George A. Johnson & Company was a partnership between three men who pioneered navigation on the Colorado River. Benjamin M. Hartshorne, George Alonzo Johnson and Alfred H. Wilcox. The George A. Johnson & Company was formed in the fall of 1852, and was reorganized as the Colorado Steam Navigation Company in 1869.
History
Early attempts to navigate the Colorado and formation of the partnership The three partners that formed the business came from various walks of life. But all had previous experience dealing with the extreme conditions of the Colorado River during their earlier frustrated attempts to bring supplies up that river to Fort Yuma. At that time Fort Yuma was one of the most remote and difficult to reach places in the United States. It had been at first supplied from San Francisco to San Diego by sea and from there overland across the Colorado Desert at the exorbitant rate of $500 per ton. Richard E. Lingenfelter, Steamboats on the Colorado River, 1852–1916, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1978
Alfred H. Wilcox The expense of land transport drove the Army in November 1850 to send an expedition to attempt to carry supplies from San Francisco to the Gulf of California and 150 miles up the river to the Fort. The attempt was made in the Army transport schooner, Invincible under Captain Alfred H. Wilcox, one of the future partners of the company. The expedition was commanded by Lieutenant George Derby.
The schooner arrived in San Diego to pick up the rations, then proceeded to the mouth of the Colorado River, stopping only at Cabo San Lucas and Guaymas. The Invincible arrived at the river mouth on December 25. Captain Wilcox then ascended the river but with difficulty. Invincible drawing 8 feet of water was grounded at every ebb tide which was extreme in the Colorado River Delta. The expedition encountered difficulty in the estuary of the Colorado when the Invincible was nearly sunk by the tidal bore that regularly occurred following the ebb tide there. On January 3, 1850, some 30 miles up river Captain Wilcox was forced to drop anchor, his way blocked by shoals too shallow to pass. Local Cocopah people there that day agreed to carry a message to Fort Yuma of the arrival of the ship.
After waiting without answer to their message until 11 January, Derby, who due to an old and inaccurate British chart of the river mouth, believed the fort to be nearby instead of 120 miles away and attempted to continue up the river to reach the fort with the ship's longboat. Two days later they met the fort commander, Major Samuel P. Heintzelman coming down the river in a boat. Arraignments were made to unload the ship at its anchorage on the shore of Sonora and loaded onto wagons sent from the fort on 28 January. Wilcox and Derby then returned with the Invincible to San Francisco. Lieutenant Derby, in his expedition report, recommended that a shallow draft stern-wheel steamboat would be the way to send supplies up river to the fort. Report of the Secretary of War, communicating ... a reconnaissance of the Gulf of California and the Colorado river by Lieutenant Derby, Senate Executive Doc. #81, 32nd Congress, 1st Session, Washington, 1852
Hartshorne and Johnson
The next attempt was made by the contractors George Alonzo Johnson with his partner Benjamin M. Hartshorne who had met when they first came as partners in an enterprise to establish a ferry at the Yuma Crossing. There they built and began operating a ferry, then sold it and returned to San Francisco. Autobiography and Reminiscence of George Alonzo Johnson, San Diego, 1901. p. 14
These partners got a contract to supply the fort, and arrived at the river's mouth in February 1852, on the United States transport schooner Sierra Nevada under Captain Wilcox.Executive Documents of the Senate of the United States, No. 37, Report of the Secretary of War, showing the contracts made under the authority of the War Department during the year 1853. p. 23 On board were 250 tons of supplies for the newly reoccupied fort and a pair of knocked down flatboats, built by Domingo Marcucci in San Francisco. Scott, Erving M. and Others, Evolution of Shipping and Ship-Building in California, Part I, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Volume 25, January 1895, pp. 5–16; from quod.lib.umich.edu accessed December 14, 2014 These they assembled to be poled up the Colorado. However the first barge sank with its cargo a total loss. The second was finally, after a long struggle poled up to Fort Yuma, but what little it carried was soon consumed by the garrison. Subsequently, wagons again were sent from the fort to haul the balance of the supplies overland from the estuary through the marshes and woodlands of the Delta.
Both of these attempts on the river failed in the face of extreme tides in the estuary or strong currents, shifting sand bars or low water in the river. Hauling supplies from the estuary worked but was less satisfactory than the 185 mile San Diego route over land. Firstly it was a violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo for American troops to intrude into Mexican territory. Secondly, on top of already costly land shipping was the prospect of the additional expense of Mexican custom duties that would be levied on anything landed on Mexican territory.
Success of the Uncle Sam
After the failure of Hartshorne and Johnson, James Turnbull, obtained the next contract to supply the fort. He followed the recommendation of Lt. Derby, sailing with supplies and the disassembled Uncle Sam, a 65-foot long side-wheel paddle steamer tug, (also built by Domingo Marcucci), to the Colorado River Delta, in the schooner Capacity. There he had the vessel re-assembled at a landing in the delta in two months. Turnbull then successfully brought supplies up the Colorado River 120 miles in 15 days from the Colorado River Delta to Fort Yuma, where he arrived December 3, 1852. He then took some passengers from the fort up the river for a few miles as a celebration of the success before returning to bring up more supplies.
Equipped with only a 20-horsepower engine, the Uncle Sam could only carry 35 tons of supplies, It made trips for four more months up and down the river to finish carrying the supplies from the Capacity to the fort reducing its time for a round trip to 12 days. Negligence caused the Uncle Sam to sink at its dock below Fort Yuma, and was then washed away before it could be raised, in the spring flood of May 1853. Turnbull who meanwhile had returned to the Delta from San Francisco with another cargo and a more powerful engine for the Uncle Sam. Finding it lost he returned for a new hull, while the army sent wagons to recover the cargo from the delta. However, Turnbull disappeared from San Francisco, leaving creditors unpaid. However, Turnbull had shown the worth of steamboats to solve Fort Yuma's supply problem and to successfully navigate the Colorado River, an example that was soon followed by George Alonzo Johnson and his partners.
Beginning and growth of the business
George A. Johnson & Company established
In late 1852, George Alonzo Johnson with his partner Hartshorne and new partner Captain Wilcox (formerly of the Invincible and "Sierra Nevada"), formed George A. Johnson & Company. Turnbull's financial debacle allowed them to obtain the next contract to supply the fort. Johnson and his partners, all having learned a lesson from their failed attempts ascending the Colorado and with the example of the Uncle Sam, brought the parts of a more powerful side-wheel steamboat, the General Jesup, with them to the mouth of the Colorado from San Francisco. There it was reassembled at a landing in the upper tidewater of the river and reached Fort Yuma, January 18, 1854. This new boat, capable of carrying 50 tons of cargo, was very successful making round trips from the estuary to the fort in only four or five days. Costs were cut to $75 per ton. The route made the Company $4,000 per trip per ship in the estuary of the Colorado River.
A second reason for the speed of the new steamboat beside its powerful engine was the establishment of wood-yard landings along the river between the delta and Fort Yuma by associates contracted by the company. The landings sprang up to supply wood for the steamboats, so the crew would not need to gather wood as they proceeded up river, as the crew of the Uncle Sam had been obliged to do. These landings were each located at about the distance a steamboat could travel up and down river each day on that section of river. Steamboats did not travel at night, due to the danger of running onto sandbars or into snags on the ever-changing river. The boats would be re supplied with cut wood at the landings while tied up overnight. The wood-yards were owned by Yankee's, who hired the Cocopah from local rancherias, to cut the wood (usually cottonwood or mesquite), transport it to the wood-yards and load it onto the boats. Cocopah men often also served as deck hands on the boats, having lived along and on the river for a lifetime, they were well qualified to spot river hazards in a timely manner. Felger, Richard Stephen, Flora of the Gran Desierto and Rio Colorado of Northwestern Mexico, University of Arizona Press, 2000, pp. 30–31
Growth of the business In August 1854, while trying to make time up river against the current, the boiler of the General Jesup exploded, killing her engineer, named Jackson, and seriously scalding two others. By December 1854, the boat was running again, with new machinery sent down from San Francisco. In an era where boiler explosions were common, this was the only such incident seen in Johnson's company or its successors until the end of steam navigation on the Colorado.
From 1853, ranches were developed nearby up river to supply the fort with beef and barley. That same year gold was found up river. By 1854, copper mines were developed along the river 40 miles above Fort Yuma. The ore provided George A. Johnson & Company with their first commercial cargo to take to the estuary anchorage. Old Mexican mines where reopened in the interior of the Gadsden Purchase that increased the traffic bringing in machinery and shipping out ore. By 1855, the volume of cargo necessitated putting another boat on the river. By December 1855, Johnson had John G. North build and bring in sections a new steamboat from San Francisco to the Delta estuary. There North assembled and launched the 120-foot-long, 80 hp, wood-hulled Colorado.Scott, Erving M. and Others, Evolution of Shipping and Ship-Building in California, Part II, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, Volume 25, February 1895, p. 123 It was capable of carrying 70 tons of cargo while drawing only 2 feet of water and was the first stern-wheeler on the river.
Once the backlog of cargo was relieved by the Colorado, Johnson looked for ways to keep his boats from being idle. He knew that Brigham Young wanted to establish a route to the Mormon settlements in Utah from the sea up the Colorado River and that merchant interests had been interested in establishing trade with the Mormons by the river route since 1852 when the Uncle Sam came to the river. Additionally there was the claim that the river was navigable by steamboat as far as the Virgin River by the fur trapper Antoine Leroux who had successfully rafted down the Colorado from the Virgin River in 1837. Johnson was instrumental in getting Congressional funding for a military expedition to explore the Colorado River above Fort Yuma in 1856. Johnson lent Ives one of his men David C. Robinson as a pilot for the expedition. However, cut out of providing the steamboat for the 1857 expedition of Lt. Ives, Johnson at his own expense took the lead in the General Jesup heading up river first, exploring the river up to a point 8 miles into Pyramid Canyon to its first rapids, now under Lake Mohave, between Arizona and Nevada.