The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

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

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

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

  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. Advent
urers 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.