CHAPTER 4

First Thoughts West

At war’s end, a flood of the maimed returned home from the armies, the thirty-one-year-old Powell among more than twenty thousand Union soldiers missing a limb. He returned to a Victorian society with clear ideas about disability. “Formerly, a cripple was a cripple,” wrote journalist William H. Rideing, “and hobbled through the world an object of pity to sympathetic elders, and of derision of wicked youngsters.” Even after serving their country, the limbless soldiers would often be dismissed as “deformed,” bundled together with the blind, the mentally deficient, and orphaned children, as in one way or another not whole—and therefore unable to contribute seriously to society. For Victorian Americans, physical deformities suggested the presence of mental deficiencies. Views would begin to change—albeit slowly—in part by the sheer presence of so many disfigured vets.

Right after the Confederate capitulation, William Oland Bourne, a magazine editor with hard experience as a chaplain in a Civil War hospital, tried to invigorate Union veterans who had lost their right arms by offering cash prizes in a left-hand writing contest. He assembled an eminent board, including the first Theodore Roosevelt—father of the future president—to judge submissions. Good penmanship, Bourne believed rather patronizingly, would be a means for crippled veterans to find a middle-class job and reassert their manliness. Hundreds of entries poured in.

While some contestants rather predictably copied out the Emancipation Proclamation or the Gettysburg Address in childlike scrawl, others wrote heartbreakingly of their experiences. Many felt themselves victimized by an evil fate that no amount of restitution could offset. Now their country no longer needed them. “To be compelled just in the prime of life (when teeming with anticipation of future prosperity and pleasure) to consent to be a permanent cripple for life,” wrote John Thompson, “and to depend entirely on others for assistance is a matter of no small moment.” He felt that he had lost his place in society. Others, however, viewed their disabilities as a sign of bravery in freedom’s cause and hard-won manhood. One disabled corporal offered himself and fellow amputees as “living monuments of the late cruel and bloody Rebellion”; another that their conspicuous disabilities embodied “the price of liberty and Union, and are richer ornaments than the purest gold.” Ezra Hilts wrote that while the war “cost rivers of blood,” this sacrifice would “cement our Union more strongly and strengthen the whole framework of our government.” There appeared a wide no-man’s-land between those apparently condemned to a life of fatalism and those who remain charged with unbounded American optimism.

Powell showed no intention of retiring to a rocking chair on the porch of a general store to bore customers with war stories. His spilled blood and shattered bone had sealed a sacred compact tying him even more deeply and imaginatively to the cause of the Union. As to the physical nature of his loss, Powell rarely if ever called attention to it, let alone begged special consideration, although it had become an inescapable part of his functioning adult makeup. Indeed, he viewed his disability not just as a badge of honor but as a focus of endless purpose to bear him throughout his life. The Powell who emerged from the crucible of war seemed possessed by an unstoppable consuming energy, the restlessness and frustrations of his earlier days transformed now into a consistent driving power.

Powell’s achievements over the next few years give the overriding impression of a man burdened with something he must prove and make whole. Such a force would often be mistaken for pure ambition—as if this was the only thing that could surely convey such drive—but his iron will toward self-healing along with other deep currents were pressing him with far greater urgency and energies. He would need to prove himself over and over—both intellectually and physically. He faced a lifetime of people patting him on his shoulder with a pitying look in their eyes.

While other amputees would rise to positions of great influence—for instance, the left-arm amputees Lucius Fairchild and Francis R. T. Nichols, who went on to become governors, respectively, of Wisconsin and Louisiana—none would come close to matching Powell’s pervasive influence over the advancement of the nation. In four years’ time, the man now known as the Major—no longer “Professor”—could persuade others against all evidence that he was equipped not just in character but in intellectual grasp and leadership skills to confront and conquer one of the most onerous physical challenges attempted in American history. His presence often made able-bodied men uncomfortable, sometimes feeling inadequate, and indeed would stir feelings of resentment, sometimes to the point of anger. But it would also forge him into a yet more formidable leader, taking him beyond the courageous crippled gunner commanding Battle F under heavy fire at Ransom’s Approach.


When Powell returned to visit his parents in Wheaton, Joseph told him to settle down to teaching and get “this nonsense of science and adventure out of your mind.” He listened with only half an ear. He turned down a nomination for a lucrative clerkship of DuPage County on the Republican ticket, instead taking a professorship of geology at Bloomington’s Illinois Wesleyan University for far less money in the fall of 1865. While besieging Vicksburg, he had received an honorary master’s degree from Illinois Wesleyan, which, two years later, gave him the minimum credentials to assume the job.

The small prairie college had indeed hired itself an unorthodox professor, whose classrooms buzzed with rare excitement. “Text-books went to the winds with Major Powell,” his then student J. B. Taylor recalled thirty-five years later, evoking a third-floor classroom as clear in memory as if he had just rushed in to catch a class. For Taylor, the “artillerist, true to his artillery instinct, [was] firing his batteries all the while at the entrenched enemies,” which appeared to have been the sluggish orthodoxies being shipped out from Yale and Princeton. His classes followed him into the woods to collect plant and animal specimens, filled notebooks with observations, pressed flowers, leaves, and grasses. “He made us feel that we had conquered the commonplace, broken our way through the accepted, and come into the heritage of free thinkers.”

In March 1866, Powell delivered a lecture in Bloomington’s popular Sunday Lyceum series titled “Perpetual Motion,” in which he refuted the notion to an audience of students and townspeople. But the phrase also describes his almost manic activities on campus. Powell teamed with a mathematics professor to restructure the curriculum and rethink faculty responsibilities; he then drew up plans for a central building consolidating the fast-growing campus, designed a college seal, and coined the motto “Scientia et Sapientia” (“knowledge and wisdom”), all of which the university enthusiastically embraced. Still juggling a prodigious teaching load, he found time to establish a local chapter of the state natural history society, as well as a small museum, of which he named himself curator. But not even that could put his expectations to sleep. Having exhausted every opportunity at Illinois Wesleyan, he lobbied the nearby Illinois State Normal University for a faculty position. Normal boasted a much more substantial natural history museum, run by the Illinois Natural History Society.

At the Society’s ninth annual meeting in late June 1866, Powell argued that the organization’s museum, which included his own mollusk collection, deserved recognition as a state treasure—and therefore should receive public funding. At first, his listeners found this amusing, but gradually became enthusiastic. He introduced a motion that would direct three professors, himself not included, to approach the state board of education to explore any such possibility. The motion passed. The delegation met with the board, which endorsed their going down to Springfield to meet with state legislators. It seemed obvious to all involved that Powell should be the one to make the case.

Therefore early in 1867, Powell appeared three times before the general assembly, revealing for the first time his ability to put legislators under his powerful, imaginative spell. He analogized his natural history organization to the Royal Societies of London, Russia, Belgium, and Sweden, and to the Smithsonian in Washington. “All civilized nations,” he proclaimed, “deem it wise to foster such institutions.” Republican Illinois should take its rightful place. He laid his plan before them: a general commissioner and curator to be hired to oversee research and collections, and take charge of the museum. Those assembled agreed, appropriating $1,500 for the Society to pay a curator’s salary, plus $1,000 for books, apparatus, and supplies. In the meantime, Powell had convinced Normal to make him a professor of geology, with teaching responsibilities limited to winter months only.

The Society applauded Powell’s success, then promptly voted him the curatorship. The minutes-old museum director then pulled from his pocket a prepared speech, which contained the astounding proposal that the Society put its newly bestowed discretionary funds toward a collecting trip out west, himself in charge. Ordinarily, so nakedly ambitious a proposition would have provoked a spirited resistance, but Powell adroitly steered the discussion away from himself toward the vision of a glorious future at the Society’s very fingertips: He was merely proposing to be the agent who would heap greater glory on this still slightly known institution and its patrons—to be embodied in grizzly bearskins, boxfuls of pressed columbines, and curious insects from the sparsely examined lands beyond. The truth was that the Midwest had no more to offer him. He had trolled all the state’s rivers for mollusks, had studied what was accessible of this flatland’s geology. The West—and the nation’s future—beckoned over the low Illinois skyline.

The Society authorized Powell to spend half of his expense money on one of the nation’s first college field trips out west. At this meeting, it also voted to have the curator print up and conspicuously display in the museum a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “The visible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Powell obliged, then planned his trip.


The Society’s $500 certainly could not underwrite such an ambitious undertaking, but he leveraged it to raise more, drawing a matching grant from the new Illinois Industrial University in Urbana (today’s University of Illinois), then raising $100 more from the Chicago Academy of Sciences, which also agreed to pitch in tools and supplies. Powell promised in return a rich bounty of natural history specimens. He needed still more support, so in April the audacious young curator boarded a train for Washington to beseech his former commander—now general of the United States Army—for assistance. Ulysses S. Grant already knew Powell as a resourceful man of his word, but even the usually impassive general grew openly enthusiastic about the plan laid before him. If Grant had reservations about the propriety of putting federal resources toward a state venture, they soon dissolved before Powell’s extraordinarily persuasive depiction of Grant’s adopted home state winning the further glories it deserved. Write me a letter, Grant told the Major, with a formal request.

In Washington, Powell arranged to meet Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the newly established Smithsonian Institution. The two got along well, marking the beginning of a long, rich collaboration that would prove as critical—perhaps more so in the long run—than Grant’s genuine goodwill. On the spot Henry wrote a letter of introduction to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Six days later, Powell delivered a clever request to Grant not for outright cash but “that the officers of the Commissary Department, on the route traveled by the party, may be instructed to sell supplies to it at government rates.”

Powell had indeed stirred Grant up. “A party of Naturalists, under the auspices of the State Normal University of Illinois will visit the Mauvaises Terres [Bad Lands] of Southwestern Dakotah for the purpose of making a more thorough geological survey of that region,” read the general’s glowing letter of endorsement. “From thence the party will proceed to explore the ‘Parks’ in the Rocky Mountains.” The letter further authorized the U.S. Commissary Department to furnish Powell with supplies at low-cost government rates for an expedition a dozen strong and directed U.S. troops to escort the party from Fort Laramie through the Badlands.

Now winged with meaningful federal support, Powell elicited passes worth $1,700 from four major railway lines. American Express and Wells, Fargo & Co. also agreed to help, waiving shipping costs for the voluminous mass of artifacts and specimens that Powell confidently planned to ship back to the Midwest. Joseph Henry loaned the shoestring operation expensive barometers and thermometers on the condition that Powell would submit the collected readings to the Smithsonian upon his return. With summer quickly approaching, Powell raced home to fill his ranks from among his friends, family, and students. Emma signed up first. Each participant would contribute the not-insignificant amount of $300. His sister Nellie’s husband, Almon Thompson, would come along as an entomologist, along with a Rock Island minister and several high-spirited undergraduates. With money from his own pocket, Powell now believed he would break even, if just barely. Still, throughout the expedition, he would need to borrow, cajole, and negotiate to keep it going.


Late that May of 1867, Powell and his wife headed west to Council Bluffs, Iowa, ahead of the rest of the team to buy wagons, draft animals, and supplies. The Chicago and North Western Railway had arrived only a little earlier that year, in the westernmost advance of the long eastern railroads. The small town, perched on either side of the Missouri north of the infall of the Platte River, had earned its name reputedly from an 1804 powwow between Lewis and Clark and the Otoe Indians. It thrived, soon becoming a busy steamship port and point of departure for the great wagon trains heading into the Missouri Territory and the Mormon exodus to the Utah Territory in the 1840s and 1850s. The Oregon and California trails struck off here also, funneling a mass of fortune seekers toward the 1849 and 1859 gold rushes in the California and Colorado territories. Powell chanced to meet Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, whom he had known during the war and was now commanding the sprawling Military Division of the Missouri, devoted to uniting nearly all western military organizations under a single command. Sherman shared his latest intelligence about the Dakota Badlands, in which the Lakota Sioux, the tribe of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, had taken up arms in reaction to the postwar increase in white encroachment. Too dangerous to go there, Sherman advised, even under military escort. Powell knew Sherman as a man who rarely exaggerated, so took this warning to heart, a decision that would change history. Instead, the expedition would head directly to Denver City, the jumping-off spot for collecting in the Rocky Mountains, specifically in the three “parks,” vast mountain valleys on the western slope of the Front Range.

For forty days, the small party drove their mule-drawn wagons along a clear trail paralleling the Platte over the plains from Council Bluffs to Denver City. Nighttime found them circling the wagons and building fires. This was by no means a virgin route: Stagecoach stations appeared every dozen or so miles, stores and military outposts less frequently. But the voyagers examined with great trepidation an abandoned wagon with a blood- and hair-smeared wheel. They found a victim of Indian retaliation shoveled into a shallow grave nearby. On July 6, 1867, they arrived in Denver City, finding a dusty, windblown town of fewer than five thousand people at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek. The stunning backdrop of snow-covered Rockies somewhat mitigated the dirt-road approach and the newborn city’s down-in-the-mouth appearance, even though it had just become the territorial capital that year. “You seem to be walking in a city of demons,” wrote the Englishman William Hepworth Dixon of the dozen hot and dirty streets, which boasted a total of two hotels, a bank, a theater, half a dozen chapels, fifty gambling houses, and a hundred grog shops. “Every fifth house appears to be a bar, a whisky-shop, a lager-beer saloon,” he continued. “Every tenth house appears to be either a brothel or a gaming-house. . . . In these horrible dens a man’s life is of no more worth than a dog’s.” With little access to wood, brick had become the primary building material. Another visitor noted that the aspiring city looked as if it “had been dropped out of the clouds accidentally, by some one who meant to carry it further on, but got tired, and let it fall anywhere.”

Gold fever had slammed Denver City on the map eight years earlier, when nearby Cherry Creek yielded shiny pieces of the precious metal, creating an overnight boomtown with a gambler’s black heart. Its finest citizens reputedly engaged in epic poker games staking city lots as chips, blocks of the city changing hands in a single round. By the time the expedition arrived, the bluster had generally worn thin as the strike petered out—the town now surviving by catering to the area’s fledgling mining industries of silver ore, lead, and zinc. But Denver City no longer felt like a destination, just a stop on the way to somewhere else.

Here Powell would meet another man who would turn out to be critical to his developing plans, which far exceeded leading a pack of greenhorns on a collecting trip. William Byers, the square-cut, handsome owner of the Rocky Mountain News, always had a strong opinion. He was a big personality in a town that bred colorful characters. Byers’s expansive boosterism could indeed take on the plain fanciful, a prime example being his publication of a Shipping News column. He set out to convince others that the Platte River, referred to jocularly by some as “mile wide and inch deep,” would soon become a major steamboat highway, a ludicrous bit of wishful thinking. Part huckster, part showman, Byers was nonetheless a shrewd businessman.

As had so many others, Byers came to this outpost with high hopes of reinventing himself and making a fortune. The discovery of gold just before the war had brought a torrent of ’59ers into the area, he among them. But instead of arriving pick in hand, he had come out with his brothers-in-law at the head of two wagons in March 1859, one bearing the heavy, flat stone slabs upon which printers then laid out type, along with a press, paper, and font, bought from a defunct Nebraska printing business. He had no journalistic experience whatsoever, but figured that starting a paper was a far better bet than prospecting. Not knowing where he would land, he had named his new paper the Rocky Mountain News, selling ad space to Omaha merchants eager to attract business out west. He had laid out the first two pages before leaving, filled with by-now stock stories such as that of Commodore Perry’s opening up Japan five years before.

After arriving at the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte, he found the two competing communities of Denver City and Aurora facing one another across the big river. Hearing that another press was setting type for its first edition, Byers leaped into action, rented a room over a saloon, and set to work. His brothers-in-law pitched in by erecting a tarp against the wet winter snow that poured torrents of water through the unshingled roof. Early the next morning, clutching copies of his first smudged edition, Byers hit the dirt streets, beating out his competitor by twenty minutes. His defeated adversary sold Byers his press and type for $30.

Byers would serve as a guide in the Rockies, taking Albert Bierstadt to Mount Evans from Idaho Springs, during which time the painter sketched a scene he would later immortalize in oils as “Storm in the Rocky Mountains.” Byers relished the chance to rub shoulders with the now-aging mountain men Kit Carson, Jim Beckworth, and Jim Baker, who frequented his table. Within a few years, he was claiming to know more about the Colorado Territory than any man alive. He had thoughts, too, about the development of the West, ideas that Powell would listen to. Four years before they met, Byers wrote that “more than one half of the total area of the United States cannot produce crops of grain or vegetables with certainty except by irrigation.” Therefore, he argued, “every drop of water that emerges from the great mountain chains of the west, in their thousands of streams, should be made useful.” When Powell met Byers a day or two after reaching Denver City, they would have much to talk about. The two different, but very savvy men fit together well. Powell had found just the local patron he needed.

Snow blocked Berthould Pass, preventing the expedition from getting up into the Rockies and beginning their collecting activities, so Byers suggested that Powell climb what would later become known as Pikes Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain visible from Denver City—which the Major did on July 27 with several others of the expedition and, quite unusually, Emma, who rode a white-eyed Indian pony. They believed that she, outfitted in a felt hat, green veil, and long dress, was the first woman to attain the summit. She was not, having been beaten out nine years earlier, but her participation brought her acclaim for her courage and endurance. Powell simply stated that she “could ride all day on horseback like a veteran.”


Atop the peak, Powell cast his eyes westward to the Rockies, imagining what lay beyond. He had come out to Colorado not simply to collect, teach, and break in a new generation of young men or to plant the Illinois flag. All this had been merely a fistful of rationalizations for beginning a far, far larger quest: Quite simply, he hungered to finish what Lewis and Clark had commenced more than sixty years before, when they set out on their legendary expedition to explore the continent. Since then, the Dakota Badlands, Death Valley, the inhospitable salt flats of Utah, the rugged mountain country of the Grand Tetons—indeed all but one part of the continental nation—had been visited and described. The lone exception was an enigmatic tract of high mountain desert and canyonland, lying within a 100-by-300-mile rectangle covering southern Utah and northern Arizona. That land, 250 miles directly west of where Powell now stood, embraced some of the most hostile but extraordinarily scenic territory in the world. Therein lay America’s most improbably iconic land forms: the Grand, Zion, and Bryce canyons, all yet to bear European names, and today’s Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, an area that many decades later would boast one of the densest concentrations of national parks and monuments in America.

That landscape had defied the most robust attempts to cross it in a straight line, its steep vertical interruptions both downward and skyward all combining to taunt its visitors with an inscrutable maze of mazes. Some of the most formidable explorers of that age had sought to conquer it. As the 32nd Congress drew to an end in early 1853, it appropriated funds for surveying different routes for a transcontinental railroad, including a central passage championed by Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The following year, Captain John Williams Gunnison led an expedition north across the 38th parallel, overcoming the Rockies on its way into northern Utah, to the Green River and on to Sevier Lake. The trip’s surgeon and de facto geologist, James Schiel, wrote that “if one considers the fantastic formations on the other side of the river, the churches, temples, houses, and towers, one cannot avoid the impression that at one time evil spirits had lived here and had found death in a struggle of extermination.” At the Green River ford, Gunnison split his party in two. Not long afterward, a band of Pahvant Utes surprised Gunnison’s own group, the captain dying when an arrow struck him as he knelt to wash his face in a stream. Seven of his men perished also.

During 1853 and 1854, the great Pathfinder himself, John C. Frémont, sought a railroad-worthy tract along the 38th parallel just north of the Grand Canyon, but could not negotiate those eerie chasms. Their supplies dwindling, Frémont’s party camped on the banks of the Green River, their leader forcing them to foreswear cannibalism. They lived off shoe leather and officers’ scabbards instead. Remarkably, only one man died. Frémont beat a hasty retreat from these threatening lands, abandoning all but his party’s most necessary supplies to stumble to the nearest Mormon outpost.

Most recently, in 1858, Lieutenant Joseph Ives of the U.S. Army topographical engineers had reached the floor of the Grand Canyon itself near Diamond Creek. Ives had begun late the previous autumn from the Colorado River’s mouth on the shore of the Gulf of California, under instructions to steam upstream to establish a water route to the Great Basin. Just before embarking, news of the Utah War, pitting Mormon colonists against the U.S. Army, reached them—and the mission took on greater import as federal commanders demanded information about the river’s navigability for strategic purposes. Ives had commissioned a Philadelphia shipyard to build a crude 54-foot iron steamboat; crated in sections, the USS Explorer was shipped to California by way of Panama. Ives invited the geologist John Strong Newberry, the topographer F. W. von Egloffstein, and the artist Balduin Möllhausen to accompany his armed exploration.

At first, Ives seemed enamored of his surroundings as the party made its way easily north upriver past Fort Yuma along most of today’s western Arizona. But things changed. In early January 1858, the Explorer steamed into the Grand Canyon’s first large chasm, Black Canyon, today submerged under the waters of Hoover Dam. “We were shooting swiftly past the entrance, eagerly gazing into the mysterious depths beyond,” recorded Ives, “when the Explorer, with a stunning crash, brought up abruptly and instantaneously against a sunken rock. . . . The concussion was so violent that the men near the bow were thrown overboard. . . . [T]he fireman, who was pitching a log into the fire, went half-way in with it; the boiler was thrown out of place; the steam pipe doubled up; the wheel-house torn away; and it was expected that the boat would fill and sink instantly by all.” Inspection revealed no breach in the hull or damage beyond repair; Ives, however, had had enough, declaring the river once and for all unnavigable.

Nonetheless Ives pressed on by mule, along with Newberry, von Egloffstein, Möllhausen, twenty soldiers, and two Hualapai guides, who led them to Diamond Creek, this perhaps making them the first Europeans to tread the floor of the Grand Canyon. Even though he did write some admiring sections about the Big Cañon, as he called it, Ives famously concluded in his 1861 Report Upon the Colorado River of the West that “it can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. 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.”

In stark contrast, Newberry, the physician-turned-geologist, reported that he had drawn a significantly different experience from his surveys of the rocky chasms. Although the same thirst swelled his tongue just as it had Ives’s, Newberry was clearly enchanted: “Though valueless to the agriculturalist,” he wrote, “dreaded and shunned by the emigrant, the miner, and even the adventurous trapper, the Colorado Plateau is to the geologist a paradise. Nowhere on the surface of the earth, as far as we know, are the secrets of its structure so fully revealed as here.”

Newberry would return the next year with another topographical engineer, Captain John N. Macomb, pressing nearly to the confluence of the Green and Grand rivers during another ordeal of an expedition. Macomb expressed the same disgust for the grueling landscape that Pike, Long, Frémont, and Ives had all shared. “I cannot conceive of a more worthless and impractical region than the one we now found ourselves in,” he wrote. “I doubt not there are repetitions and varieties of it for hundreds of miles down the great Colorado.”

They were neither the first nor the last who were simply confounded by this extreme country. They included the religious, the gold-and-empire seekers, the railroad surveyors, the men of commerce, and the suppliers of fur. It had killed, parched, or merely scared the wits out of all those nonnatives who had ventured within, as though some mighty curse fell upon all who had entered. It remained unknowable, inscrutable, and inescapably harsh. Frémont, indeed no stranger to extremity, shook his head when the prospect of running the Colorado and Green rivers raised its head. “No trappers have been found bold enough to undertake a voyage which has so certain a prospect for a fatal termination.”

No one else standing on Pikes Peak that summer’s day, even the Major’s wife, Emma, knew yet the depth of Powell’s bold ambition, nor the radical plan taking shape in his mind. He had now determined to go down the Green and the Colorado into the Grand Canyon. No one could now sway him from that task.


After a difficult passage into the Rockies, Powell’s party came to Middle Park. A broad plain opened in front of them, flanked by distant peaks, the Grand River running through a green meadow in the shadows of an abrupt gray mountain wall. Faint mist and steam indicated the presence of hot springs. Near the springs, as Byers had told them, they came upon a two-room log cabin with low ceilings and a flat roof. A hitching post stood out front near a flagpole. Twenty-seven-year-old Jack Sumner, the slight, boyish-faced younger brother of Byers’s wife, strode out to greet them.

Sumner had been too young to join his brothers in helping Byers drag the printing press to Denver City eight years before, but had come out west anyway the previous year. Byers had a job waiting for him: to occupy the sulfur springs and land around it, which Byers had picked up in a shady land deal that blatantly ignored Indian claims. Sumner had raised a trading post for trappers and Utes, buying furs and selling flour at a quarter a pound. The back room served as a “regular hunter’s abode,” observed one visitor—sporting a wooden bunk, large fireplace, and cupboard and table, with piles of skins and bags of sugar sitting on the floor. A veritable arsenal hung on the walls. Byers had sent Powell here with a letter of introduction—and this meeting, too, would have a profound influence on Powell’s upcoming plans.

In many ways a pocket edition of Kit Carson, as his nephew would recall, Sumner delighted in rolling up his left sleeve to show off the scar from an arrow wound. One of eight children, he had grown up on a farm near Muscatine, a bluffside town on the Mississippi in eastern Iowa. Sumner’s grandfather had served both as governor of Ohio and the Iowa Territory. But his father’s farm held little charm for Jack, who—like Powell—escaped to the rivers and fields to hunt, explore, and trap. He would inherit considerable real estate upon his mother’s death. As a corporal in the 32nd Iowa Volunteer Infantry, he had spent two weeks at Vicksburg during the siege, then fought at Nashville, earning some renown as a sharpshooter. He was a voracious reader. That summer and the next, Sumner would guide Powell’s collecting efforts.

In front of the cabin raced the Grand River, running southwest from Sulphur Springs through Colorado and into Utah, where it joined the Green River to become the Colorado. From there, the river worked its way south through southern Utah, then cut west through the mighty canyons of northern Arizona, finally passing on into Mexico and draining into the Bay of California. The river pierced the very heart of these canyonlands. The trappers congregating at the trading post had spoken about building boats and descending the Grand to trap beaver in the waters beyond, but this had never risen beyond mere campfire talk. But now such discussion linked Powell and Sumner as they sat in the post’s back room.

As Sumner remembered it decades later, Powell had asked whether he would join him on a geological exploration of the Badlands the following summer. Sumner claimed to have declined, suggesting instead an exploration of the Colorado “from the junction of the Green and Grand rivers to the Gulf of Mexico.” In this version, Powell scoffed at the idea as foolhardy and impossible, but “after several windy fights around the camp fire, I finally outwinded him, and it was agreed that he should come out the following spring and we would make the attempt.” Sumner would also, just as improbably, claim to have designed the expedition’s boats.

But these were an old man’s memories, torqued to recover his faded importance. Powell already had the idea well in hand. But now he had the man who would help bring it off. He could not have made a better choice in the here and now than Jack Sumner.


As the summer of 1867 ended, Powell stopped in Denver City for a few days, delivering a talk on “Peaks, Parks, and Plains” to an eager audience at the YMCA in the Methodist church. With only one summer of experience in the West, Powell had the audacity to tell residents of Denver about their own backyard. But they crowded in to hear this man who spoke with a “pleasing and persuasive” talking style, as the Colorado Daily Tribune noted. Few, if any, in the audience had heard such cosmic explanations of the mountains under whose shadows they lived. Powell called upon them to imagine the familiar ranges as reefs encompassed by an ancient torrid sea, which lapped upon shores green with tropical blooms, and through which strange predators stalked. Great forests had grown, then fallen and decayed, ultimately transforming into coal beds, while streams of liquid rock poured forth across the future parks and plains: heady stuff for these Bible-reading pioneers. The newspaper correspondent stopped taking notes in mid-lecture—whether because his fingers cramped or his mind filled to overflowing with exotic imagery—then just settled in to listen to this mesmerizing scientific storyteller.

Byers’s Rocky Mountain News reported in early November that Powell planned to return the following spring to descend the Green River to where it met the Grand to create the Colorado.


Back east that fall, Powell keenly fell to distributing “over two thousand pounds of choice minerals, six thousand plants, and a large ‘assortment’ of beasts, birds, and reptiles, and Indian curiosities,” the haul of the expedition as recorded by one participant. Each member had brought home a human scalp bartered from the Indians. In December, when Powell presented his report before the Illinois State Board of Education, they expressed their pleasure, noting that he had been “successful beyond expectations.” Into his report Powell had unobtrusively tucked mention of his intention to return to the Grand River the following summer to explore the headwaters of the Colorado, although he still made no mention of running the river through its Grand Canyon. He then delivered an avalanche of lectures on the West in Chicago, Urbana, and Bloomington, then returned to the Normal museum to label, catalogue, and arrange specimens drawn from the expedition’s large boxes. He made sure to let others know what he was doing. “Too much credit cannot be given to Prof. Powell,” gushed the Bloomington paper. “He works sixteen hours a day, and pays his assistants out of his own meager salary.” As he unpacked boxes, he was already in full-scale planning mode for the following summer and beyond.

Powell’s next venture would be yet another field trip to collect more specimens in the summer of 1868—but he clearly saw this as only a warm-up. This became most visibly evident on April 2, 1868, when he wrote Grant and put his cards on the table. He now requested that the army freely provision both an exploratory trip and a surveying expedition down the Green and Colorado through the yet-to-be navigated Grand Canyon. This “general scientific survey” would enlarge knowledge of their still insufficiently explored nation, because the Grand Canyon would “give the best geological section of the continent.” Such a topographical inquiry could not wait, he continued, but should be immediately undertaken as “powerful tribes of Indians . . . will doubtless become hostile as the prospector and the pioneer encroach upon their hunting grounds.” He ended his argument with a cunning pitch to the pocketbook of a nation still smarting from the costs of war: “The aid asked of the Government is trivial in comparison with what such expeditions have usually cost it.”

Grant wrote back that he supported the endeavor because of the work’s “national interest.” But he then ran into problems with the commissary general, A. B. Eaton, who declared that the government could not supply rations to men not employed or in federal service. Powell’s request landed at a tumultuous time in the nation’s capital. Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, had increasingly clashed with Republican lawmakers over Reconstruction policies for the vanquished South. When Johnson attempted to fire Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, who opposed the president’s lenient policies toward the former Confederate states, Stanton locked himself into his Washington office. Johnson had twisted Grant’s arm to take over the position, but the general had declined. The legality of Johnson’s decision to remove Stanton featured prominently in the House’s decision to impeach the president in late February on eleven articles that outlined his various “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The matter then fell into the Senate’s lap. Finding themselves one vote shy of conviction, senators set on removing Johnson declared a ten-day hiatus in mid-May, buying them time to persuade at least one senator to change his mind. Powell’s request could easily have gotten lost in the high drama, but the Major had asked the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry to write a note to Representative James Garfield of Ohio, a highly promising politician who had been a college president in his twenties, a major general in his early thirties, and retained a strong interest in matters of the mind. The “expedition is purely one of science and has no relation to personal or pecuniary interest,” wrote Henry. The secretary added specifically that the “professor intends to give special attention to the hydrology of the mountain system in its relation to agriculture.” Powell’s instinct to bring Garfield into the ring would prove spot on—the Ohio congressman’s political career would end up in the White House in 1881—and Garfield made sure that Powell’s request got to the Senate.

On the last day before the Senate would vote on the impeachment, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts laid a resolution of both houses before the Senate, requesting that it ratify the expedition’s funding. In his third term, the Republican legislator was an experienced hand, who would become Grant’s second-term vice president five years later. Wilson shrewdly waited to introduce the bill when more than twenty senators out of fifty-four were absent.

Even so, the bill provoked bitter debate. Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull claimed that Powell’s venture would obtain scientific information that the government should have and get it cheaper than any other way. But that flinty Vermonter George Edmunds called it a backdoor way of organizing expeditions for this government and questioned the propriety of the American taxpayer underwriting a private expedition. After all, plenty of army officers were available. Senator Lot Morrill of Maine found it “a very novel proceeding that the Government shall be called upon to support an expedition over which it has no control.” Indeed, such an unprecedented request contrasted starkly with the government’s tradition of military-led exploration, most often conducted by West Point graduates well trained in engineering and survey techniques. Furthermore most senators had never heard of this obscure, crippled professor from Illinois.

But Powell had not asked for direct funding; such a request would have been doomed. Most important, he wrapped his submission in the flag, delicately reminding the congressional leadership of the embarrassment invited by a nation that left its very own territory unmapped and undescribed. Knowing his colleagues well, Wilson called the discussion to a close with a compromise amendment limiting the allocation to only twenty-five naturalists and giving the army the right to refuse Powell rations should it prove “detrimental to the interests of the military service.” The bill carried 25 to 7 on the shoulders of a Republican-dominated Congress soon to nominate Grant. Even so, it is astounding that Powell’s measure sailed through a government still wrestling with such staggering war debt.


On June 29, eighteen days after Congress passed the appropriation, the Colorado River Exploring Expedition left Chicago on the Chicago & Western with its twenty-three members, which included one minister who had quit his flock to join, and another cleric who brought along his twelve-year-old son, Henry, largely because Emma Powell was fond of the boy. Eagerness easily trumped experience among the college students who made up most of the party, but Powell needed as many enthusiastic hands as possible to fulfill his ambitious promises to many institutions for natural history specimens. Young Henry joined Emma in the ornithological section, which was tasked to secure sixty-seven pairs of every kind of bird in the country to barter with other museums and give to the Smithsonian. Powell’s brother, Walter, still suffering the consequences of his imprisonment during the war, joined the group as well.

Since the previous year, the railroad had leaped five hundred miles west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, to Cheyenne, Wyoming—creating yet one more “Hell on Wheels” riddled with prostitution, gambling, and the consumption of as much whiskey as the railroad could ship west. Gone was the long, tedious, and difficult wagon ride over the plains. Powell bought a herd of wild ponies in Cheyenne to make possible the hundred-mile ride south to Denver City. He watched as his young charges sought to break in the horses with predictably disastrous results, most getting thrown and some breaking limbs, although that did not stop any from continuing. “We knew nothing about mountaineering,” wrote one member, “and could hardly cinch a saddle.” Thundering rains pummeled their short journey, made even more wretched by Powell’s cost-saving decision to forego tents.

Powell and his wife traveled ahead by stagecoach to Denver City. Byers had already whipped up the public’s expectations, but now pleaded: “No more artists, artisans or laborers wanted for the ‘Powell Colorado Expedition’ until further notice.” By July 14, the day before the others arrived, Byers published a summary of Powell’s plans, which included the summer’s exploration of the Grand and possibly Green rivers. “Then, next spring or summer, the railroad meanwhile having reached Green River, new supplies and boats will be obtained thence and the great cañon of the Colorado will be descended and explored. The Professor contemplates thorough work, even if it takes two or three years.”

Byers and Powell had discussed the possibility of climbing the still-unsummited Longs Peak. If Pikes Peak was a benign, easily accessible mountain, then its brother could only be described as dangerous and aloof, its approaches fortified by sheer granite cliffs and deep snows for all but a handful of weeks in the summer. Byers himself had tried and failed to climb it in 1864. His small party, which included several scientists, had encountered a stupendous chasm running against the vertical face of the main peak—and been stopped cold. Explaining that they had surveyed almost all around that peak, Byers concluded that they were “quite sure that no living creature, unless it had wings to fly, was ever upon the summit” and predicted sourly that no man would ever reach the top.

Powell convinced Byers to try again, this time with the Major leading the way. They agreed to tackle the mountain in August, with Sumner and a few others. In late July, Powell took his crew to Middle Park to begin collecting. Sumner glanced over Powell’s young men and declared them about as fit for outdoor work as “I would be behind a dry-goods counter.” As Reverend W. C. Wood and Henry approached the Grand for the first time, they saw a prospector drive his wagon halfway across the river, when the dangerous currents, hidden by the sparkling waters, ripped a wheel away. When Wood rode in to retrieve it, he quickly found the river so powerful and deep that he jumped with alarm from his saddle. A mountain man watching from the bank turned to action, braving the river, mounting the frightened horse, and dragging the wagon’s party to safety. The hero of the moment introduced himself as Oramel Howland, a part-time printer for Byers, who worked for Sumner in the warm months.

The newcomers would also meet another of Sumner’s friends, a thirty-year-old backwoods trapper named Bill Dunn, sporting dark hair that cascaded over a buckskin of dark, oleaginous luster, “doubtless due to the fact that he has lived on fat venison and killed many beavers since he first donned his uniform years ago,” noted Powell. At the outset, these mountain men had little truck with Powell, Wood reporting that “it seems to be the general opinion of the mountaineers that [Powell] doesn’t get along much.” These men relied on spontaneous improvisation; after all, their lives would repeatedly depend on it. So alien a figure as Powell, who brooded about supplies and logistics, kept talking about geology and collecting flowers and birds, must have seemed a pantywaist indeed. When the mountain men and students passed the whiskey bottle around the bonfire in the evenings, the tall tales grew ever more raucous and outlandish. Powell made little contribution to the noise. A good preacher’s son, he did not join in with the constant whiskey drinking and frequent cussing that the mountain men enjoyed so much. Casually tossed insults did not warrant even a guffaw or good-natured retort. To these free spirits, he seemed uptight, self-righteous, and probably not what he said he was. But perhaps worst of all, his aloofness smacked of the judgmental and its dangerous corollary—the conviction that he held himself somehow better than they. But it would be these mountain-hardened men, not the passionate young undergraduates, upon whom the Major would call for his dangerous river trip.

Powell’s young men spread out over Middle Park, eventually collecting more than two hundred bird species. That summer, Sumner killed three grizzlies, two mountain lions, and a large host of elk, deer, sheep, wolves, and beavers. “All think it a hard life,” wrote young Allen Durley in his journal, although Lewis Keplinger, who had marched with Sherman through Georgia and completed his studies at Illinois Wesleyan that spring, exulted in the raspberries and gooseberries they found. Powell had some of his charges transcribe an elementary Ute vocabulary, not a universally popular task. “’Tis most stupid work these children of the mountains have little or no idea of the eternal fitness of things,” wrote one. Powell alone welcomed the Indians when they came begging at dinnertime, and he continued to buy objects and clothing.

On Friday, August 21, a group of dignitaries descended on Middle Park, intent on fishing for trout, collecting a few agates, and meeting Indians. Schuyler Colfax, presently speaker of the house and previously a journalist, was stumping as Grant’s vice president designate. He had spent the past week in Denver City, Central City, and Georgetown, rousing patriotic sentiment and denigrating the entire Democratic Party as war-opposing Copperheads. Samuel Bowles, the influential publisher of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Alexander Hunt, governor of the Colorado Territory, and John Bross, the lieutenant governor of Illinois, accompanied Colfax. Bowles praised the generous hospitality of Major Powell and his assistant W. L. Byers (as Bowles saw fit to characterize the newspaperman) and their wives. The group hooked string upon string of speckled mountain trout; on Saturday afternoon, Powell led them to the crest of a narrow ridge immediately above the springs, for views of Middle Park and the miles of snow-capped peaks that spread in either direction. He pointed to the imposing outline of Longs Peak, announcing that he and Byers would leave on the morrow to climb it, an impressive declaration even for those influential men of action. Powell, who knew how to elicit grandeur and stateliness at such moments, went on to hold forth on how the mountains had formed—still a new and surprising subject. Byers found no reason to speak up; it was Powell’s show. The Major’s audience could now plainly see that his interest centered not so much on the conquest of one more summit, but in furthering science and adding to the understanding of how geographic features took shape. The mountains were certainly a grand sight, but as seen through Powell’s eyes, they became something even more marvelous: the key to unlocking nature’s deepest secrets and a reflection of the enormous possibility of human will and courage.

Later that evening, the party gathered outside Sumner’s cabin, conversation stretching far into the night about the future of these swiftly opening western lands, leaving Powell with a powerful memory he would call into service a decade later as he formulated his radical assessment of the development of the American West. While virtually all agreed that mining would define this vast expanse of mountain and wilderness, Powell submitted that agriculture and manufacturing would soon develop on a mammoth scale, calling attention to the rewards that irrigation had conferred on the arid regions of Egypt, Persia, India, and China. “In a very few decades all the water of the arid region of the United States would be used in irrigation,” predicted Powell.

When Powell laid out his plans for the next year’s expedition—to explore the headwaters of the Colorado, and then begin a descent through the unknown canyonland—all shook their heads that the federal government had left so important a responsibility to a private enterprise; but all agreed that Powell was the man to do it. For Powell, a passage down the Colorado would not be merely a high-adventure river trip, the bold effort of a team of men fighting unheralded obstacles to get from one point to another. Instead, he would be inserting the final—and strangest—piece in the American jigsaw puzzle left by nearly a century of continental American exploration. What Lewis and Clark had begun more than sixty years ago, he would complete by fitting into place this last difficult patch of terra incognita. So when Bowles rhetorically wrote, “Is any other nation so ignorant of itself?,” one can hear the echoes of Powell’s own words.

“We should be out of the Park before this time,” wrote Bowles. “But the Utes and Prof Powell are so interesting that I have lingered long, and must stop.” Darkly handsome, with what his friend Emily Dickinson described as “that Arabian presence,” Bowles was well known for his sharp tongue and keen intelligence, but also for his penchant for the romantic. In his book about that western trip, he remained entranced by the vision that Powell had evoked. “The whole field of observation and inquiry which Professor Powell has undertaken is more interesting and important than any which lies before our men of science. . . . Here are the central forces that formed the Continent; here more striking studies in physical geography, geology, and natural history, than are proffered anywhere else.” Equally was Bowles enamored of the Major: “Professor Powell is well educated, an enthusiast, resolute, a gallant leader . . . He is every way the soul, as he is the purse of the expedition; he leads the way in all danger and difficulty . . .”

On Sunday morning, as the Colfax group departed for Denver City, Powell gathered the team.


There’s nothing easy about Longs Peak. When mere talk of climbing it had come up, “[t]he old mountaineers had fun at our expense,” wrote Keplinger. “The idea of a bunch of tenderfeet coming out and trying to do a thing like that was ridiculous!” Longs rises dramatically, nine thousand feet above the Great Plain, boulders and loose rock crowding its steep slopes, which are punctuated with sheer granite faces. Few animals but marmots can survive its often unrelenting winds, unpredictable storms, and frequent lightning strikes. To negotiate a path to its summit necessitates threading often narrow, frequently snow- or ice-covered ledges. A modern guide has likened an assault on Longs as attacking “a citadel . . . a castle with defenses.”

On August 20, Powell set out on horseback with his brother Walter, the ever-enthusiastic Keplinger, Byers, Sam Garman, Jack Sumner, and Ned Farrell, one of the Sulphur Springs mountain men. A pack mule known as Grizzly bore ten days of supplies. Each man wore a pistol and packed a rifle. The party carried two sets of barometers and thermometers, courtesy of the Smithsonian. Powell would take a difficult, circuitous four-day route to reach his object.

The party rode up the Grand River to Grand Lake. They then followed a promising ridgeline east, albeit through an exacting tangle of rocks and tree blow-downs that tripped the horses and even the mule. Grizzly indeed pitched off the trail, falling forty feet end over end. It sprang up with a look of astonishment on its face, and the expedition continued.

They soon passed above the timber line to spend their first night near Ptarmigan Mountain. They climbed 13,310-foot Mount. Alice—probably the first white men to do so—braving its biting winds and subarctic cold. Catching their breath, they gazed toward Longs, now looming defiantly about five miles distant. They carefully wound their way down a precipitous northern ridge, then up again to the summit of Chiefs Head Peak, probably another first ascent. They followed a path along one more ridge toward Longs, a route that quickly narrowed to a knife’s edge.

Keplinger came upon Jack Sumner sitting, evidently discouraged by the prospect of negotiating a steeply rising ridgeline only eighteen inches wide. Now the cocky greenhorn poked fun at the mountain man. “Hello, Jack, what’s the matter?” and Keplinger confidently moved ahead, Sumner yelling after him that he could go anywhere Keplinger could. But that young man was left recalling with pleasure that Sumner got down on his haunches and “cooned it.” Shortly afterward, the party reluctantly turned back. On their descent, they saw a gully running down the southern flank of the mountain well above them, crowned by a feature now known as the Notch. They would find out the hard way that only one passage offers a nontechnical approach to the summit. The so-called Keyhole Route requires that climbers snake their way 270 degrees around the mountain and then pass through a small opening in the rocks to get to the summit.

At 2 p.m., the group camped back at timberline and built a fire. Although they had climbed two thirteen-thousand-foot peaks that day, the irrepressible Keplinger asked Powell whether he might reconnoiter up the gully. Powell assented. When night fell with no sign of “Kep,” he sent Sumner after him with bundles of dry sticks for signal fires. Sumner’s shouts, and the fires, helped Kep get down a harrowing descent. He reported that he had neared the top—and now thought he knew how to approach the summit, even though his shaken countenance suggested otherwise. The narrow ledges, pocketed with ice and snow, had exacted everything he had; the unrelentingly strong winds had nearly pitched him off the mountain several times. That night the small group crowded behind a large leaning rock, which protected them somewhat from stiff gusts of wind and scattered rains as they shivered through a cheerless night.

The next morning brought an unexpectedly fair day. At 6 a.m., the seven began up the steep, boulder-clogged gully, negotiating several treacherous snow drifts. A hundred yards or so below the Notch, they took Keplinger’s recommendation to cut west and up to the top of the gully, reaching a boulder field that was mounted by the Keyhole. After climbing through it, they cut sharply to the left, making a dangerous traverse of what is now known as the Ledges, up a broad gully (the present Trough), and across the Narrows, a thin-lipped ledge clinging to a sheer face. When they approached the Homestretch, a 275-foot, near-vertical polished slab, their hearts must have sunk—the peak, so close, appeared unassailable.

But once again Keplinger found a way through a break in the wall, snaking upward on both hands and feet. The rest followed without major mishap, and at 10 a.m., Powell heaved himself onto the summit with a cry of “Glory to God!” They spent three hours on top, a level area several football fields in extent, from which they could make out Denver City across to the east, Pikes Peak to the south, Hot Sulphur Springs and a crescent of ranges to the south, west, and north. The men deposited a slip of paper bearing their names, along with barometric readings, into an empty baking soda can to leave behind. Giddy from his outsized role, Kep dropped a biscuit into the can with an additional note christening it as “an everlasting memento of Major Powell’s skill in bread making.” Earlier Powell had insisted on taking his turn at baking, but one-handed kneading had left the biscuits dense and unappetizing, although Keplinger acknowledged that his were no better. The Major told him to remove both items, feeling it did not honor the dignity of the occasion, then took off his hat and spoke a few solemn words: “We have reached the summit of Longs, accomplishing what others thought impossible.” Yet this effort would be but a warm-up for yet greater achievements.

How Powell had managed to lead such a difficult first ascent defies comprehension: the rock slippery, his boots offering insufficient traction, the wind blowing savagely. By perpetually shifting his weight and balancing carefully—and aided by the others—he had persevered, his ferocious refusal to quit keeping the others going. Fall he did, at one point badly bruising his stump, but the others fell, too, Byers’s tumble breaking a barometer.

Indeed, Powell had not merely come through but conclusively proved to Byers and Sumner that he indeed was no pantywaist but a man who could not only outface towering physical challenges with one arm but could also lead men on a daunting challenge. Again, he had needed to prove his fitness, but this climb was a crucial test. He required Sumner’s unwavering faith in him to prosecute the unimaginable challenges that lay ahead.


As summer wound down, most of the expedition traveled to Denver City and back to school, but a handful remained with Powell, who intended to overwinter and continue the reconnaissance along the Green River that lay far to the west in present-day northeastern Utah. On September 9, he had his brother Walter lead a pack train west some two dozen miles across Middle Park to Gore Pass, following an often indistinct trail marked by famed guide Jim Bridger in 1861. Powell instructed Walter to trace the Yampa River up to the White River watershed, then to follow that river, which intersects the Green. The going proved more difficult than anyone anticipated, frequent rains and hailstorms battering them. One of Walter’s team spent a month hopelessly lost, before miraculously appearing in camp. Another man—a mountain man, to boot—decided that he had had enough, loading as much of the supplies as a mule could carry before skulking off. Some of the team pursued him, only to scurry back when the thief fired upon them.

Overwintering on the Green appeared too ambitious, so Powell determined to stop over on the banks of the White River, not far from present-day Meeker, Colorado. They would build cabins near the winter camps of several bands of Utes, among whom Powell would spend much of his time. Before settling in, he took a number of the expedition northwest to Green River City, just over the present-day Wyoming line, a nine-day journey on horseback. The continental railroad, heading toward Promontory and its completion, had just come to this small town perched on the river’s banks. Powell had realized what an extraordinary opportunity this offered him: No longer would he be confined to building boats in the southwest, but could have them built virtually anywhere else and shipped by rail to river’s edge. From Green River City, he would initiate the river journey the following summer. He knew that others would also recognize the same opportunity, so he had no time to waste.

Winter conditions did not deter him from making several exploratory excursions—down the White to the Green, northward to the Yampa, and around the Uinta Mountains. Emma prepared and identified the 175 species of birds that the expedition had collected. The Major labored over his Ute dictionary, which began to take robust form. That winter he wrote to the president of Illinois Normal University that they had enjoyed a mild season: “I have explored the canyon of the Green where it cuts through the foot of the Uintah Mountains, and find that boats can be taken down. So that the prospects for making the passage of the ‘Grand Canyon’ of the Colorado is still brighter. The Canyon of the Green was said to be impassable.” A few months later, the Bloomington Daily Pantagraph reported that “with Powell, to think was to dare. The impulse to make the terrific descent was irresistible. Those who know him and his battle experience, will recognize this feature of his character. That which seemed impossible to others, grew to him to be an imperative necessity.”

That winter, Powell’s river team started to coalesce. Traveling with the greenhorns the past two years had convinced him of the need for hard-weathered men, not just the young, however eager they were. Jack Sumner would serve well as his deputy. Sumner’s friend Oramel Howland agreed to come and would bring along his quiet, younger half-brother Seneca. The trapper Bill Dunn seemed to have toughness aplenty, so he, too, was recruited. Sumner no doubt secured their participation with assurances that Powell indeed could pull off this expedition. The Major also signed on a frequent customer of Sumner’s trading post, the twenty-year-old Billy Hawkins, “an athlete and a jovial good fellow,” as Powell described him, to serve as cook at $1.50 per day. A scrappy orphan, Hawkins had lied about his age and entered a Missouri cavalry regiment at fifteen and rode in a major cavalry charge against a Confederate force twice as large. Byers himself toyed with joining the expedition, but eventually backed out. With his contributions toward equipment and groceries, along with some outright loans, Byers became Powell’s largest financial benefactor, exceeding the Illinois Board of Education’s $600.

On February 25, Powell drew up a contract with Sumner, Oramel Howland, and Bill Dunn, which stipulated that Sumner would take sextant readings while Dunn would take barometric recordings. Howland would make topographical drawings of the river’s course. The men would help do the work necessary to get the boats safely downriver and save specimens for stuffing. In turn, the men would have time to prospect, receiving $25 per month and a commission on each skin procured—$0.50 for a porcupine, $3.50 for an otter, and $10.00 for a grown grizzly. This was how a private expedition financed itself.

With a hard core of personnel committed to the coming summer’s undertaking, Powell turned to figuring out what kind of boats he would need. No one had designed craft for even remotely so rigorous a whitewater challenge. On the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, he had seen boats that handled chop well, even while loaded with freight. And he knew the perfect man in Chicago to build them.

And so, in the spring, the Powells headed back east by way of the Windy City.