Mitch Williams Memoirs
My name is Mitchell Marvin Williams. I am a native of Moab, Utah. My father was Moab's first doctor in the 1890s. My father met my mother here in Moab, they were married May 19, 1900, and had 5 children, 3 boys and 2 girls. My father brought all of his children into the world. I am the youngest and my father was 62 years old when I was born in 1916.
Growing up in Moab was great with wonderful cliffs to climb and sloughs to raft. My friends and I built rafts before we were even old enough to raft the river and we used them to fish for catfish in the sloughs.
When we were in high school, the river was beckoning. I built a boat with 2 or 3 friends. Someone found an old car engine, someone else found the drive line and I scrounged up some of Dad's lumber. Everyone brought what they found and we put it all together. We got the car engine running and we sought a lot of advice from the older people around who knew the river and how to build a boat.
We launched the boat in Mill Creek. The river was high, so Mill Creek made a good place to launch the boat for our first few trial runs. We finally launched the boat on the river. We went farther and farther with each trip until we got experience.
On one trip, there was a lot of slush and ice on the river. The water ran through a funnel on one end of a pipe, through the engine to cool it and then was dumped back out over the side of the boat. We didn't know it at the time, but the slushy water was much too cold, but the engine ran anyway. Several times the funnel had ice jammed in it. We had to put our hands in the freezing cold water and use old rusty nails to clean it out.
My first time on the river was with my father. Father was very good on the river. He had 2 ranches and one of them was difficult to reach by land, so he usually accessed it via the river. On land it took 2 days on horseback over the red rocks and over the top. The trail came off of the red rocks and down to the river. Once you reached the river, you were actually below the ranch, so you had to follow the river bottoms back up to the ranch. (The river bottoms were dry.)
I went to the ranch on horseback with a cowboy friend of mine, Swanny Kerby, to check on his cows. I had been there with Dad and lots of other people by boat. Mother's brother, Uncle Roy, and Papa wanted to take a bull from the Moab valley to Williams Bottom Ranch by boat. Papa told Roy he wanted to take the bull to the lower ranch and that he wanted Roy to come and help him. They had the bull swim behind the boat. Papa told Roy to row the boat while Papa took care of the bull. The problem was that the bull wanted to be in the boat! The bull kept swimming closer and closer to the boat. Papa stood up in the boat with the halter rope in one hand and a willow switch in the other. Papa whipped the bull on the nose when it got too close and the bull would back off. Roy was scared to death because he just knew the bull was going to get in the boat, but it never did. They got to the ranch with no trouble whatsoever.