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John Alexander Mellon (1842 - 1924), was the best known of the Colorado River steamboat captains, came to the river with Thomas Trueworthy in 1864 and stayed for nearly half a century. [1]: 65 





  • Jack Mellon was destined to become the most famous of the Colorado River captains, working the river for over forty years. He was a New Brunswick sailor, who first went to sea at the age of ten. He had come to the river in 1864 with Overman and Thorne to work for Trueworthy. The steamboat captains earned $200 a month-good pay at the time. Their crews consisted of an engineer, who also drew from $160 to $200 a month, a first mate, a fireman and a cook, each of whom made $75, an assistant fireman who earned $40, a steward who was paid $25, and six to seven deck hands, whose wages depended on their nativity. Yankee deckhands got $35 a month, Sonorans and Kanakas $25, and Cocopahs, Yumas, and Mohaves $15. The barges also had a captain, or steerer, who drew $75 a month, and two deckhands. All hands received board.[1]: 51 
  • -64-

Navigation became difflcult here as the river fanned out over a myriad of sandbars, reaching a width of a third of a mile. At low water it was only a foot or so deep in most places. Finding a channel deep enough for a steamboat in this labyrinth of bars was often a frustrating task. The captain was constantly at the wheel. At the bow the leadsman took soundings with a long pole and sang out the depth. When it exceeded six feet he was silent, but all too frequently he would sing, "Four! Three! Two! Two light! Quarter less two!" and then with a jolt the steamer was on a bar. The deck hands would swing over the side into the river with poles to help push the boat off, as the captain rang the engineer to reverse the engine. If he was unable to spot a deeper channel through the muddy water, the captain would take the dinghy ahead to try to sound out one with a pole. If this failed he simply had to work the boat over the bar one way or another.56

First, he usually tried to "grasshopper" the boat over with poles and spars. Running full ahead onto the bar as far as he could, he called out, "Get out your small boat, take the big anchor and four-inch line to the head of the bar!" While this was being done he hollered to the deck hands, "Set your spar on starboard side." They drove the spar deep into the bar, then ran a line from the other end through a pulley on the side of the boat to the capstan. With the click! click! click! of the capstan poles, the starboard side of the steamer was slowly raised. The captain rang the engineer to "Go ahead. " The stern wheel churned up a froth, the men at the capstan took up the slack on the anchor line, and the boat slipped forward a few feet. Then the spar was reset and the process repeated again and again till the boat was over the bar.57

If the water over the bar was too shallow, however, the captain had to bring the boat around stern to and "crawfish" over, cutting a channel with the stern wheel. The novelty of this technique, devised by Captain Mellon, impressed the passengers no end. "It is pure Yankee!" one Swiss traveler exclaimed. To turn the boat stern to, the anchor was set at the head of the bar and the line run through a pulley at the stern then forward to the

56. Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), 12 Feb. 1876; Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona, p. 39; Berton, Voyage, pp. 34, 44. 57. Berton, Voyage, p.44.

  • -65-

capstan. With the help of the current, the boat swung around end for end as the capstan turned. Then the captain rang the engineer to full reverse the engine, and taking up the slack on the anchor line as he went, he dug and pulled his way through the bar with the paddle wheel. In this way the boat could be taken over a bar on which there was as little as two inches of water! Sometimes, of course, there was not even this much, and in trying to get over the steamer would run solidly aground, there to remain until a temporary rise in the river. The steamboats were rarely aground more than a week at a time, though on one occasion Jack Mellon was caught for fifty-two days! 58 [1] : 64–65 

58. Berton, Voyage, pp. 44-45; Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona, p. 40; Arizona Sentinel (Yuma), 12 Feb. 1876; U.S. Congress, House, House Executive Document l, pt. 2, "Report of Chief of Engineers, Appendix JJ," 46th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879).


  • Picture of Mellon, [1]: 65 
  • The biggest mining operation on the

Colorado River in 1879 was the newly organized Southwestern Mining Company. Headed by mining entrepreneur Joseph Wharton, of Philadelphia, the company consolidated most of the paying mines in Eldorado Canyon, completely overhauled the old mill, and chartered the Gila for four months to bring in new machinery. Jack Mellon captained the boat while under charter, and as soon as he had delivered the first cargo of machinery, he was ordered to try to take the Gila on upriver to the salt mines and the Mormon settlement of Rioville at the mouth of the Virgin' He set out from Eldorado Canyon at 8:30 A.M. on 7 July, and making reôord time through the rapids in Black Canyon, he tied up at Callville that evening. The following day he carefully guided the Gita the last twenty miles through the uncharted rapids of Boulder Canyon to his destination. e On 8 July 1879, twenty years after Johnson and Ives first set out for the elusive Virgin, Jack Mellon finally proved that it was indeed the head of steam navigation on the Colorado River. The Mormons at Rioville were "wonder-struck" to see a steamboat; one proclaimed it the "biggest thing he ever saw in water." The passengers on the Gila werc equally impressed with the deep canyons through which they had come, yowing they were the "grandest on Earth. " They felt dwarfed by the towering walls, and one concluded that the steamer could not have looked more out of place in the bottom of a mine shaft.lo During the next eight years Mellon took the Gila back up to the Virgin a couple times ayeü to get salt for the mill, eventually making a total of twenty trips. ... To help the boats through the worst rapids, Mellon secured half a dozen ringbolts to the canyon walls in 1883. However, since the steamers could only make the trip during high water and, in fact, at low water could not even reach Eldorado Canyon, the mining company bought a sloop, the Sou'Wester, to make the run the rest of the year. She was a fine, swift boat of 65 tons burden, carrying 18 tons of salt on 2 feet of water. She had a cedar deck and a boiler-plated hull, 56-foot keel and l5-foot beam, and a 48-foot mast sporting more than 400 square yards of canvas. Built in San Francisco, she was shipped by rail to Yuma, then upriver on the Gila to Mormon Island, where she was reassembled and launched in November 1879. With Captain Mellon at the helm, the Sou'Wester made nineteen trips to the Virgin before she was wrecked by his first mate in the Short and Dirty Rapids in 1882. Steamboating above Eldorado Canyon finally ceased in 1887 with the decline of mining operations. ll[1]: 78 

  • For three months after they reached the river the crews

struggled to bridge the Colorado just below Needles. It was an illsuited time and place for building a bridge. The river was at flood stage and the channel was 1600 feet wide at that point with no solid banks on either side. The swift current uprooted the pilings almost as fast as they could be driven. A wide gap mid-stream resisted all efforts before it was finally conquered with the aid of the Mohaue and a pile driver mounted on Barge No. 3. Even then the bridge was criticized as a "flimsy looking structure, " and an obstruction to navigation since it iacked a draw' The precariousness of the site was demonstrated again and again as the Colorado floods swept away the bridge in 1884 and its two successors in 1886 and 1888. The Atlantic and Pacific company belatedly recognized their error after the loss of their third bridge and began construction of a high cantilever span at a much narrower point ten miles downstream. This bridge was completed in May 1890, and the station there was named Mellen in misspelled honor of the steamer captain.l2 Before even the first bridge was completed, however, Captain Mellon had taken the Mohaue and her barge above the bridge to carry freight on upriver above Needles while the Gila under Captain Polhamus remained below the bridge to handle the trade on that stretch. But the new railroad, which passed close to the mines around Mineral Park, cut heavily into the remaining steamboat trade upriver. There was, in fact, so little river trade that after a draw was put in the bridge in 1884, the Mohaue was taken back down to Yuma and tied up. The Gila was the only boat in service then, and she was making trips upriver only once every six weeks or so. Reflecting on the fact that before the "advent of the railroad" the Colorado Steam Navigation Company had operated as many as five steamers and five barges at one time, the Yuma Sentinel editor lamented, "How the mighty have fallen. From a powerful corporation it has been reduced almost to naught. . . . Water transportation can never compete with railroads." Even the Southern Pacific's backers were no longer interested in the riverboats and on 10 September 1886 they sold out their interest in the failing company to Isaac Polhamus and Jack Mellon.18

For the next half dozen years Polhamus and Mellon barely kept the business afloat. Carrying both supplies to the Indian agencies at Parker and Fort Mohave, and coalfor the stamp mills at Eldorado Canyon and Hardyville made up the bulk of the business for the steamers. Added to this were only occasional supply and machinery shipments to the other mines at Castle Dome, Norton's Landing, Clip and the Black Metal Ledge near Aubrey, and the scattered ranches at Blythe's Landing and Chemehuevis Valley. May Day and Fourth of July excursions from Yuma to picnic grounds on Stevenson's Island some twenty eight miles upriver and from Needles to Fort Mohave also helped supplement the steamer revenue. In an effort to attract transcontinental railroad travelers, Polhamus and Mellon tried unsuccessfully to promote regular steamboat tours down to the Gulf of California and up to the foot of the Grand Canyon, offering such enticements as, "Think of passing through canyons from the profound depths of which shining stars can be seen from the deck of the steamer at midday!"l9 [1]: 82–84  photo of Gila and Mellen bridge site p83

the steamer at midday!"le The decline of the river trade in the late 1880s resulted not only from ever-increasing railroad competition, but also from ever-declining silver prices which forced the closing of many mines and which culminated in the virtual collapse of silver mining throughout the West, following the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893. The collapse of silver, however, finally spurred prospectors back into the hills to look for gold, and rich new discoveries soon revitalized the mining industry. Starting in the early 1890s a number of new mining districts were opened up along the Colorado River. In January 1891 a Piute, Robert Black, discovered gold in the New York Mountains, thirty-flve miles from the river, northwest of Needles. A rush began, and the town of Vanderbilt sprang into existence. A few months later gold was found on the Ãnzona side of the river just twelve miles below Eldorado Canyon at what soon became known as Murphyville. The following year another boom camp was born, when rich ore was found at White Hills, some twenty miles east of Eldorado Canyon. At the same time gold ledges in the Picacho and Cargo Muchacho districts northwest of Yuma were reopened. These were followed during the next ten years by a flurry of other discoveries all along the river. The most productive were the mines'at Searchlight, just fourteen miles west of the river, south of Eldorado Canyon, and the mines at Goldroad and Oatman, a dozen miles east of the river at Fort Mohave. The Searchlight mines, discovered in May 1897, yielded around $4 milton in gold, and the Goldroad and Oatman mines discovered about the same time ultimately produced some $35 million.20 During the boom several new mills were built along the river and three short line railroads were run from different mines to the river mills. The first was the Quartette Mining Company railroad built in 1901-02 between Searchlight and the company's mill at Quartette on the west bank of the river about sixty miles above Needles. At the same time the California King Gold Mines Company built a winding, frve-mile railroad from their mines to a new cyaniding plant on the river at Picacho, and in 1903 the Mohave and Milltown Railway was run from the Leland and vivian mines near oatman to the colorado opposite Needles. These railroads were not branches of the main lines, but were wholly dependent on the river, and everything from their ties and rails to their engines and coal were brought in by the steamers.2l


  • The river trade prospered once again with the renewed

mining activity. Polhamus and Mellon were once more able to keep both the Gita and Mohauø busy, and soon they had to build a new barge, the Enterþrisø, to keep up with the business' The Enterþrise was equipped with a small steam engine rigged to her capstan so that she could pull herself upriver.22

The increased business on the river, however, invited competition, and the growing popularity of the newly developed gasoline ,,vapor engine" led to the introduction of a number of smaller steam- and gasoline-powered boats. These rival boats, in fact, finally broke Polhamus and Mellon's monopoly of the river business. [1]: 84–86 

Polhamus and Mellon, in the meantime, were feeling the pinch of the Stacy brothers' competition for the river freight and excursion business. Not to be outdone by an upstart, Captain Mellon even took the palatial Mohaae out into the gulf on a ten-day excursion and would have made regular trips, but he could not sell enough tickets to pay expenses for the big boat. Finally in 1895 Polhamus and Mellon bought out the Stacy brothers. They put the Aztec to work on the run from Needles to Eldorado Canyon during low water, but she proved no more successful there than had their larger boats.26 [1]: 88 

Death[edit]

Polhamus died 16 January 1922 at the age of ninety-four and Mellon on 17 December 1924 at eighty-three.28 28. San Diego Union, 20 Dec. 1924; Arizona Republican (Phoenix), 17 Jan. 1922.[1]: 159, 179, n.28 , Aged Coronadoan Dies; Coronado Eagle and Journal, 23 December 1924. [2]


References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i Richard E. Lingenfelter, Steamboats on the Colorado River, 1852-1916, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1978
  2. ^ Coronado Eagle and Journal, Number 34, 23 December 1924, p.7,col.2; Aged Coronadoan Dies At Residence Here, Capt. John Alexander Mellon of 930 I Avenue, Coronado passed away at his residence last Wednesday. He is survived by his widow, Mrs. Grace Mellon and a daughter, Mrs. Deborah M. Rice of Watts, California. He was a native of Nova Scotia, but he has lived in Coronado for a number of years. He was eighty-three years of age at the time of his death. The funeral was held Saturday afternoon at 2:30 from the Benbough funeral parlors. It was under the auspices of the San Diego Lodge of Benevolent Protective Order of Elks of which he was a member, and interment was at Elks Rest, Greenwood.


Title The Life of John Alexander Mellon, the Colorado River Steamboat Man, 1969 Author Swahlen, Cindy Publication Date 1969 Collections CM Small Manuscripts Subjects Transporation — Boats & Boating — Navigation — Rivers — Biographies Location Hayden Arizona Collection Call Number CM MSM-592 ID 53966


External Links[edit]

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