Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection

Robert Euler Interview

Interview number: 53.18

[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]

Okay, for the record this is the Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Project. We are in Prescott, Arizona, talking to Bob Euler and this is February the 23rd, 1994.

Steiger: Let's just start with a little bit of your background, you know, just personal history: where were you born and raised and stuff like that.

Euler: I was born in New York, 1924, and my parents moved to Colorado when I was about eight and so I really grew up in Colorado right under the shadow of Pikes Peak, west of Colorado Springs. Went to high school there. Became interested in Indians at that time. I had a job cleaning out an Indian curio store - sweeping it out in the evenings while I was in high school. And I got all interested in Indians. And I decided to go to college and study anthropology. I didn't know much about it and I didn't know where I wanted to go to college. But in my senior year in high school the famous Egyptologist, James Henry Breasted, came to talk in our little high school - 200 kids in the whole high school - and my mother said: "Why don't you go up after his talk and ask him about where you might go to college or university?" So I did. I went up and introduced myself and he said: "Well, are you interested in New World or Old World archeology?" Well, I barely knew the difference. I said: "Well, I'm in the New World. I guess I'm interested in that." And he suggested that I apply to go to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which had a very up and coming department even that time before World War II. So I went there as a freshman in 1940. I spent two years there, until I had to go into the service for World War II. I joined the Marine Corps in the fall of 1942, sort of following in my father's footsteps: he'd been in the Marines in World War I and the Marine Corps at that time promised they'd leave me in school till I graduated, which was a big lie! So by the first of July of '43 I was on active duty. And I had my first experience with Flagstaff that year. The Navy had a V-12 unit, training unit, there. They had 200 Marines and 200 sailors there; and I spent two semesters in school at what is now NAU before I went back to boot camp and on to officer candidate school. I got my commission in the end of September of 1944. Immediately shipped overseas to join a unit in Hawaii and from there went to Iwo Jima. Spent 19 days there until I got shot and then back to various hospitals on Guam and in Hawaii and finally, back to the States. After I was relieved from active duty I went- I liked NAU quite a bit and I went back to school there; eventually took a bachelor's degree and the master's degree there. But not in anthropology; they didn't have any anthropology there. But I took it in economics. And then I decided: "Well, economics isn't really what I want after all. I want to go back to anthropology." So I reapplied to the University of New Mexico. They took me in on sort of a probationary status and I spent three or four years there in course work, trying to make up for what I had missed all the years of the war. And I finally took a job in 1952 at the Museum of Northern Arizona with Dr. Harold Colton. I hadn't quite finished my degree then, but I was out of money and I needed to get a job, so I went there and eventually finished my Ph.D in 1958 while I was working part time at the museum in Flagstaff and teaching part time at what later became NAU. I didn't have any particular interest in Grand Canyon until about 1952. And Dr. Colton sent me over to the Hualapai Reservation to assist that tribe in their land claims case against the federal government. I went there and a good friend and colleague of mine, Dr. Henry Dobyns, was with me. And I did some excavation for the tribe in some of the canyons tributary to the Colorado River - tributary to Grand Canyon off the South Rim. And that really got me excited about the archeology of that area. It was very rugged country. The Hualapais had never been interested in having anybody in there at all. They were not quite so sure of what an archeologist could do for them, but I wound up excavating several sites - mostly rock shelters in Mohawk Canyon, in Peach Springs Canyon, in what on the maps is called "Meriwhitica" Canyon over in the west end of the Canyon, but what is really called "Muktiwhitika" Canyon by the Indians. Then I thought to myself: "Gosh! Wonder what the rest of Grand Canyon is like archaeologically." And I hooked up with the, just by coincidence, with the Arizona Power Authority. At that time, as you probably know, they were interested in building a couple of dams in Grand Canyon: one at Bridge Canyon and one at Marble Canyon. Steiger: Now this is still in .. this is still early 50's?

Euler: It was the late 50's by that time: '58, '59. They took me on a couple of trips over to where they wanted to build Bridge Canyon Dam. They even took me on a river trip up from Pierce’s Ferry up to the damsite just above Separation Canyon. And that whetted my appetite even more. So the Arizona Power Authority in 1960 said: "Would you like to take a river trip and just sort of see what archeological resources are in the way, that would have to be excavated if and when we build these dams?" 1960 was my first river trip and I went with the Sandersons. It wasn't a company then. They were just a family affair. They had three small outboard boats - aluminum boats: 14 feet long, each with twin 35 horse engines on them. And I remember on that trip there were 12 of us and nine of the 12 were Sandersons. It was just a "family outing". That's what it amounted to. And the Arizona Power Authority paid my expenses on the trip. I think they gave Sanderson something like $200 for the whole trip .. which lasted - I can't remember exactly - about 11 days, something like that - that we were on the River. And I must add here that another professional archeologist had preceded me on river trips in the .. in the early 1950's: Dr. Walter W. Taylor, who was a very well-known archeologist, retired now. I don't remember the details of his trip except it was on some boats that had inboard motors. And he was among the first 200 to make the trip down the river, when Dock Marston was still keeping records of how many people went on those trips. He was among the first 200. Somebody on my trip in 1960 was among the first 500 to make the trip. And it was a pretty exciting .. pretty exciting trip. The River was flowing a little over 60,000 cfs. This was in June of 1960. And I really didn't know what I was getting into at all (laughing). But I do remember that when we got above Lava Falls it was the only time Rod Sanderson ever said anything to us. He said: "I just want you to remember, no matter what happens, hang onto that boat. That's your transportation out of here!" And we made it all right. We took a lot of water, but we got .. we got through it just fine on that trip. Um - I did revisit some of the archeological sites that Walt Taylor had recorded a few years before, and recorded a few more at that time. That of course whetted my appetite even more. "I got sand in my hip pockets", as they say! And, um, I managed to make altogether three trips with the Sandersons prior to the building of the Dam. The last trip I remember was - I guess the Dam was being filled then - 1965 I think it was. Um .. those three boats had just about had it. On our first trip in 1960 we took welding equipment with us for the aluminum. When we'd hit rocks they would stop and patch it. On the third trip in those boats they were so full of holes that we were patching them with flattened out tin cans and pieces of Levis and that sort of thing. They were .. they were in pretty bad shape by that time. They'd made 10 trips altogether and I made three with those boats and I think it may have been the last trip they ever made. It certainly was the last trip I ever made in, uh, an aluminum power boat, going down the River.

Steiger: Who, uh .. who drove that? Do you remember who was .. who were the pilots or who was driving the first three boats?

Euler: Well, Rod Sanderson, Jerry's father. Jerry was too young to drive one himself. Uh, he was learning then. And Jerry's uncle from Phoenix: big, husky man, I've forgotten his name, now; maybe it was Bill, something like that. He ran another one. And I've forgotten who ran the third, maybe it was Jerry - I don't mean Jerry - I mean Bill Sanderson - at that time. Somewhere in my files I've got pictures of that, that trip, going through various rapids. And we ran every single one of them. And I didn't have too much time to stop and look for archeological sites because it was too difficult at that high water to tie up where we wanted to. Although I know on the last trip we, at lower water, maybe 40,000, something like that, we were able to run back up the river through Granite Narrows because I had seen a site up on the cliff and I didn't have time to stop and the next day they ran me back up with these power boats. So they had pretty good power for them.

Steiger: Now that first trip was 10 or 12 days long, you were saying?

Euler: 10 or 11, yes.

Steiger: Man! And it was .. Well, I'm surprised that they would hit rocks at 60,000. But they did.

Euler: [laughing] You couldn't see them, of course. The water was so muddy that, uh.. And we drank that muddy river water; that's all we had.

Steiger: But you remember them actually hitting rocks. Euler: Oh, you bet! Yeah! You bet. And I remember them beaching the boat, turning it over, welding the gashes that were in it.

Steiger: Did they have .. was it just a couple of tanks, then? Just a little acetylene kind of torch or something? Or ..

Euler: All I remember, Lew, is that they told me it was very difficult to weld aluminum. But some of the Sandersons were expert at this and so we had torches and I don't know how big the tanks were they used. But that was the only trip we had welding equipment with us. The rest of the time it was patching with other, other materials. In the last trip I took with those power boats, in 1965, I said earlier they were in pretty bad shape by then, the boats were, and so were the motors. And I remember having all sorts of trouble with the motors. Uh, down near Fern Glen we ruined a lower unit and the Sandersons stuck it up under a rock on the left bank. Last time I was down you could barely see it because..

Steiger: But it's still there!

Euler: Is it still there?

Steiger: It's above Fern Glen. On the left.

Euler: Above Fern Glen, yes, right. On the left, yes. They did that just to mark our passage, I guess! On that same trip, by the time we got to Lava Falls, we were out of spare parts for the motors. One of the boats was down to one motor. So I remember very vividly we ran one boat through and then we waited below Lava Falls to watch the second boat come through. And then we were supposed to take off .. uh .. to go to St. George to try to find another lower unit while the second boat carried one of their engines back up above Lava Falls, through that mess over at Warm Springs. Uh, and they all made it .. made it through. We hiked up and I think it was with Bill Sanderson. Let me back up a minute. We were met on each of these trips at the foot of the Bundy Trail, there below Lava, with gasoline. Uh, I know we took on .. in that time they had a pipeline coming down from the Rim and they'd pour five gallons in the top and we'd catch it at the bottom. They rigged that up for those jet boats that were going upriver about the same time.

Steiger: And it was actually the one .. actually at Whitmore Wash, right? That one? Like it .. so it's in .. which would have just been ...

Euler: At Whitmore Wash, yes. That's right. Yes. That's what I call the Bundy Trail. Yes, at Whitmore.

Steiger: You know .. I have to stop this just for a second.

[BRIEF PAUSE]

Euler: Okay, are we on again?

Steiger: Yes. Now we're going.

Euler: The Bundys met us at the foot of the trail, three Bundys. And they had a pickup truck up on top. And we hiked up that trail, something like 1300 feet up, and got in their pickup and went, drove to Bundyville, which had 28 Bundys living in it at the time. And then they drove us into St. George and we did find a lower unit that would fit, and drove back, got to the rim of the Canyon about 11 o'clock at night, and hiked down in the dark.

Steiger: Carrying that thing.

Euler: Carrying that thing. Forgot to take a flashlight, of course! You know! Really "smart" people. Anyway, we got down and we made it through the rest of.. rest of the trip. But barely. In all those trips the boats never flipped, I was never out of the boat at all. I thought I was once in Lava Falls, but, uh, you know, at that high water it was just terrible and I hung on for dear life and made it! [laughing]

Steiger: Man, I tell you! To be down there at 60,000 in a .. And these are 14 foot boats? Euler: Yes. Seven feet wide, 14 .. They held four people: a pilot and three passengers. And we didn't have much room for gear. We didn't take tents or anything like that with us.

Steiger: What would you do in the rain?

Euler: Put a .. we all huddled together and put a tarp over us [laughing]

Steiger: Over the whole trip and that was it.

Euler: Over all 12 people, when it rained. I can remember on one of those trips, opposite Deer Creek Falls, it just poured all night and we had this tarp over us that got hot and sticky and we were afraid of scorpions in fact [laughing]. We stayed relatively dry anyway. So .. I also made, later on, three or four trips with Sandersons in their rafts, their motor-driven rafts. They asked me to go, just as a guest of the company and lecture to the passengers about the archeology and that sort of thing. And those were pretty .. pretty pleasant trips also, 'cause we had cots and good food [laughing] and that sort of thing. Altogether, Lew, I've made 40 trips down the River and I'm sure I won't be making any more. But most of the ones in later years were with Park Service rafts, you know, the Havasus or whatever they were in those days. Some of them I didn't go all the way through. I made one trip with, um, Bruce Babbitt, when he was governor, and some of his friends. And he invited me to go along. We went as far as Phantom and hiked out. That was in June and it was hot as could be! I had an umbrella with me and I hiked up the Bright Angel Trail with that umbrella. People on the trail thought I was crazy: "Oh, can we take your picture?" That sort of .. But at least it kept me relatively cool. One of the boatmen's training trips stopped at Phantom and we hiked out the Kaibab, I know, a lot of us. One of the boatmen's trips that Steve Carothers and I were on, we were camped above Unkar and some of our friends who were boatmen got roaring drunk and raised hell all night long, shouting, singing. Carothers and I said the next morning: "This is it! We're leaving!" And we got a ride down as far as ...

Steiger: Carothers wasn't in the middle of that?

Euler: Who?

Steiger: Carothers? [laughing]

Euler: No, he wasn't, surprisingly! We got a ride down to as far as Hance Rapid and we hiked out .. uh .. up that Red Canyon Trail from there.

Steiger: I think I might have been on the back half of that.

Euler: You may have, yes. [coughing]

Steiger: Because I remember hearing about that. I think that was .. Do you remember .. do you remember Dick Clark? Do you remember him?

Euler: Oh, yes. Very well.

Steiger: Well he was .. there was a trip where I hiked in and took his place. And he might have been on that one, because I was .. because it seems to me .. I came in at Phantom Ranch and I remember hearing that everybody was kind of holding their heads about that one. Like that would have been '81? Somewhere in there?

Euler: Probably. I remember one of my trips we were camped down at Granite Park and Dick Clark came through deadheading and he had just lost a passenger up at South Canyon. Somebody fell off the cliff and was killed there. And he stopped and talked to us for awhile.

Steiger: How did Rod Sanderson .. What was he .. what was Rod Sanderson like? How did he strike you? How was he to be around?

Euler: Uh .. he was a no-nonsense person. Very stern with the kids. I know on one of those trips he caught Jerry up at Phantom Ranch drinking beer and he raised holy hell about that. I can remember him saying: "This river water and booze don't mix! There won't be any of it on my trips!"

Steiger: So he didn't .. so he wasn't a hard-drinking guy himself.

Euler: Oh, I think he might have been. Yes. But not on the river he wasn't. Yes. But he was very skilled. He'd been on the river lots before that. I think he told me once he'd been on at some great flood of over a hundred thousand cfs and, uh, just had practically no control over the boats. He was working, I guess, for the Bureau of Reclamation at an early damsite, which was ... hmm ... up near Redwall Cavern someplace. So that's when he first got on the river, I think. And then he's the one that found the body of that Boy Scout in the late 40's that drowned up in Glen Canyon and they found him at .. in that big eddy at President Harding Rapid. The same place where Hansbrough was found by the Stanton Expedition and buried there up in the cliffs. Rod was on the trip with Willy Taylor who's grave is just down below President Harding there. He died of a heart attack down there. So Rod was a very fine person, a very good man with those power boats. He was a very strict individual with everybody on the .. on the trips.

Steiger: Did .. what .. as far as running the boat was he ... How did you .. like that first trip, do you remember how he would approach the rapids? Was he pretty conservative or did you guys just get out there and get in the waves?

Euler: No, he was quite conservative. Um .. Above many of them we would stop and look them over and he and the other two pilots would plot a course down. Of course this was especially true at Lava. We'd always stopped on the left side of Lava in those days to look it over, rather than the right bank.

Steiger: I bet you ran it on the left, too.

Euler: Yes, I think we did, yes.

Steiger: 60,000!

Euler: Well, those were exciting days. I didn't get as much archeology done as I would have liked because we just didn't have the time to spend a lot of time on land exploring. And on my last trip with the Sandersons, last trip in the power boats, Walt Taylor went with me, the archeologist who had been on the river in the 50's. And we plotted out some research sitting around the campfire. And I think that must have been '65, because in 1966 I got a National Science Foundation grant - I've forgotten how much money was involved - but it was enough for me to spend a couple of months in a helicopter flying all the side canyons from the dam down as far as Havasu on the left and Kanab Canyon on the .. on the right. And I .. It was just marvelous. The pilot was very good. It was an old piston-driven Hiller. But we'd go up the side canyons and then just sort of moosh our way down as low and as slow as he could fly. When we'd spot a ruin we'd land and record it and then go on .. on our way. Those were exciting trips in those piston- driven helicopters.

Steiger: This was in 1966?

Euler: Yes, uh huh.

Steiger: Man! Who was this pilot? That's ...

Euler: The pilot .. uh .. I think his name was Wayne Learn. And he had visions of starting the first helicopter tour business out of .. out of Tusayan. And I contracted with him with my National Science Foundation money to fly us every day - two of us: my assistant, Larry Powers, who lives in Flagstaff now. And, uh, we just had a marvelous time in that helicopter. There were times when we got a lot of down-drafts and we had trouble getting up out of the Canyon. And we'd search around until we found an updraft and then away we'd go. It was much different from the Jet Rangers that I flew in later with the Park Service. I've forgotten how many ruins I recorded: about 60 on that long couple of months that we were flying almost every day. And, uh, then just to wind up that part of the story, in later years when I was with the Park Service at Grand Canyon I was able to commandeer, so to speak, the Jet Ranger and fly into other areas that I had not been in before. For example, we flew the area that's called the Havasupai Traditional Use Lands: mostly the Esplanade, around the Great Thumb and near Mount Sinyalla. We spent three weeks every day flying that area and recorded a tremendous number of ruins in there. I finally got to the point where I felt I knew something about the archeology of Grand Canyon. And if you'd like me to stop here and say something about the archeology, I'll be glad to do that.

Steiger: At some point we darn sure should get into that.

Euler: Well, whenever. Whatever.

Steiger: Dr. Harold Colton, just a little bit of business here: how do you spell his name?

Euler: C.O.L.T.O.N. He founded the Museum of Northern Arizona in the late 1920's. And he was a very wealthy man from Philadelphia, I believe. But he had a Ph.D in zoology that he took about 1908, something like that. He and his wife used to spend their summers in Flagstaff, out in what is now East Flagstaff. And then they decided they liked it so much that they built a house up on Fort Valley Road and started that .. started that museum. He was a wonderful old gentleman. Uh, I don't know how to really to describe him. He was a very gentle man, came from a very wealthy family in Philadelphia, and was very supportive of me when I worked there. I worked for him from 1952 until 1956 when I did .. went full-time teaching at the university. All the time I was trying to finish my Ph.D dissertation and raise a family and that sort of thing.

Steiger: What did you do your dissertation on?

Euler: Well, I mentioned a little bit earlier that Colton had sent me over to the Hualapai Reservation to help them with their land claim case. I [coughing] .. I wound up excavating 10 archeological sites, not all on the Reservation. I said earlier some, in some of those tributary canyons, but also some off the Reservation that we thought had a bearing on their land claim case. Excavated 10 of them and I turned that into a Ph.D dissertation [coughing].

Steiger: I guess maybe we should get .. move into archeology and a way that occurs to me that .. that it might be good to approach it is, uh, I have some real .. some specific topics that I know are of interest to guides and stuff. But maybe it would .. and see if you agree .. maybe it would be good, interesting, to have a kind of an overview of the practice of archeology. Like how .. just sort of what it entails and how you've seen it evolve, like over the course of your career. Because I imagine you have seen a little change there.

Euler: I've seen a lot of changes, yes. When I first started doing archeology I wasn't interested solely in archeology, but I was also interested in the relationship of archeology to living peoples, like the Hopi or the Hualapai or Havasupai. And, um, we simply would develop a research design and a series of questions that we wanted answered through our research and try to follow that as best we could in the field. A lot of my early work was just pure archeological survey. By that I mean you simply went out and covered a piece of ground and tried to see what was there in the way of either historical or prehistorical ruins, before you started thinking about excavating sites. Then you picked out a few important sites that you thought might shed more light on the prehistory of the people you were dealing with and excavate those. We had to have permits at that time from the Department of the Interior to do that work. And, um, we weren't too bothered by a lot of bureaucratic rules and regulations other than those permits. And nowadays it's .. I sometimes say archeology isn't fun anymore. You have to go through all sorts of rigmarole. If you want to excavate a ruin in Grand Canyon, for example, one: you can't excavate human burials - there's a federal law against that. Two: you have to notify every single tribe within a 200 mile radius of the area where you're working to see if they have any concerns or if they don't want you to do this, then you can't do it. It's just a lot of bureaucratic red tape these days and I think archeological research has suffered because of this. Not that, uh, we weren't ethical in those days; we certainly were [coughing]. And I might say that sometimes archeology has attracted some unethical people who would go out and vandalize ruins. But that's .. that's mostly amateurs that do that sort of thing. Um, being associated with an institution like the Museum of Northern Arizona we had permits through them and were sent out by Dr. Colton to do specific work. It was about the time that what then was called "salvage archeology" was getting going ... uh, when highways were supposed to be constructed. We were able to go out and do a reconnaissance of that highway right-of-way. And, uh, that became very big business, uh, not just on highways but dams, reservoirs, pipelines. In fact before Glen Canyon Dam was built there were huge archeological projects in the area of that proposed reservoir pool to excavate. The University of Utah had a big contract. The Museum of Northern Arizona had another one. And a tremendous amount of work was done, thanks to those federal laws that required this sort of thing. That's a little bit different from the bureaucratic red tape that one has to go through today. And almost all archeological research now is, at least in the Southwest, is funded by these cultural resource management laws so that if somebody wants to develop a piece of federal land or state land, they cannot do it without providing for archeological, uh, research in advance of that. And this company that Carothers is running now, SWCA, one big arm of that is archeology. And my son, Tom, tells me that they're just swamped with work.

Steiger: That's what Tom's doing. He's an archeologist, not a biologist or anything like that.

Euler: Yes, right. He's an archeologist.

Steiger: When you are excavating, um .. how does that process go? What kinds of things are you looking at? You know, what kinds of questions are you asking and how are you arriving at the answers to them?

Euler: Well, in the broad, general sense of the word [coughing] we want to know what people were doing, where they were living, and why they were doing it. Beyond that we want to know the relationship of the people who lived in the ruin that we're excavating, with other people. Did they have trade relationships. Now when I first started out in archeology you didn't go much farther than that. You simply recorded everything you could find and write it up. Nowadays there's more concern for getting at non-material aspects. When you dig a ruin all you find are the material remains. But nowadays people are trying, through theoretical means, to get at the social organization of the people, the religion, the political organization, and we can't get all of that, by any means, but at least we can make a stab at analyzing the materials that we excavate in such a fashion that we can tell something about those what I call "non- material" aspects of culture. It's pretty .. pretty important today.

Steiger: It's hard to image how you make some of those leaps.

Euler: How you do what?

Steiger: Well, just how you can .. um, play out a particular assumption or something like that just with so .. with the little bit that does remain. I mean for a layman I have a hard time grasping that. Not that I doubt it.

Euler: Well, alright, let's .. let's take religion as one aspect. Those Indians had no written form of their language. The petroglyphs or rock art that they left don't tell us much. So as we excavate, say, we find up in Northern Arizona a small masonry village of several rooms and out in front is a circular depression in the ground: a kiva. For example, the big ruin at Unkar that Doug Schwartz excavated has a beautiful kiva out in front of the main block of rooms. This was a religious structure.

Steiger: This is on the delta.

Euler: On the delta, Unkar Delta, yes. Uh .. then we look and say: "Now who were these people's descendants?" Well, in the case of, say, the ruin at Unkar the descendants were Hopis. And we look at what the Hopis do in the way of religion. Now we realize that things have changed a lot from 1100 A.D. when Unkar was occupied to what Hopis do today. But still there are some correlations there. [Telephone rings.] Oops, I've got to answer that phone.

Steiger: [laughing] Dang!

[SHORT INTERRUPTION]

Euler: ... years ago, when we could do that right at ruins.

Steiger: Yes, so on the delta there was a kiva out there. I didn't even .. I didn't even get that. I've looked at .. um .. oh, I forget her name ..

Euler: It's on .. it's on the downstream side of Unkar Creek itself - that part of the delta.

Steiger: I've got a copy of Trinkle's [Jones] brochure. Well what was .. was the Hill Top, too, was that .. um, how did that tie in with all that? Did that have religious significance?

Euler: Now which hill top are you talking about?

Steiger: Right across the road ...

Euler: By Cardenas.

Steiger: Yes.

Euler: Yes. That's an interesting ruin. Are you recording this now?

Steiger: Yes. We are rolling.

Euler: That's an interesting ruin. It was first discovered by Robert Stanton in 1889 or 1890 - I guess 1890, his second trip. And, um, it looks today almost exactly as it did when he photographed it. A lot of people .. Well, first of all it's Anasazi ruin, the same as the ruins over at Unkar, that is, ancestral to the Hopi. The broken pottery that we found around there indicate that. Um .. a lot of people thought it was some sort of a fort. Uh, it has a blocked up doorway. It has one little peephole looking out toward the River. I always used to say: "Yeah, the Indian could hide behind that wall and look out and then he'd take an arrow right in his eye!" [quiet laughter] There isn't any evidence for real hostility - warfare - in Grand Canyon. There's some hints at it, but not any real evidence. Harvey Butchart has told me that that site is on a route out of the Canyon that he's hiked. I don't mean a trail, but a route out. I've never tried to do that at all. I've never been up above that .. that fort-like structure. It may have been just a way-station on people's way out of the Canyon. It may also have been a lookout to see if any strange people were coming around. Now, apropos of that, there are a number of sites, mostly off the South Rim, that are on what I call "islands", off the edge of the Rim itself, some of them very difficult of access today. There's a beautiful one out at Enfilade Point, uh, just before you get to the Great Thumb. There's another one out beyond that. There's some around the Great Thumb. Two or three rooms, but with massive stone walls on the side of this island facing the mainland. I think those sites were defensible. I'm not saying they were forts, but they were defensible in case some strange people came or in case there was some internecine hostilities among the people who occupied them. Uh, they were mostly Anasazi sites, although there is very little evidence. If you broke a pot or something, you tossed it over the side and down it went a couple of thousand feet. Um, we don't find much in those sites, the ones that I've been able to get out .. get out to. I've had some really hairy experiences trying to climb to some of these with Trinkle Jones when she was working with me, uh, things I wouldn't do today anyway .. [laughter] .. climbing up to some of them. But we just don't know. Over on the Esplanade there are a number of them that look right at routes going up. This is on the west side of the Great Thumb, now ... routes that go up where the cliffs have broken down. There's talus coming down .. where people could climb out. And I'm sure that many Indians, the prehistoric people as well as the historic Havasupai, used those routes in the past. Maybe, as I sometimes say, maybe there was some sort of a cold war situation. [Telephone rings] I'm going to let that go. It will pick up on my answering machine. Um, you remember .. well, maybe you don't .. when we thought we were going to be invaded by the Russians and everybody built bomb shelters in their backyards?

Steiger: Yes, I do. I mean, I was just in kindergarten, but I remember that.

Euler: Maybe these Indians just built those things as a place of refuge in case, uh, there were enemy peoples there. Other people said: "Well, look, if they were enemy, they could just sit up on the main rim and starve these people out or until they ran out of water." That assumes that those people had a knowledge of what a siege was like and maybe they didn't. Maybe these were just hit-and-run people coming through. Again the bottom line is that there's no real evidence for hostilities. You don't find any bodies with arrows sticking out of their skulls and that sort of thing in the .. in the Canyon. Not at all. There's one site like that off the North Rim, over near Tiyo Point, and there's one in the Inner Canyon just below Indian Gardens on the old trail that went around, uh, into Pipe Creek. But most of them are up on the South Rim.

Steiger: Now, when you say, a site that .. um, implies a possible defensive motivation...

Euler: Yes. Steiger: I wonder about that a lot that. Just like you say, the question was: "Is it defensive or is it aesthetic or spiritual or something like that?" You know, the placement of those things. You hear people say: "Oh, yeah, well, definitely defensive." And then other people say: "Yeah, well, how long could you last, if you run up there and hide out up there? "

Euler: Somebody will get you.

Steiger: Well, if they really want you and they got the line on the water, then it's only a matter of time.

Euler: That's why I say these may have been defensible, if not actually defensive sites.

Steiger: Well in the broad ... in a broader framework during that time, say, 1100, 1200, what were their ... were there hostile other peoples out there running around? You know, like up on the rim, is there clear cut evidence of hostilities?

Euler: No. No there isn't. Let me put it this way: along the South Rim, oh, between let's say 1050 and 1150 A.D., there were two distinct groups of people, or "tribes", if you want to use that term: the Anasazi and the Cohonina to the west of them. By the time you get west of the Bass Trail on the South Rim most of the sites are Cohonina. They had a different culture than the Anasazi who lived to the east of them, and I'm generalizing here because there are some exceptions to this. Uh .. the Cohonina tried to emulate Anasazi traits and characteristics in their pottery, in their architecture, and that sort of thing. So the indications are that they were at peace with one another, you know, no indication of warfare there. The only thing that I can think of off hand that might have occasioned hostilities is by about 1150 A.D. the Grand Canyon was hit with severe drouth conditions that lasted a long time. Maybe people were running out of food and their crops weren't maturing properly. Maybe there were some inter-family arguments or something of that nature. But that's just a hypothesis on an archaeologist's part, not a ... We can't prove that at all. Those sites on those islands are really an enigma and, uh ...

Steiger: Cohonina .. are they connected with the Pai culture further ..?

Euler: No.

Steiger: Okay, so there was ...

Euler: No. The Anasazi and the Cohonina both left the Canyon area .. well, most of them, by 1150. A few hung on until about 1200. And the Anasazi peoples went east and became Hopis. No question about that. What happened to the Cohonina: they disappear from our record. We don't know what happened to them. For a long time Doug Schwartz thought that the Cohonina became Havasupai. There's no evidence whatsoever. And he's finally changed his mind about that. From about 1150 until 1300 A.D. there were no people in Grand Canyon at all. No humans. And about 1300 the ancestors of the Hualapai and the Havasupai moved eastward up over the Grand Wash Cliffs onto the Colorado Plateau and settled that whole South Rim area all the way to the Little Colorado River. Those were the ancestors of the Hualapai and Havasupai who, at that time, were one tribe. They weren't two tribes until the United States government, by fiat, declared them two tribes instead of two separate reservations for them.

Steiger: I'll be darned. Well, do they view themselves, now, like the Havasupai and the Hualapai - they kind of view themselves as ...

Euler: As one people?

Steiger: They don't, though, do they?

Euler: No. Over the years since the early 1880's when those two reservations were set up they've begun to feel their separateness. Oh, there's some intermarriage and they realize that they all have the same culture, they all speak the same language, except the Havasupais say the Hualapais slur their words and the Hualapais say the same thing about the Havasupais. Now the Yavapai, down in this Prescott area, are something else. They were not connected with this Pai Group, as we ... Steiger: They weren't ..?

Euler: They were not. They were always on hostile terms with the Hualapai and the Havasupai. They used to make .. the Yavapai used to make raids down into Havasu Canyon. You talk to a Havasupai today and he says: "Oh, they're Apaches." But they weren't Apaches at all; they were good, recalcitrant Yavapais [laughing].

Steiger: Um, you know those little hand prints on the trail going in there to Deer Creek?

Euler: Oh, I do indeed.

Steiger: What would ... who made those?

Euler: They were made by Anasazi peoples who were living up above the Narrows. A lot of sites there up ..

Steiger: Not Cohonina.

Euler: Not Cohonina. No, they were Anasazi.

Steiger: So they're genuinely over a thousand years old.

Euler: Yes. Steve Carothers and I were down there one day. Oh, we had about half a day to kill before the helicopter came to pick us up. So we went down and we measured all of those hand prints trying to see whether they were made by a lot of different people or maybe there was just one person doing it. They're on both sides of the Narrows, but mostly on the west side where the trail goes up. I've forgotten how many we recorded: 80 some odd.

Steiger: Right there in that little ...?

Euler: Yes. There are also prints of leaves done the same way. [The way] the hand prints were done they'd hold their hand up and spit white clay paint on them. Also there are some leaves that they'd hold a leaf up there and spray it with this white clay mixture and then pull the leaf away. You can still see the imprint of the leaf there.

Steiger: I wonder what they were thinking ... to do that.

Euler: Well, it's easy to say there was some religious thing. But we can't prove that. Maybe they were just doing it for the hell of it, like their version of graffiti. Who knows.

Steiger: Was there? Dick Clark was telling me .. this is .. we're kind of wandering now, but anyway .. I was hiking around in there with him one time and he showed me this, kind of a line coming down the left side as you're going up, what he thought was the remnant of an old aqueduct or something. You know, if you cross out like you're going up to the spring, if you look over on that slope, it looks like there's a placement of rocks that's in a pretty straight line.

Euler: This is above the Narrows now?

Steiger: Yes. Out there. Do you know anything about that?

Euler: Yes. I know. I've seen that.

Steiger: Do you think that's ...?

Euler: Well, I don't know whether it was an aqueduct to carry water or whether it was just some sort of a retaining wall that they put up to keep talus from sloughing down. Uh, I saw that in one of my last trips into Deer Creek, so I didn't really investigate it thoroughly at all. If it's an aqueduct, it's the only one that I know of in the prehistoric part of the Canyon.

Steiger: I don't know. It's .. looked kind of high to me for that, but ... Euler: Yes. And where would they be taking the water? They take it out of the creek and then where was it going to go? Into the Narrows? What good would that do?

Steiger: Or onto the bench or something, but ... Nowadays we're starting to .. to not use the term "Anasazi" out of deference to the Hopis. I don't know what ...

Euler: So you are using ...

Steiger: .. Hisotsinam.

Euler: Hisotsinam.

Steiger: Yes. Is that a .. um .. do .. I don't know if you have any insight in to that.

Euler: Just .. just as you intimate the Hopis would prefer that since they were their ancestors. The word "Anasazi" is really a Navajo word. And early archaeologists, talking to Navajos out in the Navajo Country: "What do you call these people who lived in these ruins?" And they'd say: "Anasazi". We don't even know what a good translation of that term is. So, you're right. I would prefer Hisotsinam myself.

Steiger: Well, then the Navajo ... They didn't get here until about .. until after, what was it: 1500 or something like that?

Euler: The earliest really documentary evidence that we have for Navajo entry into the Southwest is around 1500 or a little bit later. Some people claim earlier, but there's no hard evidence for that. There's no evidence for Navajos over near Grand Canyon until the 1880's. The Navajos will tell you: "Oh, we were there in 1600", and that sort of thing, just to help their own land claims cases. They're still doing that. Uh, I'm involved now on the committee set up by the National Research Council to evaluate Glen Canyon Dam and the whole environmental picture of what's going to happen with different flows from the dam. And the Bureau of Reclamation is pouring literally millions of dollars into the tribes that are in the general area.

Steiger: Right now ...

Euler: Right now. Wanting to know what their feeling is about the Canyon, about the river flows [coughing], and that sort of thing. The Navajos are back to their same old story that they were in there many, many years - you know, 1600, something like that. Even the Zuñis are in the act! In all my research in Grand Canyon I've never seen one shred of evidence for Zuñis over there. They do have this origin legend that they came out of a hole in the ground in Grand Canyon, probably borrowed that from the Hopi.

Steiger: Is that the same? The Sipapu?

Euler: The legend about coming .. coming out of the Sipapu. But there is no evidence that Zuñis were ever in there. It's all mythological. And I know recently the Zuñis were taken on a river trip, I guess by the Park Service with Jan Balsam. And she told me: "Oh, they're .. they pointed out all these shrines." But you query the Zuñi about them and they say: "Well, only the priests know about these things", and "It's too sacred to talk about". And I, you know, I want hard evidence for people's occupation somewhere.

Steiger: Well, sir, from what you are saying, the Hisotsinam or the Anasazi, those guys were there through about 1150 A.D. and then there was a really clearly-defined period of a couple hundred years where nobody ..

Euler: Nobody was there, yes.

Steiger: Period.

Euler: Yes. At least there's no evidence for it.

Steiger: So, if that's the case, then most of those .. most of the ruins and stuff down there are connected to the Hopi and hardly anybody else. Well, so .. so they're really the ones that have the [history there]...

Euler: That's right.

Steiger: So what do you think about this whole Bureau thing, about this process of spending all this money with all these tribes and stuff? Is that a good thing, or ...?

Euler: Well, I have to speak off the record really, because ..

Steiger: Well, maybe we shouldn't do it, then. Let's don't put it on this tape because I don't know ... Okay, here! I'll turn it off because I'm curious! [laughing] ***

Okay this is going to be Part II of the oral history interview done with Bob Euler. We're back at Bob's house in Prescott. This is Lew Steiger and today it's February 28, 1994, and we're picking up where we left off on Part I here.

Steiger: You know, I guess what might be a good starting point, uh, would be just sort of a general discussion about man in the Canyon starting with the very earliest .. um, the earliest man that we know of: what we know about .. him .. and a little bit about that.

Euler: In the Canyon. Yes, okay. The earliest record that we have of human beings in Grand Canyon is represented by the makers of the split-twig figurines, which have been radio-carbon dated at between 3,000 and 4,000 years ago. Um .. they are found in a number of isolated caves in the Redwall limestone in the Canyon. They've also been found out on the Mojave Desert of California and at one site in Walnut Canyon south of Flagstaff. We don't know who made these figurines. They left no evidence except the figurines themselves. They're very ingeniously, but simply, made out of one twig of willow - usually willow - sometimes squaw bush, the plant that's called Rhus trilobata. A twig about three feet long usually, although this varied, which was split lengthwise down most but not all of its length. The unsplit portion became the hind leg of the animal. One of the splints was bent to wrap around and form the body. The other splint was put up vertically to form the neck, head, and front legs of this animal. Occasionally, relatively rarely, we find pieces of dung stuck inside the body of the figurine, usually the dung of a now-extinct mountain goat that lived in the Canyon, a goat called Oreamnos. But that goat lived and died long before the split-twig figurine makers came along. They found the dung in these caves and, uh, for some reason or other they put a piece in the body occasionally. While we don't know who made these we have a guess. Along the South Rim of the Canyon and near the summit of Red Butte just south of the Canyon we've recorded some sites of archaic..um..hunters who were in the area making a distinctive type of spear point that we refer to as a Pinto Basin point because the first of them were found over in the Pinto Basin of the Mojave Desert. Now, the Pinto projectile points or spear points have been dated at about the same age as the figurines. So we assume, if they're found in proximity to one another, maybe the Pinto Basin hunters are the ones who made the figurines. We're never going to be sure of this, of course, until we find one of those Pinto Basin points sticking in one of the figurines. We have a pretty good idea of why they were made. We think they were some type of imitative magic, that if the hunter made a replica of the animal that he wanted to hunt, put it in a cave, isolated cave, perhaps then he would have more success in his actual hunt. More recently some paleontologists working in the .. in the Canyon, looking primarily for remains of Pleistocene birds and animals, have found additional figurines in caves that are exceedingly difficult to get into, requiring ropes and climbing equipment. In those caves they've found the cairns of rock or in some cases cairns of the dung of this extinct mountain goat with figurines in association. This gives us a little bit more information, perhaps, as to the significance of the figurines. That's about all we know at present about them. When I was working in the Canyon I took a National Geographic photographer down to Stanton's Cave. He was interested in the cave and the figurines and the history of Stanton leaving his gear in the cave. And we talked about the figurines quite a bit and he said at that time: "Why don't you do an excavation in the cave to see if you can find out more about the figurine makers." And I said, very blankly: "Because it costs money to do this." Well, lo and behold, the National Geographic Society then came up with two grants to enable me to go down. I spent a month down there in the summer of I think it was 1969 with a couple of my students - three of my students. Um, we camped on the beach just below the mouth of South Canyon [coughing] and worked in the cave every day. We put in two test trenches. We didn't find any evidence of human use below the surface. That is to say, all of the figurines that we recovered, and we recovered over 60 of them, which are now at Grand Canyon National Park, all of them were on the surface or just covered by a little cave dust or, in a number of cases, hidden under rockfall. The cave floor was littered with rockfall when we first started to work there. [coughing] As we dug down, like sensible archeologists, we went down all the way to bedrock. We did find a great deal of biological material in those trenches that we put down, very important biological material that, when analyzed, told us a great deal about the past environment of the Canyon, perhaps going back as much as 40,000 years. Right resting on bedrock in the bottom of our trenches were masses of driftwood - wood that was bedded in the cave deposits just like driftwood is buried or deposited along the beach lines. We've had this driftwood dated at .. well, it's almost beyond the ability of normal radio carbon equipment to count, to determine. We sent it off, some of it off to a USGS lab in Palo Alto, California, and they came back with a date of 47,000+ years ago, for the driftwood. They don't know how much beyond that it was. There are some geologists who feel that perhaps the driftwood was put in there about the time one of the lava dams by .. down by Lava Falls, caused the huge backup in the river. That may well be. I've never done any actual measurements, elevational measurements, to see whether that's true or not. The other biological materials we found: a lot of plant remains that indicated that at about 12 or 13,000 years ago, the Canyon environment was a cold desert, like you get up in Northern Utah today with sagebrush and that sort of thing. We also found above the driftwood the dung and the remains, fragmentary remains, of this extinct mountain goat, Oreamnos.

Steiger: How do you spell that?

Euler: O.R.E.A.M.N.O.S. That's the genus. It was not related to the present bighorn sheep at all that are in the Canyon, but a distinct species of goat that is now extinct, died out around the end of the Pleistocene geological period. We found also the fragmentary remains of a giant vulture, whose scientific name is Teratornis [Dr. Euler then spelled out the name.] It was in some ways related to the condors. This beast had a wingspan of 17 feet. A huge beast that probably brought its prey into the cave to eat and then some of them died .. and died there. At least we found fragmentary remains of it. Condors have also been found in the Canyon - Pleistocene condors, but not in Stanton's Cave. The paleontologist, Steve Emsley [spelling?] and his colleague at NAU, Jim Mead, are the ones that are hot in pursuit of this Pleistocene fauna; doing quite a bit of work in these isolated caves, today. So that's the earliest evidence we have of human beings in the Canyon. Interestingly enough during the work that Emsley and Mead have done in the last year, one of the members of their party came across another very early type of projectile point somewhere up on Nankoweap Mesa. It's the fragment of a Folsom projectile point, the first one ever found in the Canyon. We have no idea what it's doing there, it wasn't found in association with anything else. But Folsom .. the Folsom hunters were mostly out on the high plains hunting giant Pleistocene bison. And, uh, how this got into the Canyon I don't know.

Steiger: Yes. It's hard to imagine some bison up there on Nankoweap Mesa.

Euler: That's right. I don't think there were any there, frankly. In fact this may just be a spurious find that-- maybe somebody recently dropped it there or something, some hiker or something like that. I don't know. The other evidence that we have for early people in the Canyon has to do with some pictographs, archaic pictographs that are very similar to some up in Utah, relating to an archaic culture that lived up there. These are found at one site in the western part of the Canyon and, um, nowhere else that I know of. But they've been studied fairly carefully. And they seem to date less than 3,000 years ago, but not much less. I don't think at the moment we can say there is any connection between the people who painted these weird human-like figures on the rocks or walls of the Canyon with the split-twig figurine people. Then we don't get any more evidence of humans in the Canyon until around 300 or 400 A.D., maybe even 500 A.D., when the Anasazi people first made some halting explorations into the Canyon, coming from the Anasazi heartland just to the east, around the present-day Hopi and Navajo country. Apparently they found the Canyon to their liking and by 1050, 1100, there were simply hundreds of ruins occupied by Anasazi hunters and farmers; farming corn, beans, squash, maybe a little cotton, even, in the Canyon. And, uh, they enjoyed a pretty good life there. They moved around almost at will on some very hairy trails in the Canyon, for about a hundred years. By 1150 A.D. or shortly thereafter, primarily because of drouth conditions in the northern Southwest, at that time they moved out and moved probably back to the present-day Hopi country because they were the direct ancestors of the Hopi Indians. At the same time, beginning about 700 A.D., a little bit to the west of the Anasazi area of the Canyon, there was another group of people, whom we call the Cohonina. They were in friendly contact with the Anasazi. They tried to emulate the cultural traits of the Anasazi: pottery and pottery designs, and architecture in the form of masonry structures. They didn't always get the hang of it, but there they were, mostly along the South Rim, oh, just west of the Bass Trail, in that area, and also in some places even east of there on the South Rim, as far east as Tusayan Ruin where they were in contact with the Anasazi people. They disappeared from the record about A.D. 1150 and we have no idea where they went. As I may have mentioned the other day the archeologist Doug Schwartz believed at one time for a number of years that they were the ancestors of the Havasupai and the Hualapai, but there's no evidence of that. In fact, as I said the other day, the Canyon seems to have been abandoned by human beings from about 1100, or, excuse me, 1150 or 1200 until 1300 A.D. At that time the correct ancestors of the Havasupai and the Hualapai, people archeologists speak of as belonging to the Cerbat traditions, moved eastward up over the Grand Wash Cliffs and settled the entire area of mostly the south side of the Canyon extending, that is, in the Canyon as well as on the South Rim, extending over as far as the Little Colorado River, maybe even a little bit beyond that. While the Cerbat or Pai people were settling the South Rim, the ancestors of the Southern Paiute were coming in from the north, settling the North Rim, some of this .. the tributary canyons to the North Rim. Paiute evidences have been found, oh, down in Nankoweap Canyon. Way to the west, in what is called Indian Canyon, there are good Paiute sites in there. A lot of Paiute sites in Parashont Canyon. And, uh, they remained there in the Canyon as well as up on the Rim and back up into southern Utah. including all of the Arizona Strip country, until they were forcibly removed from there by European advances. Farther north Europeans wiped out a lot of Southern Paiute.

Steiger: When you say "Europeans", do you mean the Spanish or..?

Euler: When I talk about "Europeans" I'm talking first of all about the Spaniards who had fairly decent relationships on their explorations through Paiute country in the late 1700's, early 1800's. When the Anglos came along, uh, the relationships changed. The Anglos looked down on the Paiutes, they took advantage of them, they shot a lot of them, and, uh, tried to teach them how to farm, which they already knew how to do, and finally put them on reservations, such as at Kaibab and Shivwits and places like that. So that was essentially the end - let's say in the 1850's, 1860's. That was essentially the end of Paiute occupation of the North Rim of Grand Canyon.

Steiger: Going back to the .. to the earliest guys .. um .. the Pinto Culture and stuff, I wonder where .. I'm just trying to .. to kind of grasp what that was all about. Those guys came from the Mojave Desert? Or thereabouts?

Euler: That's where the main evidence of them is .. in the Mojave Desert area, yes.

Steiger: And I wonder where they came from before that. I wonder what the pattern was there.

Euler: Well, we don't really know. We just don't have an .. they didn't leave enough evidence, except a few campsites and these distinctive spear points, to really trace them any further than that.

Steiger: But they were pretty nomadic, not very sedentary?

Euler: I think they were nomadic, yes. They had no farming at all in those days and, uh, they depended on hunting and gathering of edible wild plants for a living.

Steiger: And the country, then, was like the high deserts of Utah, you think?

Euler: Uh .. well .. I'm misleading you a bit here. The environmental studies that we did in Stanton's Cave indicate that at the time toward the end of the Pleistocene when the extinct mountain goat was living there and the vulture.. the giant ...

Steiger: This is earlier than them, isn't it? Quite a bit.

Euler: Earlier .. that's right. That's when the climate was like a high desert. When the Pinto people moved in, and I'm not so sure they really moved in, since we found only a few Pinto projectile points at the Canyon, the climate was probably pretty much as it is today.

Steiger: It's interesting that they would use the dung of this extinct sheep instead of..

Euler: Goat.

Steiger: Goat .. instead of .. and I can't remember the name already .. instead of .. instead of finding the dung from an animal that they were actually hunting. I wonder where they would pick the old stuff.

Euler: Well, it exists in these dry Redwall limestone caves. When we were excavating in Stanton's Cave we collected thousands of pieces of dung so that they could be analyzed for what the goat was eating at the time. And all of this is reported in that study that I edited that the Grand Canyon Natural History Association put out "The Archeology, Geology and Paleobiology of Stanton's Cave". It's all reported in there. But by the time the figurine makers were there the climate wasn't too much different from what it is today.

Steiger: Um .. what kind of evidence do you have, or exists, that applies to the origins of the Anasazi or the Hisotsinam? To me that's interesting because their story is that they came out of the Sipapu and stuff and started in the Canyon.

Euler: Right.

Steiger: And then later on moved to the Black Mesa area. But you .. it seems like the evidence that you guys have found indicates more that there was actually .. they were in the Black Mesa area first and moved into the Canyon and back out.

Euler: Yes, that's probably a fair assessment, although even earlier than we have evidence for the Hisotsinam in the Canyon, we find antecedents of them up in the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, earlier people that probably were ancestral to the earliest Anasazi that we know of, people who made beautiful baskets and sandals. And we see that developing in, oh, the general Four Corners country and Black Mesa .. oh, just a little before 1 A.D. And then, apparently, they were just exploring and found the Canyon and found it to their liking.

Steiger: Um, it seems like they really .. they had numerous routes across there. It seems like it wasn't that much of a barrier to them. Not so much of a barrier to them as it turned out to be to the Spaniards later on.

Euler: Uh .. we have now located .. and by "we" I mean most of these routes have been located by Harvey Butchart .. and some of them that I have .. have followed out as best I could .. we've now located over a hundred routes of entry and access into the Canyon. I don't mean trails necessarily, but just .. just routes that the Anasazi used. Let's take the Eminence Break area and the trail route that comes down that fault line just by President Harding Rapid. It was a cross-canyon route that came down from there, across the River, and up past the Anasazi Bridge. There's no doubt about that in anybody's mind that that's one of the routes that they used. And they're just all over the place. Wherever we find the sheerwall cliffs in the Canyon breaking down, either because of fault lines, or talus slopes that obscure the vertical portion, we find evidence that Indians have used those.

Steiger: Um .. when it comes to crossing the river, then, you know, one of my fantasies has always been that.. well I've always wondered if Powell or White or the white guys were really the first ones down the River. You know, I look at those guys, I look at the Indians having been down there for a hundred years and how physically, uh, competent they obviously were and the question arises: would it have .. I wonder if one of those guys ever went down the River.

Euler: Well, [coughing] if they did, there's no evidence for it. We've never found any evidence of a prehistoric boat. Although when Stanton went down .. I don't remember whether it was the first trip or second .. he said they found an Indian dugout and pushed it into the River to see how it would go through a rapid. I just don't know whether it was a real dugout or not because Stanton didn't say anything more about it than that. We've never found any other evidence. We suspect that the Indians crossed the river at low water or by pushing a log along with them when they swam across it. I don't think they ever went across at flood stage. I don't think they were that dumb, really [laughing]. So, as I say, there's just no evidence of some Anasazi boatmen having gone through the Canyon on the river.

Steiger: I wonder .. the only .. there's that myth, you know, that they have of Tiyo, the young Indian kid who ...

Euler: Yes, I'm familiar with that. And there's nothing wrong with these myths and the belief that the Hopi came out of the Sipapu. Uh .. but there's often a discrepancy between myths that people have and the scientific evidence for whatever they're saying. I'm not saying that in .. they're wrong or anything of the sort, because they really believe in these things. And with the Sipapu up the Little Colorado, the route that they call the Salt Trail is very well known. Hopi shrines have been found there, Hopi campsites have been found along that route. There's no question about the importance of that in Hopi culture. Whether the prehistoric Anasazi, or Hisotsinam, ever used the Sipapu we don't know.

Steiger: When .. how .. just a quick, if it can be explained quickly, I'm curious to know how the radio-carbon dating process works and stuff.

Euler: Well, I don't know whether we went into this last time or not, but all organic material has Carbon 14 or radioactive carbon in their bodies. Plants, animals, human beings: we all have it. And we continue to accumulate it and dispense it all during our lifetimes. Upon the death of the organism the radio-carbon content dissipates at a known rate and physicists can count the rate of this disintegration of radioactive carbon through machines like Geiger counters and they can tell, in terms of what amount of radiocarbon is left in the organism, when that organism died, when it ceased accumulating radioactive carbon and started to disintegrate. Now, there are some errors with this: materials can become contaminated. Oh, the atomic energy tests in southern Nevada could contaminate objects that archeologists might want to date by radio-carbon means later on; because that would add radio-carbon to the organism. We found on Black Mesa, just parenthetically, that coal getting into certain organisms that we wanted to date would contaminate it, because the coal had radio-carbon at .. millions of years before the object that we wanted to date .. but it still contaminated the material. So we take great care in removing materials that we want to date by radio-carbon. When we excavate it we seal it in either polyethylene bags or in .. in aluminum foil, that sort of thing, to prevent any future contamination. And, um, there are certain things that are not good for dating. Charcoal is the best by far. If you can associate the charcoal with the human remains that you are investigating, you can very often get a good date within a couple of hundred years of when the organism died. Human bone is not so good. It's just so porous that it tends to pick up more radio-carbon than it normally would have. Uh .. teeth are no good at all for it. But other types of plant remains are .. are just fine for that.

Steiger: The prehistoric vulture .. I was .. In passing I wondered how you figured that it actually had a 17 foot wingspan.

Euler: Because we found the wing bones.

Steiger: So that you actually measured them ..

Euler: Especially the humerus, the upper arm bone. And from that the paleontologists can tell what the total wingspan of the animal was.

Steiger: By extrapolating.

Euler: Yes .. uh huh .. yes.

Steiger: [whistling] Whew! Maybe we .. I'm curious to .. maybe we ought to go over how you found the bridge and um .. Kenton and Ellie hiking out the route for you.

Euler: Okay. Alright. Harvey Butchart claims that one of his friends first discovered that bridge and that may be the case. I first saw it .. oh, when was it? .. 19 .. 60 .. oh, in the 1960's sometime .. I was doing this helicopter survey for the Arizona Power Authority at the proposed Marble Canyon dam site and we just saw it from the air. And, somebody climbed up to it. I guess it was Harvey Butchart that later climbed up to it and brought me down a piece of wood from the bridge so I could have it radio-carbon dated. Later on, on one of my river trips, I managed to climb up to it and found broken bits of prehistoric pottery along the route. I don't know how in the devil I ever got down from there: I'm not much of a climber, but I know they had a rope around me and helped me to get back down from that. Then we got Kenton Grua and Ellen Tibbetts interested in it and we arranged to fly them up to the bottom of the route to the bridge in the helicopter and gave them one of the Park Service radios so they could talk to us. We .. Trinkle Jones and I stayed down on the beach. And we have good telephoto slides of their route climb up to there. You can see their white hardhats as they went up. They took ropes with them, but they didn't use them; they made a free climb all the way. And didn't step on the bridge: it's just very fragile. And they worked their way around behind it and on up several traverses. And some distance above the bridge they came across this cave in which they found pieces of weaving equipment from a loom. Um .. they went all the way up to the top of the rim and then back down bringing us some of those loom tools down with them so that we could, as archeologists, analyze them and make sure that's what they were. Those two are up in the study collections at Grand Canyon now. And they got back down and away we went, flying .. and flying out. Trinkle Jones and I wanted to get in that cave once .. after that. We wanted to really study it. So we had a very good helicopter pilot who took us up there just below the mouth of the cave. And he said: "Now, I can put you down here on one skid and let you get out very gently and then I'll fly off and come back later and pick you up." Well, he did that and just as he was about to tell us to get out, the rock on which the skid was sitting collapsed! And we peeled off and that was the end of our attempts to visit that cave. So ..

Steiger: Boy, that sounds pretty razzle-dazzle!

Euler: Well, I had a few hairy experiences [laughing] with the helicopter in Grand Canyon, I'll tell you! Especially when we .. in the early days when we were flying piston-driven helicopters that ... Sometimes because of downdrafts they couldn't pull themselves out of the Canyon. We'd search around for half an hour or so looking for an updraft to help us get out. But the Jet Rangers - it's quite different.

Steiger: When you would circle around, would you just have to, like, go back out to the river? Or ..?

Euler: No, the pilot always used to hug the walls of the Canyon because he said that's where the best updrafts are. So here we were flying around like little eagles right along the edge of the cliffs until he found an updraft and away we'd go.

Steiger: And this was the same pilot all the time?

Euler: No, I had different pilots. The first pilot that I flew with, um, when I was working for the Arizona Power Authority, I had this big camp set up at Buck Farm Canyon, on the Rim, when they were doing the .. were drilling for the adits [??] down at the Marble Canyon dam site. And they ferried their men back and forth in that helicopter. It was a little B-1 Bell helicopter then, and it would hold the pilot and two people. And whenever they weren't using it we got to use it and flew up and down Marble Canyon that way. Then, when I first started to really do helicopter reconnaissance in the Canyon proper, and I had this National Science Foundation grant - I had a pilot who had a piston-driven Hiller helicopter. His name was Wayne Learn. He was a very excellent pilot, very much interested in archeology. And I flew with him in this, mainly in the summer of 1966 ... oh, two or three hundred hours in the Canyon. As I think I said the other day, we covered the area from the Dam all the way down to Havasu Canyon on the south side and Kanab Canyon on the north side. Then, when I went into the Park Service, I had several occasions to use Park Service Jet Rangers and we had several different pilots then, at that time .. uh, some of whom were very good and some of whom were more scared than I was about flying in that Canyon [laughing].

Steiger: Well, it's funny to hear you talk about flying down there pre-Viet Nam. But the sense that I have: we see these guys down there now in these Bell Jet Rangers and they're almost exclusively Viet Nam vets. Those guys are pretty fearless, but you sort of have this impression that flying in the .. you know, of all the helicopter flying you could do, flying in the Canyon is some of the most serious. And to think of you doing this, I mean, with guys before Viet Nam ever occurred, they must have been some pretty interesting characters.

Euler: The best pilot that I had when I was with the Park Service flying the Jet Rangers ... I can't think of his name off the top of my head .. Dave somebody-or-other .. I'll think of it in a minute .. he had not been in Viet Nam. He had learned in a commercial civilian helicopter training program.

Steiger: Do you happen to have pictures of all that stuff going on at the dam site? I'm wondering about ...

Euler: Well, I've got some and then when I left the Park Service I left a number of photographs there, uh, mostly archeological sites. But I've got some in my files. I suppose I could dig some out when I have time to do it.

Steiger: Well, that's another story. Let's save .. that's an .. that whole .. we don't know much about that whole thing, you know, but that's an interesting topic to me, too. Euler: Well, I spent .. oh, two or three trips of about a week each up at their camp up on the rim at Buck Farm. And, these were most .. well, the drillers for the dam site were mostly Mormon men from what we used to call Short Creek here: Arizona City .. who just incidentally had made their own airplane [laughing] and used to fly it over to the Rim. Now that's a hairy situation I think. But anyway the engineers were all out of Chicago. The company was Harza Engineering Company from Chicago that was doing the work.

Steiger: The drillers had built their own airplane?

Euler: Built their own airplane.

Steiger: And they flew it from Salt Lake down to the ...

Euler: No, they flew it from Arizona City, from Short Creek, over to the campsite on the Rim. Landed it on a road, dirt road there [laughing].

Steiger: That seems like a .. that was a real wild and wooly time.

Euler: Yes, it certainly was.

Steiger: Um ... This loom that Kenton and Ellie found .. I'm trying to grasp the implications of that.

Euler: Okay. They were carrying this .. pieces of this wooden loom on the route out of the canyon that they had pioneered. And they for some reason or another left the parts of it in the cave. I'm sure they weren't doing any weaving down there; they just were taking it from one place to another and left it .. left it there.

Steiger: Um, does that mean that they grew cotton and used it? Is that .. I wonder what they would weave with it.

Euler: They wove things out of cotton, out of dog hair, and out of a flax-like wild plant, the name of which escapes me at the moment, a wild fibrous plant, you know. Now .. we found very little evidence of cotton in the Canyon proper. But we know that the Hisotsinam were growing cotton elsewhere and weaving very nice robes from it.

Steiger: I'm trying to visualize, when they were living down there during the heyday, um, there are places that .. uh .. you know, kind of the typical spots where we visit, in South Canyon; where we talk about the bridge; and we talk about Nankoweap; and Unkar and stuff, maybe it would be good to just visualize what .. Did they .. were they actually farming right there in all those places?

Euler: Um, yes, they certainly were, but probably not right up by the area going up to the bridge or not right at above Vasey's Paradise where that ruin is.

Steiger: Those were migratory routes.

Euler: That's too rugged a country, yes. But down at the .. Basalt and Unkar we found check dams, rock dams across areas where drainage would come down, that were ideal for farming. And then, going back to the bridge, up on top, there by Buck Farm - the rim at Buck Farm Canyon - um, there's an area .. really it's the very upper part of the South Canyon drainage where it's just a very shallow swale .. uh, I have recorded up there .. I think I am correct in these figures .. over 30 Anasazi ruins that were occupied around 1100 A.D. And, in the wash, 77 check dams. And I dug down behind one of those dams to recover soil from which pollen analysis could be done and we found corn pollen there. That was a big Anasazi settlement up there above South Canyon.

Steiger: Um .... Boy, I'm trying to picture where that .. where that is up top .. that's right there like ...

Euler: If you take the road down through the Buffalo Ranch and on the way towards Saddle Mountain, it's just off toward the rim of the Canyon there, before you get to Buck Farm Canyon and where South Canyon comes back in, at the very head of South Canyon. It's very shallow. The limestone cliffs there are not more than 10 or 15 feet high, or even less. That's where all those ruins are. It's actually part of the Kaibab National Forest area, even though there aren't any trees there.

Steiger: Um .. was there evidence of the same .. of extensive farming there in Deer Creek? I wonder. Down .. we're talking Cohonina, then.

Euler: No. Deer Creek was occupied by the Anasazi .. on the north .. north side of the river. Um ... well, I think they were farming there. There are certainly enough ruins in there and enough area in which they could farm. You know we're not talking about Iowa cornfields now - we're talking about just little plots of ground where they could take advantage of some runoff. There's no evidence that they had irrigation ditches coming out of Deer Creek, except that one thing we were mentioning the other day which .. that wall which I can't explain. In Tapeats Creek there's also some evidence of check dams, uh, where the ruins are there. There are just lots of ruins in Tapeats, before Thunder River comes down. Same is true, Lew, on the North Rim. As one explores the North Rim itself, oh, from Bright Angel Canyon westward, wherever there's a way to get down into the Canyon there are ruins on the Rim. Where there's no route down there aren't any sites, or very, very few. All of the sites are located .. I say all .. most of them .. the Anasazi sites are located near the Rim and there's plenty of evidence of farming in the way of check dams and little what we call "waffle gardens", that sort of thing. And the reason that they could farm up at that altitude, um, say 8,000 feet, was because unknowingly they took advantage of the warm air coming up out of the Canyon. And you get a hundred, 200 yards back from the Rim, you're back in a different vegetative zone. You're into white fir and spruce, things like that, aspen. And there are no sites. They just .. it was just too cold to farm there. There is a story I'll tell you .. maybe I shouldn't .. um, when I was working up at the Canyon one winter the heaviest snowfall on record at the North Rim, 300 inches, and I conned the Park Service into letting me take the helicopter over there because they had a helipad packed down - because I told them I wanted to see whether Indians can survive up there in the winter time. Well, two or three of us went over in the helicopter and we dug down into one of the Park Service cabins so we could get the door open and get in, and then we went cross-country skiing all over that area. And we skied up on the roof of the North Rim Lodge and sat there and had a beer and [laughter].. and I'm sure that Indians were not there in the dead of winter. Just too much snow.

Steiger: Was that in '66 or '67? I can't remember which. There was that one really big snow.

Euler: Yes, yes.

Steiger: I think the thing that .. one of the things that hits me the longer .. the more time I spend there .. is how extensive the ... population was. I mean, it seems like when you .. from the perspective of a river passenger or a river guide, when you first go down and there's a few sites that you see and you know, there's these .. the ones that are easily accessible from the River, um ... it's been my experience that the more time I spend the more I realize that there was quite the culture, quite the numbers of people down there. Is that true? I mean ...

Euler: Well, the Park Service recently contracted .. or a couple of years ago .. contracted to do a thorough survey along the river corridor in connection with this G.C.E.S. study. And they went back up the cliffs, or in the side canyons just a little way, I don't know how far, and they said they found over 400 sites along the river corridor there. And I don't doubt that. I think in all my trips down I may have found as many as 60 sites, something like that. But the ... and I wasn't spending months and months walking and looking for sites then. Just whatever I could gather from .. learn from boatmen or something like that .. as to where sites were.

Steiger: I wonder what .. You wonder what drew them down in there to .. Would it have been the access to the water? Or ...

Euler: I think there are probably several reasons why they were down there .. uh .. the most important of which had to do with plant and animal resources. [telephone rings] I'm going to just let that go. Um, take that ruin above Vasey's Paradise. Come down to that site through South Canyon. There's no way you could farm down there. Those Anasazi were not fishermen, they never ate fish .. that we know of. Uh .. they weren't water people. They didn't .. you know, I don't think, as we said before, that they ran rafts or anything, down there. But I think the reason they were down there was to hunt animals that did not occur up on the North Rim, like bighorn sheep, and to gather wild .. edible wild plants that either did not grow up on the Rim or, growing down in the Canyon, ripened and were harvestable at an earlier time than they would be up on the North Rim. And I think they were down there just temporarily and built that little structure and stayed there for awhile gathering plants or doing a little hunting, and then back out again. I knew a man with the U. S. Geological Survey who used to come down that route while I was excavating at Stanton's Cave. And he could make it down there in a little over three hours .. from the Rim. You know you don't come all the way down in the gorge of South Canyon; you have to detour up along .. come right down where that ruin is.

Steiger: So they .. so you think they used the ruin for just a short time, one time and then left?

Euler: Oh, no. I think ..

Steiger: They'd build these things so they could just trot down there for a little bit.

Euler: Come back season after season, yes. You bet.

Steiger: Same thing at Nankoweap?

Euler: I think there were longer habitations .. longer periods of occupation at places like Nankoweap and Unkar. There are some extensive ruins at Nankoweap, just up the Nankoweap drainage, just above the flood plain in the Nankoweap drainage. And, um, they of course built those storerooms up in the cliffs to store food in. Again, I don't think they were there all year round, by any means, or at Unkar all year round. But they certainly made more use of those areas than at a place like the ruin above Vasey's. [short pause in conversation] I might, if you're interested, tell you a little bit about Beamer's cabin at the mouth of the Little Colorado River. Uh, when Major Powell made his trip down he found an Indian ruin right there where Beamer's cabin is. And he talked about all the potsherds that he found around there, as well as rattlesnakes. And archeologists later on were never able to find that ruin. And the first or second trip I was down there I spent quite a bit of time looking around at the eroding cutbank in front of the cabin. And, lo and behold, here are all sorts of potsherds and arrow points and things like that, sticking out of the bank. And I'm sure that Beamer, when he went down there, simply remade that little Anasazi ruin into his own .. own cabin in there.

Steiger: Yes, that's a neat little spot. Amazingly cool. Well, I'm kind of at a loss here. I'm trying to .. I hate to .. Usually when I do these things, what happens is I'll sit down and talk to somebody and then I'll drive away and about half a day later I'll be thinking about it or I'll be going through the transcript and thinking: "Boy, why didn't I ask this question or that question?"

Euler: Write down those questions when you think of them and come back. I'll be glad to .. talk to you more.

Steiger: I will. I'd like to keep that option open. I mean, it may be that we'll need to come back. But right here while we're sitting, I wonder, you know, thinking along the lines of really leaving some information behind for posterity or whatever, I wonder if you can think of something that isn't written down. You know, something important .. that we haven't covered.

Euler: The minute you drive away I'll think of something I suppose [laughing].

Steiger: That's the way it works.

Euler: We've talked about the work at Stanton's Cave and the figurines ..

Steiger: I feel like there's a lot of stuff I .. one of the things I meant to do before I talked to you was to go over your articles and the stuff that you've written. I hate to just have this be a rehash of stuff that's already available in print.

Euler: Yes, right. Right, yes.

Steiger: I think what we're fishing here for is stuff that's going to fall through the cracks otherwise, if we don't do this project. But I'm not .. but I'm not real clear as to what, you know, what that ...

Euler: Well, let me say something personal for a few moments here. I am just so pleased that I was able to make three trips down the River before the Dam was filled up .. or the reservoir was filled up. Those were exciting trips in those .. those power boats and really got me excited about the archeology of .. of the Canyon. Likewise the long trips in 1966 that I had in the helicopter. Uh, I had one assistant with me, and the pilot, and, uh, it was just very exciting to be able to cover that much territory and spot ruins on the ground that would have taken a lifetime for somebody to find just hiking around. You know you can hike up Shinumo or some place like that, and there are ruins up on the tops of the talus slopes at the base of the cliffs that you couldn't see from down in the bottom of the creek area there, at all. I also got very much interested in the historic ruins that are there. Not only Beamer's cabin, but there's a site over .. I guess it's at the mouth of Basalt, a prospector's cabin and stove, or the remnants thereof. The mining work that was done up in Asbestos Canyon. That mining camp was built on ruins that are there. The asbestos mining up in Shinumo Canyon. When I was first working in the Canyon the cable at Hakatai and the cable there at Bass were still up; the Park Service hadn't cut them down, which I thought was a terrible thing.

Steiger: Well, that's what they .. I didn't realize that. They just decided those things had to go down.

Euler: They thought that it represented a danger to a low-flying helicopter and they went in there with acetylene torches and cut them down. That's a historic record and I hated to see that .. that done. It's the same way with the Grandview Hotel up on the South Rim. Uh, that hotel was not in the best of shape, but the Park Service thought: "Well, it's a hazard and somebody will get in there and hurt themselves." So they razed it, just took out almost all evidence of it there. That's as bad as pot hunting in an Indian ruin, for goodness sakes, as far as I'm concerned. I could tell you horror stories about what the Park Service has done to Indian ruins in the Canyon; even right in the Grand Canyon Village. Why, I'm thinking people don't know what they're looking at. So those .. those things affect me. I, uh, I miss the Canyon very much. I don't miss the Park Service at all, the bureaucracy of it. And, uh, I'm trying to find time to continue working on a book, a definitive technical study of the archeology of the Canyon. I've got about a hundred pages done, but I haven't had time because I've got to take other jobs to eke out an income. And I hope one of these days to get it done and out of the way.

[TAPE 2, MIDDLE SIDE A]

This is Tape 2 of an oral history interview with Bob Euler here in Prescott, Arizona. This is February 28th, 1994, and the interviewer is Lew Steiger. Okay, so we're rolling again.

Euler: Alright. The archeology book that I'm trying to finish, I really intend to get that out. I don't want to be like Dock Marston who always threatened to finish his book on the history of the river, but never did. I've just got to find time to do it away from consulting jobs that bring money into the .. keep the family going. Now, with James White..I got very intrigued with the James White story back in the 1950's when the historian, Richard Lingenfelter, wrote a little book called "First Through Grand Canyon", and I was asked by a historical journal to review that book. And I didn't know anything about the Canyon or the River or anything else. But I concluded that, yeah, he probably did. He may not have deserved to have been the first through the Canyon, but I think he did. And then I got all involved with Dock Marston on this and Dock introduced me to James White's granddaughter. And to make this story relatively short, James White's granddaughter lives down in Lake Havasu City and she and I are co-authoring a book. My portion of the book has to do with what evidence do we have that James White actually made this trip. The evidence is pretty slim. We'll never know for sure whether he actually did it. But, I've been able to retrace the area that he claims he and his partners were ambushed by Ute Indians. Uh, I've been able to take aerial photographs of the area that fits his description of the area they were in, the distance that he and his .. his companion, George Strole, had to hike down to the Colorado River from where they were ambushed, and Captain Baker was murdered. And, um, the impossibility of White's fabricating this by going overland down to Callville, either on the south side or the north side. The north side would have been just almost impossible for somebody that didn't know the canyon country up there: Waterpocket Fold and that .. that general region. And getting over the Kaibab: impossible. And on the south side the Indians would have killed him. The Hualapais were at war with all white people in 1867 and they would have just done him .. done him in. I think the only reasonable thing is to have gone down on his little raft. There's one thing in his .. I can't say his journal - he was semi-literate; he just .. we just have this letter that he wrote to his brother. [coughing] Excuse me. The one thing that rings a bell, that someone who had never been on the River would not be able to describe and that's Deer Creek Falls. He talks about this stream of water, about the size of a man's body, coming over a notch in a cliff about a hundred feet above the .. above the river. Uh, I don't think that was Vasey's Paradise. I think it was Deer Creek Falls. And that, had he not been there, he would not have known how to describe that thing. The one fact that we really do know is that he was pulled off the River at .. at Callville and in a horribly emaciated, sunburned state. He thought he'd been on the River 12 days, but we think it may have been longer than that. Um, he was just practically incoherent when they found him and pulled him off the River. He had bumped into a Paiute camp just a couple of days before he reached Callville and he traded one of his pistols that he still had with him to the Paiutes for the hind quarters of a dog that they were cooking .. there in a camp. And he still had that dog in his hand when they found him at Callville. Well, his granddaughter remembers her grandfather, remembers what kind of a man he was. Uh, he never tried to make anything out of this. He just said: "Well, I accidentally came down the river and I didn't mean to." And he lived to a ripe old age of almost 90, I think. Lived up in Trinidad, Colorado. His detractors are numerous, of course. Major Powell didn't want to acknowledge that somebody had beaten him to the .. to the first trip down the river, although he did mention it to some of his men while they were on the river. And some of them .. his men's journals .. they talk about this. [Pet cat comes for visit?] Alright, cat. Um .. Stanton, of course, who wrote in his "Colorado River Controversies" a long story, and who interviewed White .. uh .. Stanton certainly didn't want to be the third man down the river. It was bad enough to be the second, so he pooh-poohed the whole thing. And, um, other explorers of the river, Julius Stone, people like that, have claimed it was impossible to do. Anyway, we think he did it and we're doing this book .. or I'm doing the physical evidence and Eileen, his granddaughter, is doing a really interesting narrative of, oh, how he was taken off the river and what people thought down there at Callville when they took him off. And the newspaper accounts a few days later about it. And then her reminiscences of her grandfather. A lot of people say that he was a hothead and killed his companions. Well, he'd gotten himself in trouble, alright. He was in the Civil War and he got arrested by the Army for allegedly stealing some equipment. When they .. when he got out of the service he and two or three other men went on this prospecting trip and they went up to, oh, somewhere near Lake City in Colorado. And he got in an argument with one of the men on the party, and he shot him. It didn't kill him; wounded him, left him there to get well again. So people say: "Well, he just murdered his companions." Well, in 1867, where he was between the Colorado River and the San Juan, he could simply have gone back to the settlements in Southern Colorado and said: "We were ambushed by Indians and everybody was killed except me" and nobody would have thought a thing about it. But he didn't. He went on to describe as best he could this trip that he took.

Steiger: So they were probably, you think .. they're .. they were downstream of the San Juan.

Euler: They had come down from about where Silverton is now, in Colorado, down into the area around Mancos, and then they started down the San Juan. And they were on horseback, three of them. And when they got to the mouth of Comb Wash, and where the San Juan becomes entrenched going down toward Mexican Hat, they couldn't get their horses through. So they turned north and, uh, we've been able to follow this route through the descriptions that he made .. um, about 50 miles over to the Colorado. Well, they had to skirt Grand Gulch, for one thing, and there are several canyons, side canyons, going down to the Colorado that may be candidates for the trip down, but the first one they came to was White Canyon. No relationship to James White. Can't get horses down there. The next canyon, I've forgotten the name of now at the moment, but the .. visibility of that canyon is blocked by the Red House cliffs there. And the first place they could get through was .. uh .. uh, what's the name of that pass? It's now on the paved road going down to the ferry there. Well, it's a break in the .. in the Red House cliffs there that goes over past a spring. And then there's a place where White said: "We needed water for the horses and we saw water in this little canyon and we worked our way down a sand dune and got water, but we couldn't get up the other side because there were sheer cliffs." And that's about the time they were ambushed by the Uke [Ute?] Indians. There's only one place that fits that description and it's in Moki Canyon about 12 miles from the Colorado. I've flown over it and got all the photographs of it. Sand dunes are still there, the cliff's still on the other side. And I think that's about the place where they .. where they started. And then his companion, Strole, was washed off the raft a few days later and drowned. Of course they didn't have life jackets or anything that, uh ... Then White went on from there. People .. his detractors have said: "Well, he couldn't remember which side of the river the Little Colorado came in on." That sort of thing. Well, this poor man was uneducated. He'd never been in that area before. He was hallucinating by that time. It's, uh, no wonder that he couldn't remember where certain things were, as we know today. As a matter of fact in the 1950's there was a .. a pilot that was forced down up in Glen Canyon. And he built hims .. he survived and built himself a raft and got down to Lees Ferry in two days and he was just ... non compos mentis by the time he got there. He didn't know anything. He was so hallucinating and so afraid of this whole situation. So .. tsk .. I can understand why somebody wouldn't remember just where he .. where he was. But, as I say, in the final analysis we'll never be able to prove it. We just know that he was pulled out of the river at Callville and the rest of it's his story. So .. Steiger: It does have a certain ring to it. Um .. I think .. one other thing I would like to touch on now is the difference .. is how fortunate you were to go to see that .. to see the river before the Dam. Did you see .. did you get through .. so you didn't get into Glen Canyon at all?

Euler: No, never did.

Steiger: But I wonder if you .. if we could .. um .. if you could talk a little bit about the difference there; like what those first trips were like, what the .. just what the place was like, what the whole feeling of it was like before the Dam and then after.

Euler: Well, as I told you at our last session, I made my first trip in 1960 at a little over 60,000 cfs, with Rod Sanderson in three little aluminum power boats. Uh .. The water was warm and of course very muddy. Uh .. It's all we had to drink was that river water. And I remember when Jerry Sanderson was a kid on those trips he came up with some little tablet called "Fizzies" that was supposed to make soda pop, if you put it in water. And we would drop one of those in a cup full of this muddy, sandy water, and it would fizz and fizz and all this sand would come up in bubbles over the side [laughing]. We took some fresh food for the first couple of days and after that we just had to .. had canned goods. We didn't have any other fresh food at all, except on that first trip when we were at Tapeats and .. uh .. camped there at Tapeats and one of the Sandersons said: "Now, you go and hike up the River looking for ruins. When you get up so far you'll see us there and bring a fork and a piece of aluminum foil. We'll have some trout." And, lo and behold, they did. We had trout right up there, below where Thunder River comes in. It was also on that first trip when we had stopped briefly at the mouth of Monument Canyon, and they were .. the other boats had gone on. There were just two Sandersons and myself and the boat started to drift away and one of the men yelled at me .. I was closest: "Jump on that boat and start that motor! Bring it back in!" And I did and I pulled on that cord and threw my shoulder out of joint. Separated shoulder. And I said, uh .. I had done it before in skiing accidents, but I said to them: "Any of you know how to put a shoulder back in place?" "No." So I'd heard of this "sock method" where somebody lies down next to you and puts their socked foot up in your armpit and pulls on it. And I said: "Well, that's .. You know, we have to do something here. I can't .. I can't stand the pain, I can't ride the rest of the river with the thing out of joint." So they did and we got it back in. But I rode the rest of the trip with my arm in a sling [laughing], sort of like Major Powell!

Steiger: That was the first trip you ever did?

Euler: 1960. Yes. Right.

Steiger: Boy, that's incredibly painful.

Euler: Yes, it really was. And, fortunately we were able to, you know, use our heads, get it back in .. in place. And it took a week or so and I was all better again. But .. The Sandersons were marvelous people to travel with. As I told you before Rod was a very stern person on the River. He commanded those boats. He told you what to do and what not to do. Um .. At that time there was a big ledger in an overhang down near Elves Chasm and we all signed in on that and other people, parties, had before us. And on my later trips, that thing, somebody stole it. It was missing. Dock Marston said he never knew what happened to it. It was a marvelous, big, leather-bound ledger, about so big [demonstrating]. And a lot of historic names in there: people who had gone down the River in the 1930's and 40's.

Steiger: And it just disappeared.

Euler: Just disappeared, unfortunately, yes. Um .. what did I say the last time? We made that trip in about 10 days, I think. And, um, for example, we stopped for a day at Tapeats, camped two nights there. But when we wanted to make time we could really move it out and, uh, could make 40 miles a day easily. We got down to the Grand Wash Cliffs at the beginning of the Lake and we stopped someplace there where there were some other boaters that come up the lake. And here we were in these three dinky little power boats and somebody said: "Where are you coming from?" We said: "Lees Ferry". Well they thought that was some place like Pierces Ferry on the .. on the Lake. And they said: "Where are you going?" And we said: "We're going down to Pierces Ferry". And he said: "I wouldn't go out there in those little boats. That water is pretty bad, pretty choppy today." And away we went, down through the Lake [laughing]. And I guess we went to Temple Bar, that's where it was, where we ended up. So they were great .. great trips .. really. Steiger: It must have seemed like a .. when you started out there, that first trip, uh ... it seems like it must have been such an adventure. Was there doubt .. was there doubt that you would make it? I mean .. was it a real...?

Euler: I never had any doubt. Because Rod had done it before and he knew what he was doing. I was pretty frightened at times in some of the big rapids. But the boats never tripped .. tipped over. In fact, in 40 trips I've never been out of a boat. I used to say I swim like an anvil. [laughter] So we did just fine. I would guess I was too naive to be scared about too much of it. [laughing]

Steiger: Did people who knew you were going .. I wonder what the general feeling at that time was. It must have seemed like quite the adventure.

Euler: Oh, yes. Yes. As I said, somebody in our party was number 500 to have made the trip. I have a list that Marston gave me years ago of the first 200 .. people to make the trip. Um .. Well, my wife knew about it. And she didn't know any more about the river than I did, so she wasn't particularly worried. She thought I could handle myself alright. Other members of the Sanderson family - I don't know whether I'd mentioned this or not - when we got down near Tanner we built a big fire on the beach and there were people up at Desert View who were Sanderson family, so they knew we'd gotten that far all right without any .. any great problems. Didn't have any radio or anything like that with us. Rod did have a list of side canyons through which people thought, if we got in trouble, we could make it .. hike up to the Rim. But we never had to use that at all.

Steiger: So I guess you guys just .. cooking and stuff was just, uh, would you just make a fire and cook on the fire?

Euler: Yes. It was a .. we had a pretty neat set-up. The hatch covers on the boats could be taken off, turned over, and legs screwed in and make a little table there for cooking on. Uh, yes, in those trips we built fires right on the beach out of driftwood. In fact the Park Service said, according to what Rod had told me, encouraged us to burn driftwood ... uh .. that in high water would break loose and go down and be a navigational hazard down on the Lake. And we burned some tremendous piles of driftwood on that trip. [laughing] And we just sat around, eating. We had a little game that we played in the evening that we called "Washers". They'd bury a .. it was almost like horseshoes .. they'd bury a can in the sand and we had these big washers that we'd toss at that can to see if we could flip it in .. into the open part of the can. Just for something to do in the late evening before it got dark.

Steiger: Um ... [long pause] ... Did it .. I wonder how .. did ... that first trip, how did it affect you, just the Canyon and all that stuff at that point in your life? I wonder what kind of impression it made on you. I mean, was that the main one, or ...?

Euler: Well it was .. it was really awesome to me. I was trying to do my scientific work, the archeology, I was trying to stay in the boat and not get flipped out. There were a lot of times when I had to concentrate on that. But, gosh, especially sitting around a campfire in the evening and looking up at the cliffs, I just .. I could hardly believe it. You know, I had seen the Canyon from the rims before, but nothing like that. And .. To be able to get ... well, we didn't do much hiking. We had to move along pretty fast. Um .. Hiked a little bit up Fossil Canyon, because I'd heard about a ruin up there. And .. and the two days we spent at Tapeats. Uh ... It .. I just thought .. you know, this .. the immensity of this thing! And I thought: "Gosh, it's just impossible that a lot of Indians ever came in here." I knew that Major Powell had found a few ruins along the River and I thought: "Well, maybe if we find 40 or 50 sites, that will be it. And they weren't up in these side canyons." I didn't know anything about routes at that time and nothing was farther from the truth when I really started doing reconnaissance in the Canyon. I don't know how many sites I personally recorded over the years I was there. Several hundred anyway. Yes, it was very exciting for me. Intellectually stimulating and exciting to be in that type of natural environment that was relatively unspoiled.

Steiger: Did you see the riparian zone, comparing it the way, um, between the way it was the first trip and, say, the last trip? When was the last trip that you did?

Euler: Eighty ... two .. or something like that.

Steiger: Was there a pronounced difference in the river corridor physically, uh, at that time as compared with the first trip?

Euler: Yes, indeed. There were a lot more beaches on that first trip, first three trips, to camp on. We never had any trouble finding a place to camp except way down in the far end of the Canyon toward the .. toward the Lake. Uh, we did find that sometimes when we'd tie the boats up at night we'd simply drive a big metal stake into the dune and tie the boat up. And I remember a couple of times when we heard noises like the whole sand bank was caving off into the river and it was the boats chafing against the bank that was causing this; huge chunks of sand going off to the point where we had to really move the boats and be very, very careful. On the third ... But wonderful campsites, really. I don't remember much about the vegetation. I don't remember any camel thorn at that time, but there was lots of .. lots of tammies there, of course.

Steiger: Were there .. there were in the 60's as well.

Euler: Oh, yes. I remember one time, on the third trip in the power boats, we were camped there at Tapeats, like we always did, and we woke up in the morning and, we were in the little lagoon there at Tapeats, one of the boats was under water. It had developed a leak somehow or other, a hole in the boat, and there it was, nose sticking up, the rest of it down in the bottom of that little lagoon. [laughing] And we managed to get it out, of course. I don't remember just how. I think we tied a line onto the stern and .. and pulled with the other boats to try to get it out of there. But they patched it, fixed it up. Those Sandersons were very self-sufficient, I'll tell you. Very .. and very, uh, what shall I say .. very tough guys. They knew what they were doing: Bronse [spelling?], Cousin [?], and Jerry's uncle, and people like that. Rod's wife went on one of those trips, with her nephew, who was about nine years old. And they went pretty well. They didn't run through Lava. They walked around Lava with the little boy. And, uh, I've forgotten what trip that was. Maybe the third. But I don't remember ... Oh, one thing on that first trip: we were camped down at the mouth of Parashont and we were eating breakfast and we looked up and here were three men on horseback, dressed in buckskin, out of the Old West, you know! [laughing] And we struck up a conversation with them. And, uh, they were..lived in Tropic, Utah, and they'd ridden down in there; they were prospecting. And we, uh, chatted with them for quite a while. Well, they were as surprised to see us as we were to see them, of course. They didn't expect to run into anybody. They were living off the land down there, shooting whatever game they could find. [laughing] And, they had found a prehistoric Anasazi sandal in a little cave somewhere. They tried to describe to me where it was and they showed it to me, but they kept it with them. And I often thought I'd try to find that place, but I never was able to, that cave. So ... That was a very pleasant experience, to run into those three old guys.

Steiger: Were they Mormon guys?

Euler: I presume, yes.

Steiger: Man, that's amazing!

Euler: Alright, well, Lew, as I say, if you think of other things, or if I .. you’re in the book, are you?

Steiger: Yes. I am, right there in the phone book. And, uh ..

Euler: If I think of anything, I'll give you a buzz. And if you remember some things you wanted to ask me, we'll set up another time.

Steiger: It sure .. it sure may be that'd be good to do that. What I'll do with this stuff, with what we have so far, is I'll send it on and have it transcribed and, uh, try to get it back at you as soon as we can for .. for editing.

Euler: Alright. Come in, we're just done.

[END INTERVIEW] ?? 68