The completion of the railways was a death blow to steam navigation on the Colorado, yet, in the future, when the fertile bottoms are brought under cultivation, small steamboats will probably be utilised for local transportation.
The journey of the Esmeralda added nothing to what was already known.
The following year, 1867, a man was picked up at Callville, in an exhausted and famishing condition, by a frontiersman named Hardy.

When he had been revived he told his story.

It was that he had come on a raft through the Grand Canyon above, and all the canyons antecedent to that back to a point on Grand River.

The story was apparently straightforward, and it was fully accepted.

At last, it was thought, a human being has passed through this Valley of the Shadow of Death and lived to tell of its terrors.