Pre-Territorial Boating in Arizona, 1541-1863

By: Jon Fuller

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Pre-Territorial Boating in Arizona tells the stories of Arizona's first boaters. Indigenous tribes began boating the lower Colorado River long before Hernan de Alarcon sailed up the Colorado to Yuma in 1541. Beaver trapper James Ohio Pattie floated dugout canoes on the lower Gila and Colorado rivers in the winter of 1827-28. In 1847, the Mormon Battalion built an unwieldy boat from two wooden ponton wagons and floated the Gila from near Agua Caliente to the Colorado River crossing.

Numerous Forty-Niners floated the Gila River enroute to California's gold fields, including Gila Howard, the first American child born in Arizona. Gila's story is told correctly for the first time in this book. Then in the 1850's, Lt. Joseph Christmas Ives and George Johnson ushered in the era of steamboating on the lower Colorado and lower Gila rivers. Ives also recorded the first use of an inflatable and a foldable boat on an Arizona river.

A retired hydrologist and geomorphologist, Jon has been writing about Arizona rivers for more than 40 years. In 1992, Jon was hired by the State Land Department to research and write reports on Arizona's navigable rivers. That work continued for 29 years. Along the way, Jon collected several hundred stories about Arizona's earliest boaters. Pre-Territorial Boating in Arizona, 1541-1863 is Jon's fifth book and the fourth in Jon's Arizona River Anthology Series.