The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  To every foray into the unknown—whether into the jungle, across the sea, over the pack ice, or deep into a desert—comes a moment of reckoning, which often declares itself with savage immediacy in the form of a storm or sudden death or bad accident, polar frostbite or tropical fever, equipment breakdown or just plain failure of leadership in the face of unanticipated hazards. Optimistic anticipation must rudely encounter rough, cold realities. Human vulnerabilities suddenly reveal themselves, often in stark detail—the veneer of even the toughest can crack. Good cheer alone, even buoyed by formidable skills and fortitude, may not be able to overcome such misfortune. To survive, all adventurers must then acknowledge that they exercise far less control than they thought. To survive, the party must join together far more cohesively than before.

  Such thresholds of adversity break many such enterprises, but they also offer an opportunity for a party to discover its deeper purpose. Relationships shift, stretch, and strengthen. On the river, roles were clarifying—Sumner’s most notably, as he repeatedly stepped up to take leadership in difficult situations. Powell certainly remained the overall leader, but the genial trapper had already begun to keep the men focused and working together, his decisive action crucial to the group’s survival.

  Their bodies now reeked of the earthy river. Each man nursed a variety of physical insults: strained backs and ankles, myriad cuts and bruises, stomachs churned by too much coffee. The stress of uncertainty—what new dangers awaited them around each bend?—chewed on them day and night. The river was unquestionably their master now. The only way to survive contact with such power is not to fight it but to find a way of working with its overwhelming force.

  Bradley, so recently a soldier, hinted at the transformation that took place among the men at Disaster Falls. “The red sand-stone rises on either side more than 2,000 ft., shutting out the sun for much of the day while at our feet the river, lashed to a foam, rushes on with indescribable fury. O how great is He, who holds it in the hollow of his hand and what pygmies we who strive against it.”

  Indeed, they now faced powers greater than they had the temerity even to imagine.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Canyon

  Lodore Canyon continued to pound them. Even Disaster Falls paled beside the ferocity of Hell’s Half Mile, which drops at a pace of more than sixty feet a mile. They found themselves out of the boats more often than not. The men hefted the heavy frames upon their shoulders and worked them awkwardly down and around the rapids. Then they would wearily clamber back up the same path and repeat many round-trips to ferry their supplies downstream. Every yard became a hard-fought contest.

  Where they could, they lined the boats, but that presented its own challenges. All too frequently one of the Whitehalls would wedge tightly between rocks, requiring all hands to push, pull, and coax it free. If a stuck boat filled with water, liberating it could take half an hour or longer. Even those sturdy boats began to show wear: The rapids stove a hole in Kitty’s Sister and the seams on all the boats began to leak. The men themselves took a beating. Pulled repeatedly off balance, they frequently lost their footing. Bradley gashed his forehead above the left eye, blood pouring ghoulishly down his face. Their leather boots split open under repeated immersions and hard wear, very often leaving toes battered and bloodied.

  In one section of Hell’s Half Mile, five men lined the empty Maid of the Cañon through the tumultuous water right along the bank, liberally paying out the bowline. Whenever a boulder blocked Maid’s path, they released even more line so it could skirt the obstacle. At one such obstruction, they let out too much: Maid’s bow touched the main current, which jerked it savagely out into the river, ripping the line out of their hands. The boat, wrote Sumner, tore “off like a frightened horse,” shooting to the far side of the river and out of sight. Sumner and Hawkins leaped into Emma Dean and took off through the rapids in pursuit. By a special providence, the intrepid pair discovered the runaway craft circling lazily in an eddy below that awful cascade. Maid had shipped much water and also now bore a sizable hole in its stern, yet it remarkably remained afloat.

  They patched Maid up. Nerves continued to fray. Bradley confided to his journal that he felt like a galley slave. “The major as usual has chosen the worst camping ground possible,” he complained in the time-honored tradition of expeditioneers grumbling about their leader. “If I had a dog that would lie where my bed is made tonight I would kill him and burn his collar and swear I never owned him.” Nothing stayed dry for long, so the querulous sergeant now kept his journal and some family daguerreotypes under his hat.

  On June 17, the ninth day in this dark canyon, they pulled onto a small beach running just under a cliffside, choked with willows, cedar, sage, and grass. They had just enough room to strip off their wet clothes and hang them to dry on the vegetation. Hawkins lit a fire to boil coffee while the rest joked around and discreetly examined their cracked and bruised hands and feet. Powell walked off along the cliffside, searching for a way up so he could study the rocks.

  A sudden gust of wind keened down the river course, blowing embers from the cookfire into the scrub. In seconds, the desert-dry beach vegetation and driftwood flared into a conflagration, catching the men flat-footed. They grabbed their drying shirts and pants, many of them already on fire, shaking them furiously as they ran along the narrow beach. The panicked Hawkins embraced the mess kit, stumbled to the water’s edge, and stepped into shallows, or so he thought. The bottom fell away, pitching him into the river. The kit flew from his grasp into the water. Before Bradley could dive into the river, flames singed his ears and mustache, burned off his eyebrows, and set his shirt on fire.

  From above the camp, Powell heard cries, and peering over the cliff edge, he was astounded to see his party in complete disarray: his men tumbling helter-skelter into the boats, which they frantically pushed off the bank and into the current. Attempts to land farther down the beach failed as the fire outraced them. Instead the boats, with bows pointed every which way, shot into an unscouted rapid, the men just managing to grab their oars, but still unable to direct their course.

  They flew through the rapids backward and sideways, somehow emerging unscathed in an eddy below the torrent. “One of the crew came in hatless,” wrote Oramel Howland, “another shirtless, a third without his pants, and a hole burned in the posterior portion of his drawers; another with nothing but drawers and shirt, and still another had to pull off his handkerchief from his neck, which was all ablaze.” But these men were not easily spooked: Bradley’s ghostlike countenance sent them all into howls of laughter.

  Hawkins at last got supper going while the elder Howland inventoried their remaining cooking equipment and eating utensils: “One gold pan, used for making bread; One bake-oven, with broken lid; One camp-kettle, for making tea or coffee; One frying-pan; One large spoon and two tea spoons; Three tin plates and five bailing cups.” And, he added with a flourish, “One pick-ax and one shovel”—the cook using “the latter article for a spoon, the former to clean his teeth after our repast is over.” They now had to sip their coffee from a bailing cup each shared with another man, but that did not dim their spirit as their laughter roared for an hour. “Went to bed and were lulled to sleep,” wrote Sumner casually, “by the rain pattering on the tent.”

  * * *

  Lodore released them the next day, its cliffs falling back steadily from the river, the long hours of shadow also melting away to bright sun. As they left the hard, ancient rock of the Uintas, the rapids burbled and sparkled, requiring no lining or portaging. The boats swept effortlessly downstream, the men giddy with their reprieve. As they laughed and sang, Powell studied the low cliffs in amazement. The chaotic violence of the water seemed to have jumped right into the cliffs, which now exhibited sinister-looking formations. One cliff face, its horizontal cake layers of rock thrust skyward by some titanic force, appeared like a rain-swollen paperback, its alternating red-and-white s
tone layers improbably bent. Powell puzzled over the elemental forces that had lifted and carved, eroded and twisted that alien landscape. Where his men saw only rock and color, he saw patterns that posed more questions about Earth and its long history. Powell looked at each new feature, not only as a geologist but also with a further rarer quality that he himself would later describe as “the instinct for cosmic interrogation,” the power he believed that most animated the evolved human mind. “It is easy to be lost in a maze of hills and a confusion of mountain peaks,” he later wrote, “unless the grand topographic forms on which the hills and mountains are sculptured are seen with a mental vision that reaches further than the eye. He who can see a mountain range, or a river drainage, or a flock of hills, is more rare than a poet.”

  After they had passed this anomaly, they rowed into what they would name Echo Park, where the Yampa falls into the Green from river left. Across from the Yampa’s dramatic entrance, Sumner glimpsed the prettiest rock wall he had ever seen, an immense 700-foot chunk of ivory-colored Weber Sandstone rising abruptly from the water’s edge. They pulled onto the gentle bank opposite this shark fin–shaped monolith, which they would dub Echo Rock, and set up camp.

  The journal entries written just after the terrors of Lodore now began to reveal each man’s survival strategy. Oramel Howland adopted a tone of confidence verging on bluster. “Danger is our life,” he wrote. “As soon as the surface of the river looks smooth all is listlessness or grumbling at the sluggish current, unless some unlucky goose comes within range of our rifles. But just let a white foam show itself ahead and everything is as Jolly and full of life as an Irish ‘wake’ or merry-making, or anything of that sort. Jokes generate faster and thicker than mosquitoes from a bog, and everything is as merry as a marriage bell.”

  Bradley could not muster Howland’s level of apparent self-confidence—but relied instead on a native optimism fused with keen observation. The Yampa swelled the Green’s volume, he noted, creating a wider channel less likely to get blocked by boulders. Lodore Canyon, he wrote, “has been the worst by far and I predict the worst we shall ever meet.” It would not be so. As the rapids grew more and more perilous by the day, Bradley would mark almost each new one with the mantra that it was the worst they would face. Somehow this willful thinking got him through each day—sincerely believing that things had to be looking up.

  Sumner found it best to remain in the present, not wasting time looking backward or forward, choosing instead to fill his journal with the human accounts of the party blowing off steam caterwauling at Echo Rock (today’s Steamboat Rock). But not every man was coping. The Englishman Goodman, who had signed up on a lark, had come closest to drowning—and probably to breaking down—the river ripping away his dignity and everything he owned save his red flannel underwear. But he counted himself lucky to have even that—and his life. After he clambered aboard the next boat, he promised himself that he would leave the river and the expedition at the first opportunity.

  Powell later filled in his journal with more flourish and swagger than he almost certainly felt at the moment: “This has been a chapter of disasters and toils, notwithstanding which the Canyon of Lodore was not devoid of scenic interest, even beyond the power of pen to tell.” He took mental refuge from the continually demanding river by puzzling over its display of geological enigmas—and periodically drew back from the incessant strains by writing about the significance of their undertaking, not just for science, but for a nation just getting to know itself fully.

  * * *

  After running south continuously from its source, the Green hooks northward around Steamboat Rock, thus crossing Mitten Fault, where much older rock has been thrust up to river level. The geology suddenly became even more fascinating as the expedition crossed what later would be named the Pennsylvanian Morgan Formation, eye-catching alternations of gray limestone and orange-red sandstone. For a man who endlessly examined the landscape for clues, the formation was indeed transfixing. As clearly as words on a page, it told of titanic battles between ocean and land. Some three hundred million years before, as scientists today reckon it, the vast shallow sea covering the still-forming North American continent began to recede. When the inland sea thrived, the calcium-rich skeletal fragments of uncountable marine organisms—shells, corals, algae—sank to the bottom, forming a layer eventually compacted into limestone. As that sea receded, terrestrial sand and debris spread over the calcium layer, themselves duly forming sandstones. The alternation of strata bespoke to Powell the comings and goings of that sea over long stretches of time—and evidence of multiple beachheads in the struggle of water and sand. In all nature, few examples exist so clearly of Earth’s dynamism and how its surface has so radically altered over time.

  Now they entered Whirlpool Canyon, its steep walls closing in on the Green to create “a gloomy chasm, where mad waves roar,” noted Powell. The river exhibited new and disturbing patterns in the form of tight, circling whirlpools that clutched at the boats and sent them spinning like the minute hand on a clock face when they caught them. If denied a place to land and scout a rapid, they bounced the boats along the cliff walls, grabbing at even slight rocky protuberances to slow their passage. They hunted for crevices or breaks in the rock wall in which they might scramble up to a shelf from where they could line their boats once more. At the end of Whirlpool Canyon, the milky-white layers of Weber Sandstone dove below the river’s surface. Passing over and across a fault in the rock, they emerged into what they would name Island Park. As with Brown’s, the river cuts right through a mountain at the end of the park’s open area. If the entrance to Lodore is dramatic, then the entrance to Split Mountain Canyon bends the mind, the river acting like a cinched wire ten miles long to cleave the peak perfectly in half from crest to base.

  This phenomenon of the river again deeply puzzled Powell. Why would a river choose this less than economical route? To consider the problem, he peeled back the landscape. Today, geologists identify Split Mountain as an anticline, a structure formed by two opposing pressure points pushing against one another, thus upthrusting the midpoint into an arc of strata, not unlike the effect of pinching the loose skin on one’s arm. Had that pressure been exercised before or after the river formed? What had the land looked like then? The answer to this three-dimensional puzzle lay in understanding the battery of forces that had shaped, and is shaping, the Earth’s surface: mountain building, erosion, river formation, deposition. “We think of the mountains as forming clouds about their brows, but the clouds have formed the mountains,” wrote Powell, pulling the pieces together. “Great continental blocks are upheaved from beneath the sea by internal geologic forces that fashion the earth. Then the wandering clouds, the tempest-bearing clouds, the rainbow-decked clouds, with mighty power and with wonderful skill, carve out valleys and canyons and fashion hills and cliffs and mountains. The clouds are the artists sublime.”

  On June 28, the Green once more spat the expedition out of a rocky canyon passage: “All at once the Great Uinta Valley spread out before us as far as the eye could reach,” wrote Sumner. “It was a welcome sight to us after two weeks of the hardest kind of work, in a canyon where we could not see half a mile, very often, in any direction except straight up.” They had been on the river now for a little more than a month and had traversed 258 river miles. They beached near the confluence of the Uinta and Green. Forty miles upstream lay the newly established Uinta Indian Reservation, their last chance to contact civilization, however rough it was.

  * * *

  Powell sent Walter and the young cook Hawkins to the Indian Agency, promising to follow in two days, once the rest of the crew had finished notes for newspapers and private letters. At Powell’s request, Sumner wrote a list of the forty-one bird species and families that they had seen, including sandhill cranes, eagles, loons, and woodcocks. Oramel Howland assembled his recollections for the Rocky Mountain News, while Andy Hall scribbled a note to his brother: “We h
ad the greatest ride that ever was got upon the countenent, the wals of the canone where the river runs through was 15 hundred feet in som places. i think we ar through the worst off the water now . . . The major is from Bloomington, Ill. I suppose you never herd of him and he is a Bully fellow you bett.”

  That same day, while they dried out, relaxed, and took stock, a curious story surfaced in the Omaha Herald, which would have left them whooping in disbelief. The paper reported that all but one member of the Powell expedition had perished. The news blazed across every major U.S. newspaper over the following week, picking up speed and somehow even more lurid detail. A couple of days later, the survivor was named as Jack Sumner. But then, John A. Risdon burst into the story, a liar of such temerity that he walked his fantasy into the Illinois governor’s mansion at Springfield. Governor John Palmer bought Risdon’s story, which the Chicago Tribune printed verbatim on July 2 under the headline, “Twenty-one Men Engulfed in the Colorado in a Moment.” Risdon inflated his bona fides, first by claiming three years of war service under Powell, then asserting to have signed on as a “chainman” on the recent expedition. He blithely invented a roster of expedition members that included a “half-breed” Indian guide named “Chick-a-wa-nee,” who had convinced the Major to abandon his three boats for a twenty-foot birchbark canoe.

  Governor Palmer sorrowfully explained to the Tribune how Risdon had tried to dissuade the Major from a suicidal river crossing, but Powell had laughed this off, replying, “We have crossed worse rapids than these, boys. You must be getting cowardly.” While Risdon reputedly guarded the horses and wagons on the bank, the boat pushed out into the current, “the Major standing in the stern steering.” A moment later, the canoe started to whirl about out of control. Risdon saw it “like a living thing dive down into the depths of the river with its living freight, Major Powell standing at his post. . . .” For two hours, he claimed, “I lay on the bank of the river crying like a baby.” He discovered Powell’s carpetbag before taking two horse teams on an eight-day journey back to civilization. It was all so vividly detailed.