When he started taking paying passengers by boat through the rapids of the Colorado River's canyons, Norman Nevills invented whitewater tourism and the commercial river business. For twelve years, from 1938 until his death in a plane crash in 1949, he safely took, without a single life lost, friends, explorers, and customers down the Colorado, Green, San Juan, Salmon, and Snake Rivers in boats he designed. National media found him and his adventures irresistible and turned him into the personification of river running. Logging seven trips through the Grand Canyon when no one else had completed more than two, he was called the Fast Water Man. Boatmen he trained went on to found their own competing operations. Always controversial, Nevills had important critics and enemies as well as friends and supporters, but no one can dispute his tremendous impact on the history of western rivers and recreation. Nevills's complete extant journals of those river expeditions are published for the first time in High, Wide, and Handsome. They contain vivid stories and images of still untamed-by-dams rivers and canyons in the Colorado River system and elsewhere, of wild rides in wooden boats, and of the few intrepid pioneers of adventure tourism who paid Nevills so they could experience it all. They have been transcribed and edited by river historian Roy Webb, author of If We Had a Boat: Green River Explorers, Adventurers, and Runners and Call of the Colorado. High, Wide, and Handsome The River Journals of Norman D. Nevills Utah State University Press Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87421-603-5 Contents Foreword........................................................................................viiIntroduction....................................................................................11938: Cataract and Grand Canyons, June 20 to August 1...........................................161940: Green River Through the Grand Canyon, June 17 to August 22................................611941: Grand Canyon, July 14 to August 5.........................................................951942: Grand Canyon, July 12 to August 7.........................................................1191946: Salmon River, July 11 to August 3, Snake River, August 4 to August 17.....................1541947: Green River, June 16 to July 5, Grand Canyon, July 10 to August 5.........................1861948: Grand Canyon, July 11 to August 5.........................................................2161949: Green River, June 19 to July 3 Grand Canyon, July 12 to July 31...........................238Coda............................................................................................251A Note on the Sources...........................................................................255Notes...........................................................................................261Index...........................................................................................303 Chapter One Cataract and Grand Canyons, June 20 to August 1, 1938 By 1937 Nevills sensed that he was on the verge of that big strike that had eluded his father and so far, eluded him; he might be able to make a good living taking paying passengers down the wild San Juan and Colorado Rivers. The key was publicity: people wouldn't sign up for what they didn't know about, and he knew he needed a lot more publicity than was it was possible to obtain living in remote southeastern Utah. The chance for something bigger came along in the form of Elzada Clover, a small, unassuming botanist from the University of Michigan, who drove into Mexican Hat in August of that year looking for cacti. A plan that had been bubbling in Nevills's head for a while surfaced, and he quickly found a willing ally in Clover. Over the table at the Mexican Hat Lodge, they hatched a plan to traverse the rugged canyons of the Colorado. Clover headed back to Michigan to recruit crew and obtain funding from the university, while Nevills, along with USGS engineer Don Harris, spent the winter of 1937-38 building three boats to Nevills's design, that he called cataract boats. Harris agreed to go along as a boatman, as long as he did not jeopardize his job with the USGS (this being the Depression), and he was promised one of the boats in return for his labor. Nevills also recruited a San Francisco artist, Bill Gibson. Clover, meanwhile, brought back her lab assistant, Lois Jotter, and a graduate student in zoology, Gene Atkinson. The party departed in high spirits from Green River, Utah, on June 20, 1938, for the first leg of the trip that would take them through Labyrinth and Stillwater Canyons on the Green River to the confluence with the Colorado, through the dangerous rapids of Cataract Canyon, then through Glen Canyon to Lees Ferry, Arizona. The water was near its peak flow, at 17,400 cubic feet per second (cfs). In the words