The Story Of A Boat
The Utah. Near the rim of the Canyon, at El Tovar Hotel, is a steel boat, sixteen feet long, scarred and battered, showing signs of the roughest usage, named the Utah. Here is its story:

Loper Plans to Explore the Canyon. For ten years after Galloway's first trip was made, no one was found venturesome enough to risk the dangers of the Canyon journey until the man who built the Utah and his two companions resolved to "dare and do." These men were Charles S. Russell, of Prescott, Arizona, Edward R. Monett, of Goldfield, Nevada, and Albert Loper, of Louisiana, Missouri. Russell was thirty-one years of age, Monett twenty-three, and Loper thirty-eight years.

The plan originated in the mind of Loper, in a mine in Cripple Creek, in 1899. Six years later, Loper had been attracted to the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado in Southeastern Utah, by the excitement created by the discovery of placer mining there. He confided to Russell his belief that the Colorado River offered much greater chances of richer placer mining.