In the spring of 1972, a 93-foot 150-passenger stern-wheeler ([fig. 69]) began passenger service on the Colorado River from just above Potash to the foot of Dead Horse Point and return (Lansford, 1972).
Entrenched and cutoff meanders
Meanders such as those above the confluence generally are formed by streams flowing in soft alluvium consisting of clay, silt, and sand, such as along the Mississippi River below Cairo, Ill. But there is no soft alluvium along the Colorado and Green Rivers, so how did these meanders form? They probably attained their serpentine shape while cutting in softer, younger material, which long ago was removed by erosion, and then continued to cut their crooked channels down, until they created the deep rock-walled canyons in which they now flow as “entrenched” meanders.
Meandering streams tend to shorten their lengths from time to time by cutting through narrow walls between adjacent loops, leaving abandoned horseshoe-shaped channels or lakes. In most of the United States these are known as oxbows or cutoff meanders, but in the desert Southwest they are commonly called by the Spanish term “rincon.” Cutoffs are common along soft alluvial channels such as the lower Mississippi River valley but are rare along channels whose meanders are entrenched into hard rock. Thus, there have been many natural (and several manmade) cutoffs along the lower Mississippi during historic times, but the most recent ones along the Green and upper Colorado Rivers probably occurred a million or so years ago, during the Pleistocene Epoch (figs. [65], [80]).
Mark Twain served several years as an expert riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River during which several cutoffs took place. Chapter 27 of his “Life on the Mississippi” contains sage references to both natural and artificial cutoffs and concludes with a few good-natured jibes at geologists in particular and scientists in general:
Therefore the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cutoff of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently, its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor “development of species,” either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague—vague. Please observe:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oölitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Green River
Much more has been written about the Green River and the main stem of the Colorado than about the Colorado above the confluence (the former Grand River), because all but one of the early float trips began on the Green. The first reports concerning Powell’s memorable voyages of 1869 and 1871 were his articles published in Scribners Monthly during 1874 and 1875 followed by his formal 1875 report “Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries.” As pointed out by Porter (1969, p. 21), however, Powell’s narrative
is written as if everything chronicled therein occurred during the first trip. Events which actually occurred in 1871 and 1872 are reported as happening in 1869. There is no mention of the personnel of the 1871-72 party, nor is there an indication that there even was a second trip. The engravings illustrating the report were made from photographs taken by Beaman and Hillers between 1871 and 1874, but this fact is not noted.
For these reasons, Porter’s account contains Powell’s diary of the first (1869) trip and many of the missing photographs, plus his own beautiful color prints. Much more complete and accurate accounts of the 1871 voyage than those of Powell, including many of the photographs taken by Beaman and Hillers, were given by Dellenbaugh (1902, 1962), who was a member of Powell’s 1871 expedition.