Norman D. Nevills (April 9, 1908 – September 19, 1949) was a pioneer of commercial river-running in the American Southwest, particularly the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He led trips including Dr. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, the first two women to successfully float the Grand Canyon (which occurred in 1938), and Barry Goldwater.
Nevills was the son of William E. and Mae Davies Nevills of California. The elder Nevills left California in 1921 to pursue a career in oil drilling in the San Juan oil fields of southern Utah. [1] [2] Norman and his mother moved to Mexican Hat, Utah to join his father in 1927 after two years of college at the College of the Pacific in Stockton, California. [2] William E. Nevills had some experience running whitewater on the Yukon River during the Klondike gold rush, and the younger Nevills adopted his father's interest in running rivers. [3] Norman became interested in running rivers, floating the San Juan River in an open boat in 1932, carrying supplies to a miner downriver from Mexican Hat. The next year, he worked for a while for the Rainbow Bridge/Monument Valley expedition, including using their Wilson Fold-Flat boats on the river.
Nevills met Doris Drown in July, 1933; they married in October of that year. For their honeymoon, they floated the San Juan in a boat that he had built from his mother's horse trough. They had two daughters, Joan (Staveley), born October 7, 1936, and Sandra (Reiff), born March 28, 1941. [4]
Although most of Nevills' river trips were on the San Juan, he ran seven trips through the Grand Canyon: 1938, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1947, 1948, and 1949. Nevills' chance for fame came in 1938, when he had the opportunity to escort Dr. Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, two botanists from the University of Michigan who wished to catalog the flora of the Grand Canyon, from Green River, Utah, to Lake Mead. They encountered extraordinarily high water at the confluence of the San Juan and the Colorado, but finished the trip without serious incident. [5] Their 43-day, 666-mile trip generated a lot of publicity for Nevills. [3] At least one river historian, Otis "Dock" Marston, in reviewing all the journals after the trip, noted that the success of the cruise was due in large part to Dr. Clover's insistence new boatmen be found to replace the two that quit at Lee's Ferry. [6]
In 1940, Nevills took Barry Goldwater, a young man from a family which owned Arizona's largest chain of grocery stores, as a paying customer down the Grand Canyon. [7] Nevills allowed Goldwater to take the oars, and Goldwater flipped the boat in one rapid. [4] Following his trip, Goldwater began giving slide shows in movie theaters and other venues, often to sold-out crowds. His statewide barnstorming tour convinced Goldwater that he had a knack for public speaking—which he parlayed into his very successful career in politics. [8]
Successful trips down the Grand Canyon followed in 1941 and 1942. The 1942 Grand Canyon trip included passengers Ed Hudson, Ed Olsen and Otis Marston. On that cruise boatman Wayne McConkie flipped a boat in Lava Chuar Rapid. Olsen made the film Facing Your Danger after the trip, which won the Academy Award for short subjects in 1947. Marston would proceed to travel more river miles with Norm than any other of Norm's boatman. [9] Restrictions on travel caused by World War II ended Norm's Grand Canyon trips for the duration. Nevills stayed in Mexican Hat throughout the war, leading an occasional river trip, including some on the San Juan river and one on the Colorado through Cataract Canyon. In 1946, challenged by a Salt Lake City newspaper writer, Nevills went to Idaho to run trips on the Main Salmon and the Snake Rivers. These were very successful and Nevills considered expanding his business to include these rivers, but that never came about. He ran the upper Green River in 1947, as well as the Grand Canyon; then ran only the San Juan and Grand Canyon in 1948. In 1949, his last season on the river, he ran the Grand Canyon, finishing the trip in August. [10]
In ten years of leading paying customers down the Colorado, San Juan, and Green Rivers, Nevills never lost a customer, and he himself never capsized a boat, although some of his boatmen did. Magazines and newspapers labeled him "The World’s No. 1 Fast-Water Man." [5]
To overcome the challenge of getting around Mexican Hat, Utah, which was accessible only by bad dirt roads, Nevills took flying lessons and bought a small private airplane in 1946. He used it to fly customers for his river trips, to bring supplies to remote locations, and in general loved flying. He often flew under the Navajo Bridge near Lees Ferry, Utah, and then looped back around and under the bridge. On September 19, 1949, Nevills and his wife, Doris, took off in his Piper J3 from his airstrip in Mexican Hat, Utah, en route to Grand Junction, Colorado. The plane had engine troubles shortly after takeoff, and Nevills tried to turn around, but the plane crashed into the rim of an arroyo, killing them both. A plaque honoring the Nevillses was installed at Navajo Bridge in 1952. [11]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
John Wesley Powell was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for his 1869 geographic expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers, including the first official U.S. government-sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon.
Sir Charles William Feilden Hamilton was a New Zealand engineer who developed the modern jetboat, and founded the water jet manufacturing company, CWF Hamilton Ltd.
The San Juan River is a major tributary of the Colorado River in the Southwestern United States, providing the chief drainage for the Four Corners region of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona. Originating as snowmelt in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, it flows 383 miles (616 km) through the deserts of northern New Mexico and southeastern Utah to join the Colorado River at Glen Canyon.
The Colorado Plateau is a physiographic and desert region of the Intermontane Plateaus, roughly centered on the Four Corners region of the southwestern United States. This plateau covers an area of 336,700 km2 (130,000 mi2) within western Colorado, northwestern New Mexico, southern and eastern Utah, northern Arizona, and a tiny fraction in the extreme southeast of Nevada. About 90% of the area is drained by the Colorado River and its main tributaries: the Green, San Juan, and Little Colorado. Most of the remainder of the plateau is drained by the Rio Grande and its tributaries.
Glen and Bessie Hyde were newlyweds who disappeared while attempting to run the rapids of the Colorado River through Grand Canyon, Arizona in 1928. Had the couple succeeded, Bessie Hyde would have been the first woman known to accomplish this feat.
Glen Canyon is a natural canyon carved by a 169.6-mile (272.9 km) length of the Colorado River, mostly in southeastern and south-central Utah, in the United States. Glen Canyon starts where Narrow Canyon ends, at the confluence of the Colorado River and the Dirty Devil River. A small part of the lower end of Glen Canyon extends into northern Arizona and terminates at Lee's Ferry, near the Vermilion Cliffs. Like the Grand Canyon farther downstream, Glen Canyon is part of the immense system of canyons carved by the Colorado River and its tributaries.
Lewis Ransome Freeman was an American explorer, journalist and war correspondent who wrote over twenty books chronicling his many travels, as well as numerous articles.
Haldane "Buzz" Holmstrom (1909–1946) was a pioneer of running the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was the first person to float all the way from Green River, Wyoming to Boulder Dam solo. He built his own rowboats, often of his own design, to run whitewater rivers.
Albert A. "Bert" Loper was a pioneer of the sport of whitewater river-running in the American Southwest, particularly the Colorado River and its tributaries. He, along with many of the noted boatmen of his era, including Charles Russell, Julius Stone, Ellsworth Kolb, and others, were among the first people to navigate the Colorado River before the construction of Glen Canyon Dam and Navajo Dam.
Facing Your Danger is a 1946 American short film. The cameraman was amateur filmmaker Edwin E. Olsen. Using a Cine-Kodak and 16mm Kodachrome film, Olsen shot the film in 1942 on a Grand Canyon river trip conducted by Norman Nevills. Another amateur cameraman on the trip was Otis R. Marston. When Olsen ran out of film, Marston, who had brought 6,000 feet of Kodachrome magazines, provided Olsen with what he needed. Olsen edited the film and sold it to Warner Brothers in 1946. Lee Anthony and Gordon Hollingshead collaborated to re-edit and shorten the film to a one reel for theater release.
The Colorado River Storage Project is a United States Bureau of Reclamation project designed to oversee the development of the upper basin of the Colorado River. The project provides hydroelectric power, flood control and water storage for participating states along the upper portion of the Colorado River and its major tributaries.
Robert Brewster Stanton was a United States civil and mining engineer. He was chief engineer of an expedition investigating the Grand Canyon for a possible railroad line in 1889-90, and investigated many mining properties.
Mary Ogden Abbott was an American wood carving and line drawing artist, world traveler, equestrian and an early Grand Canyon River runner.
Otis Reed "Dock" Marston was an American writer, historian and Grand Canyon river runner who participated in a large number of river-running firsts. Marston was the eighty-third person to successfully complete the water transit of the Grand Canyon. He spent the last thirty years of his life writing his magnum opus on the history of the first 100 Grand Canyon river runners. In researching his book, he amassed a vast collection of material on early river runners in the American Southwest, especially runners of the Green and Colorado Rivers. His collection is housed in the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.
Elzada Clover (1897–1980) was an American botanist who was the first to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon on the Colorado River. She and Lois Jotter became the first two women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon.
Mary Lois Jotter Cutter was an American botanist. She and Elzada Clover were the first women to raft the entire length of the Grand Canyon in 1938, making scientific collections of plants along the way.
Hugh Carson Cutler was a plant taxonomist, economic botanist, plant collector, and pioneer of paleoethnobotany.
Frank Elmer Masland Jr was an American industrialist, conservationist, explorer, early river runner in the Grand Canyon, and philanthropist.
Gene Field Foster was an American carpenter, artist, anthropologist, ornitholigist, and early Glen Canyon river runner.
