Crossing the Colorado Plateau (which another explorer ten or twelve years later claims the honour of naming, forgetting that Ives uses the name in his report), they visited the Havasupai in their deep canyon home, just as Garces had done, and then proceeded to the towns of the Moki.

Ives was deeply impressed by the repellant nature of the great canyon and the surroundings, and remarks: "It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed." Late in the same year that Lieutenant Ives made his interesting and valuable exploration, another military post was established on the Colorado, and called Fort Mohave, just about where the California line intersects the stream.

Lower down, Colorado City had been laid out several years before (1854) under amusing circumstances.
The Yuma ferry at that time was operated by a German, thrifty after his kind, and on the lookout for a "good thing." A party of indigent prospectors, returning from the survey of a mine in Mexico, reached the Arizona bank with no money to pay for the crossing, and hit upon the ingenious plan of surveying a town site here and trading lots to the German for a passage.

Boldly commencing operations, the sight of the work going on soon brought the ferryman over to investigate, and when he saw the map under construction he fell headlong into the scheme, which would, as they assured him, necessitate a steam ferry.* The result was the immediate sale of a portion of the town to him and the exchange of a lot for the necessary transportation to the opposite bank.

Afterwards, these parties did what they could to establish the reality of the project, but up to date it has not been noted as a metropolis, and the floods of 1861-2 undermined its feeble strength.