by John F. Ross
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.
