Grand is one of four boats used to survey the "ruggedest" 300 miles of the Colorado River's Grand Canyon during the 1923 expedition by the U.S. Geological Survey. Led by Col. Claude Birdseye, the expedition's primary purpose was to survey potential dam sites for the development of hydroelectric power. Indeed, the survey party mapped twenty-one new sites.
Grand is eighteen feet long, with a beam of four feet, eleven inches. Heavily built of oak, spruce, and cedar, the boat weighs about 900 pounds. Grand is one of three boats ordered in 1921 by the survey's sponsors, the Edison Electric Company, and built at the Fellows and Stewart Shipbuilding Works in San Pedro. The vessels were patterned after those designed by the Kolb brothers, who had based their boats on vessels used by trappers in the upper Colorado River canyons.
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