by John F. Ross
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 st
reams 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.
