Buzz Holmstrom Collection

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NAU.PH.97.22.1.1 - 17.1

Volume:

287 black-and-white photographs and negatives

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The collection provides documentation of several western rivers and the cultures they foster, boat and boating styles, and insights into the life of a remarkable boatman. Holmstrom's boating skills and his solo river expeditions in particular command the respect and admiration of river guides past and present. The captions he prepared for the two albums in the collection are especially elucidating. Also of note are the images of other significant but less known river runners, such as Bernard and Genevieve DeColmont and Alexander "Zee" Grant.

Biographic Note:

Buzz Holmstrom was born in 1909 in a logging camp in the southern coastal forests of Oregon, raised in the area of Coquille. The second of four children, he graduated from Coquille High School in 1928 and worked for many years in a local service station. In 1934, he began building boats and running whitewater rivers. That same year, he ran the nearby Rogue River from Grants Pass to the ocean, solo. In 1935, he completed a second boat and ran the Rogue again, this time with a friend. The following year he built a third boat and did a solo trip down the Salmon and Snake Rivers from Salmon, Idaho to Lewiston, Idaho. He achieved national fame in 1937 when he built a fourth boat and ran it down the Green and Colorado Rivers from Green River, Wyoming to the Boulder (Hoover) Dam--the first person to do it alone. In 1938 he retraced the trip accompanied by Amos Burg, who made a short film of the trip, Conquering the Colorado, and Willis Johnson.

In 1939, Edith Clegg hired Holmstrom to take her across the USA by boat: up the Columbia and Snake Rivers, down the Yellowstone, Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, up the Ohio and Allegheny Rivers, across the Erie Canal, and down the Hudson to New York.

Holmstrom later worked the Bingham Mines near Salt Lake City (1939-40); for the Bureau of Reclamation on the Echo Park Dam project and a survey of the Green River through Desolation and Gray Canyons (1940). He returned to Coquille for a year, working at a local lumber mill (1940-41), then returned to the Bureau of Reclamation at the Bridge Canyon dam project in lower Grand Canyon (1941-42).

In 1942, Holmstrom enlisted in the Navy and served as a carpenter's mate on PT boats, both in the South Pacific and Europe. He was discharged in October of 1945. In early 1946, he returned to the Bureau of Reclamation, this time in central California on the Friant Dam. In April he transferred to the Coast and Geodetic Survey to build and run boats for a survey of the Grande Ronde River. On the second day of the survey he was found dead, at age 37, apparently of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Motives for his suicide are unclear.

Related Materials:

For related materials, see the Buzz Holmstrom manuscript collection (MS 311), Carnegie/Caltech photograph and manuscript collections (PH 94.27 and MS 293), Lois Jotter Cutter photograph and manuscript collections (PH 95.3 and MS 69), Emery Kolb photograph and manuscript collections (PH 568 and MS 197), and The Doing of the Thing: The Brief, Brilliant Whitewater Career of Buzz Holmstrom by Cort Conley, Brad Dimock and Vince Welch (Fretwater Press, 1998).

Cline Library
Special Collections and Archives Department
Northern Arizona University