Moment in Time (September 8, 2022)

A boat from the 1909 Galloway-Stone Colorado River expedition floats down river with Steamboat Rock in the background. The boats were specially designed and built by Nathaniel Galloway for the expedition, with specifications provided by Grandview resident Julius Stone (the photo inset is Stone’s boat, now on display in the Grand Canyon Archival Collection). The expedition included five men at the start, with four completing the three-month trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers. Shown in the inset are Galloway, Raymond Cogswell, Charles Sharp (who dropped out early in the trip), and Julius F. Stone (lower left). Not shown is Seymour Dubendorf.

Grandview Heights resident Julius F. Stone was an influential Columbus industrialist and entrepreneur, a trustee of The Ohio State University, and President of the OSU Research Foundation. He was the owner of Ohio Buggy Works and the Seagrave Company, turn of the century makers of Seagrave fire equipment. He and his wife donated quite a sum of money to the University, endowing a fellowship in biophysical research and purchasing the first OSU cyclotron. He also purchased and immediately donated Gibralter Island in Lake Erie near Put-In-Bay to OSU to establish what would become the Franz Theodore Stone Lab, in honor of his father. This was just one of the gifts to environmental causes that Stone made.

Stone’s entrepreneurial efforts went beyond the city and state, including several ventures in the west. One of these ventures was financing the Hoskaninni Mining Company in Utah, a company founded by mining engineer Robert Brewster Stanton in 1897. The company, headquartered in Glen Canyon, was the largest gold mining venture to extract profit from the Glen Canyon gold field. Stanton had a grand idea of dredging the Colorado River and sluicing the material to process the gold. But his 80-bucket, 180-ton custom dredge sank in the variable water levels of the Colorado River. Stone lost his significant investment in this venture, but his involvement set the stage for another groundbreaking experience in the area.

Stone met Nathaniel Galloway, who was a trapper and part time prospector from Vernal, Utah, who was at the time working for Hoskaninni. In 1896-97 Galloway made trips by boat on the Green and Colorado Rivers from Green River, Wyoming through the Grand Canyon to Needles, California. Stone had the idea of repeating the trip to document the course of the river, river rapids, canyon characteristics, as well as the geology of the area. Stone hired Galloway, and together they designed and built four 16’ flat bottomed boats made of Michigan pine. He hired an expert photographer, his brother-in-law Raymond Cogswell, and a helper, Seymour Dubendorf. Dubendorf was a young aspiring writer, and Stone felt that he could help put a book together about the trip.

Stone, then 54 years old, and the other four men and their four boats (they were accompanied by a friend of Stone, Charles Sharp, for the first portion of the trip) left Green River on September 15, 1909. They arrived in Needles, California in November. Over the course of the 69-day trip, Stone and Galloway kept extensive notes in a diary that is now in the Western Waters Collection at the University of Utah. Cogswell took a significant number of photographs of the canyon walls, geological formations, and landmarks, river routes and rapids, hieroglyphics, and impacts to the river due to erosion.  The photos are in collections at the Northern Arizona University and the University of Utah libraries.

Stone gave a lecture about the trip at Ohio State in 1910, discussing the trip. He revealed that he had to self-treat a bout of pleurisy, and the boats had to be repaired several times because of encounters with rocks in the rapids. He stated in the lecture that “The river water was very muddy, but the party drank of it after allowing the mud to settle. Provisions were to have been supplied at four different places, but at one place they were not forthcoming, so we were forced to go scant for a while.” At one point, several of their boats capsized in the rapids, and Dubendorf suffered a head injury. In 1923, a USGS survey party named these rapids after Dubendorf, and named the upper rapids for Galloway, and the lower one for Stone. The whole story of the trip was told by Stone in his book Canyon Country: The Romance of a Drop of Water and a Grain of Sand. This volume is Stone’s account of this remarkable journey from his diary and includes over 300 of Cogswell's photographs.

Historical Society Trustee Emeritus Tom DeMaria wrote in a 2004 Society newsletter “The book is an outstanding legacy from one of Grandview’s most prominent early residents and civic leaders. Most of the Green River and Glen Canyon portion of the expedition route is now under the waters of Lake Powell, and the photographs in the book offer a rare look at the original canyon topography, now lost to the eye.” Recent droughts in the west, coupled with increased demand for water from the river have made much of the details visible again as the water levels have significantly receded. Stone would certainly provide strong commentary about the environmental dilemma if he were alive today.

References:
1.     Julius Stone. Canyon Country: The Romance of a Drop of Water and a Grain of Sand (New York, London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1932.)
2.     David Lavender. River Runners of the Grand Canyon (Grand Canyon, Ariz.: Grand Canyon Natural History Association. 1985)
3.     Trustees Lecture - Dr. Julius F. Stone Addresses Large Audience in Chapel on Trip Down Colorado, The Ohio State Lantern, 16 November 1910.
4.     https://swvirtualmuseum.nau.edu/wp/index.php/national-parks/grand-canyon-national-park/river-runners/
5.     https://collections.lib.utah.edu/
6.     https://www.nps.gov/dino/learn/historyculture/galloway-stone-expedition.htm
7.     http://www.azarchivesonline.org
8. https://hdl.huntington.org/digital/collection/