“The attack which wiped out this miserable band was planned by two young Mexicans, who had attempted to cross the ferry with their wives, and had them taken from them and detained by the Texans.  The Mexicans went down the river and the desperadoes supposed they had gone their way and left their wives in their hands.  But they only went far enough to find the chief of the tribe who had suffered so horribly at the hands of this gang, and arrange for an attack on their common enemy.”

* Wild Life in the Far West, by Captain James Hobbs.

By this plan twenty-three out of the twenty-five whites, including the master scoundrel himself.  Dr. Craig, were destroyed with little loss to the attacking party.  Hobbs calls this the best thing the Yumas ever did.  It took place only a month before Hobbs reached the ferry, and only two or three days before one of the periodical returns of United States troops, this time a company of dragoons under Captain Hooper, probably belonging to Heintzelman’s command.  To him the two escaped desperadoes came with a complaint against the Yumas, but the captain was posted and he put the men in irons to be transported to California for trial.  The Yumas now established a ferry by using an old army-waggon box which they made water-tight, as the Craig Ferry had suffered the fate of its owners.  Hobbs employed the Yumas to take his party over, the horses swimming, and the arrangement seems to have worked very well.

According to Hobbs, the first steamboat came up the river while he was there, frightening the Yumas so that they ran for their lives, exclaiming the devil was coming, blowing fire and smoke out of his nose, and kicking back with his feet in the water.  It was the stern-wheel steamboat Yuma, and this is the only mention of it I can find.  It had supplies for the troops, but what became of it afterward I do not know.  This was evidently before the coming of the Uncle Sam, usually credited with being the first steamboat on the Colorado, which did not arrive till a year after the reconnaissance of the river mouth by Lieutenant Derby of the Topographical Engineers, for the War Department, seeking a route for the water transportation of supplies to Fort Yuma, now ordered to be a permanent military establishment.  He came up the river a considerable distance, in the topsail schooner Invincible and made a further advance in his small boats.  The only guide he had to the navigation of the river was Hardy’s book, referred to in a previous chapter, which assisted him a good deal.  He arrived at the mouth December 23, 1850.  “The land,” he says, “was plainly discernible on both coasts of the gulf, on the California side bold and mountainous, but on the Mexican low and sandy.”  There could, therefore, never, have been any doubt in the minds of any of those who had previously reached this point as to the character of Lower California.  The Invincible sailed daily up the river with the flood tide, anchoring during the ebb, and they got on very well till the night of January 1, 1851, when the vessel grounded at the ebb,