The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  CHAPTER 7

  Encore

  The story of the great conquest of the Colorado was now everywhere, the moniker “Powell of the Colorado” evoking steely courage and unimaginable endurance. But Powell took little satisfaction in the congratulatory handshakes and beaming faces that now always welcomed him. In ways he could probably admit only to Emma, he concluded the venture a failure. They had indeed made it through, but his expedition had been a wild adventure in which three men had been lost and the others left starving and battered, their scientific equipment ruined. The voyage had located the general course of the Colorado and the Grand and Green confluence. And indeed, while held in the Canyon’s thrall, Powell had experienced an epiphany about the ancient depth of the Earth’s history; but what he had encountered would take years to sort out and make sense of. Simply to come out the other end had never been his only goal.

  Virtually all his barometric readings and the maps—the data that would prove the Colorado River Exploring Expedition to have been a serious scientific undertaking—had been destroyed by water. He could not therefore create an accurate map, his prime object all along. From the moment that he stepped onto land at Callville, the river water not yet dried from his emaciated form, he knew with piercing clarity that he must return to the river—and do it right this next time, not as a hero but as a scientific explorer.

  As he mused over the experiences of the first descent, the precariousness of their food supply stood out. Even his conservative calculations had not insulated them from near starvation. Ten months of food had dwindled to a few pounds of moldy flour in only three months. The food shortfall had weakened them, forcing them to move downriver faster—and more dangerously—than Powell felt comfortable and afforded them less time to rest, perform critical measurements, and explore their surroundings.

  Clearly a successful second expedition would hinge on resupply. Completing their scientific observations would require spending even more time on the river than before. The relatively well-known stretch of the Green River presented few problems; the Uintah Indian Agency forty miles from Brown’s Hole and Gunnison’s Crossing at present-day’s Green River, Utah, would provide opportunities to bring in supplies. Downriver, the Crossing of the Fathers in lower Glen Canyon and the mouth of the Paria also provided points to deliver food, but that left a long inhospitable run between Green River, Utah, south through today’s Canyonlands National Park and the deadly difficult Cataract Canyon. Powell knew that the Dirty Devil River, which his first expedition had named, falls into the Colorado from the north just below Cataract. That canyon could provide an ideal avenue for a loaded mule train.

  But therein lay the problem. No one knew the location of the Dirty Devil’s headwaters, and the entire region lay within an unmapped tangle of desert land that remains to this day the most remote, difficult topography of the entire continental United States. If roughly mapping the path of the Colorado had brought acclaim to Powell on his first expedition, then solving the daunting labyrinth of southern Utah and the Arizona Strip—the nearly three million acres of high desert north of the river to the present-day Utah border—would become the key to the second.

  A big factor in Powell’s fateful decision to continue downriver at Separation Rapid had been Jacob Hamblin’s journal. In 1867, that enterprising Mormon guide had floated down the Colorado from Grand Wash just below the Grand Canyon to Callville. No non-Indian knew the canyonland of southern Utah and the Arizona Strip better than this fifty-one-year-old “buckskin apostle”—and Powell could not hope to find a better guide to solve his resupply problem. Hamblin had become Mormon leader Brigham Young’s eyes and ears in the lands south of the Great Salt Lake, learning Ute and southern Paiute languages, and even taking a Paiute wife. Powell determined to seek him out. Overall, the Mormons would need to figure large in his plans. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would plant some five hundred settlements in the Southwest during the late nineteenth century, eventually sowing the Colorado Plateau with farms and towns, telegraph stations, banks, sawmills, and warehouses, the skeleton of a critical infrastructure upon which Powell would come to rely.

  Before he could head west to solicit Mormon help, one last critical piece of business remained. The 1869 expedition, as well as the two earlier field trips, had limped along on a shoestring budget. He had begged funds from Byers and others, skimped where he could, reached into his own pocket, made large promises to furnish specimens to midwestern institutions in return for grants, and depended on the largesse of the army to provide supplies free or at reduced cost. If he intended now to prosecute the important science crucial to the nation’s westward advance, he needed more stable funding—and after the much-publicized 1869 descent, he could make a powerful case. By then, every congressman knew his name. In the summer of 1870, he traveled by train to Washington, D.C., to pitch Congress. In July, the national legislature granted him $10,000; a victory certainly, but nowhere near enough to cover even basic expenses—he would still need to supplement it with his salary and return to Washington the following year with hat in hand. But with this direct appropriation, Powell had crossed a major threshold: No longer a private citizen individually prosecuting his explorations, he had now joined the thin, elite ranks of federally supported surveyors, which included such well-established heavyweights as Clarence King, Ferdinand Hayden, and George Wheeler.

  * * *

  In early September 1870, Powell took the train west to Salt Lake City. From there, he rode down to the southern Utah town of Parowan to join Mormon president Brigham Young on a trip to the Paria River and the tiny Mormon community of Kanab. The forty-three-person complement included many Mormon Elders, such as Erastus Snow, who had investigated the disappearance of the Howlands and Dunn. Powell would accompany them for four days, during which he would secure Young’s blessing to hire Hamblin for $50 a month.

  On September 5, Powell and Hamblin shared a midday meal of baked chicken with John D. Lee, who oversaw a ten-man squad escorting the party. The two Mormon men could not have been more different. Lee, a stout, heavyset man with a low forehead and short, thick neck, was blunt-spoken, straightforward, uncomplicated, and not unlikable, but trailing dark rumors that he had taken part in a barbaric, holy massacre a little more than a decade earlier. This ruthless, devoted foot soldier of a patriarchal religion struggling to survive in a wild land vividly contrasted with Hamblin, a western leatherstocking, who had come to devote his life to understanding the native cultures and forging peace with them.

  In Hamblin, Powell found a kindred spirit. Hamblin, too, had spent his teenage years in southern Wisconsin before converting to Mormonism at twenty-two—to his parents’ horror—and following his faith west. In his early thirties, while leading an expedition against hostile Indians in Utah’s Tooele Valley, his guns as well as those of his entire party had misfired during a skirmish, and arrows had passed harmlessly through his hat and coat. “The Holy Spirit forcibly impressed me that it was not my calling to shed the blood of the scattered remnant of Israel,” he wrote, “but to be a messenger of peace to them.” Shortly thereafter Young called upon him to work with the Paiutes of southern Utah—no easy task, as Indian and Mormon relations had been fraught from the beginning.

  Sometime after 1000 AD, Numic-speaking Indians had moved into the Great Basin, displacing the ancient Anasazi and Fremont peoples across Utah, eastern Nevada, and northern Arizona. By the time the Europeans appeared, small bands of southern Paiutes ranged across a huge crescent reaching northwest from the southern California deserts to Utah’s Sevier Lake and south to the confluence of the San Juan and Colorado rivers. These hunter-gatherers derived a thin living, foraging for roots, seeds, berries, insects, and hunting small and large game. Living close to the land, eking out what little the harsh climate might yield, the southern Paiute were isolated, dirt poor, and late to adopt the horse.

  The southern Paiute, as most contemporaneous commentators noted,
were a rather timid and reclusive people, among the last continental tribes to enter into sustained contact with the white newcomers. Navajo parties from the south, and Ute from the north and east, frequently raided their settlements, bearing off captives to sell as slaves among the Spanish settlements of New Mexico and California. The Kaibab Paiute themselves traded their own children for horses, which they more often ate than rode. While the Mormons ended the slave raiding, the incursions of their Indian neighbors had affected the southern Paiute little in comparison with the arrival of the LDS. Hamblin had seen firsthand how Mormon livestock had devastated the seed-bearing vegetation upon which the Indians depended. Savaged by starvation and disease, their water sources and farmlands appropriated by whites, the southern Paiute had died in droves. Those left were reduced to utter poverty. In short order, the LDS had subjugated virtually all southern Paiute communities. One of the more numerous southern Paiute bands, the Tonequints, had simply vanished in less than a generation.

  * * *

  As the large party pushed toward Kanab, Powell shared a campfire one evening with Young. The latter-day Moses of the Mormon faith, who had led the largest single emigration in American history, improbably establishing a vast empire over the arid lands of what would become Utah and Arizona, sized up the tough, one-armed thirty-five-year-old. Although a vast chasm separated the scientist and prophet, they shared a pugnacious resolve and formidable streak of practicality. Young quizzed Powell about the petrified tree trunks that the party had seen, once so clearly wood, but now beautifully crystallized. At another point on their journey, a rock fall had revealed a perfect bed of petrified oyster shells. Young queried Powell about the mineralization process. The Major “philosophized a little upon it,” remembered Young, eventually asserting that the shells had turned to stone over the course of 150 million years. Tantalizing the Mormon leader even further, Powell pointed to the night sky, rhapsodizing on the many thousands of years that starlight took to reach their eyes.

  In a sermon three weeks later, Young brought up his conversation with Powell. But, he asked, why could not the petrification process have taken eighteen years? “All that can be said of such things is that they are phenomena, or freaks of nature, for which the knowledge and science of man cannot account.” But Powell had opened up rich questions for Young to mull over. No one as shrewd as the Mormon leader could doubt that science was reshaping the world. Young soon began to urge that Mormon children be taught mineralogy, geology, and chemistry. “There are branches of knowledge which we ought thoroughly to understand and are particularly adapted to these mountain regions,” he wrote.

  Also on that brief journey, Young would learn information of a different sort that would further shake the Mormon world. While Powell and Lee rode with Young south to Kanab, Snow informed Young about Lee’s culpability in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, one of the most bloody, bizarre crimes in American western history. Thirteen years earlier, in September 1857, during the Utah War that had Mormon settlers facing off against the U.S. cavalry, a group of LDS dressed up as Indians, along with a handful of Paiutes, had attacked the Baker-Fancher wagon train as it rested in southwestern Utah. The pioneers circled their wagons and put up stiff resistance. After five days of fighting, the embattled emigrants surrendered to Lee, who presented himself as a peace broker between them and the Indians. He claimed to have negotiated safe passage for them. An LDS militiaman escorted each of the weaponless men out from the corralled wagons. The order was then given, “Halt!”; then “Do your duty!” Each Mormon tender delivered a single shot to the head of his prisoner. Every emigrant older than five years old was slaughtered, the youngest spared only because they could not bear witness. All told, about fifty men died, along with twenty women and another fifty older children and adolescents. Mormon families took in the tiny, dazed survivors. No proof exists whether Young directly ordered the attack or whether zealous militia leaders had misinterpreted possibly unclear orders from higher-ups, but it had been a Mormon-initiated action from start to grisly finish. The Mormons blamed the Indians for the slaughter, even though most of the Paiute had departed long before the massacre took place.

  Justice was slow to catch up. The frontier realities of plodding communication and hard travel compounded by a national civil war had stymied a sustained federal inquiry for many years. Snow later explained that Young’s tardiness in bringing Lee to justice occurred because the Mormon leader believed Lee’s lies that Indians alone were culpable. Snow had learned of Lee’s involvement from recent interviews he had conducted. He recalled that Young reacted with “great astonishment,” even though it strains credulity to believe that he knew nothing. As the party rode toward Kanab, the president pulled Lee aside, giving him “some kind of Fatherly council,” encouraging him to gather his wives, sons, and daughters and move yet farther south and out of sight into the Arizona Strip. Young had already determined that Lee must shoulder the blame for the outrage, despite telling evidence that two of Lee’s superiors had given him direct orders to kill the gentiles. Two weeks later, after Young returned to Salt Lake City, the church excommunicated Lee for “extreem wickedness.”

  The party pressed on to Kanab, crossing the twisty Paria Creek some twenty-one times, finally arriving at the tiny settlement and its crude fort. The following morning Young and the elders selected a site to the northeast of the fort on an elevation protected from the wind. A surveyor marked out blocks, while another man located well sites. Powell joined the surveyor, noting that the out-lots were fenced as one great farm. The townspeople would collectively own the water ditch and farm fence. Powell later observed in an article for Scribner’s that the Mormon towns in Utah were thus “woven together by a net-work of communal interest.”

  Powell became deeply impressed by the Mormon success in settling the desert, particularly in their collective management of water resources. While most Americans might dismiss the entire Mormon “experiment” out of hand, he cast no judgment on them, nor the Indians, studying them both intently for clues as to how humans survived in arid, inhospitable lands. Practicality certainly played a part—he could not afford to alienate the Saints and jeopardize his upcoming plans—but his overall attitude toward them appeared to be one of genuine curiosity. The observations of outlier cultures would fundamentally shape his evolving vision for the large-scale sustainable development of the West.

  * * *

  From Kanab, Young and his party headed back north, while Powell, Hamblin, and the southern Paiute chief Chuarumpeak, whom Powell would come to call “Chuar” as their friendship deepened, continued on. The rabbit skin–robed chief fondly called Powell “Kapurats,” or “one arm off.” When Powell inquired about a way down to the Colorado, the Paiute assured him that no one could get to the water’s edge from this side of the Canyon, but that he would happily show them the springs and water pockets on the way to the rim. Two recruits to the upcoming river expedition joined them at the tiny Mormon cattle settlement of Pipe Springs: Francis Marion Bishop, a former student of Powell’s and devout Christian, and Powell’s cousin, Walter Clement Powell. The small party continued southwest toward the river into the Uinkaret Plateau, now part of the Mount Trumbull Wilderness. Powell would name the dominant lava-capped peak in honor of the Illinois senator who had helped him secure federal support. Mount Trumbull rises some twenty miles north of the Grand Canyon, and about sixty miles from Kanab, close to the area where the Howlands and Dunn had vanished. Shuts, a “one-eyed, bare-legged, merry-faced pigmy,” recorded Powell, joined them, too. While Chuar rode a pony, Shuts preferred scampering about, often taking shortcuts so that the party would turn a corner and come across him sitting on a rock, “his face a rich mine of funny smiles.”

  Thus guided by Shuts and Chuar, the party jumped from one water pocket to the next, enabling them to cross the scorching desert and negotiate the deep ravines that headed the canyons leading into the Grand Canyon. Powell was amazed by the Indians’ geographic understa
nding: “My knowledge is general, only embracing the more important features of a region, that remain as a map, engraved on my mind. But theirs is particular; they know every rock and ledge, every gulch and cañon, and just where to wind among these to find a pass, and their knowledge is unerring.” In due course, they reached the base of a great volcanic eminence that Powell later dubbed Mount Dellenbaugh.

  Nearby lay a Uinkaret Paiute village. That evening, under tall pines around a roaring campfire, Powell asked the Uinkaret elders to tell their traditional stories, even though such expositions usually took place during the winter. They obliged, the storytellers speaking in a special sweet, soft, and musical language. A “scene strange and weird,” Powell recorded: “by the fire, men, old, wrinkled and ugly; deformed, blear-eyed, wry-faced women; lithe, stately young men; pretty but simpering maidens, naked children, all intently listening, or laughing and talking by turns, their strange faces and dusky forms lit up with the glare of the pine-knot fire.” The legend of Stone Shirt ended well beyond midnight. Afterward, Powell pulled Chuar aside and explained that he sought information on his three expedition members who had disappeared into the mountains some thirty miles to the west, in the territory of the Shivwits Paiute. Could he summon the Shivwits to a meeting? Chuar agreed to arrange a powwow.

  The following morning, Powell and the party, along with a Uinkaret guide, left their pack train and most of their gear to ride out to the Colorado, and they managed to reach the Grand Canyon’s northern rim, probably some sixty miles north of Separation Rapid. The precipitous descent to the river proved impossible for their horses, so they clambered down on foot with much difficulty. Powell considered this a possible avenue of resupply, but the logistical challenges appeared insurmountable. Many laborers would need to bear heavy loads on their backs down that treacherous face. Retracing their steps, they passed again by a “stinking water pocket” so foul that their ponies had refused to drink from it on the way over. But after thirty hours without water, the animals drank rapaciously, while the men strained out “loathsome, wriggling larvae” to make coffee.