with Lieutenant White and party returning to the fort, and went back with them in order to bring up the pack-train.”  He does not mention, however, that Johnson was piloting a steamboat larger than the Explorer.  Indeed, I have been told that he failed to reply to Johnson’s salute.  Slowly they worked their way up, and on up, toward their final goal, though the water was exceptionally low.  At last reaching Bill Williams Fork, Ives, who had seen it at the time he was with Whipple about four years earlier, could not at first find it, though, on the former occasion, in the same season, it had been a stream thirty feet wide.  It was now a feeble rivulet, the old mouth being filled up and overgrown with willows.  Approaching Mohave Canyon, a rapid was encountered, necessitating the carrying forward of an anchor, from which a line was brought to the bow, and this being kept taut, with the boat under full steam the obstruction was surmounted without damage.  This was the common method of procedure at rapids.  This canyon, Ives, says was a “scene of such imposing grandeur as he had never before witnessed,” yet it is only a harbinger of the greater sublimity extending along the water above for a thousand miles.  Mohave Canyon and The Needles soon were left behind, and they were steaming through the beautiful Mohave Valley, where the patient footsteps of the padres and the restless tramp of the trappers had so long ago passed and been forgotten.  Probably not one of that party remembered that Pattie on horseback had covered this same field over thirty years before, or that rare old Garces guided his tired mule along these very banks a full half century ahead of Pattie.  To-day, the comfortable traveller on the railway, crossing the river near The Needles, has also forgotten these things and Lieutenant Ives as well.

Many Cocopas, Yumas, Mohaves, and Chemehuevis were met with since the trip began, but there had been no trouble with any of them.  Ives now began to inquire for a former guide of Whipple’s, whom he pleasantly remembered and whose name was Ireteba.  Fortunately, he soon came across him and engaged his services.  Ireteba was a Mohave, but possessed one of those fine natures found in every clime and colour.  He was always true and intelligent, and of great service to the expedition.  The Explorer pushed on, encountering many difficulties, some due to the unfortunate timbers on the bottom, which often became wedged in rocks, besides increasing the draught by about six inches, a serious matter at this extremely low stage of water.  “It is probable,” says Ives, “that there is not one season in ten when even the Explorer would encounter one fourth of the difficulty that she has during the unprecedentedly low stage of water.”  At one rapid, after the boat by hard labour had been brought to the crest, the line broke and she at once fell back, bumping over the rocks and finally lodging amidst a mass so firmly that it required half the next day to pull