The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  Back in Washington, Powell sent Byers a fancy watch for Sumner that would handsomely replace the one he had given to Oramel Howland to pass on to his sister: “A very fine present,” replied Byers, “and I know he will appreciate it highly.”

  * * *

  For the second expedition, Powell would not select leather-tough mountain men. Such backwoods resilience no longer seemed quite so critical. Nor did he pick professional scientists. He now mostly chose men he knew or was related to, men from back home in Illinois on whom he could depend. Loyalty appeared paramount. His second-in-command, the Illinois school superintendent Almon Harris Thompson, was married to his sister Nellie and, at thirty-two, was second oldest to Powell. “Prof,” as Thompson was called, had accompanied Powell on the first trip out west in 1867 as head of entomology. On this expedition, he would learn on the job, serving as “chief geographer, astronomer and topographer.” Most important, his loyalty would rarely waver through thick and a whole lot of thin.

  In early May 1871, Powell and Thompson brought their wives to Salt Lake City for the summer, Emma clearly showing in the fifth month of pregnancy. Some bad news arrived that Sumner—the only original crew member to receive an invitation for the second expedition—could not join them. He had spent the winter trapping in the mountains. Deep snow, and probably some ambivalence about joining another river trip with Powell, prevented him from getting to Green River City, Wyoming, in time for the departure. But the new expedition would carry Sumner’s 1869 journal.

  Powell met a strapping German-born teamster in Salt Lake City, whom he signed up on the spot, much as he had Andy Hall two years before. The tall, red-haired Jack Hillers had fought for the Union, staying in uniform until 1870, when he found himself working in the Mormon capital. Life in the City of the Saints had not panned out well for the whiskey-drinking twenty-seven-year-old with an affable manner and a penchant for the ribald. Powell liked “Jolly Jack” from their first handshake, which began a long friendship. With Powell’s patronage, Hillers would rise to become one of America’s most prominent photographers.

  The three men arrived in Green River City on May 16, 1871, where the rest of the crew were readying. Powell had commissioned three new Whitehalls, the design identical to the original craft except for the addition of a third waterproof compartment, plus a steering oar placed astern for more responsive turning. Powell bought a captain’s chair from Jake Field’s store, which Hillers bolted on top of the center cabin of the latest version of Emma Dean.

  Six days later, eleven men left Green River City on three boats. Powell had broken the trip into two sections. In summer and fall of 1871, they would row down the Green and the Colorado until they met the Paria at the head of the Grand Canyon; the following summer, they would finish, running from the Paria through the Canyon to Callville. Compared with 1869, in which the expedition raced the thousand miles from Green River City to Callville in three months, the 1871 party would take two months longer just to reach the Paria. Hamblin, still searching for the Dirty Devil’s canyon, would coordinate their resupply along the way.

  During the trip, the seventeen-year-old Fred Dellenbaugh, the son of a rich Ohio doctor, manned the oars below Powell’s feet, listening to the Major’s stories. The starstruck young man reveled at Powell’s “magnificent will, his cheerful self-reliance, and his unconquerable determination to dominate any situation.” On the river, Powell sang constantly, noted Dellenbaugh, fragments ranging from arias in The Marriage of Figaro to Way Down upon the Suwannee River, his voice rising exuberantly whenever they approached a rapid.

  In calm water, the expedition sometimes rafted together, the Major regaling them with his readings of The Lady of the Lake. At camp, they read more Walter Scott, and Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, prompting photographer E. O. Beaman to write: “Imagine a group of rough, unkempt men, surrounded by the wildest and grandest solitude, with all the rude appurtenances of camp-life about them listening to the musical rhythm of Hiawatha’s wooing, intelligently read.”

  Thompson described how they confiscated young Dellenbaugh’s gun at night for fear of his frequent nightmares about Indians and large white snakes, which once caused him to half throttle a comrade while sleepwalking. Most all expedition members scratched down daily journals. At Brown’s Park, Powell dismissed Frank Richardson, who despite his flute-playing prowess, did not possess a strong enough constitution to continue. They discovered the wreck of No Name below Disaster Falls, plus an eerily preserved copy of Putnam’s Magazine and a bag of flour.

  The second expedition brought little of the suspense of the first, but plenty of grueling work—the extremely cautious Powell insisting that they line or portage even mildly perilous rapids. They methodically took the measurements necessary to map the river. Thompson, aided by his assistant, Vandiveer Jones, a principal of the Washburn, Illinois, schools, sighted ahead at each bend with prismatic compasses to estimate the length of the river’s reach, the height of walls, and the width of the side streams. Every forty-five miles, Thompson took astronomical readings with a sextant. From these measurements, Bishop drew the double-lined course of the river on paper, accompanied by notes in a tiny, cramped hand indicating noon stops and evening campsites. It made slow work, not enough to keep the men sufficiently busy.

  With Clem Powell’s assistance, Beaman photographed the river and its canyons. The state-of-the-art wet-plate Collodion photographic process, which had replaced the daguerreotype—the first practical photographic technique—in the late 1850s, required equipment weighing a ton or more. The best panoramic vantage often demanded that photographer and assistant climb several thousand feet above the river, lugging a large, heavy box containing the darkroom—a five-foot-tall tent of yellow cloth lined with green calico—and tripod—two wagon bows cut in two, reversed, then fastened together with hinges—in addition to the large-format camera with two side-by-side lenses, bags of processing chemicals, and fragile glass plates. Beaman found himself abandoning the tripod and foraging for sticks to construct the tent. Even significantly lightened, Clem cursed that “infernal howitzer on my back,” which several times caused him to fall.

  While the cumbersome Collodion process may have required extraordinary patience in setting up, the processing was all about speed. Once he coated the glass plate with wet chemicals, the photographer had ten minutes or less to expose and process it. Wind or rain could destroy a morning’s work in a moment, as could an improper mix of the chemicals or contamination by dirt. The sand and dust, compounded with alkali, made it “hard to elude that great pest to the photographer, pin-holes,” wrote Beaman in frustration. “[W]e often have to station a man at the tripod to keep the camera from going down the cañons on an exploring trip of its own, carried by the frequent whirlwinds which visit us during the calmest days.” Clem bickered with Beaman constantly.

  Long exposure times prevented such “action” shots of a rowboat caught in fearsome waves. But this collection—Powell would bring 250 images with him to Washington that winter—were powerful, not only for capturing the vast expanse of the western canyonland, but for the sheer alien quality of a landscape whose only human touch was a boat or the rigid outline of a man sitting in a natural amphitheater—images that would join an increasingly sophisticated arsenal that Powell would use to explain the West to the rest of America.

  * * *

  On July 6, Thompson reported that the Major “had decided to go on ahead to Uintah as he says, but to Salt Lake as I believe.” By now, Emma was in her seventh month of a difficult pregnancy, and he wanted to be with her.

  When the rest of the expedition reached the Uinta River on July 15, they found a rusted oyster can containing a note from Powell telling them to stay put; so wait they did, for eight days. On his way back from Salt Lake, Powell met Jacob Hamblin, who still had not located the Dirty Devil. The Major hired Pardon Dodds, the former Indian agent at Uinta, to help him. By July 23, Powell had rejoined the men
at the river, but told them to continue without him; he would meet them at Gunnison’s Crossing in the Utah Territory. By then, the monotony and hard work had worn on morale, and Beaman and Clem were not the only ones not getting along. Most complained about the cook and his food, while others flinched every time John Steward opened his mouth, such was the color and vigor of his profanity. In late August when Powell rejoined the party at Gunnison’s Crossing, even Thompson was not happy to see Powell, who had managed only to secure a rather slim resupply of flour, sugar, and meat. That would have to last for some time, because Powell still had not been able to locate the Dirty Devil, not that “the Major made any serious effort,” grumbled Thompson. In fact, Powell had traveled across the West Tavuts Plateau south of the Uinta Valley on his way to the Sevier River drainage, examining rocks and studying the Indians. Those he interviewed had confirmed Hamblin’s premise that the Dirty Devil did not offer a viable path for a mule train. “I do not care a cuss whether he comes with us or not on the river,” wrote Prof, “but it makes one mad to wait and then have him come in and report a failure.” He added as an aside that he should not complain, having known what the situation would be like before leaving on the trip. Like all secondary commanders in the field, comfortable when the leader is gone, Powell’s reappearance—once again sitting kinglike in his chair and calling all the shots—irritated him.

  The expedition set off through Labyrinth Canyon, then to the intersection of the Green and Grand, and on to the bad whitewater of Cataract Canyon, which Powell dreaded seeing again. By the end of September, they reached the foul Dirty Devil, but did not find Hamblin and supplies waiting there. Powell decided to cache Canonita in a shallow cave some two hundred feet back from the river. They had less than a week’s worth of flour left. They would travel faster and more easily with two boats, although overcrowded, and could retrieve Canonita later.

  Much to the Major’s disappointment, their dwindling food supplies forced them to skip the chance to climb the mountain Powell had named after Oramel Howland (today’s Navajo Mountain). They did stop at the Music Temple in Glen Canyon, a beautiful grotto with high walls, in which Powell showed them where the Howlands, Dunn, and others from the 1869 trip had carved their names. In silence they inscribed their own.

  A week later, they reached the Crossing of the Fathers, where Dodds waited with food and supplies, including a pair of heavy shoes and overalls for each man. They had cut it close. Two days later, Powell again, this time with Hillers, set out for Salt Lake City to meet his month-old daughter, named Mary Dean after his mother.

  The rest of the party continued downriver to arrive on October 23 at the influx of the Paria—and found no supplies awaiting them. They camped and waited. Five days later, down to half rations, they heard an “Indian yell” from across the river. When they rowed over, they met Hamblin, who was leading a party of nine Navajo, along with Isaac C. Haight and George W. Adair, both participants in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, on a trading visit to the Mormon settlements. After Hamblin had shared a dinner of beans with the hungry rivermen, all enjoyed an evening filled with Navajo song and dancing. One expeditioneer wrote of the friendly Haight: “Can it be that he would sanction and assist in the murder of women and children?”

  Several days later, their supplies finally arrived. The pack train had gotten badly lost. Thompson left for Kanab with two sick men: Jones, plagued by rheumatism, who had also injured his ankle; and Steward, inexplicably unable to stand or eat. The others cached the boats, some equipment, the instruments, and the oars for the following season. The first section was complete.

  * * *

  Powell overwintered the expedition at Kanab. The small Mormon town had filled out since his visit with Young a year earlier, now hosting almost fifty families. Fruit and shade trees grew, watered by irrigation ditches that ran down either side of the wide streets. For men who had labored alone on the river for five months, Kanab glowed as a bastion of civilization, especially when Emma arrived with the new baby, accompanied by Nellie Powell, and Fuzz, their tiny terrier.

  Before the congressional appropriation committee in Washington, Powell had promised not only to map the river, but also to complete a survey of the Colorado Plateau itself, west of the Colorado River to the Sierra Nevada, an area encompassing southern Utah and northern Arizona. From Kanab over that winter and spring, Powell and his expedition would begin the demanding survey work. In mid-December, Powell and Clem rode six miles south of town into the Arizona Territory, then selected a flat stretch of desert in which they would establish their nine-mile “baseline,” the surveying marker that would anchor all their subsequent readings. Once this baseline was laid out, they could take bearings on any feature in the distance from both ends of the baseline, creating a large triangle. Basic geometry then enabled them to determine the length of the two other sides of the triangle by knowing the triangle’s angles. From that first triangulation they would extend others, and others off those, until they had covered a large swath of the Arizona Strip. These measurements, along with barometric readings to determine the elevation of topographic features, would provide the key data points for accurate mapping.

  Other members of the party soon followed, setting up a tent camp, complete with conical sheet-iron stoves. Dellenbaugh especially remembered the sorghum molasses-soaked bread desserts, but Bishop started complaining: “Sent over in Utah to hunt a place for a lunatic-asylum—for if I ever see a lot of men working on a bigger piece of tomfoolery than this, measuring baseline with 3 fourteen foot rods, I am going to petition the powers for an asylum for the insane.”

  Prof Thompson took a theodolite sighting on Polaris to determine the true north-south, but before he could use it, snow and rain started coming down heavily. Difficult weather would continue to hamper their efforts. Bishop crafted three fourteen-foot wooden rods, connected by pins at each end. These would be laid down, two always on the ground to prevent accidental shifting by the often-whipping wind, so they could measure the exact distance of the baseline they were creating. Bishop created molds into which he poured molten lead to form the plumb bobs necessary to level the rods.

  They started to measure out the baseline just after Christmas, using a zenith telescope to determine latitude at the north end and longitude by telegraphic signals with Salt Lake City, finishing by February 21. From there, small groups rode out to mark points with cairns, every twenty-five to thirty miles, the angles of triangles thus formed were then measured with a seven-inch theodolite. Secondary triangles were added, then others extended from those. They fought snowstorms and the landscape itself, Thompson at one point climbing a 125-foot-tall tree to take a bearing. By May, their invisible triangles covered Arizona to the Grand Canyon, and southwest of Kanab to Mount Trumbull, west from there to the Nevada border. The unmapped portion of the unwelcoming Arizona Strip slowly yielded to their determined work.

  In February, the Major prepared to return to Washington to seek another year’s funding. Although contracted to the expedition, the photographer Beaman had bristled at Powell’s constant demands, eventually deciding that he could do better on his own. He sold 350 stereoscopic glass plates to the Major and all rights to his eight months of work for $800, then headed off to photograph the Hopi towns. On his way east, Powell stopped for a week in Salt Lake City to have prints made from 250 stereoscopic plates. The expedition’s specially designed camera took two simultaneous shots at slightly different angles, about the same distance that lies between two human eyes. These two images were printed side by side on a single card, which was then slipped into a device with a lens and viewed, the images popping into startling three-dimension. At a time when publishing photographs in newspapers or magazines had not been fully worked out, such stereoscopic photography cards proved extremely popular in American parlors. These stereographs served as important gifts to the influential politicians who determined Powell’s further funding.

  Powell liked the genial if
sickly technician at Charles R. Savage’s gallery who took so much care in making the prints. On the way back through Salt Lake City, he hired James Fennemore as expedition photographer. On his return to Kanab, Powell found he had lost yet another employee. After complaining at length that Powell and Thompson had been living in luxury compared with the others, Bishop quit the expedition. Powell paid him $400 in back wages and gave him a railroad pass to Illinois—which Bishop never used, for he stayed on instead in Kanab. The man who once described the Mormons as “vile, miserable sinners with but few exceptions,” fell in love with a Mormon woman and converted, settling in Salt Lake City, eventually became a bishop in fact as well as name, and science professor at the University of Deseret.