CHAPTER 5
Descent
As Powell pulled together logistics for the river trip, he still knew precious little about what lay before him. He had researched the region as best he could during the winter of 1868, scrambling down to the banks of the Green River to peer into its rapids and muddy waters. He had interviewed Indians and trappers, studied the terrain from atop more high peaks than anyone else had ever climbed in the Rockies, and started to make sense of parts of the area’s geology. Such vast, inscrutable landscapes give rise to great tall tales, and Powell had heard many. One man told him how he had laid out a city at the confluence of the Green and Grand rivers before Indians chased him out. Others fed him disturbing accounts of how the river plunged underground, only to emerge miles later. The Canyon elicited the wildest flights of fancy.
He knew only the general outlines of the river’s descent: The Green coursed south out of Wyoming into the Utah Territory, where, despite a brief swing into western Colorado, it moved south on its way to join the Grand River in southeastern Utah to form the Colorado, located in today’s Canyonlands National Park. From there, the great new river flowed into the Arizona Territory and roared west through the Grand Canyon on its way to the Gulf of California. The expedition would traverse the entire Colorado Plateau, the human-heart-shaped, 130,000-square-mile desert province that straddles the Four Corners, the juncture of the present-day states of Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. Averaging about 6,000 feet—second in height only to the Tibetan Plateau—this is a remote, difficult land of mesas, cliffs, escarpments, and endless canyons. This family of rivers cut like coronary arteries from the north-northeast of the plateau to its southwestern edge, where the united river attains its most magnificent expression as it drops precipitously through the Grand Canyon, and off the plateau.
Powell knew precious little else, except that the party’s put-in at Green River City in southwestern Wyoming lay at 6,115 feet above sea level. When the Colorado races out of the Grand Canyon, it has nearly reached sea level. Without knowing how long the combined Green and Colorado flowed—whether they meandered and snaked or ran straight as an arrow—he could only guess at the average or most extreme drop per mile. Even had he known the exact mileage, he still could not determine the nature of the elevation loss, whether the river fell gradually or was punctuated by significant, large-scale drops in the form of great falls. The Yellowstone tumbled over two formidable waterfalls, one of them 300 feet tall, nearly twice the height of Niagara Falls. A far more modest undetected plunge could doom the expedition in seconds if the steep walls hemming them in afforded them no chance to pull off the river in time. Even if they could get ashore, a great falls could well trap the expedition. Unable to go downstream or upstream, they would have to abandon their boats and head overland. Even if they could scale the formidable cliffs overhanging the river, they still would need to cross some of the nation’s most inhospitable desert country.
Such uncertainties face all those who head off into the unknown. The smartest of them carefully figure out exigencies. Powell calculated that they would need ten months to reach their destination, including time to overwinter as he figured that ice would clog the river, yet another tribute to how little the land was known. Each of the expedition’s three freight boats would carry a ton of supplies: the axes, hammers, saws, augers, nails, and screws necessary to raise a cabin against the cold, plus two or three dozen traps and a large quantity of ammunition. Their soldierly provisions would consist of flour, bacon, dried apples, coffee, beans, sugar, and baking powder. To document and collect the data necessary for a map, they would take two sextants, four chronometers, and four barometers, as well as thermometers and compasses.
Powell had asked an old Paiute man if anyone had gone right down the river. Yes, came the answer. A fellow tribesman had attempted to run the Canyon in a canoe with his wife and little boy. “The rocks,” the Indian said, holding his hands vertically above his head, and looking between them to the heavens, “the rocks h-e-a-p h-e-a-p high! The water hoo-woogh, hoo-woogh, hoo-woogh! Water pony [the canoe] heap buck! Water ketch ’em No see ’em Ingin any more! No see ’em papoose any more!” The Indians indeed, despite periodic visits to their sacred places, otherwise kept clear of this ominous Canyon.
The strangest story from this strange land came from reports of a nobody prospector, James White. At 3 p.m. on September 7, 1867, at the Mormon outpost of Callville on the Colorado just downstream of the Canyon, a startled resident dragged White’s emaciated, bruised, and ragged form from the shallows. His skin sunburned to leather, the delirious man clung tightly to a makeshift raft cobbled from driftwood. He could neither talk nor stand. The entire tiny population of Callville—a handful of Mormon missionaries, U.S. soldiers, and barge workers—had reached this desolate outpost aboard a steam-driven paddlewheeler traveling upstream from the Gulf of California. None had arrived from the north or east—sixty miles directly upstream of the settlement lay ferocious rapids choked with bone-crunching rocks. Above that lay an even more formidable basin of the great Canyon, untraversed by even the most intrepid, much less navigated by boat or raft. But when White came to his senses, he babbled a fabulous tale. He claimed to have made his way nearly 500 miles through that monstrous Canyon in only two weeks. Too fabulous a story indeed, yet here he was.
White asserted that he and two companions had been prospecting near the San Juan River, several hundred miles from Callville as the crow flies, when an Indian attack—White never specified which tribe—left one dead and the two survivors fleeing for their lives. White and his companion hurriedly built a raft and pushed off into the Colorado River. Not long after, White’s companion, who had not tied himself to the raft, disappeared into a rapid. White appeared hazy about most major details of his alleged journey, but perhaps understandably did not seem to care in the sheer joy of being alive. He remembered trading his gun for the cooked hindquarters of a dog with some Indians who appeared on the bank.
A physician who had accompanied William Byers on his thwarted attempt on Longs Peak interviewed White, but interjected many of his own speculations in the account he wrote, getting the geography all wrong. Many years later, an engineer and river runner, Robert Brewster Stanton, interviewed White again, but he also overlaid his own assumptions on a narrative difficult enough in itself, blurring all distinction between the interview and his preformed conclusions. Stanton believed that White had started his trip below the Grand Canyon, floating only some sixty miles. A century and a half later, the story still remains shrouded in mystery, one that has an ending, but no clear beginning.
White lived until ninety, never appearing to care much whether people believed him or not. Why did he not bypass the Canyon on land? What about the great eddies that can tie up rafters in hours-consuming circles—if they are lucky? For the most part, river runners do not believe that anyone without a life jacket could have survived the Canyon’s notorious rapids. Adventurers have tried to replicate White’s alleged run, some drowning in the process, but some more recent ones have succeeded, although none at anything approaching White’s speed through the Canyon. The river was high, so it is not absolutely impossible that he could have made it, the human will to live being what it is. Yet even extraordinary fortitude could not protect an increasingly exhausted man from the repeated, maiming blows of rock against his flesh and bones. Perhaps the most persuasive argument for White’s having done what he claimed is the yet greater improbability of the alternative—that he could have marched some two hundred miles across desert and rock to parallel the Canyon until he could launch in the benign waters of Grand Wash Cliffs or below. Other factors complicate the story further. White had stolen horses from Indians near Fort Dodge, an army post in southwestern Kansas, before heading into Arizona Territory, so he had a good motive for lying about his exact whereabouts. But the absence of corroboration must forever leave the truth unknown. Powell scoffed at the idea that a man clinging to some hastily bound logs could have washed through the Canyon, more like a piece of driftwood than a sentient man. As with much of the other reports he had received, he discarded what he believed fallacious, White’s story among them.
On the top of Powell’s mind was whether the river hid any expedition-devouring falls. Absent credible information, he simply did not know. Yet he was too meticulous a planner not to have given considerable thought to the possibility. A single brief clue may shed some light on his thinking. Years later, a friend recorded a conversation in which Powell was asked this very same question. The aged Major pulled on a cigar and looked into the faces of his friend and other rapt listeners. “Have you ever seen the river?” he asked. “It is the muddiest river you ever saw.” He paused. “I was convinced that the canyon was old enough, and the muddy water swift enough and gritty enough to have worn down all the falls to mere rapids.” Yes, he certainly expected that rockfalls and debris from tributaries would create rapids, but not significant falls. “I entered the canyon with confidence that I would have no high falls to stop us, although there might be bad rapids . . .” Powell had seen the soft, sedimentary rock composing most of the Canyon walls in the Green River, figuring that the high volume of the river must have smoothed any large irregularities in the soft rock of the riverbed. But he did not know about the hard pre-Cambrian rocks or the volcanic faults of the Canyon’s deep inner gorges that could set up ideal conditions for a waterfall. The truth was that neither he nor anyone knew what lay down the Green and Colorado rivers.
The press took scant interest in the expedition. In May 1869, just three days before they started, the Chicago Tribune opined that the entire business “savors of foolhardiness” in the light of White’s experience. It “will result fatally,” the paper grimly advised. One lone voice raised a more serious accusation. In June, the geologist John Strong Newberry took to the Tribune to question Powell’s claim that “it is doubtful whether these canons [sic] have ever been seen by man.” The plainly irritated Newberry, who had pressed into the Canyon with the Ives and Macomb expeditions, pointed out that the Franciscan priest Silvestre Veléz de Escalante had crossed the Colorado north of the Grand Canyon in 1776, not to mention Newberry’s own experiences and those of James White.
Newberry’s anger was not misplaced. By bad luck, his geological reports on his visits to the Canyon, delayed by the Civil War, did not see print until after Powell’s expedition returned. They would contain astute geological observations about Grand Canyon country, particularly how the defining sculptor of these arid lands was, paradoxically, water. Indeed, Powell had clearly overstepped with his claims of uniqueness, the unhappy product of his passion to sell this bold journey to the Senate, the Smithsonian, and ultimately, to the public. He intended to make history—and this would not be the last time he would bend details to fit a storyline. Yet even given Newberry’s work, or if White was in fact the first through the Canyon, the encounters of human beings with this unique landform had still been only brief or accidental. No one had penetrated its inner sanctums and seen it completely from the water’s edge. In the big picture, Powell was correct.
Some of Newberry’s animus may well have arisen from professional jealousy, for every serious geologist knew that the Canyon offered a spectacular opportunity of their career. No other place on earth so dramatically reveals the layers of the planet’s history in such a compressed space. Newberry was right about that. The dean of geological science, the great Charles Lyell, was among the most eager of those awaiting news of Powell’s expedition.
Perched on the Green River near the influx of Bitter Creek in Wyoming Territory, Green River City was less than a year old and had already seen better days. Abandoned, mostly roofless, adobe structures crumbled in the baking sun under Castle Rock Butte. Green was a misplaced adjective for this lonely outpost, flashes thereof appearing only in the spring on the sagebrush and prairie grass. The river itself turned a sickly shade of that color for a few days as the snowmelt washed in before the river returned to its slow muddiness.
In 1862, the postmaster general created a stage station on the south bank of the Green River as part of the Overland Trail, a southern alternative to the often more dangerous Oregon, California, and Mormon trails leading west. Samuel Clemens—not yet fully Mark Twain—enjoyed a breakfast of hot biscuits, antelope meat, and coffee there in 1862, “the only decent meal we tasted between the United States and the Great Salt City.” In 1868, the transcontinental railroad reached this outpost, crossing the river on a trestle bridge built from logs floated down the Green and sawed into boards at the Bitter Creek lumberyard.
An enterprising businessman saw dollar signs with the coming of the Union Pacific. Jake Field had found some earlier success with the Jackass Express—a slight mockery of the already-defunct Pony Express—which bore its colorfully painted metal boxes packed with mail and strapped on muleback to far-flung towns and outposts. Field platted out his would-be city, which by then had attracted some two thousand expectant souls. Also smelling easy money, Theodore Hook, the mayor of the equally new railroad town of Cheyenne, abruptly quit his job to set up in Green River. But the Union Pacific and its lawyers had other ideas than filling the pockets of those they dismissed as squatters, declining to build a switching station there and launch Green River as a serious enterprise. Instead they threw up a new town twelve miles to the west on Black’s Fork. By the time Powell’s recruits started to arrive in the spring of 1869, Field’s dream had shriveled, the town now containing a hundred people or so, his Union Pacific Railroad Eating House and Outfitting House its only going concerns.
While Powell raced to nail down the expedition’s final details, the three recruits he had secured in Middle Park the summer before—Jack Sumner, Oramel Howland, and Bill Dunn—had made their way leisurely from the White River winter camp through Brown’s Park and Fort Bridger, feasting on an endless supply of “duck soup and roasted ribs,” and generally having fun, as Sumner remembered it—a continual binge that boiled up when they hit Green River: “We camped and awaited orders, and in the meantime tried to drink all the whiskey there was in town. The result was a failure, as Jake Field persisted in making it faster than we could drink it.”
From Fort Bridger, a military outpost not far from Green River, also came Sergeant George Bradley, whom Powell had met and recruited in 1868. A bullet in the thigh at Fredericksburg had not deterred him from signing up for more service after the war, but a soldier’s life that centered on keeping Indians from harassing railworkers had offered little but crushing boredom. The sergeant, who sported a handsome handlebar mustache, told Powell that he “would explore the river Styx” if that could get him out of the army. Powell queried Grant about releasing the soldier from active duty and was obliged quickly, despite the president’s busy schedule. Powell found in Bradley an able, if a bit excitable, comrade interested in his geologic work. He would become the most entertaining and prolific of the journal keepers on the trip stretching before them. Sumner warmed immediately to the man who “had been raised in the Maine codfishery school, and was a good boatman, and a brave man, not very strong but tough as a badger.”
While awaiting the Major’s arrival, one Sam Adams dismounted at the campsite with word that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had officially sanctioned him to take Powell’s place. The startled explorers examined official-looking papers, then shrugged and gave him a place at their mess. On May 11, Powell steamed up on the Union Pacific, leading his brother Walter and a young unnamed greenhorn recruit, along with four specially crafted wooden rowboats. Taking one look at Adams and his letters, Powell politely told Adams to leave, which he did immediately. A liar of gargantuan proportions, Adams would later turn up in Washington with a request for funds, backed by the bald-faced assertion that he, not Powell, had descended the Colorado—and came close to getting what he asked.
Much to his irritation, Powell found the waiting expeditioners hungover and crotchety, but he quickly sorted them out, setting them to unload the three freight and one scout boats from the flatcars and onto the banks of the Green. The rowboats, although sleek and narrow, contained double ribbing, added planking, and bulkheads that increased their durability, but made them quite heavy, as the men would soon find out. Field gave them permission to camp on a willow-choked islet about a mile below the railroad bridge, just out of the view of curious townspeople. Powell next turned the men to caulking and painting the boats, and preparing the seven thousand pounds of food and supplies for transit. The young recruit whom Powell had brought along soon left, scared off by the practical joking of the rough fellows whom he had planned on joining. This left Powell with seven men besides himself—not enough to crew four heavily laden boats, each of which ideally required two oarsmen.
From the banks of the Green, Powell struck up a conversation with a nineteen-year-old man hauling firewood in a homemade boat. His youthful ebullience, underscored by a pair of twinkling deep-set blue eyes, suggested a life already richly lived. Andy Hall had come to America from Scotland at seven; at fourteen, he left his widowed mother to become a bullwhacker, the lowest job on great wagon trains running west, trudging alongside to spur the reluctant oxen onward. No bitterness appeared to sour this lighthearted wanderer, who regarded life as one great lark. Powell signed him up on the spot.
Powell would hire another man he encountered in Green River City, a red-cheeked Englishman named Frank Goodman with a broad face and receding chin, who had fought in the New Jersey Volunteers, then become a Hudson’s Bay Company trapper in British Columbia. He had eventually worked his way down the Columbia River to Walla Walla, in the Washington Territory, and thence up the Snake and over the mountains, arriving in Green River only a few days before. The tall, twenty-five-year-old widower, who proudly wore a beaver hat of his own trapping and sewing, sold off his furs for enough to set him free from the hard work of the trapper. Powell believed that his geniality and fine health would be assets for the hard voyage. Goodman signed on right there, the promise of adventure too good to turn down. Powell now had the nine-man crew he desired.
On first inspection, his recruitment choices—both in number of men as well as their character and background—make little sense. Ten men appear inadequate to operate four heavily laden rowboats. The three larger boats worked best with two oarsmen and one to captain and possibly steer the boat through rough water. The scout boat could get by with a crew of either two or three, bringing the ideal complement to eleven or twelve. Finding volunteers had not been a problem on his two earlier trips out west, so he appears to have intended to have ten men all along. Fewer men certainly meant less supplies, both reducing cost and weight. But another possible explanation for the small number of men is equally plausible, even if a bit grimmer: Powell, the master of logistics, worked into his plans the serious likelihood of losing a boat and all its supplies. He indicated that by writing into the contract with Sumner, Howland, and Dunn that hunting would not be possible “should it be necessary to proceed on the journey without delay on account of disaster to boats or loss of rations.” Such a scenario would mean that three remaining boats would need to accommodate the crew of the lost boat, if they survived. That would lead to dangerous overcrowding if the complement was too large to begin with. Any additional men would also draw heavily on limited supplies.
The ragtag group of men swatting mosquitoes next to the small mountain of supplies on that islet would have inspired little confidence in a casual observer. The band of hungover frontiersmen did not appear disciplined enough to mount so daunting an expedition. Powell had not pursued the scientifically trained or men with past surveying, engineering, expedition, or even boating experience. His brother apart, not a single man had served under him during the war. Nor did he invite a single member of the 1867 and 1868 field trips, although someone like Keplinger would have made a fine addition. Instead he crafted a volatile, but extremely tough, body of field-tested outdoorsmen and former soldiers. None but Powell were married; most were in their twenties. They had not trained together, nor had anyone but Powell and Bradley sat at the oars of a rowboat for any length of time. He did not have the money to mount a large expedition—but he had drawn the acute conclusion that any group on such a large undertaking into an inhospitable environment can readily become their own worst enemies, a lesson repeatedly imposed by war. Unlike a column, this small band could move fast, and if necessary, regroup quickly.
If they shared a common quality, their leader not excepted, it was sheer cussedness, an attitude and bearing that fueled fierce self-reliance. Every man, with the exception of the Englishman Goodman, exhibited an unrelenting resilience that would armor them to face almost unthinkable physical challenges. More important, all shared the deep belief that—as Americans—they were destined to write their names large on this still unshaped continent. In another light, such overwhelming confidence in their skills and mission would have bespoken arrogance. They liked to tell wild tales around roaring driftwood fires, wrote Powell, having “seen such in the mountains or on the plains, and on the battlefields of the South.” They could take hardship without complaining, improvising when new challenges arose. While Powell’s choice of men proved to be brilliant in the aggregate, it also would nearly prove the expedition’s undoing. Working with independent-minded and authority-bucking characters came with a downside.
These men had volunteered for different reasons—personal enrichment, adventure, merest boredom, some genuinely detecting the possibility of touching something great. And their leader, entrusted to organize every detail of this perilous journey, had his own particular motivations. He was not moved by the prospect of naked conquest or wealth, but came to the task as an inquirer, particularly in the new science of geology. He did not look for thrills or search for glory but dreamed of matching himself against a great physical and intellectual challenge and overcoming it, especially if it had been previously declared insurmountable.
“We are quite proud of our little fleet,” wrote Powell in his journal as their preparations drew to a close. He had named the lead scouting boat after his wife. A stiff breeze whipped and snapped the American flag above Emma Dean, “the waves rocking the little vessel, and the current of the Green, swollen, mad and seeming eager to bear us down through its mysterious canyons. And we are just as eager to start.” For all his advance work, the river trip still amounted to a dangerous gamble. He would need to deploy all his logistical savvy, all his courage, all his planning acumen and leadership to pull this one off. He would need a good deal of luck also, but he had long known that fortune favors the prepared.
On May 24 at 1 p.m., the Colorado River Exploring Expedition, “thoroughly tired of our sojourn at Green River City,” as Walter observed, began their journey in high spirits. “After much blowing off of gas and the fumes of bad whiskey, we were all ready,” noted Sumner. They waved nonchalantly to the townspeople who had assembled by the bank, then pushed their four stout vessels into the wide, muddy current. Seated on rowing benches, two men in each boat pulled at oars secured by iron oarlocks. Walter raised his deep baritone in a melancholy song—indeed, the men would come to call him “Old Shady”—and all roared along in hearty chorus, commencing to pull downstream. Powell described with excitement the Uinta Mountains to the south as “high peaks thrust into the sky, and snow fields glittering like lakes of molten silver, and pine forests in somber green . . .”
Powell captained the smaller, sixteen-foot-long pine scout boat, which took the lead of this small flotilla. His crew consisted of Jack Sumner and trapper Bill Dunn. George Bradley commanded Maid of the Cañon, which he and his boatmate Walter Powell had decided to christen as befitting two bachelors. The two youngest—Billy Hawkins and Andy Hall—took to the oars of Kitty Clyde’s Sister, a popular song of the time whose refrain ran: “For if ever I loved a girl in my life, / ’Tis Minnie, Kitty Clyde’s sister.” Finally came No Name, commanded by Oramel Howland and crewed by his brother Seneca and the Englishman Goodman. Sumner’s description of the boat—“No Name (piratical craft)”—hints that it may have been christened not out of a lack of imagination, but in reference to a currently popular sea story. Major newspapers and magazines had covered the sensational escape of Confederate secretary of war John C. Breckinridge and the naval officer John Tyler Wood after war’s end from Florida to Cuba in a small unnamed sloop, weathering storms and pirates. When Cuban custom officers sought the name of the boat, Wood replied: “No Name.” The epic of so small a craft overcoming such deadly odds—“the manner of [Wood’s] escape from the coast of Florida savors of the romantic,” observed the New York Herald—might well have inspired the Howland brothers to give their plucky little rowboat the same nondescript moniker.
Their lack of experience afloat became immediately apparent when Hawkins and Hall ran aground a mile or two below their launch point. The others guffawed as the two clambered out of Kitty Clyde’s Sister to wrestle her back into the river. Andy Hall muttered how his boat handled about as well as an unbroken mule. Not long after, someone broke an oar fending off a rock, which sent the vessel reeling into an eddy. “In the confusion two other oars are lost overboard,” wrote Powell, “and the men seem quite discomfited, much to the amusement of the other members of the party.”
But in the relatively slight rapids, the boats performed admirably, shooting through “with the speed of the wind,” wrote Oramel Howland—others commenting that they flew like a blue-ribbon railroad train going flat out at sixty miles an hour. They came nowhere near the power of steam, of course—the strongest current in the largest rapids averages twenty miles an hour, only on occasion does the Grand Canyon’s most violent waters reach thirty miles an hour. Yet that perception of uncommon speed comes frequently to those who race close to the surface on which they speed, their freeboard only inches from the surging waves, like a sledder whose face rides mere inches above the ice of a steep run.
“The boats seem to be a success,” wrote Powell with some qualification, “although filled with water by the waves many times, they never sink.” They were all Whitehall rowboats, named after the street in New York City from which they were first launched to ferry goods and sailors to ships at anchor in the harbor. These keeled boats handled the choppy water of New York Harbor and later the Great Lakes well, tracking faithfully and moving smartly. One contemporary observer, who braved Lake Michigan when the waves ran high in a Whitehall, proclaimed that “in the great billows it was so constant” that its company was “satisfied that the boats could ride any sea . . .” Tight for money, Powell had been forced to skimp on many things, but in the choice of boats he wisely did not pinch pennies. The Whitehall’s hull design remains very sophisticated and difficult to build even today, employing complex, compound curves that are particularly hard to fashion from hard oak. The Whitehall boasted a carvel-style construction, in which the hull boards lie side by side without overlap.
But a whitewater river—and certainly the Green and Colorado—did not behave like open water, the hydraulics of its tumultuous motions governed by entirely different forces. “Running” whitewater had not yet been seriously contemplated, even among the French voyageurs in their large rabaska canoes of the century before on the St. Laurence, or the Algonquins in their birch-bark vessels along eastern rivers. Even these brave and skillful boatmen portaged the worst waters, not eager for thrills or to wreck boats that had consumed so many resources to build. They often used materials on the bank for repairs; Powell could not assume that his party would find sufficient wood to craft a replacement boat within the inhospitable canyons. The tough fur entrepreneur William Ashley had attempted the Colorado in round Indian bull boats, but the first touch of serious whitewater had quickly taken them out of commission. Frémont had experimented with a four-chambered raft made from rubberized linen on the rapids of the North Platte in present-day Wyoming as far back as 1843, but the craft flipped, and one or more of the air chambers had ruptured. Ives had shown that even iron hulls could not withstand repeated pummeling by granite boulders.
Powell’s selection of the Whitehall design made sense, given what he knew at the time. But even they would ultimately prove not ideal craft for whitewater. The very qualities that enabled them to travel fast in a straight line, prevented them from doing exactly what the boaters would need most in the turmoil of whitewater rock gardens: the ability to swing and pivot quickly, letting the oarsman rapidly pick a zigzag through and around multiple obstacles. Andy Hall summed it up best when he commented that his boat would not “gee nor haw nor whoa worth a damn.” When the whitewater grew its worst, as the canyon walls narrowed, offering no place to pull over, the boats’ handling characteristics would drag the expedition into mortal danger.
Yet Powell had taken some sensible precautions to make his Whitehalls “stanch and strong” by doubling the number of ribs and their stemposts and sternposts. He added bulkheads fore and aft to provide waterproof compartments and flotation, leaving an eleven-foot-long cockpit amidships. The bulkheads’ placement distributed weight farther fore and aft, unfortunately thus making the boats even less agile. When waves filled the cockpit, as often they did, the Whitehalls became virtually unsteerable, although the waterproof bulkheads prevented them from actually sinking. The liquid ballast lent a certain stability, but proved fickle and dangerous when a rapid violently shifted the water trapped within the boat.
The notion of an oarsman facing downstream—something now taken for granted today by whitewater river runners—had yet to be formed. The standard rowing stroke derives its most efficient and powerful mode by harnessing the broadest muscles in the back, trunk, and thighs, achieved traditionally by rowers facing upstream. But placement and negotiation in the grip of a tumultuous rapid is far more crucial than power. Rowing with their backs downstream would effectively blind an oarsman—even if they could glimpse the conditions downstream over their shoulders—and leave them unable to respond quickly to rapids that so often reveal themselves in a startling moment. The party’s journals give no indication that they used a steering rudder, or sweep, which would have significantly enhanced their ability to maneuver.
Powell had taken other important steps in anticipation of bad water: He had Emma Dean built five feet shorter than the other three, and out of lighter white pine to be more nimble, so it could serve as a scouting boat. Aware that the river’s deafening rapids might drown out effective voice commands, he brought along red signal flags, a means of communication that worked effectively during loud artillery duels during the war. Powell planned to stand when Emma Dean approached a rapid and read the current for “a clear chute between the rocks” while the oarsmen backwatered. Should he see a clear passage, the scout boat would run the rapid, then immediately pull ashore. He would then use the flag to indicate the optimal course between the rocks, standing waves, and holes. If the rapids appeared unrunnable, the scout boat would pull ashore. A flag waved right and left, then down signaled “land at once.” A rightward motion meant “keep to the right” and vice versa to the left. Boats were to keep one hundred yards between them. It all made logical good sense on dry land, but the wild river, like conditions during a battle, would find a way to disrupt the best laid plans.
The Green flows through southern Wyoming’s desertscape of rocky, nondescript hills patched with grass and scrubby greasewood thickets, these punctuated every few miles with small clumps of spindly cottonwoods and cedars. “Country worthless,” groused Sumner. Far to the west, the expedition could faintly discern the Wasatch Mountains, to the south rose the Uintas, toward which the Green drove, its surface now and again broken by riffles. The pair rowing each boat began to fall into a rhythm; they could now straighten their bows quite effortlessly with light adjustments when the current pushed them off center. Despite heavy rains, spirits remained high.
On their third day, having rowed and floated some sixty miles, they crossed into modern-day Utah, and the current accelerated. They passed into the upper canyons of the Green, through the outlying hogback ridges of the Uintas. The fiery-red Chinle and Moenkopi sandstones of the justly dubbed Flaming Gorge loomed above them, beds of orange, ocher, and ruddy remnants of the 200- to 250-million-year-old Triassic, when dinosaurs and the earliest mammals first appeared on Earth. They camped just inside the uppermost canyon, Bradley scribbling in his journal that the river “winds like [a] serpent through between nearly perpendicular cliffs 1200 ft. high but instead of rapids it is deep and calm as a lake.” The veteran would record his impressions with almost boyish immediacy and excitement. When they camped over for a few days, Bradley went out exploring in the morning, walked too far, and got caught in a blinding rainstorm, only struggling back to camp after dark “tired and hungry and mad as a bear.” The canyon’s walls block out direct sunshine for most of the day, dropping temperatures significantly, conditions that favored Ponderosa pines and Douglas firs, which appeared like apparitions at the water’s edge.
Flaming Gorge opens onto the tight hairpin of Horseshoe Canyon and then gives way to the soaring ivory Weber sandstone of Kingfisher Canyon, thronged with the thick-necked, large-billed fish-eating bird. The canyon’s narrowing now speeded up the river, creating riffles but little whitewater, the sandstone riverbed smoothed for so long by the racing river. Marveling at this steep and narrow Uinta country, they floated past the immense rock dome of Bee Hive Point, honeycombed with small, eroded holes, in which swallows nested. The lithe birds flitted about the rock with the industry of bees.
They came upon the name “Ashley” painted onto a rock wall just before some rapids, along with the date 1825. Powell had been able to gather few details of this fur entrepreneur’s journey, but someone had told him about a group floating down the Green that had capsized in the rapids. Some had drowned. “This word ‘Ashley’ is a warning to us and we resolve on great caution,” he wrote.
Conditions grew less benign all of a sudden as the river crossed the Uinta Fault where Red Canyon begins, the soft sandstones giving way to the hard Uinta Mountain Quartzite. Inescapable to all of them—and to all others who would later paddle the western canyonlands—is that hard rock most often equates with rapids. Chunks of fire-hardened quartzite, which had splintered from rock walls in side canyons, had eventually been washed into the main river, forming dangerous rock gardens, which the expedition now named Skull Creek, Ashley Falls, and Red Creek.
But this was no more than they had anticipated. For the next week, they encountered exhilarating whitewater: “We plunge along, singing, yelling, like drunken sailors, all feeling that such rides do not come every day,” wrote Sumner. He reached deep to find an apt metaphor, comparing the passage to “sparking a black eyed girl—just dangerous enough to be exciting.” They learned the elemental truth of whitewater: Rapids begin when the channel narrows and the walls vise inward. No matter how great the pressure, water cannot compress; consequently when unyielding rock walls close upon a river, the water can only do one thing: increase in velocity—often furiously, not unlike what happens when a thumb is pressed over the nozzle of a hose. When that focused stream of water smashes into a natural dam of rock and boulders, a river will exhibit its exhilarating, but violent, side. “Here and there the water would rush into a narrow gorge, the rocks at the side rolling it to the centre in great waves, and the boats would go leaping and bounding over these like things of life,” Powell recalled.
Here the Major deemed their first rapid too dangerous to run, so the men “lined” their boats. After climbing out, several of the party would grab hold of the boat’s bowline, then scramble down the bank paying out rope, trying as best they could to slow the path of the bucking vessel downstream. The men suffered their first ankle bruises from staggering along the rocks. Loaded boats proved hard to control while lining, so they often had to unship an entire cargo and carry that as well. Of necessity, they were all becoming students of the river, interrogating its constantly shifting personality for clues as to what kind of obstacles lay ahead. They learned quickly that a boat caught broadside in fast water often becomes jammed on a rock, the river pinning it down with thousands of pounds of force, making it extremely difficult to dislodge. Experience taught them that lighter boats danced best through the rapids, so they became diligent in bailing the cockpits.
Once in camp, they settled into routines. First order of business: Sumner helped Powell fix two of three surviving barometers, damaged on the trip west. This entailed pouring mercury into a glass tube, then boiling it over an alcohol lamp to create a vacuum. The glass too often burst, spraying its poisonous contents. Although the Smithsonian had provided these James Green field barometers—the finest then available—the thirty inches of glass tubing protectively encased in brass remained fragile, needing to travel upside down in a leather case. To get a reading, the men suspended the barometer beneath a tripod.
Of all the scientific instruments, Powell counted most on the barometer, which provided elevation data crucial to mapmaking and enabled him to measure the heights of features along the river. This instrument gave accurate altitude, thus enabling him to calculate the remaining drop in their overall 6,000-foot descent, which he could match with estimates of the distance left—then he could, in a rough manner, guess the drop per mile. Like counting cards in blackjack, barometric readings do not predict the next play—what kind of rapids may come up over the next mile—but rather give some sense of the overall trend of the river’s rate of drop.
The expedition grew used to Powell heading up into the cliffs to “geologize” the moment they pulled ashore for the day. His restless imagination was starting to come alive in examination of the rocky features. If they followed him, they might find the Major lying on his side, staring intently at a far prominence. “I had found a way,” he later explained, “to judge of altitude and slope as I could judge distance and trend along the horizontal.” He compared the experience with a stereoscope in which a pair of lenses focuses on two identical objects fused into a three-dimensional image. “The distance between the eyes forms a base-line for optical triangulation.”
On June 12, after a dozen days on the river, the canyon walls melted away, and they entered the anticipated outlines of Brown’s Park, a valley bounded by steep mountains on either side, running twenty-five miles in length and four miles in breadth, named by a Hudson’s Bay Company trapper four decades earlier. By the time Powell’s team entered that remote tract, cattle rustlers, outlaws, and horse thieves had already known about it, their visits evident by shacks and signs of cattle grazing. By the turn of the twentieth century, Butch Cassidy and his Wild Bunch used this distant spot as a hideout from which to terrorize southern Wyoming, eastern Utah, and western Colorado. Indeed, some in the expedition had camped here on their way to Green River City. It provided a welcome taste of familiarity.
At the park’s lower end, the meandering Green abruptly changes character, inscrutably cutting south by punching through the mountain’s flank into a yawning mouth of immense, dark canyon walls. All of a sudden, its gates rise precipitously, a full thousand feet higher than the Empire State Building from the flat confines of the park, sandstones fused by the heat of the Earth’s core into hard, shiny quartzite. At its threshold into the canyon, the Green again forsakes the softer sedimentary and volcanic rocks of the Tertiary to embrace the far older and harder Pre-Cambrian bedrock, a recipe for truly dangerous water.
Daylight found Powell extolling the beauty of the vermilion cliffs, but the setting sun brought shadows that encouraged correspondingly dismal thoughts: “Now it is a dark portal to a region of gloom—the gateway through which we are to enter on our voyage of exploration to-morrow. What shall we find?” These Poe-like words, written years later at his comfortable desk, smack of melodrama. Yet something about the Canyon deeply troubled him: Why had the river sliced so directly into the mountain, instead of continuing to meander gently to the end of Brown’s Park? Pour water into a sandbox and it will take the easiest course, certainly not undercutting the wooden sides. This set the confounded Powell onto a line of questioning that would lead him to generate revolutionary ideas about the formation of rivers and mountains, evoking the huge and ancient forces that must have riven the landscape. At that time, orthodox geology explained the creation of canyons with the theory of catastrophism: The Earth simply cleaved apart under some cataclysmic force, rivers implacably spilling through the resulting cuts. Powell would turn that theory on its head, arguing powerfully instead that the rivers themselves had carved the landscape as titanic forces pushed the plateau up against them.
If Powell revealed his roiling speculations to the others and brought to their attention the daily geological revelations unveiled by this journey, their journals do not reflect it. But even with so much to ponder, Powell would have to turn his attention almost exclusively to getting down the next eighteen miles of river, a ten-day effort that would try each expedition member’s strength and determination—and bring near disaster.
On June 8, they stripped to their long underwear and shirts, and kicked off their boots in full anticipation of a soaking ride. The bright red flannels that Goodman had bought in Green River City jarred particularly loudly upon the ancient cliffs. One by one, the boats pushed into the river, Powell and Emma Dean of course in the lead, passing through the billion-year-old gates. As they traveled, they named features they encountered, imprinting some form of humanity on this inhuman landscape. This Canyon would earn the sobriquet Lodore, after Robert Southey’s 1820 poem, “The Cataract of Lodore,” in which the poet uses onomatopoeic rhymes to describe a falls in northwestern England. In the poem, the water crashes, moans, groans, tumbles, claps, slaps, foams, rushes, and flushes. Sumner complained that “the idea of diving into musty trash to find names for new discoveries on a new continent is un-American,” but Powell liked the idea anyway, so Lodore it became, and remains to this day. From then on, they would use no more Old World inscriptions for the many hundreds of memorable features that they would christen on their voyage.
All that morning they rode rapids, Powell pointing out paths around boat-eating rocks with his flag. They lined what is now known as Winnie’s Rapid, formed by a spray of boulders fallen from a grotto in the right river cliff. After lunch in the shadow of that rose-colored, 1,500-foot wall, they set off again; only a half mile later, Emma Dean encountered a set of double rapids squeezed by quickly narrowing canyon walls. The first rapids, which drop only two or three feet, seemed runnable, although beset by large standing waves. The second rapids, immediately thereafter, startled the men with its violence: It tumbled down twenty or thirty feet in a channel choked with dangerous rocks that broke the waves into whirlpools and beat them into foam. Should any crew lose control of its boat in that upper rapid, no amount of effort could save it from smashing into the head of a cigar-shaped islet of sand and gravel dividing the lower falls. The Green drops thirty-five feet in little over half a mile.
Powell pulled Emma Dean ashore, then signaled Kitty Clyde’s Sister to do the same. He gave the flag to Dunn to signal the next two boats, himself walking downriver to scout. A cry rose behind him and, looking upriver, he saw No Name madly pulling for shore—but from too far out to make it. Somehow Oramel Howland had not caught Dunn’s signal in time. In swift, powerful current, oarsmen must anticipate rather than respond: Reaction most often means action too late. Perhaps still woozy from a big lunch, they had been sloppy at their bailing. Riding too low in the water, No Name could respond only sluggishly to the oar. Powell watched as Maid of the Cañon pulled over safely. But by this time No Name, or what was left of it, was in serious trouble. Oramel, Seneca, and Frank were fighting for their lives.
No Name had shot into the first rapid, the center of which held a threatening, large boulder. The bow smacked the rock, throwing men and oars into the water, although they managed to cling to its sides and climb back into the now-swamped boat. Powell recalled that the first rapid was not so bad, “and we had often run such”; but now No Name spun out of control toward the far deadlier second rapid. It hit the islet with such force as to crack the boat in two, its occupants left clutching the severed bow section. Once in the water, all vantage is lost—the waves slap the face and jerk the body unnaturally. Time takes on a different quality altogether, the sheer violence of the water overwhelming one almost faster than the brain can process events. Adrenaline charges mind and limbs for action, but they respond hopelessly out of step.
Goodman lunged for a barrel-sized rock while Oramel jumped for the islet; Seneca waited a beat before flailing for its most downriver tip. Below this sliver of sand and rubble, the water turned even more savage as it rushed toward the overhanging cliff walls on the right bank; no man, even with a life jacket, would likely survive that “perfect hell of waters,” wrote Sumner. The wreckage of No Name disappeared into the foam as if swallowed by some insatiable beast.
On the islet, Oramel reached for a dead tree root, which he swung out toward the boulder upon which Goodman precariously clung. The Englishman jumped for it, and Oramel pulled him gasping onto the sandy gravel. Their ankles were bloody from battering on the rocks, their stomachs bloated from inhaling the muddy water, their long underwear and shirts clinging like a second skin. Shouting to be heard, Oramel and Seneca lit a pine trunk on fire with some matches that miraculously had not gotten wet. Goodman sat still, all but the shadow of life sucked right out of him.
The others scrambled downstream, staring across the narrow channel—only a couple of dozen feet but a violent froth separating them from the marooned trio. The others emptied Emma Dean, then lined it down to a point on the bank just above the islet. Sumner climbed in, then pulling with all his strength “right skillfully,” remembered Powell, just made the islet. The four men dragged the boat to the most upstream end of the island. Sumner instructed the rescued men to lie in the bottom of Emma Dean while he alone manned the oars to cut hard and sharp across the narrows. The others pulled the boat safely to the main bank.
“We were as glad to shake hands with them as if they had been on a voyage ’round the world and wrecked on a distant coast,” wrote Powell. But the tone of comradely bonhomie in which he cast the story was intended for the benefit of a readership far removed from that remote, wave-crashed riverbank. Anger had quickly overwhelmed the relief Powell felt at having the men back alive: Within two minutes, and only two weeks into the trip, two thousand pounds of provisions—nearly one-third of their entire complement—had vanished, along with half the mess kit, Oramel’s maps, three rifles, and a revolver. Powell lost his writing paper. The river had also swept away the bedding and clothing of the three survivors, who were left with only a shirt and pair of drawers apiece. Goodman, who had lost his new buckskin trousers and shirt, a buffalo robe, a blanket, a blue army overcoat, and his beaver hat, seemed particularly spooked. He would later describe to a friend that his long underwear bottoms dropped down to his ankles and made swimming virtually impossible. It had been a very near thing. There would be none of his usual singing or storytelling that night.
Powell confronted the still-dripping Oramel. Why had he not acted on the signal? Surprised at the Major’s thinly veiled accusation, Howland responded rather prickly that he had not seen it in time. Who was Powell to question his judgment after he had just returned from the edge of death? Howland was not used to a challenge like this. Such a confrontation with a fellow mountain man risked a fist or pulled knife.
But Powell could just not understand how this could have happened. The bend before the rapid was gentle, the sound of the whitewater loudly audible long before it came into view. Two other boats were clearly visible ashore. Howland should not have even required a signal to warn him. Of the three freight boats, only No Name had a free passenger in it, one who could devote himself entirely to peering downstream. Of all the boats, Howland’s should have been the most vigilant. Like Powell, Oramel could stand up to survey the situation. How could he not have been paying steady attention? Powell had trained entire batteries to execute complicated maneuvers under the extremity of battle—why could this man not follow simple instructions? Howland had no answer, aside from claiming that the boat had been full of water and unresponsive. Why had he not bailed the boat, as they had done before? It seemed that Powell’s obsessive planning—the scout boat and the flag system—had gone for naught.
At least Powell had clearly divided food and supplies equally among the boats. All, that is, except for the three barometers, which were packed aboard No Name, and now were lost. For Powell, these were the most galling casualties. The very reason for the expedition—accurately mapping the river’s course and riparian topography—was now impossible to complete. The loss of the barometers represented so severe a setback in Powell’s eyes that he seriously considered undergoing a grueling trek to Salt Lake City to replace them. Their adrenaline still surging from the rescue, the others must have wondered about the Major’s hardheartedness in seeming to place a shiny bronze tool above the lives of his crew.
A few days afterward, Oramel Howland wrote that the calamity had resulted “owing to not understanding the signal.” Whatever the ultimate reason—whether he had missed the signal or just failed to understand it—Howland’s mistake proved devastating. Most likely, he had simply underestimated the force of the water. These mountain men, of necessity individualistic, naturally resisted being told what to do, especially by a rather officious Major who, while battle tested, had little experience in the uncharted West, and whose planning seemed excessive and often unnecessary. Howland had relied on wits and guts for years. He had grossly underestimated these ferocious waters, taking Powell’s warnings more as recommendations than as imperatives for staying alive and preserving the expedition’s resources. His had not so much been willful neglect as a habitual placement of his own judgment into any process.
The men lined Emma Dean another half mile down shore, and discovered part of the stern cuddy stuck on a rocky shoal in mid-river. Sumner immediately volunteered to get it, but Powell overrode him, uninterested in risking further mishaps on an already disastrous day. They returned to the other two boats at the top of the rapids to set up their pallets. Underneath scrubby mountain cedars, they ate a quiet supper of bread and bacon, the roar of the water now taking a more sinister note than before.
But troubling questions haunted Powell that evening, and despite his exhaustion, he could not fall asleep. He recognized more starkly than the others how far the risk equation had shifted. Many adjustments were now necessary to complete the journey safely. While he certainly had anticipated—even planned for—a scenario like this, the accident had nevertheless thinned their safety margin far too early in their trip. The odds of the expedition surviving the loss of a second boat—which would catastrophically diminish food supplies as well as seriously overload the remaining boats—were slim indeed. Powell would now direct his expedition to line and portage even more frequently to minimize the chance of another devastating wreck, exertions that would push them all to the edge of their physical capacities.
The next morning, they lined the boats down what they would soon name Disaster Falls. When they spotted more wreckage on a rock, Powell permitted Sumner to investigate. Sumner powered Emma Dean single-handedly out to the crushed remains. Upon reaching them, he whooped with joy. While he had indeed found the barometers, his exultation came from the recovery of a keg of whiskey, which Oramel had smuggled aboard without Powell’s knowledge. “The Professor was so much pleased about the recovery of the barometers that he looked as happy as a young girl with her first beau,” wrote Sumner. They also came across the traces of another unknown party—perhaps Ashley’s. The wreck of a boat, along with the lid of a bake pan, tin plate, and further abandoned supplies, suggested that this party had camped here after a similar debilitating accident—and then left the river altogether.
To every foray into the unknown—whether into the jungle, across the sea, over the pack ice, or deep into a desert—comes a moment of reckoning, which often declares itself with savage immediacy in the form of a storm or sudden death or bad accident, polar frostbite or tropical fever, equipment breakdown or just plain failure of leadership in the face of unanticipated hazards. Optimistic anticipation must rudely encounter rough, cold realities. Human vulnerabilities suddenly reveal themselves, often in stark detail—the veneer of even the toughest can crack. Good cheer alone, even buoyed by formidable skills and fortitude, may not be able to overcome such misfortune. To survive, all adventurers must then acknowledge that they exercise far less control than they thought. To survive, the party must join together far more cohesively than before.
Such thresholds of adversity break many such enterprises, but they also offer an opportunity for a party to discover its deeper purpose. Relationships shift, stretch, and strengthen. On the river, roles were clarifying—Sumner’s most notably, as he repeatedly stepped up to take leadership in difficult situations. Powell certainly remained the overall leader, but the genial trapper had already begun to keep the men focused and working together, his decisive action crucial to the group’s survival.
Their bodies now reeked of the earthy river. Each man nursed a variety of physical insults: strained backs and ankles, myriad cuts and bruises, stomachs churned by too much coffee. The stress of uncertainty—what new dangers awaited them around each bend?—chewed on them day and night. The river was unquestionably their master now. The only way to survive contact with such power is not to fight it but to find a way of working with its overwhelming force.
Bradley, so recently a soldier, hinted at the transformation that took place among the men at Disaster Falls. “The red sand-stone rises on either side more than 2,000 ft., shutting out the sun for much of the day while at our feet the river, lashed to a foam, rushes on with indescribable fury. O how great is He, who holds it in the hollow of his hand and what pygmies we who strive against it.”
Indeed, they now faced powers greater than they had the temerity even to imagine.