Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Above all else, they have one priceless bit of knowledge whose lack tormented Powell and his companions. They know that what they are trying is possible.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE CREW

  Inside the palatial railroad car, the mirrors were French and the carpets Belgian, and the menu included such indulgences as raw oysters and lobster salad and omelets made with a splash of rum. A passenger crossing the Green River by train might have been forgiven for neglecting to glance out the window. And, in truth, even if a curious sightseer had turned his eyes from the sparkling chandeliers and the black-walnut woodwork, he might not have deemed the scene below him worthy of a second glance.

  He would have seen, in the middle weeks of May 1869, an empty desert and a broad river and Powell’s crew of novices struggling to learn how to handle their boats. Powell and his brother Walter, and the expedition’s four boats, had arrived in town on May 11, by train from Chicago. By then the rest of the men had been impatiently hanging around Green River Station for three weeks. The town was shabby and tiny—it had only a hundred residents and had not existed a year before—and three weeks was a lengthy sentence.

  In its brief heyday, during the single month when it had marked the transcontinental railroad’s farthest advance west, Green River Station had bustled with activity, nearly all of it illicit. These end-of-the-line towns were known collectively as Hell on Wheels. Like the others, Green River Station had plenty to tempt hardworking railroad workers and to repel anyone else. “By day disgusting, by night dangerous, almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice,” wrote one newspaperman, “averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce the chief business and pastime of the hours.”

  Those were the good old days. By the time Powell’s men arrived in Green River Station, the railroad workers had been gone for six months and the town was almost deserted. The visitor who had sampled Jake Fields’s homemade whiskey and Ah Chug’s apple pie had largely exhausted Green River’s amusements.

  Powell had chosen Green River Station as a rendezvous not because of any virtue of the town itself but simply because the train stopped there. This was no ordinary train, but the transcontinental railroad, the marvel of the age. The name alone, in the nineteenth century, conveyed power, glamour, and pizzazz. And it was brand-new. On May 10, 1869, millions of Americans across the nation had waited eagerly for word of the driving of the golden spike that linked East and West. For six years, the Central Pacific’s army of laborers had been racing east from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada, digging their way through forty-foot snowdrifts and blasting tunnels through thousands of feet of solid rock. (Workmen, especially the Chinese, had died in such numbers that the expression “not a Chinaman’s chance” came into common use.) In the meantime, the Union Pacific workforce, at its peak ten thousand strong, had raced westward from Omaha, laying track across the treeless plains and through the scorching desert while fighting off Cheyenne and Sioux raiding parties.

  Now, finally, the last link was forged. The spanning of the continent, the New York Times exclaimed, marked “the completion of the greatest enterprise ever yet undertaken.” At 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869, a telegraph operator tapped three dots, signaling “done.” The signal triggered a simultaneous nationwide celebration—the first ever. Fire bells rang in every hamlet in the land; cannons thundered in San Francisco and New York and Omaha and Sacramento; ten thousand residents of Chicago took to the streets and formed a parade that stretched seven miles. To an enthralled nation, it was an occasion as momentous as the announcement of victory at the end of a long war.

  • • •

  For John Wesley Powell, the train made feasible the assault on what he liked to call “the Great Unknown.” Rather than having to build his own boats on site with whatever materials he could scrounge together, like a desert-bound Robinson Crusoe, Powell could have first-rate, professionally made boats built in Chicago and sent west by train. He had placed his order with Thomas Bagley’s boatyard in early spring, 1869. On May 11, Powell stepped off the train at Green River Station, collected his handsome new boats, and joined his restless crew.

  For one moment, two of the epic sagas in American history occupied the same stage, though few ventures could have had as little in common as the transcontinental railroad and Powell’s expedition. Like the space shuttle or the Concorde a century later, the transcontinental railroad was the racing, roaring embodiment of technological might and engineering elegance; Powell’s rowboats were the products of a technology nearly as old as human culture. Newspapers across the country had lavished countless pages on the building of the railroad; John Wesley Powell and his men were all but anonymous. The federal government had backed the railroad with an unending succession of giveaways of cash and land; Powell had knocked on one closed door after another in Washington, looking for funding, and had come up next to empty. Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington and a host of other eager, striving men would make millions from the railroad, piling up fortunes that generations of descendants could barely dent; Powell and his men worried about starving to death. The story of the railroad was an epic with a cast of thousands; Powell and his crew were a force of ten lone men.

  Now the two expeditions found themselves at the same lonely spot in the desert, in a juxtaposition that seemed almost to have required time travel. It was as if, on a single parade ground, one could see a battalion of modern soldiers with automatic weapons and night-vision goggles and also a host of knights in battered armor, perched atop gaunt-ribbed stallions.

  In their reliance on tiny boats and fragile oars and their own muscle and nerve, Powell’s men were a new link in an ancient chain. In common with explorers in every age, they had willingly left the safety and familiarity of home to visit an unknown world beyond the reach of rescue. But unlike modern explorers, unlike astronauts in particular, Powell and the other nine men of the grandly named Colorado River Exploring Expedition were hardly an elite corps, certainly not the survivors of a rigorous selection program.

  The crew—not Powell—bore a closer resemblance to a band of rough, experienced camping buddies in pursuit of the ultimate outdoor adventure. The very factors that would have sent more prudent men scurrying toward hearth and home drew these men on. Territory unknown? Death a possibility? Good! When do we start?

  The youngest member of the group was barely into his twenties, the oldest thirty-six. Six of the men, in addition to Powell, were Civil War veterans. (All seven had fought on the Union side.) Each man preferred life outdoors with a blanket and a rifle (or, in Powell’s case, with a collecting box for fossilized bones and shells) to a sheltered existence of weekly paychecks and regular mealtimes. Only Powell was married.

  Five of the crew were “mountain men,” hunters and trappers by trade and human tumbleweeds by inclination. The mountain men were as savvy in the ways of the West as anyone on earth and twice as ornery, not much inclined to heed Powell or any leader. Their motives for joining the expedition varied, though vague but seductive notions of easy fortune played a key part. In a land almost unknown to white men, perhaps they would find game just waiting to be bagged and gold glistening unclaimed in the sunlight. Certainly they would find adventure, and that was perhaps the greatest temptation of all.

  It was not simply that, by temperament, these men craved action. The times played a role as well. The Civil War had been agonizing, thrilling, boring, and terrifying. It was the most important event since the nation’s birth and universally recognized as such. For the young men who survived it, it was clearly the most important thing that would ever happen to them. Few soldiers could echo the Gettysburg veteran who called that battle the most enjoyable three days of his life and a time of “joyous exultation.” But more than a few ex-soldiers did admit that sometimes civilian life seemed a bit humdrum, a shade anticlimactic. Most of Powell’s men were in their twenties; the war had ended four years before. Against such a ba
ckdrop, the prospect of a glorious adventure, tempting at any time, beckoned all the more alluringly.

  Powell’s previous trips to the West—the first had been only two years before—had been in the company of eager and well-mannered college students. He liked to read aloud to them. Emerson and Scott and Longfellow were particular favorites. The men of this new expedition were a tougher lot. Campfires were places to drink and brag and swap tall tales. An attempt to read “The Lady of the Lake” aloud was unlikely to go well.

  The expedition was strictly low-budget. Powell and six of his men were volunteers. (Powell, who took for granted that everyone felt as he did, noted blithely that the unpaid crew members “give their time, feeling remunerated by the opportunity for study.”) The other three men were to receive a small wage, one for taking measurements with the barometer, another for using the sextant, and the third for drawing maps. The wage, as spelled out in a homemade contract, was $25 per man per month. Even in an era when a carpenter or a stonemason earned only $3 a day and a hotel room cost $1 a night, this was far from lavish. In addition, the three men had been promised they would be given five days along the way to prospect for gold and silver and thirty days to hunt and trap. Finally, a long, meticulous list spelled out the prices Powell had agreed to pay for various skins: deer, $1.25 each; elk, $2; grizzly bear, $10; and so on, through two dozen animals.

  The contract seemed routine, even optimistic in its presumption that there would be free time and good hunting. Only its last sentence hinted at darker prospects. “Should it be necessary to proceed on the journey without delay on account of disaster to boats or loss of rations,” it read, “then the time specified for hunting may not be required by either party, nor shall it be deemed a failure of contract to furnish supplies should such supplies be lost in transit.”

  Powell’s motives were different from those of his men. Hunting, prospecting, and general dare-deviltry held little appeal. For Powell, the expedition was primarily an intellectual adventure. “The object,” he declared, “is to make collections in geology, natural history, antiquities and ethnology,” in the hope of “adding a mite to the great sum of human knowledge.” This was sincere, if a bit coy. Powell was a man of vaulting ambition, and he rarely thought in “mites.” He intended to fill in a blank space on the map, as he freely declared. What was equally true, though Powell refrained from saying so outright, was that he intended to put himself on the map.

  This is not to downplay Powell’s passion for science, which was heartfelt. In the middle of the Civil War, for example, while his men dug trenches outside the besieged city of Vicksburg, Powell had combed the turned-up ground for fossils. In canyon country, where nature herself had dug trenches a mile deep, Powell’s zeal for science would grow all the more fervent. Early on, at least, the men were bemused rather than irritated by the quirky and time-consuming obsessions of “the Professor.”

  Let us gather the entire crew together for a moment. In the center stands John Wesley Powell, the undisputed leader. Powell was a formidable character—intelligent, impetuous, brave, driven, visionary, a jangle of primary colors with hardly a pastel in the mix. Every gesture was quick, every word emphatic. When he was caught up in an argument, for example, he would wave his maimed right arm, beating the air with his empty sleeve. (Powell made as little concession as possible to his injury, although it made even the most routine task a trial. He could not wash his own hand, for instance, and had to rely on someone else for help.) Magnificently self-assured, Powell had what a later generation would call charisma. He was, in the words of one contemporary, “eminently a magnetic man.”

  Like Walt Whitman, who contained multitudes, Powell was a grab bag of contradictions. He was a democrat to the marrow of his bones, for instance, but also a firm believer in the privileges of rank. (The “boys” of his crew were “Billy” and “Sumner” and “Frank,” but Powell was always “the Major.”) He was so reckless that he put together an expedition that struck his contemporaries as more akin to a suicide pact, but so prudent that, to the men’s dismay, he insisted on portaging rapid after rapid. He was gregarious, fond of reading aloud and singing, but on the river he often took his meals alone. He was “a Renaissance man,” in the judgment of one twentieth-century historian, but “as single-minded as a buzz saw” in the eyes of another.

  One contradiction is especially jarring. Powell was honest and straightforward in his financial dealings—and this in the flamboyantly corrupt Gilded Age—but he was light-fingered as a pickpocket when it came to stealing credit from others. Sometimes it was merely a matter of embellishing a story. Sometimes it was bolder than that. Powell was a fine writer, and although his account of his historic expedition has become a classic, it combined reporting and invention in an intricate mix. “He wasn’t all saint,” Powell’s brother-in-law noted. “He could lie on occasion—be generous one minute and contemptible the next.”

  The fudging began early on. “After three years’ study of the matter,” Powell told the readers of the Chicago Tribune in a May 1869 letter announcing the aims of his expedition, “I think it doubtful whether these canyons have ever been seen by man.”

  Even without three years’ study, Powell knew better than that. For countless generations, Indians had not only seen the canyons of the Southwest but had lived in them. In the sixteenth century, they had guided Spanish explorers to the Grand Canyon’s rim. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish had come back for a closer look. In 1857, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers had surveyed a stretch of the Colorado beginning near its mouth and had descended into the Grand Canyon at two different spots. In 1861, in an official document entitled the Report upon the Colorado River of the West, the Corps had described its findings.

  The early visitors had not been tempted to linger. “The region last explored is, of course, altogether valueless,” wrote Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives in concluding his 1861 Report on the Grand Canyon. “It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.”

  All this was common knowledge, and Powell had no reason to gloss over it. To have seen the Grand Canyon was one thing; to become the first to ride the wild Colorado through it was something else entirely. Powell’s predecessors had gazed upon the dragon. They left to him the task of taking up a sword and battling it.

  The second-ranking member of Powell’s expedition was his younger brother Walter. A Civil War veteran himself and a onetime prisoner of the Confederates, Walter was as much a war casualty as his brother. Half crazy with all he had seen and endured, Walter was surly, sullen, alternately melancholy and bad-tempered. Even to the indulgent eye of his older brother, he appeared “silent, moody, and sarcastic.” One of the mountain men was even more direct. Walter Powell, he griped, was “about as worthless a piece of furniture as could be found in a day’s journey.”

  Among the others, Jack Sumner was first among equals. Sumner, another ex-soldier, was a guide and outfitter who ran a trading post at Hot Sulphur Springs in the Colorado Rockies. (“Trout fishing can now be indulged in to the fullest extent. Game is abundant. Mr. John Sumner has supplies of all kinds at the Springs. Come ye sweltering denizens of the plains to the mountains and enjoy life.”) Sumner was fearless, quietly competent, short-fused, sharp-eyed, and sharp-witted. He kept an acerbic journal that serves as a counterbalance to Powell’s more polished and more politic account. Where Powell inclined to starry-eyed excess, Sumner favored a sly wink. He stood a fraction under five feet, six and was fair-haired and deceptively delicate in appearance.*

  Powell had met Sumner in the summer of 1867 when he ventured to the West for the first time, leading a group of eleven that included his wife, his brother-in-law, and several of his Illinois State Normal stu
dents on what amounted to an extended field trip. This was an era when the young nation still tilted eastward. The population of New York City had already neared one million and was climbing fast, but the West was barely settled. San Francisco, with a population of nearly 150,000 thanks to the gold rush, stood almost alone. Salt Lake City had fewer than 13,000 residents, Denver fewer than 5,000, Los Angeles fewer than 6,000. Las Vegas was an almost empty oasis in the desert. Brattleboro, Vermont, was a bigger city than Denver, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, more of a metropolis than Los Angeles.

  Powell made no claim to know the West—he freely acknowledged that his 1867 party consisted entirely of “amateurs like myself”—but he was never one to tiptoe into a new project if he could fling himself into it headlong. “Mountains, hills, rocks, plains, valleys, streams,” Powell exclaimed in delight, “all were new.” Let loose in the Rockies, Powell and his fellow amateurs began a frenzy of collecting that soon yielded box after box of birds and butterflies and plants and insects and rocks and minerals and fossils.

  Sumner served as Powell’s guide. Like many a guide, he was proud of his skills, and he liked to moan about the ignorance and naiveté of the dudes he was obliged to chaperone. “In our evening talks around the campfire,” he wrote, “I gave the Major some new ideas in regard to the habits of animals, as he had gotten his information from books, and I from personal observation of the animals themselves.”

  A less prickly character than Sumner might have been more generous. Sumner had been raised not on a cloud-shrouded mountain or in a desert gulch but on an Iowa farm, and he had come to Colorado only in June 1866, just a year before Powell’s first visit. Even so, Sumner’s know-how was genuine, and his nerve was beyond question. Like life in the army, life in the West brought new experiences at faster than the accustomed rate. Last year’s raw recruit was this year’s grizzled veteran.