by H. W. Brands
Powell ran on. “I turn a bend, and see a man’s head above the water, washed about in a whirlpool below a great rock.” The man was Frank Goodman, and he tried to get a grip on the rock, but his hands kept slipping. Another of the men approached Goodman from an island onto which the other man had been washed. “He comes near enough to reach Frank with a pole”—a stick on the island, apparently—“which he extends toward him. The latter lets go the rock, grasps the pole, and is pulled ashore.” A third man also managed to make the island.
Yet they were hardly safe. On either side of the island, the river raged past. And below the island lay another waterfall.
A rescue was set in motion. A man named Sumner took the light boat and, starting far above the island, succeeded in reaching its head. Then the three stranded men and Sumner, wading in the river neck-deep, pulled the boat as far upstream as possible from the head of the island. They knew the current would suck them toward the falls as soon as they tried to cross to the bank, and they wanted to give themselves a fighting chance to make the crossing before they went over. When they had gotten as far up as they could, they hauled themselves into the boat and rowed for their lives toward the bank. To the great relief of Powell and the others, they made it. “We are as glad to shake hands with them as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast,” Powell concluded.
The good feeling was tempered by the knowledge that the four boats were now three. And the rations and equipment had shrunk proportionally. How many miles remained of the voyage, no one knew. How many more falls they would encounter, and how much worse they might be than the ones passed so far, were equally unknown. Their losses were all too obvious.
CURIOSITY, AS MUCH AS ANYTHING ELSE, HAD ENTICED Powell into the canyon. Curiosity nearly prevented his getting out. He made a habit, while the men were pitching camp or resting after supper, of climbing the walls of the canyon for a better view. George Bradley sometimes accompanied him, as Bradley did on June 18. “We start up a gulch; then pass to the left, on a bench, along the wall; then up again, over broken rocks; then we reach more benches, along which we walk, until we find more broken rocks and crevices, by which we climb, still up, until we have ascended six or eight hundred feet,” Powell wrote. “Then we are met by a sheer precipice.” There seemed no way forward. But Powell wasn’t discouraged easily. “Looking about, we find a place where it seems possible to climb. I go ahead, Bradley hands the barometer to me, and follows.” The barometer was for measuring altitude. “So we proceed, stage by stage, until we are nearly to the summit. Here, by making a spring, I gain a foothold in a little crevice, and grasp an angle of the rock overhead.”
On the entire journey till now, the men had marveled at Powell’s ability to do everything they could do, but with one arm. His lack became apparent at this point. “I find I can get up no farther, and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand, and cannot reach foot-hold below without.” Powell did something he almost never did. “I call to Bradley for help.”
Bradley tried to give it. “He finds a way by which he can get to the top of the rock over my head, but cannot reach me. Then he looks around for some stick or limb of a tree, but finds none.”
Powell was weakening. “My muscles begin to tremble. It is sixty or eighty feet to the foot of the precipice. If I lose my hold I shall fall to the bottom, and then perhaps roll over the bench, and tumble still farther down the cliff.” Serious injury, likely death, would be the inevitable result.
His companion had an idea. “It occurs to Bradley to take off his drawers, which he does, and swings them down to me. I hug close to the rock, let go with my hand, seize the dangling legs, and, with his assistance, I am enabled to gain the top.”
THE JOURNEY CONTINUED, AND REVEALED A LANDSCAPE unlike any Powell had imagined. “We pass through a region of the wildest desolation,” he recorded. “The canyon is very tortuous, the river very rapid, and many lateral canyons enter on either side. They usually have their branches, so that the region is cut into a wilderness of gray and brown cliffs. In several places, these lateral canyons are only separated from each other by narrow walls, often hundreds of feet high, forming passages from one canyon into another. These we often call natural bridges; but they were never intended to span streams. They had better, perhaps, be called side doors between canyon chambers.”
In mid-July, after seven weeks on the river, the party reached the confluence of the Grand River with the Green, the two forming the Colorado River. Powell, again joined by Bradley, climbed to another vantage point. “What a world of grandeur is spread before us!” he wrote. “Below is the canyon through which the Colorado runs. We can trace its course for miles, and at points catch glimpses of the river. From the northwest comes the Green, in a narrow, winding gorge. From the northeast comes the Grand, through a canyon that seems bottomless from where we stand. Away to the west are lines of cliff and ledges of rock—not such as you may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains that, rolled out on the plain below, would stand a lofty range; and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit.”
In early August they reached the head of the Grand Canyon itself. “We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown,” Powell wrote. “Our boats, tied to a common stake, are chafing each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month’s rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried, and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun, and reshrunken to their normal bulk; the sugar has all melted, and gone on its way down the river; but we have a large sack of coffee. The lighting of the boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better, and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage.”
The Grand Canyon dwarfed anything they had seen so far. “We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders.”
They continued to lack crucial information. “We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not.” But the members of the expedition were in good spirits. “The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning.” On Powell, though, the weight of responsibility hung heavily. “To me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.”
No canyon that Powell ever heard of was like the one the party was penetrating. “The walls, now, are more than a mile in height—a vertical distance difficult to appreciate.” Powell knew his journal would be read by Easterners; he tried to give a sense of proportion. “Stand on the south steps of the Treasury building, in Washington, and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Park, and measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to extend to that altitude, and you will understand what I mean; or, stand at Canal Street, in New York, and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have about that distance; or, stand at Lake Street Bridge, in Chicago, and look to the Central Depot, and you have it again.”
The river boiled along at a frightful pace. The men ran some rapids, portaged around others. They had hair-breadth escapes. “The boats are entirely unmanageable,” Powell wrote of one stretch. “No order in their running can be preserved; now one, now another, is ahead, each crew laboring for its own preservation.” The rapids seized the boats, swamping one. “A great wave fills the open compartment; she is waterlogged and drifts unmanageable. Breaker after breaker rolls over her, and one capsizes her. The men are thrown out; but they cling to
the boat, and she drifts down some distance, alongside of us, and we are able to catch her. She is soon bailed out, and the men are aboard once more; but the oars are lost.”
One afternoon, while the men pitched camp, Powell explored a side canyon. He came across the ruins of some rock houses, obviously very old. A milling stone, for the grinding of corn by hand, lay in one of the rooms. Broken pottery was strewn outside. Footpaths worn into the rock indicated someone’s long residence. But who? And why there? “It is ever a source of wonder to us why these ancient people sought such inaccessible places for their homes,” he remarked. “They were, doubtless, an agricultural race, but there are no lands here, of any considerable extent, that they could have cultivated.” Perhaps they had built terraces on the steep faces. “But why should they seek such spots? Surely the country was not so crowded with population as to demand the utilization of so barren a region.” Powell guessed that these canyon dwellers might have been fugitives from Spanish rule. “Those old Spanish conquerors had a monstrous greed for gold, and a wondrous lust for saving souls. Treasures they must have; if not on earth, why, then, in heaven; and when they failed to find heathen temples, bedecked with silver, they propitiated Heaven by seizing the heathen themselves.”
By mid-August the provisions were running dangerously low. “We have now only musty flour sufficient for ten days, a few dried apples, but plenty of coffee,” Powell wrote. “We must make all haste possible.”
The summer sun blazed overhead, and the canyon walls focused its beams on the voyagers. Most of the party lacked hats; none had an entire suit of clothes. And despite the day’s heat, the nights were chilly. “So we gather drift wood, and build a fire; but after supper the rain, coming down in torrents, extinguishes it, and we sit up all night, on the rocks, shivering, and are more exhausted by the night’s discomfort than by the day’s toil.”
At every turn Powell and the others stared agape at the geological record that unfolded before them. Slates, shales, sandstones, limestones, granites, marble and lava lay stacked like pages in the history of the earth. “The book is open, and I can read as I run,” Powell wrote.
To their surprise they discovered an active vegetable garden, planted by Indians, currently absent, in a side canyon apparently accessible from the canyon rim. The corn was not yet ripe. “But there are some nice, green squashes. We carry ten or a dozen of these on board our boats, and hurriedly leave, not willing to be caught in our robbery, yet excusing ourselves by pleading our great want.” They cooked the loot and gobbled it down. “Never was fruit so sweet as these stolen squashes.”
They entered a granite canyon where the river plunged faster and louder than at any place on the journey so far. They landed, and Powell reconnoitered. He got himself in a fix again. “In my eagerness to reach a point where I can see the roaring fall below, I go too far on the wall, and can neither advance nor retreat. I stand with one foot on a little projecting rock, and cling with my hand fixed in a little crevice. Finding I am caught here, suspended 400 feet above the river, into which I should fall if my footing fails, I call for help. The men come, and pass me a line, but I cannot let go of the rock long enough to take hold of it. Then they bring two or three of the largest oars. All this takes time which seems very precious to me; but at last they arrive. The blade of one of the oars is pushed into a little crevice in the rock beyond me, in such a manner that they can hold me pressed against the wall. Then another is fixed in such a way that I can step on it, and thus I am extricated.”
This solved Powell’s immediate problem, but it left the question of whether this stretch of river could be run. They hadn’t seen anything so frightful. “The lateral streams have washed boulders into the river, so as to form a dam, over which the water makes a broken fall of eighteen or twenty feet; then there is a rapid, beset with rocks, for two or three hundred yards, while, on the other side, points of the wall project into the river. Then there is a second fall below; how great, we cannot tell. Then there is a rapid, filled with huge rocks, for one or two hundred yards. At the bottom of it, from the right wall, a great rock projects quite half way across the river.”
Against appearances, Powell declared the pitch passable. “I announce to the men that we are going to run it in the morning.” He wasn’t sure their food would last if they took the time for what would be a difficult portage.
His decision provoked a mutiny. The men had repeatedly tempted fate on Powell’s orders, but three of them, including two brothers, now concluded that this wasn’t so much a tempting as a date with certain death. The elder of the two took Powell aside and urged him to reconsider. They all could abandon the river, the man said, climb out of the canyon, and find their way to Mormon settlements on the rim above.
For the first time Powell wondered if he was doing the right thing. “All night long, I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on? I go to the boats again, to look at our rations. I feel satisfied that we can get over the danger immediately before us; what there may be below I know not.” Powell wasn’t even sure they could climb out of the canyon at their present location. Nor, given their dearth of provisions, was it likely they could reach the Mormon settlements, which were at least seventy or eighty miles away, across desert and mountains. Farther down the river, the walls appeared to be still more forbidding. They might well become trapped, if they weren’t already. And the settlements, should they get out of the canyon, would be that much farther away.
He made a decision for himself. “For years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished, to say that there is a part of the canyon which I cannot explore, having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on.”
Come morning he polled the men. The voyage had been underwritten by the army, but it was not a military expedition, and the men were free to go if they pleased. The three objectors said they remained opposed; they were leaving. The other six said they would go forward with Powell.
Powell gave the three leavers weapons: two rifles and a shotgun. They accepted these. He ordered that the scant provisions remaining be divided with the leavers. They rejected this offer, saying they could shoot something once they got out of the canyon. But the cook prepared a pan of biscuits, and left them for the three to take.
The expedition had been incommunicado with the outside world since the day they launched the boats on the Green River. Powell had kept a double set of records, lest one be lost in an overturning or a wreck. He now gave one set to the leavers, with orders that they be forwarded to the government. He wrote a letter to his wife and likewise handed it over. One of the remainers gave the leavers his watch, that it be sent to his sister in case he was never heard from again.
The three leavers once more asked Powell and the others to reconsider. “They entreat us not to go on,” Powell wrote, “and tell us that it is madness to set out in this place, that we can never get safely through it; and, further, that the river turns again to the south into the granite, and a few miles of such rapids and falls will exhaust our entire stock of rations, and then it will be too late to climb out. Some tears are shed; it is rather a solemn parting; each party thinks the other is taking the dangerous course.”
THE DEPARTING TRIO CLIMBED UP A SIDE CANYON; POWELL and the rest headed down the river again. They lowered the boats by rope over the first fall, then put out into the stream. “We glide rapidly along the foot of the wall, just grazing one great rock, then pull out a little into the chute of the second fall, and plunge over it. The open compartment is filled when we strike the first wave below, but we cut through it, and then the men pull with all their power toward the left wall, and swing clear of the dangerous rock below all right.”
They started feeling better about their prospects. As bad as the stretch had appeared from above, it proved no worse than others they had run before.
Then things did get worse. “A little stream co
mes in from the left, and below there is a fall, and still below another fall,” Powell recorded. “The river tumbles down, over and among the rocks, in whirlpools and great waves, and the waters are lashed into mad, white foam.” They tried one side of the channel, then realized that it was becoming impassable. Pulling hard on the oars, they backed up the stream and crossed over. The canyon walls were too close to the water and too steep for a portage. Powell scaled a high basalt escarpment that overlooked the first fall and decided to lower the boats by a rope secured at that height. One man would remain in each boat to keep it off the rocks.
But the rope wasn’t long enough. Bradley was the one standing in the first boat, and the rope was secured to the stem-post. The men played out all the rope they had, yet this left Bradley and the boat in the swiftest part of the stream, being bounced from left to right by the current, and crashing into the rocks on either side. A second rope was brought up, and the men prepared to attach it to the first. Bradley couldn’t see this from the boat, and in any event all his attention was devoted to keeping the boat from wrecking on the rocks.
Powell leaped up on a rock in what he hoped would be Bradley’s line of sight. He waved his hat and shouted over the roar of the cataract. But Bradley didn’t notice.
“Just at this moment, I see him take his knife from its sheath, and step forward to cut the line,” Powell wrote. “He has evidently decided that it is better to go over with the boat as it is, than to wait for her to be broken to pieces.” But even this decision came too late. “As he leans over, the boat shears again into the stream, the stem-post breaks away, and she is loose. With perfect composure Bradley seizes the great scull oar, places it in the stern rowlock, and pulls with all his power (and he is an athlete) to turn the bow of the boat down stream, for he wishes to go bow down, rather than drift broadside on. One, two strokes he makes, and a third just as he goes over, and the boat is fairly turned, and she goes down almost beyond our sight, though we are more than a hundred feet above the river. Then she comes up again, on a great wave, and down and up, then around behind some great rocks, and is lost in the mad, white foam below.”
