The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  The Aseys welcomed them into their home. Upon hearing the news, the Mormon bishop of St. Thomas, James Leithead, piled a wagon high with mail and melons and drove to meet them. The famished men “ate melons till the morning star could be seen.”

  On September 1, the party split one last time, Powell and his brother riding in a wagon with the bishop to St. George, the other four deciding to continue downriver to seek their fortune. Powell gave them some of the money he had left, along with the two remaining boats. George Bradley and Billy Hawkins would jump off the river at Fort Yuma, Bradley heading west to San Francisco, Hawkins to the north. Young Hawkins would outlive them all, dying at the age of seventy-one in 1919 in the Arizona Territory. He had lived a full life, bringing up a family of six boys and serving as a justice of the peace.

  The record on Bradley goes cold until 1885, the last year of his life. Until then, he may have survived as a laborer, and perhaps owned a nursery in San Diego. He never apparently brought up his part in the expedition or attempted to leverage it to his benefit. He never sought to publish the journal he had kept, the longest and richest of all written on the 1869 expedition. In late 1885, Bradley’s nephew helped the recently crippled fifty-year-old return to his hometown of Newberry, Massachusetts. He spent his last few months with his sisters, who do not appear to have known about his participation in the now-famous Colorado expedition of sixteen years earlier. No obituary or mention of his life accompanied his quiet passing. But he had brought his journal East—and thirty years later, a relative would donate it to the Library of Congress, so only then would the world hear Bradley’s bright voice describing that hellish descent into the unknown.

  The irrepressible young cook, Andy Hall, would accompany Jack Sumner all the way down the now-gentle Colorado to where it spilled into the Gulf of California. Hall returned to the Arizona Territory as a mule driver. Robbers gunned down the thirty-two-year-old in 1882 as he escorted a mule train into Globe, which was carrying the Wells Fargo gold payroll for workers in the Mack Morris Mine in Gila County. Eight bullets were found in his body. Later, a lynch mob strung up the three bandits who had shot him on a sycamore tree outside the Saint Elmo Saloon in Globe.

  Jack Sumner would go on to become a prospector and trapper, but would have little to show for it over the next three decades. He would have a contentious marriage with a wife angry at his drinking and frequent long absences. One thing he knew in his bones to be true and clung to desperately: his unbreakable grasp of the frontier ethic, in whose service he himself carried the torch of the independent, remarkably rugged outdoorsman, spinner of tall tales, but fiercely honest and loyal to his friends. In the Southwest, he would become known as the last of a dying breed of frontiersmen.

  In 1901, a Denver newspaperman gently poked fun at Sumner. “Any building higher than a Mexican adobe house reminds him of the treacherous box canons that are the terror of the old prospector,” he wrote. The newspaperman then turned to quote Sumner himself and his observation that a “train’s bad enough, but these elevators make a fellow think he’s drowning and falling over a cliff at the same time.” The old West, as epitomized by this old-time mountain man, now generated robust parodies of itself.

  In late May 1902, a few days shy of the thirty-third anniversary of the 1869 river expedition start, Sumner found himself throwing back forty-rod in Green River, Utah. The whiskey somewhat eased the many pains in his back and legs, but did not quiet his roiling memories. One evening, he stumbled out of the saloon to watch the muddy waters of the Green River roll on as implacably as they had when the Colorado River Exploring Expedition paused here so many summers ago. He pictured it like yesterday. The shapes and voices of Oramel, Seneca, and Bill, were caught in his imagination as they would always be—young and strong, at the peak of their vitality. Three decades later, no one still knew exactly what had happened to Sumner’s good friends after they set off from the river. No bodies were ever recovered, nor their possessions.

  For a third of a century, Sumner had felt a numbing regret at not doing more to save his three friends, living over and over again the fateful moments at Separation Rapid when he had missed his chance to prevent them from leaving. He had failed them, he felt, and for that crippling guilt consumed him. If only he had tried just a little harder. Or, why had he not stood up to Powell? He could not escape the feeling that he ultimately shouldered blame for their deaths.

  Over the years, the weight had grown unbearable. Alone and despondent that evening, Sumner pulled out his knife, which he had honed to razor sharpness, then dropped his pants and calmly castrated himself. At noon the next day, a townsperson found him unconscious in a pool of blood. Twenty-seven-year-old surgeon Knud Hanson, an immigrant from Norway, sewed him up. Sumner miraculously survived, living for another five years. When Hanson filled out a surgeon’s certificate that Sumner would use in an application for army disability, he could not hide a professional admiration for the cool precision in which Sumner used his knife: “Testicles:—Both testicles have been removed by himself. Operation was very successful. Done at a time of supposed temporary insanity.” Anything less than a perfect incision would have led quickly to massive blood loss and rapid death. Such careful mutilation suggests a clearly premeditated act, not a flailing, drunken attempt at self-destruction.

  While no one can know what courses through the mind of someone set on so terrible an act, the juxtaposition of place, looming anniversary, and precision suggest a purposeful—even strangely courageous—act, symbolic of deep expiation for guilt borne for so long. In the all-too-applicable vernacular of the western frontier, Sumner believed that he did not have the balls to stop his friends from marching off to an early death. Perhaps by this act of self-mutilation, he was atoning for his perceived sins. And coursing through it all was a sense of loss also for the storied frontier West, which had been so much of him, and now had gone. He died five years later, broke and alone in Vernal, Utah.

  * * *

  Once off the river, the Powell brothers passed over the Beaver Dam Mountains to St. George by wagon, where they recuperated for a few days. Here Powell inquired about the Howlands and Dunn, but no one had heard anything. A friend wrote William Byers in Denver that Powell was “anxious about the others.”

  On September 8, while the Powells traveled by coach to Salt Lake City, the Deseret Evening News published the contents of a dispatch received through the Deseret telegraph line from St. George. A friendly Indian reported that the Shivwits, a small band of the southern Pauite, found the three starving men five days earlier, fed them, and sent them on their way to one of the two nearby Mormon settlements. The three, the reporter explained, had then come across a squaw gathering seeds and shot her. Angry Shivwit men had pursued and killed them.

  Other reports surfaced that the woman had been raped. Powell immediately rejected this storyline: “I have known O. G. Howland personally for many years and I have no hesitation in pronouncing this part of the story a libel. It was not in the man’s faithful, genial nature to do such a thing.” And indeed, such behavior does not fit with any of those men’s character.

  On September 29, nine days after Powell had arrived in Chicago, the Salt Lake paper reported that Mormon president Erastus Snow had telegraphed from St. George upon completing a thorough investigation of the matter. They had not molested a squaw, but “were killed by an enraged Shebitt, some of whose friends had, a short time previously, been murdered by a party of miners on the other (east) side of the Colorado River.” The Mormon elder oddly did not order the bodies recovered or see to the arrest of any guilty Indians.

  The Mormons assured Powell that they would mount a search, which seemed to satisfy him. It was not characteristic for this man of action to let others do his bidding, although he may well have concluded that the Mormons could conduct a more thorough investigation than he could, especially now as he was worn out and light on funds. Had a certain cool practicality trumped a devotion to
his men? Did he not, as Howlands and Dunn suspected, really care for his men at all? Were they merely pawns in his larger machinations? The debate goes on today, among river runners sitting beside campfires on the Colorado and in blogs and chat rooms populated by often well-read, independent historians. Some paint him as an Ahab-like figure, a crippled psychopath so consumed with his task that he would do anything to attain it. No one would doubt his focus and determination. But did a heart beat inside his chest?

  What exactly transpired at Separation Rapid, when the walls closed in and the water roared, the flour petering out, will never be known. But that sort of uncertainty and the prospect of death most definitely unleashes powerful demons inside even the strongest men. And it is never possible to tell, when sitting around a bar in town, how one or another will react under the throes of such extreme privation and challenge. One might easily conclude that the Howland brothers and Dunn were cowards, who could no longer face the river, but that is not something that Powell believed. He had seen firsthand that they were not.

  But neither would he, unlike Sumner, acknowledge any regret for not changing their minds. He had certainly tried. But he also knew with crystal clarity that they had broken a solemn compact that day. They had parted not with bitterness and rebuke, but with clear thought, a decision that Powell accorded them the freedom to make. But once they made that choice, those three men no longer were part of the expedition—and, thus, no longer his responsibility. Perhaps, in the retrospect of more than a century, this can appear as cold calculation. But when they left the river, they did so under their own will. And while certainly their relationship with Powell had deteriorated, it was not the predominant factor for their leaving. On that dark, difficult day, it boiled down to a very basic decision about survival. Oramel Howland had clearly determined that their odds of living were better off the river. As simple as that.

  Battle decisions by commanders become the fodder of armchair generals for years after the event. Did a commander exercise enough care about his men, while also keeping his eyes on the big prize of winning the battle? Powell had watched up close as Grant had exercised difficult command decisions during the war, enduring the slings of those calling him a butcher, but somehow managed to do what he must. Of course, the descent of the Colorado was not war, although it certainly turned into a life-and-death struggle. Neither was Powell as deft a field commander as Grant. But leadership under significant duress requires difficult decisions. Real leaders must understand that and cannot look backward. And that may well be the best lens through which to look at Powell’s decisions on the river.

  As for how Powell ultimately regarded Oramel Howland’s spearheading the trio’s departure, the Major left no written record, aside from that comment in his report about each party thinking the other was taking the dangerous course. Did he ultimately regard their act as a betrayal or as the unfortunate collateral damage of so risky a venture? Or had he recognized that the expedition was better off without them, like he had with Goodman? He had never represented that the expedition came under anything like military rule. Honoring the independent traditions of the West, Powell would have understood that anyone could leave should they so desire. Even so, Powell would get the last word. Several years afterward, when he sat down in Washington to write up the narrative, he searched for a way to portray Oramel and finally reached for Shakespeare: “When busily employed he usually puts his hat in his pocket, his thin hair and long beard stream in the wind, giving him a wild look, much like that of King Lear in an illustrated copy of Shakespeare which tumbles around camp.” Powell could well have believed that the comparison stretched beyond mere appearances. Doomed by his own folly, Lear is one of literature’s most powerfully tragic figures. Certainly, too, Oramel had brought tragedy upon himself by his own actions, starting with the wreck of No Name, caused either by his inattention or willful disregard of the flag signals, then his fateful decision to abandon the river. Powell not so subtly hinted that Oramel, like Lear, had crafted his own fate through prideful arrogance and misplaced allegiances.

  It would take a year before Powell returned to the area to conduct his own investigation into the disappearance of the missing party, but by this time he was well on his way to the next big task.

  * * *

  Salt Lake City turned out a hero’s welcome for the somewhat surprised Powell. Just three months earlier, he had been an obscure midwestern academic with improbably bold plans. But a horse thief’s outrageous fantasy about the expedition’s tragic end had enthralled the nation—and now his return from the dead in defiance of this crazy fiction was simply too compelling a story to ignore. As the details emerged of the expedition’s epic struggles, the voyage would thread its way into the fabric of the American story. Powell’s emergence undaunted from that colossal cut in the Earth had somehow enlarged the entire nation, plain flesh and will overcoming the unyielding, ancient hardness of rock and the force of violent cataract. The Canyon journey would become a telling moment in the mighty struggle of Americans with their continent.

  From the moment Powell stepped off the river, his journey and its story no longer belonged to him and his expedition members alone, but to America itself. Audiences now gathered, hungry for details. But as the clamor rose to hear the stories of the handful of men battling nature in their pitifully small boats, he wanted mostly to talk impersonally in the language of scientific pioneering—about geology, deep time, how rivers carve the landscape, and the little-known lifestyles of the desert Indians. He wanted to be useful, awakening his audiences to a sense of their land, not inspiring the heroic, but his story now lived beyond his desire to shape the narrative.

  Powell addressed a packed house at the Thirteenth Ward Assembly Rooms in Salt Lake City, a reporter observing that he had “endured the fatigues and anxieties of the trip remarkably well.” That evening, he traveled to Chicago, where he submitted to a Tribune interview, which glowingly noted that “so important a contribution to geographical and geological knowledge has not been made in a long time.” He lectured at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, the Great Bethel Fair in Cincinnati, his father’s Wheaton College, and in Brooklyn, New York. Back in Chicago, a choir prefaced his talk at the Teachers’ Institute. “The adventures of the party were related,” noted a journalist, “the sad fate of some who fell at the hands of Indians was mourned, and a handsome tribute was paid to the cool intrepidity and daring of Bradley, an old sailor of the party.”

  The New York Herald noted that his demeanor fell far short of a public lecturer’s—he spoke in a low and indistinct tone of voice, but had “a very pleasant conversational style of telling what he has heard and seen.” Another newspaper described him as “erect as a pine, and compactly built, brown hair and whiskers, the latter cut in Burnside fashion. In manners affable—his style of delivery is free from affectations and display. . . . He excels in freshness, originality and compactness of idea and expressions, rather than oratorical finish and flourish.”

  Powell did not feel different, even though others now beheld him so. Yet the experience had indeed changed him. Not because he had stared into death’s maw—he had done that before at the Hornet’s Nest and under the surgeon’s saw. Certainly he now offered convincing proof that so badly a maimed man could overcome formidable challenges and be useful to his nation. But far more important, this steady descent into Earth’s hard-rock history had extended his imagination into surprising new dimensions, greatly reorienting his perspective. He may not have realized it then, but the experience capped an education that had begun so many years ago in an Ohio streambed with Big George. Powell would now be pivoted into a true American visionary, the Canyon’s lessons exercising as tangible an influence as the ancient lavaflows of the Inner Canyon had wrought on the river’s course.

  No other scientist had ventured a mile deep into a scar slashed into the Earth and observed layer upon layer of rock—evidence of the planet’s history—revealed so nakedly and cle
arly. It was not so much that he encountered new formations and previously undescribed convulsions of Earth history—he had—but rather the overwhelming general impression that he had formed was the truly astounding dynamism of Earth’s long history. Far from static, or created in a single, divinely inspired instant, the Earth’s form had never ceased changing, morphing, upheaving, eroding. The Grand Canyon had forced upon him a new consciousness.

  Powell had long been a student of landscape, accumulating knowledge of midwestern rivers necessary for collecting his mollusks, or when deciphering the topographic curvatures and vantages at Cape Girardeau. But his understanding of the land now encompassed a far deeper appreciation of how those contours had arisen—and continued to morph—in the assault of ever-changing forces. The form of the Earth’s surface may seem frozen at any moment in the perspective of a human being standing atop a mountain, but seen through the lens of deep time, it revealed huge flux and change, a continuum of major disruptions and a world constantly remaking itself.

  This journey would stimulate Powell to develop brand-new theories about river formation and to coin the term “geomorphology,” the new science that examined how Earth’s topographic features formed through geologic processes. Geologic history would no longer be read only in the rocks alone, but in the landforms and in the paths of rivers.

  Along with the geomorphological issues of river formation and mountain building, this new kind of understanding would force him to think deeply about how humanity and nature intersected, how each reciprocally acted upon the other, and would nourish an original vision of sustainability, ecology, and environmental stewardship. When the exhausted Major disembarked in Callville, the journey that counted had only just begun.