Thus, after all these years of endeavour, the mighty Colorado foamed away amidst this terrible environment as if no human element yet existed in the world.  And as it continued to baffle all attempts to probe its deeper mysteries, the dread of it and the fear of it grew and grew, till he who suggested that a man might pass through the bewildering chasms and live, was regarded as light-headed.  Then came the awful war of the Rebellion, and for several years little thought was bestowed on the problem.*

* The troops that were so foolishly and feebly sent against the Mormons in 1857 had some experience in Green River Valley, but it was not directly connected with this story and I will not introduce an account of it here.

Some few prospectors for mineral veins began investigations in the neighbourhood of the lower part of the Grand Canyon, and the gorge was entered from below, about 1864, by O. D. Gass and three other men.  I met Gass at his home at Las Vegas (see cut, page 137) in 1875, but I did not then know he had been in the canyon and did not hear his story.  It was not till 1866 that any one tried again to navigate the river above Mohave.  In that year Captain Rodgers, who for four years had been on the lower Colorado, took the steamboat Esmeralda, ninety-seven feet long and drawing three and one-half feet of water, up as far as Callville, near the mouth of the Virgen, which was several miles beyond the highest point attained by Ives in his skiff, but little, if any, farther than Johnson had gone with his steamboat.  He ascended the most difficult place, Roaring Rapids in Black Canyon, in seven minutes, and was of the opinion that it could as easily be surmounted at any stage of water, except perhaps during the spring rise.  It does not matter much now, for it is not likely that any steam craft will soon again have occasion to traverse that canyon.  The completion of the railways was a death blow to steam navigation on the Colorado, yet, in the future, when the fertile bottoms are brought under cultivation, small steamboats will probably be utilised for local transportation.

The journey of the Esmeralda added nothing to what was already known.  The following year, 1867, a man was picked up at Callville, in an exhausted and famishing condition, by a frontiersman named Hardy.  When he had been revived he told his story.  It was that he had come on a raft through the Grand Canyon above, and all the canyons antecedent to that back to a point on Grand River.  The story was apparently straightforward, and it was fully accepted.  At last, it was thought, a human being has passed through this Valley of the Shadow of Death and lived to tell of its terrors.  Hardy took him down to Fort Mohave, where he met Dr. Parry,* who recorded his whole story, drawn out by many questions, and believed it.  This was not surprising; for, no man ever yet having accomplished what White claimed to have done, there was no way of checking the points, of his tale.