805 E. San Rafael Street Colorado Springs, Colorado 80903
Certainly not a unique, unusual or rare engine in any way, it
was designed to drive corn binders on midwestern farms. How one
ever got to southwestern Utah, into the depths of Glen Canyon on
the Colorado River where it operated a Wil-fley shake table at an
old abandoned gold placer mine, would make an interesting story in
itself.
The summer before the completion of the Glen Canyon Dam, during
a Boy Scout river trip through that spectacular gorge, we
discovered the old engine at a place called Shock’s Bar on our
maps, between Hall’s Crossing and the confluence of the San
Juan, just a little downstream from the historic Hole-in-the-Rock
crossing of Mormon fame. The water and the gas tanks had been used
for target practice, someone had lifted the brass carburetor, but
otherwise it seemed to be intact, and more importantly, free and
un-stuck.
My interest in antiques and ‘things old’ was then
limited to vintage cars, but right away I developed a yearning for
that old forsaken piece of scrap iron. Of course we couldn’t
just take it with us; its sharp corners would surely poke holes in
our rubber rafts, and we had many miles to go and much more white
water to negotiate. We would have to come back overland with the
truck, and somehow figure out a way to sky-hook it straight up the
mile or so of solid rock from the river bank to the canyon rim.
Time was running out-Glen Canyon Dam was scheduled for completion
that winter, and the area would soon be submerged under hundreds of
feet of Lake Powell water.
Glen Canyon lies in one of the most rugged and desolate (and
beautiful) parts of the country; at that time there were no roads
into the region and no maps. We were on our own. We began to take
exploration trips, hidden in the guise of ‘Boy Scout
outings’ into the godforsaken desert badlands soutwest of
Blanding, down in that vast triangle of broken mesas and buttes
bounded by the Colorado and the San Juan, whose only access was by
a tortuous and billious jeep road over and obscure ‘Clay Hills
Pass’, always searching for the elusive old Mormon wagon road
that led down into the Hole-in-the-Rock, which we suspected would
have to be our only way in.
Somehow our endeavors paid off; we found that ‘road’,
now no more than faint wheel ruts worn into slick rock. We
bushwacked our way off out into the tules to the very brink of the
canyon, and could look at the river and Shock’s Bar only one
mile away-straight down.
Now two hundred pounds of rusty old iron on the ground weighs
about 200 tons when suspended half-way up a sheer rock wall by a
nylon climbing rope, attached at the other end to a luckless
climber, belayed himself to the rocks with only a couple of scrawny
pitons. Questioning the ancestry of ol’ Newton and his stupid
law of gravity all the way, we somehow horse-wrestled that
worthless piece of junk, now minus its skids, gas and water tanks,
to the top, sacrificing in the process, 3 good climbing ropes,
about 47 pitons, and several pairs of jeans.
The engine is all restored now, as well as it will ever be,
although still without its original and correct carby, its gas and
water tanks. Every year it is used to operate one or more of my
puzzle saws at engine shows all over the midwest. Of course it is
worn out; it burns oil, more oil than gas (and what it doesn’t
burn it squirts out of its every crack and cranny). New bearing
tubes had to be turned from solid chunks of babbit; its rod first
saw service in a Model A Ford, its piston came out of a modern 350
Chevy V-8.
But regretfully, still down at Shock’s Bar, under perhaps
500 feet of Lake Powell water, lie two old horizontal 1-lungers of
unknown make, both much too large and too heavy to ever be lifted
by hand up that rock wall, even in pieces. There is a little
cat-type tractor there with a 4-banger open pushrod engine that was
free and intact; with a little gas we could have started it up. But
most unusual and odd, was the large single-cylinder horizontal
center crank steam engine, about 10 by 12 or so, that drove the
water pump for the hydraulic placer system. It had a wood-bed
frame-two 12×12’s with the cylinder bolted at one end and the
crank boxin’s at the other.
The old miner lived in a cabin nearby, no doubt with his wife,
for there were pictures on the walls; the place was still neat and
tidy in spite of the 1936 calendar. Outside, a wonderful clear cold
spring; hollyhocks grew wild by the porch, and there was a fig tree
in the yard. Someone’s dreams and hopes all for nothing, for it
is all gone now, destroyed in the name of ‘progress’, in
man’s greedy and futile attempt to ‘tame nature’.
All that is left is the Cushman. But does anyone want to go
scuba diving in the depths of Lake Powell? -‘Ole Uncle
Smiley’, the Puzzle Man