The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  In the spring of 1871, Hayden attended a lecture in Washington by a Montanan who had explored the upper Yellowstone the year before, returning with breathtaking accounts of bizarre geothermal features. The speaker urged that this strange area become a park of some kind. Hayden was intrigued. In 1860, Hayden had traveled with Jim Bridger, the legendary mountain man, who told him wild stories of Yellowstone’s exploding mudholes, boiling springs, and a mountain of yellow rock and glass. Few had believed him, so wild were his descriptions. But with the recent story appearing in Scribner’s Monthly and Congress now starting to pay attention, Hayden saw a ripe opportunity. It was time for a formal federal survey to visit Yellowstone—and, of course, he should lead it. Relying on his already strong congressional connections, he pressed the idea and Congress bit, increasing his appropriation from $25,000 to $40,000. Congress would not be disappointed with this outlay.

  In the summer of 1871, Hayden enlisted a highly talented retinue—the photographer William H. Jackson and the topographical artist William H. Holmes, and painter Henry W. Elliott, who was the private secretary of the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry. Then a piece of luck fell into Hayden’s lap. The thirty-four-year-old landscape artist Thomas Moran was also desperate to get out to see Yellowstone for himself. The painter borrowed funds from railroad financier Jay Cooke as well as the editor of Scribner’s, the latter in return for a pledge to deliver watercolors. An agent of Cooke’s asked Hayden whether Moran might accompany him. With the painter’s expenses already covered, Hayden agreed. The cadaverous artist, weighing only 110 pounds, had never ridden a horse before, but his oils of Yellowstone’s odd features would create a sensation back East and vault Hayden into star status.

  During that summer of 1871, Hayden conducted a first mapping of the Upper Yellowstone. But it would be Jackson’s stunning photographs, along with a satchel full of Moran’s work, published in Scribner’s and passed around to congressmen, which, with Hayden’s strong lobbying efforts and support from well-placed friends, would move Congress to enact a bill making Yellowstone America’s first national park. President Grant signed the bill into law on March 2, 1872. In later years, Hayden would claim near sole credit for the park’s creation—a huge overstatement, yet it is unlikely that without Hayden’s work that this unprecedented initiative would have passed through the Congress that spring. Moran worked up a monumental 7-by-12-foot canvas of Yellowstone Canyon, which Congress would buy for $10,000—the entire amount that the body had voted Powell for his surveying activities in 1870.

  In 1872 Hayden was back in Yellowstone for a second season, the same year that King had completed his field survey work along the 40th parallel. But Hayden had no intention of wrapping up his survey, cleverly defining his objectives only in the widest possible terms as parts of a “Survey of the Territories.” By 1872, ten western territories still remained unsurveyed. “General Garfield told Governor Potts and other citizens of the West that my exploration would be continued as long as there was any of the public domain to be explored, so we might as well strike out as free as we can,” wrote Hayden.

  * * *

  The third entrant into the federal survey contest, the twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Wheeler of the Corps of Engineers, had graduated from West Point in 1866. The world’s best-trained army had demobilized quickly, its million soldiers melting away to barely twenty-five thousand regulars by 1867. Few academy graduates chose an army career, their chances for advancement and glory limited in the Reconstruction era to Indian fighting and enforcement duty in the South. But Wheeler, who graduated sixth in his class, decided to stay on anyway, becoming an assistant engineer on the Point Lobos survey around San Francisco Bay.

  In 1869, Wheeler, while not yet in command of his own survey, rode twenty-four thousand miles throughout southeastern Nevada and western Utah to find an efficient route for moving troops from the northwest to the Arizona Territory. He did so, and his report included the suggestion for a general military survey of the western territories. The civilian scientists’ maps, he argued, were “controlled by the theoretical considerations of the geologists.” Army maps would provide only practical information. Geologic and natural history would be treated as “incidental to the main purpose.” Wheeler would become the U.S. Army’s champion against the civilian savants now inflexibly asserting their rights to survey and map the west.

  The Corps of Engineers approved a $50,000 budget for Wheeler in 1871, with the authority to hire ten assistants, and further employees not to exceed thirty. The authorization unleashed a whirling dervish: That year, Wheeler and his teams would cover an astounding 72,250 square miles across southern and central Nevada, eastern California, southwestern Utah, and much of Arizona. Wheeler raced across Death Valley, even though the Briers Party had explored it as far back as 1849, driving his men to exhaustion, he himself admitting that marches had often “extended from fifty to sixty or even eighty hours, with scarcely a single halt.” He did not hesitate to invoke the strict articles of war to enforce discipline. Stories emerged in the press of Wheeler’s leaning hard on the Indians, including a report that he tied four Native American guides to the ground so they would lower their demands. When one got loose under the sweltering sun, Wheeler’s men just shot him. Other stories whispered of men gone mysteriously missing, perhaps murdered by an unknown hand, and of a young Indian boy strung up by the thumbs. Perhaps some of these tales were told by someone with an ax to grind—and certainly fewer enterprises ranked tougher that running a survey in the American West, but such charges of bad management and racism boiled up everywhere Wheeler led his men. In October 1871, he left the surveys for two days with two prospectors, visiting thirty mining locations and staking his own claims.

  After his race through the Mojave desert, Wheeler turned to challenge Powell directly by pushing up the Colorado. Powell had yet to publish the results of his 1869 trip, and so perhaps Wheeler felt the region fair game. Three flat-bottomed boats arrived at Camp Mojave from San Francisco close to the point where the Colorado passes into California. Thirty-five men, including geologist G. K. Gilbert, the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, whom Wheeler had borrowed from Hayden, and a number of Mojave Indians started out on September 16, 1871, intending to work their way up into the Grand Canyon as far as Diamond Creek. Powell had already covered this stretch going downstream, and Lieutenant Ives had already bulled his way upriver. Perhaps Wheeler feigned ignorance that Powell’s second expedition would row downriver again that season. He may have placed too much stock in James White’s story of washing downriver—and that determined upstream boaters could make their way. He may have dismissed Ives’s and Powell’s stories of rough water, feeling that a strictly disciplined enterprise could complete the task. More darkly, he probably intended to usurp Powell’s work. Wheeler simply wanted to crush the competition.

  The river quickly beat any exultation right out of Wheeler and his men. Weary and demoralized, they reached Diamond Creek thirty-three days after starting out, having rowed, but more often dragged and shoved, their boats two hundred miles upstream. A little over a week before they finished, one of the boats swamped in a rapid. Wheeler lost the stout case in which he kept all his personal papers, including the expedition’s astronomical and meteorological observations. Only Wheeler’s threats and Gilbert’s persistence kept the expedition pressing on overland, and now on reduced rations.

  Once back at Camp Mojave, Wheeler sent O’Sullivan to Washington with his glass plates to show the politicians about their trip. But nearly all three hundred of them broke in transit. Despite his negligible success, Wheeler brashly reported to Congress that “the exploration of the Colorado River may now be considered complete,” an odd statement considering Ives’s and Powell’s efforts—but he directed a growing army, intent on recovering what the army claimed by right.

  In America, the Gilded Age was blossoming. In an 1871 newspaper essay, Mark Twain satirically proposed that the chief end of man was in
getting rich. What’s the best way? he quipped. “Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” Few examples better illustrate the Gilded Age’s hunger for quick, fabulous wealth that the West appeared to offer than the Great Diamond Hoax. In 1871, two Kentucky hucksters walked into the office of a prominent San Francisco businessman carrying a bag of diamonds, which they claimed to have found in Colorado. They swore him to silence, but the secret, just as the two men planned, lasted only seconds after they left. Selling interests in the diamond fields, the pair themselves bought more rough-cut diamonds and rubies, then salted a remote, unnamed Colorado field. Smelling chicanery, Clarence King carefully read a report about the so-called discovery by mineralogist Henry Janin, deducing that “there was only one place . . . which answered to the description,” and it lay within the confines of his 40th parallel survey. King located the spot with several of his men, discovering that some of the jewels were in anthills and that they carried cut marks on them. King brought his findings to San Francisco. “We have escaped, thanks to GOD and CLARENCE KING, a great financial calamity,” crowed the San Francisco Morning Bulletin on November 27, 1872. Had the hoax gone undiscovered, the paper continued, no less than 12 million dollars’ worth of stock would have gone on the market.

  In the early summer of 1872, Congress appropriated $75,000 to fund the U.S. Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian, under Lieutenant Wheeler. Four national surveys now operated in the western lands. And many people were paying attention to what they were finding.

  * * *

  That spring, in the wake of the landmark Yellowstone legislation, but before heading west for the second leg of the river trip, Powell had set his sights on luring Moran away from Hayden. It had not taken long for the national surveyors to realize the importance of taking artists and photographers along with them. As Powell had discovered with his stereographs, visuals could turn congressmen into supporters far faster than written reports. Visual documentation also served a greater function in educating the public about these exotic lands. Based only on scattered accounts of explorers and a handful of illustrations, long before the photography of Ansel Adams, the filmmaking of John Ford, the stories of Zane Grey, or the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, Americans to the east and south had virtually nothing by which to comprehend the scope, detail, and raw intensity of the American West. For most it remained vaguely alien and dangerous, perhaps unable to be assimilated into the national story. Americans needed someone to explain the West to them, not only to discern more clearly what it contained but to interpret its very significance.

  The American public hungered to learn more. By the 1870s, more than four thousand inexpensive weekly magazines had appeared, the beneficiary of railroad delivery, cheap postal routes, availability of the cylinder printing press, and rising literacy rates. The first illustrated story from the great surveys came out several weeks after Powell completed his first voyage. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published “Photographs from the High Rockies”—thirteen wooden engravings describing the travels of John Samson—the pen name of Timothy O’Sullivan—with King’s 40th Parallel Survey since 1867.

  Powell had watched Hayden’s annual appropriation increase and Wheeler poach on his territory. He needed to move boldly. On May 22, 1872, he offered Moran the chance to join him out west so that he might create a fitting painting of the Grand Canyon. Powell could pay $500 for a trip to last four months and cover his railroad ticket from Chicago to Salt Lake City. Wheeler also approached Moran with an offer.

  The following month Moran sent a note declining Powell’s invitation. He had already committed to illustrating a chapter of the book Picturesque America. He also turned down Wheeler, as well as Hayden’s invitation to the Grand Tetons. But he did keep Hayden apprised of his interest in joining him the following summer. Like a good negotiator, he dropped the hint that Powell tried to lure him away with “great inducements.” But Hayden did not yet consider Powell a threat. His play for Moran seemed the work of an ill-funded wannabe.

  Tensions ratcheted up in early 1873. After spending several hours with Hayden in January, Garfield wrote in his diary: “I am troubled to know what to do with the large number of exploring expeditions Congress has on hand.” He mused that “there should be a consolidation of all the geological and geographical expedition[s] in their work under one head.” Hayden understood that events pointed toward a showdown—and only one surveyor would come out on top. “The Engineer Bureau is the only real foe we have,” he wrote to a recent survey recruit in February 1873. With King’s present work closing, he and Wheeler were in head-to-head competition to determine whether the War Department or the Department of the Interior would control the federal surveys. Eight days after Garfield’s worried diary entry, Hayden wrote his boss, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, formally requesting $100,000 for the 1874 field season, unilaterally switching his efforts from the sources of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to Colorado. He knew Wheeler had shifted his survey into southern Colorado—and wanted to get there first. In the letter, he attributed the change of plans to the large expense of working in an area without railroad transportation. He also complained about the hostility of the Indians, who had attacked one of his survey divisions the past season in Wyoming, although no lives or property had been lost. The bold letter glossed over far more significant strategic reasons for the realignment. He must confront Wheeler, he felt, or his congressional funding might dry up. The maw he must feed annually demanded that he deliver new, colorful discoveries, and he had already plucked the ripest fruit from his seasons surveying Yellowstone. Colorado would give him new fields of discovery. If he played it right, Colorado would extend his survey and guarantee him continued support for years to come.

  As Hayden planned for the summer of 1873, he decided to send one of his surveying divisions, accompanied by Jackson the photographer, down the Green and Colorado to the Grand Canyon, yet another challenge to Powell. He mentioned the idea of visiting the Grand Canyon to Moran, which thrilled the painter. Moran could use Jackson’s images to create drawings, or they could serve as research toward perhaps a new large oil to rival the Yellowstone painting. “I saw Wheeler’s photos from the Grand Cañon of the Colorado today,” Moran wrote Hayden in May. “They are poor and Jackson will knock spots out of them.”

  That spring, Hayden abruptly pulled Jackson and a team from visiting the Grand Canyon, sending them instead to Colorado’s high peaks, part of his strategy to beat out Wheeler. He told the acting assistant surgeon general of the United States to pass along a curt message: “You can tell Wheeler that if he stirs a finger, or attempts to interfere with me or my survey in any way, I will utterly crush him—as I have enough congressional influence to do so, and will bring it all to bear.” That summer, Hayden’s and Wheeler’s men literally came to blows. In Colorado’s South Park on July 9, a Wheeler survey team headed by Lieutenant William Marshall encountered one led by Hayden’s men. According to Marshall, the parties agreed to operate on opposite sides of the upper Arkansas River. But he claimed Hayden’s men had ignored the agreement. The two parties closed upon one another and fists flew.

  When he had raced out of town in June to resume his survey, Hayden neglected to bid farewell to a now thoroughly miffed Moran. “Under the impression that you would go [to the Grand Canyon],” wrote the painter, “I made a number of contracts to furnish pictures of the region. . . .” Hayden had left him in an embarrassing predicament. With regret, he wrote, though his tone does not suggest it, he would instead accompany Major Powell. Even though Powell had left long ago for the West, his offer to Moran remained open; he may even have upped the inducements.

  This good turn of events for Powell came just in time. While peddling a book about the 1869 expedition, Powell had received an editor’s note that such a manuscript would need full-page engravings and vignettes to make the book more publishable. The Riverside Press editors looked nervously on Powell’s thick prose
and heavy emphasis on geology. Moran’s sketches would change that. When the painter went west, he did so with a passel of commissions: “70 drawings for Powell, 40 for Appleton, 4 for Aldine, 20 for Scribner’s . . .”

  * * *

  Two months after Dellenbaugh sent the map back east in February 1873, Powell traveled west to Salt Lake City to set up the next phase of his survey. On the way he received a telegram from Secretary Delano that would significantly alter the summer’s survey plans. Delano had appointed him a special Indian commissioner, and charged him, along with southern Nevada Indian agent George Ingalls, with evaluating the “conditions and wants” of the Utah and Nevada Indians and making recommendations on reservation policy. President Grant’s Peace Policy had fallen apart after Modoc Indians had murdered a U.S. general in southeastern Oregon. Delano feared that the violence would spread into the southwest. In Washington Powell had reassured him that the Pauite and Ute were unlikely to mobilize in force against the whites, but the secretary remained unconvinced.

  From the outset, Delano’s task proved a tall order. Assembling a formal census of the southwestern Indians was daunting enough, but putting together a coherent legal and humane policy for settling the Utes (Utah), Paiutes (Utah, northern Arizona, southern Nevada), Shoshones (Idaho and Utah), and western Shoshones (Nevada) into reservations verged on the impossible. But Ingalls and Powell turned to their task with energy, traveling throughout Utah in May and June to many places without railroad or stage lines. The commissioners divided up in September, Powell to Las Vegas, Ingalls to southern Nevada. All told, they identified more than one hundred tribes, each independently governed and named, counting 10,437 individuals, half already living on reservations. Powell took along photographer Jack Hillers. Although later criticized for questionable practices—Hillers and Powell were not averse to providing some of the poorer Paiute with colorful headdresses and clothing for their portraits—the images form an important documentation of the southwestern Indians on the cusp of tumultuous change. Powell also amassed considerable ethnographic and linguistic material. If he worried that his work for the commission would subtract from his survey efforts while Hayden and Wheeler furiously prosecuted their own, he never showed it. Increasingly Powell had been drawn to ethnology—and this opportunity gave him an ideal chance to put that interest to practice.