Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  This was crucial. The Whitehall had two distinguishing features—it was fast, and it was hard to knock off course. For nearly every purpose, that made it an ideal choice. Suppose, though, that you planned to bring your rowboat not to a lake or harbor but to a surging river. Suppose, further, that you needed desperately to keep from being smashed against house-sized boulders and plunged into boat-hungry whirlpools. Then the combination of speed and the inability to change direction would be the last things you wanted, and maneuverability would be beyond price. Your best hope would be a boat designed to inch its way through the minefield, poised at every instant to pirouette away from danger.

  In hindsight, Powell may have had better options. Grand Banks dories, for instance, were sturdy, flat-bottomed fishing boats that were perhaps more maneuverable than Whitehalls. But their home base was the ocean off New England (the dories were stored on a schooner’s deck and lowered into the sea) and no one had ever thought to try them on white water. In any case, hindsight was one of countless luxuries unavailable to Powell. In search of the best rowboat available, he had picked a Whitehall. In 1869, anyone might have done the same. Powell had made the natural choice, and it was all wrong. Now he was headed into a fire wearing a gasoline suit.

  Powell’s 1869 boats no longer exist, not even in drawings or photographs. (Nor, for that matter, do we have a group photo of Powell and his men.) There were four boats altogether, three of them built to identical specifications. Each of the three “freight boats,” as the men called them, was twenty-one feet long and four feet wide and could hold about four thousand pounds of cargo, though they were never loaded that heavily. Even empty, these long, narrow boats were a burden—it took four men to carry one empty boat. And as time passed and the boats grew waterlogged, they would grow heavier still.

  They were far from empty. The gear and food together weighed seven thousand pounds. The plan was to carry supplies to last ten months, so that if the expedition was still under way in winter and the river froze, they could “winter over” until the spring thaw. The food was standard army issue—rice, flour, beans, coffee, sugar, bacon, dried apples. (Powell’s trip to Washington to find government financing had not panned out, but in lieu of money he had been granted army rations for himself and his men.) They would supplement that dreary fare with fish and whatever fresh meat the hunters brought in.

  The gear was as straightforward as the food. The men carried tents, ponchos, bedrolls, extra clothing, hundreds of feet of rope, knives, rifles, guns, traps, gold-panning equipment, axes, hammers, saws, nails, screws, and a miscellany of other tools, as well as sextants, chronometers, barometers, thermometers, and compasses. It was a lengthy and careful list, as it had to be for a caravan through the desert.

  Vital as the tons of supplies were, they were dangerous as well. To upend a hardware store into a boat that was hard to maneuver even when empty was asking for trouble. The boats rode so low, Powell noted, that even without rapids to make life complicated, it required “the utmost care to float in the rough river without shipping water.”

  Powell had anticipated that the boats would take a beating, so he had ordered them built of oak. They were “stanch and strong,” he noted proudly, “double-ribbed, with double stem and stern-posts.” At each end of the boat a decked-over bulkhead provided storage space. This was essentially an off-the-shelf design. The few modifications, notably the choice of oak, provided extra strength but made the boats heavier and more ungainly than they would have been otherwise.

  Built of pine and only sixteen feet long, the fourth boat looked like the others except that it was smaller and lighter. This was Powell’s boat, the Emma Dean. The food and supplies were divided into three identical parts and distributed among the three large boats, as a precaution in case a boat was lost. The Emma Dean carried only a few of the scientific instruments, three guns, and three bundles of clothing.

  Not knowing what the river had in store for him and his men, Powell had devised a river-running plan intended to keep surprises to a minimum. His boat was faster than the others, because it was smaller and lighter and less heavily loaded. Powell’s idea was to proceed downriver ahead of his clumsier companions and scout a safe course for them to follow. If no safe course presented itself, he would give a signal to pull to shore, and the men would begin the dangerous, exhausting business of wrestling the boats and their thousands of pounds of cargo around the foaming, mocking rapid in their path.

  In theory, the system was simple and sound. “The boats were ordered to keep one hundred yards apart,” Sumner explained. “Flag signals were arranged as follows, always to be given by Major Powell from the pilot boat: flag waved right and left, then down, ‘Land at once’; waved to right, ‘Keep to right’; and waved to left, ‘Keep to left of pilot boat.’ ” Everyone was well-pleased with the boats and the planning (and boaters running unknown rapids today follow a similar system). “We feel quite proud of our little fleet,” Powell acknowledged, and even Sumner, temperamentally allergic to gush, conceded that “we make a pretty show.”

  Since the boats were so heavy, each needed two men at the oars, one seated in front of the other. Powell was in the Emma Dean, with Sumner and Dunn rowing. Walter Powell and Bradley crewed the Maid of the Cañon, Hall and Hawkins the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, and the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman the No Name. The men rowed in the age-old fashion, facing upstream, their backs to the action. To row “backward” might sound odd to someone who has never tried it, but it has the great advantage of permitting the boatman to use the big muscles of his back and legs. (Rowing “forward,” facing downstream, places heavy demands on the boatman’s arms.) And since a rowboat on flat water moves slowly, it is easy to keep on course by stealing an occasional peek over one shoulder or the other. For countless years, boatmen on harbors and lakes and lazy rivers have rowed in just this way.

  In rapids, though, Powell and his men would not be moving slowly, and they would be headed—blind—into desperate danger. So Powell would be the eyes for the entire group. Not rowing, he was free to face forward and fix all his attention on perils downstream. There he would stand while Sumner and Dunn strained blindly at the oars, his left hand clutching a strap that ran across the boat, balancing like a circus rider on the back of a cantering pony, looking for trouble.

  On the expedition’s first day, the river was kind, as if allowing its fledgling challengers to get their bearings. After a shaky start, Powell and his men managed to fish their dropped oars back out of the river and point themselves downstream. They made their way more or less uneventfully for another seven or eight miles, where they made camp for the night. Hall and Hawkins, in the last boat, reacted too slowly. “I saw they were all landing,” Hawkins recalled, “and I told Andy they were camping at this point. The river was straight and the water smooth and Powell signalled to me and we tried to land, and did finally get to shore some four hundred yards below.” No one was much inclined to preach a sermon on a four-football-field miscalculation—the upstream boats joined their wayward colleagues and, in Hawkins’s grumpy summary, “the rest of the boys had the laugh on us”—but everyone knew the story had a moral. It was easily put: The river was fast and strong, and they were all novices; they had better hope they were quick learners.

  Their problem, Hall and Hawkins decided, was that they were overloaded. Each of the boats was supposed to be carrying the same weight, but the Kitty Clyde’s Sister seemed to be riding several inches lower than the others. Even in calm water, the river was within four inches of spilling into the boat. The two men set to work removing supplies, figuring that “we better unload some of the bacon and take chances of replacing it with venison and mountain sheep later on. So we unloaded five hundred pounds of bacon in the river.” At the time, throwing food overboard seemed like a good idea.

  They camped that first night at the foot of an overhanging cliff, perhaps ten miles downstream from Green River Station. The two Powells and Bradley set out for “a couple of hours
geologising.” While they searched for fossils, Oramel Howland and Dunn set out to hunt dinner. The two men returned at dark with one small rabbit. It made, Sumner noted dryly, “rather slim rations for ten hungry men.”

  Camp was cheery, though it was wet and raw. Unfazed, the men did their best to keep dry and to outboast one another. We “exchanged tough stories at a fearful rate,” Sumner recalled, but the crew was still suffering the effects of the nights of hard drinking at Green River Station. Everyone turned in early.

  The first day of the trip was complete. So far, so good.

  While the men snore in their bedrolls, let us take a moment to talk about their journals. Powell, Sumner, and Bradley all kept diaries. (Somehow the taciturn Bradley managed to keep a detailed daily record of the trip without any of the others catching on.) Several of the others chimed in briefly, adding still more voices to the unruly chorus. We have two short accounts of the trip from Billy Hawkins, a few brief letters from Andy Hall, a long newspaper article by Walter Powell, two long newspaper stories by Oramel Howland.

  The men had two favorite modes of speech, wild exaggeration and ludicrous understatement. Ideally, both were delivered deadpan. Time and again, the accounts overflow with an offhand vitality that reminds us that we are listening to Mark Twain’s contemporaries. One remote spot was “desolate enough to suit a lovesick poet.” An eddy snagged a boat and “whirled it around quick enough to take the kinks out of a ram’s horn.” In one especially wild rapid, “we broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments.”

  Some of the handwritten originals have been lost. But Powell’s notes (or, more precisely, notes that cover just over half the expedition) survived a long journey, from the depths of the Grand Canyon to a silent, dusty archive at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. There, at a wooden table under flickering fluorescent lights, a visitor can hold the pages that Powell held and study the notes he scrawled on long, thin pages marked with water spots and splashes of coffee that fell more than a century ago. The handwriting is large and looping, and the words sit awkwardly on the page.

  Bradley’s journal has come to rest only a mile or two from Powell’s, in the Library of Congress, a second message-in-a-bottle from a single shipwreck. Meticulously neat, it looks nothing like Powell’s. Bradley wrote on small pages in impeccable but infinitesimal script, as if he were one of those people who can inscribe the Twenty-third Psalm on a grain of rice. From its appearance alone—with no bold underlinings, no exclamation points, no crossed-out words, no stars or arrows in the margin to hint at excitement—one might take Bradley’s journal to be a record of experiments in a none-too-promising chemistry lab. No one would guess that it records one of the great American adventures.

  It is tempting to see Powell’s bold, sprawling handwriting as reflecting his taste for splash and melodrama, especially when his writing is compared with Bradley’s tiny, finicky penmanship, but the true explanation is simpler. Powell had lost his right arm at Shiloh seven years before, and he had not quite mastered the art of writing with his left hand. Writing outdoors, in the wind, perhaps on a rock serving as a makeshift desk, made matters worse. A friend who came to know Powell later observed “the difficulty of writing with his left hand and keeping the paper from blowing away by trying to keep it in place with the stump. I have often seen him struggling this way.”

  Powell’s description of the 1869 expedition is the most compelling but the least straightforward of the firsthand accounts. He kept two journals, first of all, and the two are quite different. Powell’s river diary contains short, spare entries, written in free moments in camp and not published in his lifetime. One day’s entire entry, for example, reads: “Wrote until 10:00 A.M., and then came to camp with Walter.” (This is the diary at the National Museum of Natural History.) Powell’s published account, which is the one nearly always cited when people quote him, was lovingly and painstakingly composed years after the expedition had ended.

  Powell purposely blurred the distinction between the diary he composed on the river and the account he published in 1875 as an official government report. The published journal is written in the present tense, in diary format, as if each entry had been composed by firelight at the end of a hard day on the river. In fact, it was dictated half a dozen years later to a secretary as Powell paced back and forth in his office, waving his cigar and gesturing as though he were addressing a vast lecture hall and not a lone listener.

  For the most part, the reader is grateful for Powell’s literary sleight of hand. His river diary is as dry as the Southwest it described, but the published account continues to draw new readers even after a century and a quarter. What other government publication can say as much? At a glance, few books look less inviting. The title, usually abbreviated to Exploration of the Colorado River, runs on for more than two dozen words; the publisher is the Government Printing Office; the text is introduced by a formal note carrying the signatures of the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But even in such an austere setting, Powell’s personality bursts forth like a dancer from a birthday cake.

  The government imprimatur gave Powell’s version of events a credibility it did not always deserve.* Powell described his formal account as simply a carefully worked-out version of the telegraphic river diary. “I decided to publish this journal, with only such emendations and corrections as its hasty writing in camp necessitated,” he declared. This seems a stretch—the river diary contains only three thousand words, for example, in comparison with the published journal’s nearly one hundred thousand—but diaries, after all, are not written for outsiders. And perhaps those three thousand words spoke to Powell even years later, summoning complete memories, as a scrap of melody can call forth a symphony. But at some points in this official report, Powell soared beyond his own adventure, magnificent as it was, and touched up stories or actually invented them.

  May 25, the first full day on the river, was another day of bad weather and good spirits. The men were under way by six in the morning and made it until about nine-thirty before running into trouble. Then Powell ran aground on a sandbar and, before he had time to signal, so did the next boat and the one behind that. Bradley, trailing the others, just managed to steer to the right and sneak by. Two of the men jumped out of their boats and pushed everyone free.

  They continued downstream for another hour. The rain continued to pelt down, and the men pulled ashore to try to wait it out. By this point, everyone was “wet, chilled, and tired to exhaustion,” Powell wrote, but with the help of a roaring fire and many cups of coffee they were soon “refreshed and quite merry.” (They also cooked up some “villainous bacon,” as Sumner put it, but that was less satisfactory.) When the sky looked as if it might clear, they set out again. After five or six miles, they saw some bighorn sheep on a cliffside and stopped to give chase. Two or three hours later, the hunters straggled home empty-handed. Only Hawkins had not struck out completely. He had found a sleeping lamb, which he had caught by the heels and thrown off the cliff, toward camp. The hunters consoled themselves for their failure by teasing Hawkins—they pretended to believe that the lamb was dead when he found it—but they all agreed it made a fine lunch.

  It was now about four in the afternoon, time to move on. All the boats except Kitty Clyde’s Sister soon ran aground on another sandbar and found themselves unable to budge. Bradley and Walter Powell managed to plant the Maid so firmly they had to pry her off with oars. It took “a great deal of tall lifting and tugging” to get free, Bradley wrote, which was especially irksome because Powell had given a danger signal and Bradley had decided to ignore it.

  Their third day was another fairly easy one, noteworthy only for an entry in Bradley’s journal. They had encountered, he wrote, “the largest and most difficult rapid yet seen.” From here on, Bradley’s diary would be dotted with similar observations, as if to convince himself that this time they must have taken the river’s worst blow. Sum
ner, no more inclined to bluster than the hard-to-faze Bradley, was just as impressed by the rapid. “It cannot be navigated by any boat with safety, in the main channel,” he wrote, though it was possible to hug the bank and scoot by safely.

  Three of the boats made it through in fine fashion, but Hawkins and Hall, in the Sister (the shortened name they used for their boat) found themselves pinned on a rock. Hawkins climbed overboard and managed to pry the boat free. “No injury done except one man took a bath,” Bradley noted unsympathetically. The rain, which had continued throughout the day, kept up at night, but no one paid it much heed. The hunters, for once, had something to show for their efforts, and everyone tucked happily into an excellent dinner of duck and goose.

  There was no great significance to running aground. Heavy boats moving fast on low water might almost be expected to beach themselves. But in pinning the Sister to a rock, even if only briefly, the river had provided a far more telling warning of the havoc it could unleash at any moment. It happens in an instant—one minute a boat is racing along and then, suddenly, it is sideways to the current, wrapped against a rock or another obstacle, and helpless. The river holds the boat in place with overwhelming force, like a sumo wrestler smothering a kitten. Worse still, it perpetually replaces itself as it flows, so that there is no wriggling out from under. A kitten might claw or bite a wrestler and sneak away in the ensuing confusion, but a river never “shifts its weight.” It simply persists in its assault, unceasingly and unforgivingly, until the obstacle in its way is an obstacle no longer.

  “Wrapping is, in the estimation of many, the worst fate that can befall a riverboat,” writes the historian and river runner Roderick Nash. “In an upset, at least, the boat washes downstream where it can usually be recovered and righted. But a wrapped boat is bent around a rock and pinned there by the force of moving water. Some boats can be freed using lines from shore, but often they remain wrapped until the river shreds them into rubber ribbons or wooden or metal splinters.”