold operations and for carrying coal from a deposit that has been found in the Marble canyon that the vessel is being ■ built She will

have a speed of ten miles an hour, enough to overcome the-current, and will enable the gold hunters to reach places now Inaccessible. The boat will be built as any other, and after she is completed she will be taken apart, put on a train, and taken to Flagstaff, Artz. From this point she must be taken over a sandy waste for 200 miles by wagon. At Lees Ferry a crew of men from the shipyards will <>ut her together again and launch her. The operation will be costly, but the miners expect to pay for the steamboat soon with the wider operations and make her a fine investment Persons who have been at the ferry will await with interest the attitude the Navajo Indians will take when they first behold the monster of the water as they cross the river for their trading with the Plutes. Nothing the whites have brought to their attention so far has shaken their stoic calm, bYit this revelation may do so.