rfectly understandable English, "He will sell his boat for $18.00.
It is worth $30.00." This was decisive for an Indian. It usually takes
a half-day of bickering to get them to make any kind of a bargain. I
told him I would take it in the morning.

It was a well-constructed boat, almost new, built of inch pine,
flat-bottomed, and otherwise quite similar in shape to the boats my
brother and I had used on our twelve hundred mile journey through the
canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers,--but without the graceful
lines and swells that made those other boats so valuable to us in
rapids. The boat was nearly new and well worth $30.00, as boat prices
went in that town. Why he was willing to sell it for $18.00, or at the
rate of $1.00 a foot, I could not imagine. It was the first bargain an
Indian had ever offered me. But if I paid for it that evening, there
were doubts in my mind if I should find it in the morning, so I
delayed closing the bargain and went back again to inspect the boat.

That evening I inquired among my acquaintances if there was any one
who would care to accompany me. If so I would give them passage to
Yuma, or to the Gulf of California in Mexico, if they wished it. But
no one could go, or those who could, wouldn't. One would have thought
from the stories with which I was regaled, that the rapids of the
Grand Canyon were below Needles, and as for going to the Gulf, it was
suicide. I was told of the outlaws along the border, of the firearms
and opium smugglers, who shot first and questioned afterward, and of
the insurrectos of Lower California. The river had no real outlet to
the ocean, they said, since the break into Salton Sea, but spread over
a cane-brake, thirty miles or more in width. Many people had gone into
these swamps and never returned, whether lost in the jungles or killed
by the Cocopah Indians, no one knew. They simply disappeared. It was
all very alluring.

My preparations, the next day, were few. I had included a sleeping bag
with my baggage. It would come in equally handy whether I went down on
the Colorado or up into the Coast Range. A frying-pan, a coffee-pot a
few metal dishes and provisions for a week were all I needed. Some one
suggested some bent poles, and a cover, such as are used on wagons to
keep off the sun. This seemed like a good idea; and I hunted up a
carpenter who did odd jobs. He did not have such a one, but he did
have an old wagon-seat cover, which could be raised or d