by John F. Ross
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 nondesc
ript 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.
