The lower San Juan River country remained a remote backwater well into the late 19th century; John Wesley Powell's famed 1869 expedition down the Colorado River barely noted the San Juan River where they passed it in Glen Canyon. During the 1875 Hayden Survey of the lower San Juan River, George B. Chittenden wrote: "This whole portion of the country is now and must ever remain utterly worthless. It has no timber, very little grass, and no water." However, in 1879 more than 200 Mormon pioneers embarked on the Hole-in-the-Rock expedition which established the agricultural settlement of Bluff, Utah on the lower San Juan River in April 1880. The wagon trail they established became an important link between Utah Territory and the Four Corners region (although the infamously difficult Hole-in-the-Rock crossing just above the mouth of the San Juan was moved upstream to Halls Crossing the following year). The colony suffered greatly in its early years due to a series of floods, but the settlers persisted, as the LDS church strongly wished to maintain its presence in southeast Utah. In 1882, oil prospector E. L. Goodridge conducted the first known exploration of the lower San Juan canyons, floating from Bluff to Lee's Ferry, Arizona. Later, placer gold was discovered along the river, the news of which brought more than 2,000 miners to Bluff in the 1890s in what proved to be a short-lived boom.