The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  At the Rocky Mountain News, William Byers took exception to Palmer’s characterization of Risdon as an honest, reliable man, insisting instead that he should be hung for his lies. A letter from Emma to the Detroit Post declared the “whole story glaringly false.” Risdon claimed the disaster had occurred on May 8, while she had a letter from her husband dated May 28. But so compelling a story of a martyred hero and his party would not die so easily. “Ambition had a strong hold upon reason,” waxed a Chicago newspaperman. “Judgment was laid aside, and the Napoleonic major, with his brave band of faithful companions, saving one who was ordered on shore to report, in case the failure none believed in did occur: These high-minded men, bracing their courage well up, made every preparation, and then entered death’s portals—the awful, treacherous portals of Hell’s Gate. We can only say they must have died as they had lived—heroes all; yielding up their spirits with the same quiet indifference and pure faith manifested during the horrible descent of the rapids in Brown’s Hole.”

  Finally, however, a few actual facts caught up with Risdon, of whom the Springfield (IL) Journal reported on July 10: “The ‘Sole Survivor’ of the Powell Expedition Arrested and Lodged in Jail.” Risdon, it turned out, had stolen a horse, blanket, overcoat, quilt, and shawl.

  But the fabricated story had accomplished one thing certainly by bringing the Powell expedition national attention, the New York Times alone featuring eleven stories about it. “Up to the circulation of RISDON’S hoax,” a late July edition wryly noted, “the country had taken hardly any interest in the exploring party, which has started out on its daring and dangerous adventures. But since then, the entire country has taken the deepest interest in the Powell expedition. The newspapers have eagerly printed every item they could get hold of about the party, and every letter or note from any of the members has been universally read.”

  America craved a hero—and news from this exotic locale. “Nothing that can be written is so interesting to the casual or constant reader as historical sketches, incidents, actual realities and occurrences of the new and undeveloped country west of us,” read the Tribune’s preface to Risdon’s story. “The new discoveries, hairbreadth escapes, astonishing revelations are often of such a nature as to be almost incredible and beyond belief.” The Times chimed in: “The ascent of the Jungfrau or the Matterhorn will be nothing to the descent of that watery Montagne Russe.”

  But of this hubbub, Powell and his men knew nothing.

  * * *

  When the Major walked to the Uinta Agency with Hawkins and Goodman, he discovered that the agent had gone off to Salt Lake City. More disturbing, the ramshackle outpost contained scant supplies. In a letter posted there, Powell confided that nearly half their rations were gone, while the rest lay on the verge of spoiling from constant wetting. Nor had his plans panned out to supplement supplies by hunting. At the agency, Powell could secure only three hundred pounds of flour. The loss of No Name two weeks earlier now loomed more ominously than ever.

  The once-exuberant Frank Goodman pulled Powell aside to announce his intention to leave the expedition, a defection that the Major probably welcomed, not only because of Goodman’s halfhearted contributions, but because it meant one less mouth to feed. They parted amicably, Powell moving on to buy some items from the Ute Indians before heading back to the river with the cook, Walter, and Andy Hall. He brought no letters from the agency, for none had come. The Indians lent them a pony to transport the flour.

  The men who had stayed riverside noted the slim resupply with disappointment—and, years later, some of the expedition members would criticize Powell harshly for not bringing away more—a rather unfair charge, as Powell knew all too well that their food supplies were growing thin, but the agency had nothing more to sell. And there was no going back now. In 245 miles, the Grand, coming in from the northeast, would unite with the Green to form the Colorado. From this camping spot in the Uinta Valley, they would now press into truly unknown territory.

  On July 6, after a seven-day break, they pushed off again, relieved once more to be in motion. After less than two miles, the White fell in from the left, the same river along which many of them had overwintered the year before. In a couple of days of easy water, they floated fifty miles downstream of the Uinta, when the walls started rising again, the water quickening and rapids beginning as the river crossed from the Uinta Plateau into the Tavaputs Plateau. “The canyon is very tortuous, the river very rapid, and many lateral canyons enter on either side,” noted Powell, establishing the perfect conditions for whitewater by creating what geologists call debris fields (or debris flows), which so often force the current into the opposite wall. The Green abandoned its languorous drop rate of 1 foot per mile, increasing to 6.2 feet per mile for the next 75 miles, pounding through 68 brief but difficult rapids.

  Scant vegetation and gray shale walls lent an ominous countenance to the first large canyon, which they appropriately named Desolation, as well as the second, named Coal. Even the few juniper trees, Powell wrote, looked like “ugly clumps . . . war clubs beset with spines.” Adding to this bleak scene, the wind did not let up. “A terrible gale of dry hot wind swept over our camp and roared through the cañon mingling its sound with the mellow roar of the cataract making music fit for the infernal regions,” wrote Bradley. “We needed only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell.” The wind drove the sand with such ferocity that it stung exposed skin and soon covered their bedding. But at least it kept the flying insects away. When the wind abated, one of the men joked about encountering a very large mosquito, which had asked him for his pipe, knife, tobacco, and a light.

  Near the entrance to Desolation Canyon, after an exhausting day, Bradley joined Powell on an afternoon geologizing trip, scrambling up and over broken rocks and geologic benches to reach a point eight hundred feet above the river, only to meet a sheer rockface. Searching about, they finally located a steep but climbable pitch. Nearing the crest, Powell jumped to gain a foothold and grabbed a rock overhead. He found himself stuck, unable to move forward or backward “for I dare not let go with my hand, and cannot reach foot-hold below without.” Absent a right hand, he could not feel for another purchase. A sixty- to eighty-foot, potentially fatal, drop awaited him. He yelled for Bradley, who had climbed to a ledge above. Just out of reach, Bradley searched for a stick but could find nothing.

  Powell’s muscles began to tremble from the strain. Above him, Bradley could think of nothing to do; but then, with an electric burst of inspiration, he ripped off his long underwear bottoms and dangled them over the edge.

  Leaning backward, Powell let go and—while falling—grabbed the formless rag with his one hand. The underwear sagged and stretched, but miraculously held. Bradley struggled to keep his grip on the other end, but still managed to swing Powell to solid footing. In moments, characteristically without discussion, they resumed their climb. From one thousand feet above the river, they took barometric readings as they surveyed a “wild and desolate” scene: a lonely, dark, and deeply cut chasm threading its way through a broken-rock moonscape.

  The rapids now seemed to press upon them one right after another, at each one Powell choosing whether to run, line, or portage. More often than the men liked, he erred on the side of caution, a strategy that often set Bradley and the others to grumbling. Perhaps Powell heard the grousing, for he decided to run one set of rapids in Emma Dean with Sumner and Dunn, at either Steer Ridge Canyon or just below it at Surprise Rapids. Waves washed over the boat, filling it before it crashed into a large wave, which immediately sent it rolling and flung the crew into the chop. Unable to grip the boat, Powell struck out for the bank, later writing that his crude life preserver made swimming “very easy”—but surely this was a stretch, even for an able-bodied man. Sumner and Dunn managed to swim the boat ashore, considerably downriver. They lost the crew’s bedding, a barometer, and two rifles. Gone, too, were Emma Dean’s oars
and “$800 worth of watches,” wrote Sumner. Building a bonfire to dry out, they selected a large piece of driftwood from which they sawed out new oars. The following day, a wave knocked Bradley off Maid of the Cañon, his foot catching on a rope just as the boat plunged into a rapid. With Maid now trailing the half-drowned soldier, Walter valiantly wrestled the oars to prevent a collision with a nasty overhanging cliff. Bradley emerged from the ordeal wet, battered, and his leg badly bruised, but otherwise unhurt.

  That afternoon, they exited Desolation Canyon, only to enter the drab gray-shale and brown-sandstone confines of Coal Canyon, which Powell named after the seams of lignite in the rock. (He would later rename it Gray Canyon.) Almost immediately, they pulled to the bank above a section of the river that broke through low but sheer vertical walls and offered no possibility of lining or portaging. They huddled to discuss options, eventually devising a dangerous, but ingenious solution: a technique of leap-frogging the boats down midstream. Lashing all three boats together, they maneuvered this raft over to a large boulder, just before the rapid. Dunn climbed into Emma Dean, which they untied and guided downstream by paying out its bowline until it reached another midstream boulder upon which Dunn leaped. Then they let down the second boat, which carried the third boat’s still-attached bowline, to Emma Dean. The last boat then let go from the top rock, the second boat’s crew pulling her to the others. Dunn guided Emma Dean, its crew members holding the second boat’s bowline, down to the end of its tether. The second boat floated down, somewhat controlled by the men in Emma Dean, who let it pass a full line below them. The third was similarly let down until it had passed the second, three 130-foot rope-lengths from the second rock. By this time, the third boat had reached a cove in which the crew secured it.

  At Powell’s signal, Dunn, on the second rock, dived into the whitewater, holding Emma Dean’s line. The others pulled the two boats and the struggling Dunn to safety below the rapid. At any point, this experiment could have gone wrong, but the expedition members worked together seamlessly. After a short portage, they collapsed exhausted on a beach. That night the wind blew fiercely, piling sand over their prone bodies until, wrote Powell, “we are covered as in a snow-drift.” Then in casual understatement that belied that long evening’s misery, he simply wrote, “We are glad when morning comes.” Everyone now bore several kinds of injury: sunburns, sore backs, cuts and gashes that would not heal, along with cracked fingers and toes, sprains, and lost toenails.

  Next morning, they came out of the 120-mile gauntlet of Desolation and Gray canyons into one more desertscape, which let them run forty miles through easy rapids that day. Moods visibly relaxed, Bradley even reflecting that a stranger coming into their camp that night would quickly recognize “the cool deliberate determination to persevere that possesses every man of the party . . .” Gone was their boasting and easy confidence, replaced instead by tempered, even humor. They understood clearly now that only a small mistake lay between them and catastrophe.

  * * *

  On July 15, they entered Labyrinth, the first of two flat-water canyons with little current, which left them to row. The heat mounted, measuring more than a hundred degrees ashore. “The sun was so hot,” complained Bradley, “we could scarcely endure it.” They worked hard, covering twenty-five miles that day, but their effort gained them only eleven miles, as the crow flies, such were the undulations of that crooked canyon. Yet another circuit in Labyrinth twisted so severely for nine miles that the flotilla returned to within six hundred yards of where they began.

  On July 16, at 5:30 p.m., they reached the meeting of the Green and the Grand, the latter the very river that went past Hot Sulphur Springs in Middle Park. “Hurra! Hurra! Hurra!” scribbled Bradley in his journal. They had reached the halfway point in river miles. Sumner wrote that the river formed “an apparently endless cañon in three directions—up the Grand, up the Green, and down the Colorado; the walls 1250 ft. high.”

  At the confluence, Powell and Sumner sifted the remaining flour through mosquito netting to remove the moldy lumps. Repeated soakings and dryings had ruined more than two hundred pounds, leaving only five to six hundred pounds for the rest of the journey. The heat had turned most of the bacon rancid. All looked at the dwindling supplies with alarm. In seven weeks, they had eaten, discarded, or plain lost eight of the ten months of rations that they came with. Geese shot here had proven so scrawny and weak as to lack the muscle to fly. Beaver meat helped, as did the occasional mountain sheep they shot, but the meat quickly spoiled. If they could not rely on hunting, how long could they last? They had descended a little more than 2,000 feet of the 6,000-foot descent. Would the remaining 4,000 feet take another seven weeks or more?

  Few activities burn more calories than portaging heavy, water-soaked wooden boats over terribly uneven, often slippery terrain. Even with an abundance of food, consuming enough replacement calories would be difficult. Yet the men met this new challenge with continued good humor, Powell writing that the cook “takes instruments to determine the lat. and long. of the nearest pie.”

  But despite such rather forced levity, starvation now loomed large. Each one knew the grisly story of the Donner Party’s ordeal when trapped by a heavy, early snow in the high Sierras in 1846. When supplies vanished, many of the emigrants resorted to cannibalism. In one of the first reports, a California newspaper described how a woman watched as some party members cooked her husband’s heart, while another ate other parts of him and her brother. Such graphic images could not have been far from anyone’s minds as Powell and Sumner tossed clump after clump of green flour into the current.

  Ever the practical military man, Powell adjusted his calculus yet again on how they must attack the next stretch of whitewater. Rapids offered them the opportunity to increase speed and deliver them faster to journey’s end—reducing the odds of starvation. But running bad rapids magnified the odds of a catastrophic accident that could drown them all. Even a fairly benign capsizing that endangered neither crews nor boats, could spoil the remaining food supplies. The pressure mounted on Powell to make just the right decision at each new rapid. The vise tightened. And only now were they approaching some of the journey’s worst—by far—whitewater.

  Five miles below the confluence, the channel narrows into Cataract Canyon, which delivers a quick succession of rapids over fourteen miles. On July 23, they camped just above this mess. The scouters delivered bad news: They must portage most of the rapids. But they also found a curious fossil, which the Major believed to be an alligator. Bradley joked that the creature must have been on an independent exploring expedition: “All I have to say is he was sensible to die before he attempted to assend the next rappid for it has an almost direct fall of from 15 to 20 feet. We have met nothing to compare with it before.”

  Powell turned to techniques that had enabled him to negotiate other tight situations—cramming and furious studying. He spent an hour that same day trying to divine the waters’ secrets. “The waves are rolling, with crests of foam so white they seem almost to give a light of their own,” he recalled years later. “Nearby, a chute of water strikes the foot of a great block of limestone 50 feet high, and the waters pile up against it and roll back. Where there are sunken rocks the water heaps up in mounds, or even in cones. At a point where rocks come very near the surface, the water forms a chute above, strikes, and is shot up 10 or 15 feet, and piles back in gentle curves, as in a fountain.” He could make little sense of it. River runners of the following century would coin terms for these curious hydraulic features: haystacks, pillows, rooster tails.

  Engorged by the junction of the Green and Grand, the Colorado begins to do things not seen on such a scale in virtually any other river. A steep mountain stream may share some superficial similarities in the behavior of whitewater created when gravity hurls water at rock, but such whitewater is a different animal altogether from what the men now faced. When the irregular riverbed spins and twists the immense v
olume of the Colorado, the water piles into fifteen-foot standing waves, falling away into improbably immense holes, upwelling in violent boils, and torquing in forceful whirlpools. One whirlpool whipped Emma Dean around “like a roulette wheel,” reported Sumner. He and Dunn pulled hard on their oars, but could not break the boat from the current’s fierce grip. Finally, Sumner executed a well-timed jump with bowline in his teeth toward a rock thirty feet away. “I was able to pull the bow of the boat out of the swirl, whereupon it shot ahead like a scared rabbit.”

  They faced other strange river features, including the “keeper hole,” which river runners dread today. Rushing over a rock or boulder at the surface or near it, the water dives to the bottom of the river, creating a perpetual hole behind it, which water must fill. The river improbably races back upstream: It can slam boats abruptly and hold them there. The Colorado’s immense power and volume create gigantic holes capable of swallowing large motor launches, twisting frames and stripping everything from them, and spitting boaters out like pieces of popcorn in hot oil. A keeper can spin a swimmer like a reverse Ferris wheel, all underwater except at its highest point. The struggling victim can only gasp for a half breath before being sucked underwater—an ordeal that repeats itself, often until the body and mind give up the struggle.

  Soon the small flotilla reached what modern boaters now reverently describe as Cataract Rapids numbers 21, 22, and 23, or simply the “Big Drop.” The worst of these—Big Drop 3—narrows to a thin but ferocious path of water shooting between two boat-eating holes, which in modern times at high water so regularly flip boats that park police often station a rescue vessel below it. Pressed by the need to make better time, Powell decided—mistakenly—to run Big Drop 1. Emma Dean proved no match for the huge standing waves, which battered and filled its cockpit before discarding it into a whirlpool. “[I]t is with great difficulty we are able to get out of it with only the loss of an oar,” wrote Powell with characteristic understatement.