The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  Without Bishop, Beaman, and Steward on the payroll, Powell still struggled to support the survey, even to pay for the weekly hundred pounds of flour they consumed. But in Prof, Powell had picked an extraordinary worker, who somehow managed to keep the venture fed and occupied, though he, too, considered quitting at times. For long months in early spring 1872, Powell did not respond to his repeated queries by telegraph. At one low moment, Thompson wrote to him, claiming that he had not acted squarely or honorably. But by June 10, Powell’s hard work had paid off: Congress appropriated $20,000 to complete the survey.

  Powell bought a modest row house in Washington at 910 M Street, which he and Emma would call home for the remainder of their lives. He tendered his resignation to the Illinois State Board of Education as curator of the museum on the Normal campus. He was moving fast along a path that opened up to him with each larger task he embarked upon. It meant sometimes leaving his supporters in the lurch, such as the vast confusion over unclear ownership of some of the collections he had sent home. And though he made some attempts at sorting things out, it was not enough, and so soured some of his early relationships. But something far bigger than collecting specimens had possessed his imagination.

  * * *

  The finishing river season for the second expedition proved somewhat anticlimactic. Where Hamblin had failed, Thompson had succeeded. He and a few other expedition members not only located the Dirty Devil canyon but also named the last mountain range to be discovered in the continental United States—the Henrys. The route down the river gorge proved too difficult to navigate, so Thompson and his men skirted it, making it down to the Canonita cache on May 25. Several men stayed behind to caulk the boat, then emblazoned its stern with bright red lettering and rowed down to the Paria confluence by July 17, where they awaited the others.

  The place now held permanent residents, the exiled John D. Lee and his family, who operated a ferry across the main river. One of his wives dubbed the spot Lonely Dell, but it would soon become known simply as Lees Ferry. A journalist had kicked up trouble trying to track Lee down, so he did not welcome non-Mormon outsiders. But when Thompson’s group arrived, identifying themselves as part of Powell’s undertaking, he invited them to dinner, where they found him quite pleasant. While awaiting the Major, the visitors helped Lee out in his garden and fixed some of his irrigation canals, cracking uncomfortable jokes about Mountain Meadows just within earshot of Lee.

  On August 13, Powell arrived, eager to continue into the Canyon. Given the number of dropouts, they no longer needed a third boat, so they gave Nellie Powell to Lee for his ferry. Fennemore the photographer, who had gone down the Colorado with Canonita, had already fallen sick and proved too weak to continue. His assistant Jack Hillers proved a quick learner, so Powell tapped him to succeed Fennemore. The former teamster would shoot more than three thousand photographic glass plates of the Colorado River area between 1872 and 1878, completing twenty thousand more for the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology over the rest of a productive career.

  Only seven took to the river again: the teenage Dellenbaugh and Hillers, along with Powell in Emma Dean; Thompson, Jones, Clem, and Andy Hattan in Canonita. Fennemore and the others headed back to Salt Lake City. Five years after Fennemore had enjoyed a meal at John D. Lee’s table, he would famously photograph Lee sitting on his coffin moments before a firing squad executed him for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the only person held accountable for those unspeakable crimes.

  On the river, Powell could see that the water was running eight to ten feet higher than before, rainfall steadily adding to it. With seams dried out from months of disuse, the boats leaked badly. Rain soaked everything, forcing them to raise a tarp over the fire. “The party seems dead,” wrote Clem, “—nothing but work and danger, hard beds and worse food—a little bread, a few peaches, jerk and coffee.” To make matters worse, a many-legged insect had infested their beef jerky.

  On September 3, Powell and Hillers flipped Emma Dean twenty-four miles downriver from Bright Angel Creek. Hillers flew six feet headfirst into a whirlpool, followed by Powell, who both were immediately sucked out of sight. The swirling water stripped Hillers of his hat, shoes, and stockings. He claimed that Powell owed his life to his lifejacket, but it was he who had pulled Powell to safety after the boil finally brought them spluttering to the surface. “We joked him a good deal about his zeal in going to examine the geology at the bottom of the river,” wrote Dellenbaugh, “but as a matter of fact he came near departing by that road to another world.” The river was fast, muddy, turbulent, and ever more dangerous.

  Four days later, the crew arrived at Kanab Creek, south of mile 143 of the Canyon, slightly more than halfway through, where they met three Mormon packers with much-needed supplies, but also with the disturbing news that whites had killed some Paiute near Mount Trumbull. After breakfast that day, the Major called the expedition off. Everyone “felt like praising god,” wrote Hillers.

  While the others scattered, Thompson and Dellenbaugh stayed on in Kanab to integrate all their accumulated measurements into a map. Dellenbaugh would roll up the completed document on February 28, insert it into a tin tub, and send it off to Powell in Washington via Wells, Fargo & Co. The map was a solid topographical achievement, accurately delineating at two miles to the inch the heretofore unmapped section of the remotest reaches of the Colorado Plateau. Powell was no longer just the tough, heroic conqueror of the Colorado, but a world-class scientist/surveyor of America’s far western lands.

  Even though he had finished his objective of mapping the Colorado River and some of its surrounding area, he was not finished. Now he set his sights on securing more robust federal funding to survey the rest of the Colorado Plateau. He would come up against stiff competition.

  CHAPTER 8

  Fighting the National Surveys

  Ever since Congress had created the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1813, the military had conducted the young nation’s official business of exploration and surveying. After Polk appropriated Mexican territory, the army naturally stepped in to help redraw new national borders. It made sense: During peacetime, the army directed much of its effort toward surveying army roads west, siting forts, and determining reliable supply routes. When the transcontinental railroad gelled into an important national priority in the 1850s, the army only naturally undertook five large-scale expeditions to evaluate the best path west. Their Pacific Railroad Surveys produced thirteen quarto volumes weighing some eighty-three pounds, more than seven thousand pages long, not including maps and hundreds of full-page lithographs. Much natural history found its way inside these tomes, but only as an afterthought to the main purpose. Before the war, civilian-led explorations had been limited to the state level.

  But in late 1866, when Powell the Illinois schoolteacher had only begun to contemplate a field trip west with his students, the military dominance in national surveying would be challenged by a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate, who walked into the halls of Congress with a bold, unprecedented plan for a large-scale geological survey of the American West. Clarence King laid before the congressmen a proposal to survey eight hundred miles between the Rockies and the Sierras, a hundred-mile-wide swath along the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad now being built. He seductively dangled in front of legislators the promise that these lands contained coal, oil, and precious metals. Should not the nation know what it possessed? King argued convincingly that only an experienced civilian geologist could properly accomplish this kind of work. King would later boast that the year 1867 marked a turning point in the history of national geological work “when the science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”

  The short, dapper Clarence King represented everything that Powell was not. While Powell had wandered from college to college across the Midwest, searching for mentors who
might slake his intense thirst to understand the natural world, King had matriculated at “The Sheff,” Yale’s new school of science, which would award the nation’s first PhDs in geology and engineering. King studied under James Dwight Dana, listening raptly to America’s foremost geologist tell stories of his travels with Charles Wilkes’s world-circling United States Exploring Expedition in the 1830s. King learned firsthand about the latest European topographical mapping techniques.

  Whereas Powell often appeared more detached, King commanded a room when he entered, not only by his fine dress, which often included silk gloves and colorful polka-dot ties, but with his captivating stories. In drawing rooms, or around cards and a bottle of whiskey, men and women gravitated to him naturally, delighting in his tales of evading Mexican bandits, surviving a lightning strike that left half his body brown for a week, or crawling into a grizzly’s den. Somehow his stories of sexual conquests of dark-skinned women did not come off as boasting, perhaps because his jokes were usually at his own expense. Bouts of recited Romantic poetry also seemed to offset any vulgarity. Writer Henry Adams recognized in his great friend so many of the manly attributes in which he felt himself lacking. “He had in him,” wrote Adams, “something of the Greek—a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander.” Indeed, King personified the grandest ambitions of a nation pressing into new lands rife with promise and unlimited possibility, and embracing these with gusto, unbounded confidence, and largesse of spirit. “I regarded the brilliant and beaming creature before me,” wrote William Dean Howells, “simply as a promise of more and more literature of the vivid and graphic kind.”

  King’s survey request fell at a propitious time. Congress eagerly wanted to get back to business after the war. He solicited support from the pioneering economic geologist Joseph Whitney, on whose California survey King had cut his teeth, Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian, and scientific notables from Yale to send letters to key senators and Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war. On the last day of its second session, March 2, 1867, the outgoing 39th Congress authorized King as the U.S. Geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, under the supervision of General Andrew A. Humphreys of the Corps of Engineers. King could expect to receive $100,000 to finance the work over three years, and engage two assistant geologists, three topographic aides, two specimen collectors, a photographer, and needed camp assistants. King’s directions, which he drew up himself, included a dizzying list of activities that included the examination of all rock formations, mountain ranges, detrital plains, coal deposits, soils, minerals, ores, and saline and alkaline deposits. His team would make barometric and thermometric observations, collect plant and animal specimens, and establish the necessary data points for a topographic map.

  “Now, Mr. King,” the secretary of war told him, “the sooner you get out of Washington, the better—you are too young a man to be seen about town with this appointment in your pocket—there are four major-generals who want your place.” Powell would be a beneficiary of King’s precedent-setting work when he received an appropriation of $10,000 in July 1870 for his second Colorado trip. Civilian geologist Ferdinand Hayden would also vie for congressional dollars to survey the West. The army’s topographical corps was not about to abandon its long exploring traditions either. Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler of the Corps of Engineers would also enter the fray. These four charismatic men would clash and compete, setting off a fierce, sometimes vituperative arms race for the chance to direct scientific surveying after the war. Their personalities and passions would deeply shape American science as it emerged after the war, and their competition would turn cutthroat: They would badmouth one another, steal one another’s talent, and compete for limited appropriations. Much lay on the line. The high stakes would soon put the four on a dangerous collision course.

  Officially, the federal government had given the four authority for the rather straightforward task of exploring and surveying the West. Congressmen viewed them as little more than instruments of plain aggrandizement who served as the cutting-edge truth seekers of Manifest Destiny. The mountain men, railroad captains, westward-traveling journalists and editors, and politicians each had a self-interested take on the still little known West. But the surveyors would serve as far more than mere wayfinders across a largely still alien landscape. They would become explainers and interpreters of lands that defied easy understanding, and had yet to find purchase in the American imagination. In every report, map drawn, or photograph framed and captioned, they shared their vision of the West, how best it could fit into the larger emerging consciousness of a truly continental nation. Their findings might launch new gold rushes, stimulate entire new economies, and open new frontiers of wealth and prosperity.

  The search for scientific fame and fortune certainly motivated these four players, but, more important, their main competition revolved around an argument that would form one of the most significant struggles in America for the three decades after the Civil War, a contest over the nation’s very soul. Would America develop her rich, promising western lands with the public interest in mind or hand development over to selected, well-connected, and wealthy individuals to exploit, and worry about the consequences later? How would the federal surveys choose to assess the economic value of public lands larger than European empires? And how would that influence the General Land Office, the bureau in which America distributed its land to its citizens?

  Powell came late to the game, after the other three had already secured large annual appropriations, an underfunded dark horse who at first glimpse did not stand a chance of surviving against the others. Although famous for his river trip, he had published nothing from his expedition aside from some letters to newspapers. But the Major had been underestimated before. The new competition would stoke the furnace in which Powell would hone and develop new keen ideas. He had something the others did not: a developing large-scale vision of what exactly was at stake.

  * * *

  In 1869, when Powell and his nine men started down the Colorado for the first time—and as King prosecuted his survey west into Utah—the geologist Ferdinand Hayden received a large appropriation and leadership of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, the next great federal survey after King’s. Hayden’s star had risen two years earlier as Nebraska had gained statehood. Funds designated for the now-defunct territorial legislature lay unspent, prompting Congress to decide that these $5,000 might best be used for a survey of the state. When the Smithsonian’s Spencer Baird learned this, he contacted Hayden, then a professor of mineralogy and geology at the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, who had served as a Civil War surgeon. Baird had known him before the war when the ambitious medical student had devoted summers to collecting fossils out west. Hayden took his degree, but never seriously considered going into practice, spending the next seven years privately exploring the geology and geography of the upper plains, cleverly winning patronage from the American Fur Company, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. “I feel as though I could endure cheerfully any amount of toil, hardship and self-denial provided I could gratify my strong desire to labor in the field as a naturalist,” explained the excited twenty-three-year-old.

  He often traveled alone through dangerous Sioux lands collecting fossils. The Indians left this strange figure alone, naming him “He Who Picks Up Stones Running.” Hayden wandered beyond the Dakota Badlands and the Black Hills to explore the Yellowstone River and the Missouri’s major tributaries in Montana. Hayden sent natural history specimens back east to Baird, as well as fossils to academies in St. Louis and Philadelphia, particularly to his mentor, the University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph Leidy. The soft-spoken Leidy had shocked scientific circles in 1847 by uncovering evidence that the horse had once thrived in prehistoric North America before going extinct.

  The Late Cretaceous dinosaur teeth and bones that Hayden sent from Montana enabled Leidy to identify many new spec
ies, notably the duck-billed dinosaur and armored ankylosaur, firmly establishing dinosaur paleontology in America. Recognizing raw talent, Baird set Hayden up in a Smithsonian Castle office during the off season, and secured him positions on two military explorations of the upper Missouri just before the war broke out. Hayden’s impatient, confrontational style, however, had already begun to grate on other scientists. He made no friends when he waged a bitter war of words and influence over rather obscure boasting rights about who first discovered Permian rocks in America.

  Born out of wedlock to an alcoholic father, Hayden grew up poor and suffered frequent humiliations, developing within him a ruthless ambition and unsleeping restlessness. The notorious womanizer exhibited impatience bordering on rudeness, his self-promotion at times embarrassing to those around him. Nonetheless many admired him for his energetic and consuming curiosity, which left few others better able to communicate the sheer excitement of the western lands.

  With Baird’s support, Hayden became head geologist of the Geological Survey of Nebraska, during which he exhibited a striking ability to win over powerful men. He would grow into the job, and expand his survey into the largest, most famous of the postwar years, eclipsing even King’s. Like Powell, Hayden excelled at cobbling funds and patronage into ever larger projects.