Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  In 1848, he set out to cross the Rockies in winter, against the fervent advice of everyone who heard his plans. His goal was to demonstrate the feasibility of a transcontinental train route that followed the thirty-eighth parallel. Such a continent-spanning route, joining New York and San Francisco, had long been a pipe dream of Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, Frémont’s patron and father-in-law. (Not coincidentally, the route would have passed through St. Louis, where Benton lived.) The problem was that the thirty-eighth parallel ran directly through some of the most forbidding terrain in the Rocky Mountains. Frémont’s reasoning, apparently, was that the worse the conditions he survived, the more plausible the case for a rail line. At twelve thousand feet, with his men starving and their mules frozen to death, the storms that had bedeviled the trip all along suddenly grew even worse. The snow lay in drifts as deep as thirty feet. The men were so desperate for food that they ate their candles and the soles of their moccasins. Some of the survivors cannibalized their dead companions. In the end, ten members of the thirty-three-man party died; another fifteen were rescued at the point of death by the heroic scout Alexis Godey.

  None of this fazed Frémont, who declared the mission’s outcome “entirely satisfactory.” And yet even he paled at the dangers of the Green and the Colorado. It was undoubtedly true that those untamed rivers presented “many scenes of wild grandeur” and “many temptations” generally, Frémont wrote, but he conceded that neither he nor anyone else wanted any part of them. “No trappers have been found bold enough,” he wrote, “to undertake a voyage which has so certain a prospect of a fatal termination.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PARADISE

  If Frémont had seen Powell and his men on June 2, 1869, he might have taken back his words of warning. That glorious spring day marked perhaps the high point of the entire Powell expedition, and the hours between eleven o’clock and three marked the best part of the best day. The men had finished lining the boats and wrestling the cargo past Ashley Falls by late morning—“had dinner and smoked all round,” Sumner reported contentedly—and then returned to the river. They were safe and on the move and all was bliss.

  “Beautiful river, that increases its speed as we leave the fall . . . but clear of sunken rocks,” Sumner noted with glee. “So we run through the waves at express speed; made seventeen miles through Red Stone canyon in less than an hour running time, the boats bounding through the waves like a school of porpoise.” Sumner’s boat, smaller and lighter than the three “freight” boats, bounded even more than the others. “The Emma being very light is tossed about in a way that threatens to shake her to pieces, and is nearly as hard to ride as a Mexican pony. We plunge along singing, yelling, like drunken sailors, all feeling that such rides do not come every day.”

  Sumner ran through his memories in search of a similar thrill and finally hit on a comparison. “It was,” he wrote, “like sparking a black-eyed girl—just dangerous enough to be exciting.”

  Suddenly the sandstone canyon opened out into a beautiful little valley. This was the best land they had seen yet, the low, grass-covered hills a welcome change from the towering cliffs and bare rocks they had grown to expect. The men made camp at about three in the afternoon, spread the bedding out to dry, and set out to shoot dinner or flung themselves on the ground to rest, depending on how ambitious they felt. The hunters eventually returned empty-handed, except for Powell, who could wield a pistol but not a rifle and had managed to shoot two grouse. Sumner was in too good a mood to be dismayed by the meager haul. “Spread our blankets on the clean, green grass,” he wrote, “with no roof but the old pines above us, through which we could see the sentinel stars shining from the deep blue pure sky, like happy spirits looking out through the blue eyes of a pure hearted woman.”

  Bradley, never much inclined to lyricism, went so far as to acknowledge that “the sky is clear—weather warm and delightful.” Still, he had little trouble keeping his euphoria in check. “The men are out hunting and have not yet come in,” he wrote, “but if they have their usual luck we shall have bacon for breakfast.”

  Powell, in contrast, was in full Wordsworthian mode. He rose early the next morning and went for a five- or six-mile hike “up to a pine grove park, its grassy carpet bedecked with crimson, velvet flowers, set in groups on the stems of pear shaped cactus plants; patches of painted cups are seen here and there, with yellow blossoms protruding through scarlet bracts; little blue-eyed flowers are peeping through the grass; and the air is filled with fragrance from the white blossoms of a Spiraea.” To complete the picture, a mountain brook ran through the meadow. “It is a quiet place for retirement from the raging waters of the cañon,” Powell noted happily.

  While Powell was basking in nature’s glories, the rest of the party were out hunting and fishing. The hunters came back to camp disappointed again—“they didn’t bring in enough game to make a grease spot,” Bradley grumped—but the fishermen had succeeded, after a fashion. The riverbank was lined with strange-looking specimens. Some were a “queer mongrel of mackerel, sucker, and whitefish,” Sumner wrote, and the rest “an afflicted cross of white fish and lake trout.” Their taste was a match for their appearance. “Take a piece of raw pork and paper of pins, and make a sandwich, and you have the mongrels,” Sumner wrote. “Take out the pork and you have a fair sample of the edible qualities of the other kinds.”

  The next day was nearly up to the standard of the previous two. Rested and content, the men had a “splendid ride” on a fast river with “only few rappids and mostly deep water.” At one point all the boats ran aground yet again, but this counted as little more than a nuisance. Indeed, the day was marred only by the dismaying appearance of “a most disgusting looking stream” they encountered about six or eight miles after setting out. “It is about ten feet wide, red as blood, smells horrible, and tastes worse,” Sumner noted. But they quickly left the muddy stream behind and came to a large and handsome valley about twenty miles long by five miles wide. They made camp beneath a giant cottonwood tree that Sumner claimed was big enough “to furnish shade and shelter for a camp of two hundred men.” The weather was good, the river was easy, and the men had killed some ducks (and, less enticingly, caught more fish). Life was sweet.

  The valley was Brown’s Park, a hideaway nestled in the mountains and, in winter, sheltered from the worst snow and wind. Though the river itself was nearly unknown, at this early stage of the trip the canyons occasionally opened up into well-explored valleys like Brown’s Park. Because of mild winters and abundant grass, this was a good place for cattle—Sumner had passed through the previous winter and had seen “4000 head of oxen pastured in it without an ounce of hay”—and it was remote as well. That combination would prove enticing. Brown’s Park later became a favorite spot of outlaws and cattle rustlers and other entrepreneurs not much hemmed in by conscience. Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch would come to know Brown’s Park well.

  Powell’s men seemed more inclined to sprawl on the grass than to make trouble. “Everything [was] as lovely as a poet’s dream,” Sumner declared, and he painted a picture of his own vision of celestial bliss, which ran less to harps and angels than to a harem full of beckoning beauties. He lay half asleep the morning of June 5, entranced by “the sweet songs of birds, the fragrant odor of wild roses, the low, sweet rippling of the ever murmuring river at sunrise in the wilderness . . . I was just wandering into paradise; could see the dim shadow of the dark-eyed houris . . .” The fantasy was interrupted by a bellowed call to breakfast—hot coffee and fried fish. Perhaps not worth leaving paradise for, but a step up from bacon.

  The rest of the day continued almost as pleasantly, the men exploring or mapping or loafing. Powell and Dunn scrambled their way up a cliff; Oramel Howland worked on his map; and Bradley, Seneca Howland, and Hall crossed the river to survey the far side. On the way back to camp, Bradley shot a rattlesnake and tried (unsuccessfully) to shoot some trout he saw in a brook.

  The followi
ng day brought a return to work. The river was broad and sluggish, and the men were rowing directly into a strong head wind. They fought it for twenty-five miles—“no easy task,” Sumner conceded—and dragged themselves into camp dog-tired. “I feel quite weary tonight,” Bradley wrote. “Would rather have rappids than still water but think I shall be accommodated.”

  Accommodated soon, he meant, and he was right. The view downstream was unsettling. It looked, in the words of one early settler, like “a mountain drinking a river.” Bradley provided a more detailed picture. “We have now reached the cañon at the lower end of Brown’s Hole and have camped tonight at the mouth of the Cañon,” he wrote. “It looks like a rough one for the walls are very high and straight and the sides are of sand-stone much broken with seams but at the mouth nearly perpendicular; in such the worst bowlders have been found and I expect them below here.”

  Powell took a long look the next day, and, unlike Bradley, he liked what he saw. “When we return to camp, at noon, the sun shines in splendor on vermilion walls, shaded into green and gray, where the rocks are lichened over; the river fills the channel from wall to wall, and the cañon opens, like a beautiful portal, to a region of glory.”

  Then he made the mistake of reexamining the view later in the day. The sun had begun to set, and the reds and greens had given way to long, black, foreboding shadows. Now the canyon that had beckoned so enticingly only hours before appeared as “a dark portal to a region of gloom—the gateway through which we are to enter on our voyage of exploration to-morrow. What shall we find?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  DISASTER

  Melodrama came naturally to Powell, but his dread here was sincere. At the same point on the Green, Ashley, in 1825, had written just as fearfully. A businessman and a politician, Ashley was not given to flights of fancy. Nor were his mountain men. But when they left the sanctuary of Brown’s Park and approached Powell’s “dark portal to a region of gloom,” they seemed as jumpy as schoolchildren trembling at the door of a haunted house. “As we passed along between these massy walls, which in a great degree excluded from us the rays of heaven . . . I was forcibly struck with the gloom which spread over the countenances of my men,” Ashley wrote. “They seemed to anticipate (and not far distant, too) a dreadful termination of our voyage, and I must confess that I partook in some degree of what I supposed to be their feelings, for things around us had truly an awful appearance.”

  The entrance to Lodore Canyon, as Powell named it, retains its dismaying appearance to this day. “Each canyon of the Green has its own distinctive presence but none is as dramatic as Lodore,” writes Ann Zwinger, an acclaimed and notably levelheaded natural historian. “The cliffs rise two thousand feet, immediate, all the more striking because of the pale landscape from which they spring, almost without transition. The Gates of Lodore hinge inward, cruelly joined, hard rock, ominous, and when mists skulk low between the cliffs, they become an engraving by Gustave Doré for one of Dante’s lower levels of hell.” And this, mind you, from a writer far more inclined to celebrate the river than to cower before it.

  The Gates of Lodore, the entranceway to the canyon, are forbidding partly because they tower so high. Castle builders in the Middle Ages knew well that a doorway that loomed twelve or even twenty feet high would make a visitor feel timid and puny. But castle doors, even colossal ones, bear some relation to human proportions; this narrow stone gateway stands nearly half a mile high. In addition, Lodore Canyon seems foreboding partly because it is dark and shadowy. Red Canyon, just upstream, has lower walls and runs east-west, so that it is often bathed in sunlight. Lodore, hemmed in by taller cliffs and running north-south, is gloomy for all but a few hours a day.

  But it was not high cliffs and weak sunlight that played the largest part in making Ashley and Powell so fretful. Lodore is truly fearsome because it is here, in a series of roaring, seemingly interminable rapids, that the Green finally reveals its power. The rapids and falls and fast water they had seen so far, Powell and his crew now realized, amounted to no more than a warm-up routine on the river’s part, the equivalent of stretching exercises. Now the preliminaries were complete.

  Powell’s men were still novices when it came to running rapids, but they had figured out some of the basics. They knew that dark, smooth water was probably deep (and therefore safe). Small, apparently random ripples meant rocks just below the surface. A smooth, rounded mound of water usually signaled a big, barely submerged rock. Powell and the men watched eagerly for V-shaped stretches of water, wide at the top and narrowing downstream, where the river squeezed itself between nearby obstacles. Their river-running strategy at this point consisted essentially of two options—aim for one of these V-shaped “tongues” and pray, or portage.

  They knew enough to be wary, but not much more than that. Often, for example, the river pooled up quietly just above a rapid. That calm zone was safe, Powell noted, but “sometimes the water descends . . . from the broad, quiet spread above into the narrow, angry channel below, by a semicircular sag. Great care must be taken not to pass over the brink into this deceptive pit.”

  The problem with Powell’s rudimentary strategy—“If I can see a clear chute between the rocks,” he wrote, “away we go”—is that the chute rarely led all the way through a rapid. More often, it provided a glorious mini-ride that served as a shortcut to trouble, as if a magic carpet passed above a line of angry boulders only to drop its passengers into a whirlpool. And once into the heart of a rapid, all bets were off. “On the ocean, where waves are rhythmic, predictable, and usually from the same direction as the wind, there is time to anticipate and prepare . . . ,” observes Martin Litton, one of the towering figures in modern river running. “Not so in a rapid where—if you’re in really big water—things are coming at you from all directions at once.”*

  But rapids were riddles formed of water, and any tentative conclusions the men reached in one rapid washed away in the next. Often the waves did come from every direction at once, for example, but at other times they lined up in perfect order, seemingly eternal. “The water of an ocean wave merely rises and falls,” Powell noted, so that the wave form moved toward shore but the water itself bobbed and sank in place. “But here,” he noted, transfixed, “the water of the wave passes on, while the form remains.” At Hermit Rapid in the Grand Canyon, for example, the waves stand in perfect rank, the first one some seven feet tall, then the second, third, and fourth each a bit taller in turn, and the fifth tallest of all, followed by a set of waves that diminish just as uniformly. Since each wave stays in place, a boatman surfing a river wave could theoretically stay poised in the same spot forever, freeze-framed in ecstasy as if on a Grecian urn. When the Colorado is running chocolate brown, these standing waves look so much like abstract sculptures that it is hard to remember they are made of water. Touching one, it seems, would feel like patting a dolphin.

  The men had learned at the outset that it was crucial to take waves head-on rather than sideways, but how to convince the waves to wait their turn? Let yourself turn sideways even for a moment, so that the river has the full length of the boat to attack, and it can flip you before you have time to curse.

  A homemade experiment helps make the problem clear. Hold your hand out the window of a fast-moving car, palm toward your cheek, and notice that your hand slices through the wind effortlessly. Now abruptly rotate your hand so that the palm faces forward, as if you were a policeman signaling “Stop!” Suddenly the wind has something to hit, and it pummels your hand.

  Try the same experiment while standing in shallow water in a fast river. Place a hand or a canoe paddle in line with the current, and the water flows smoothly around the obstacle. But turn the paddle so that it catches the current broadside, and the force can jolt you. Now try the same experiment with the canoe itself rather than with a mere paddle. Fasten your life jacket first.

  Whether they wanted to or not, Powell and his men would become students of rapids. Lesson one was that rapid
s formed wherever the channel shrank in size. That happened where colossal chunks of rock broke off a cliff side and tumbled into the river or where giant loads of rocks and boulders swept down a side canyon and finally came to rest in the main channel. Suddenly squeezed into a small space but still retaining all its power, the pent-up river was transformed and newly dangerous, a tornado in a box.

  All the trouble in rapids stems from one simple fact—unlike a wad of cotton, for instance, water cannot be compressed. Arnold Schwarzenegger could squeeze a water balloon until he was red-faced and gasping, and although he could change the balloon’s shape—it might bulge here instead of there—he could not shrink its overall volume. Now think of a river. It flows at the same steady rate whether it is traveling through a broad valley or a skinny bottleneck. Suppose that rate is, say, one thousand cubic feet per second. All that means is that if someone could divert the river into a giant bathtub, it would fill a one-thousand-cubic-foot tub every second. But there is a tricky point. Whether the river channel is broad and deep or narrow and shallow, the river would fill the same one thousand-cubic-foot bathtub in a second. How can that be?

  Since water cannot squeeze in on itself, the only possibility is that the river speeds up whenever the channel contracts. This is the discovery that every delighted five-year-old makes when he learns to put his thumb partway across the end of a hose and spray his little brother. More to the point, it is the reason a placid, gently flowing, almost lakelike river transforms itself into a chaotic, churning nightmare when it squeezes through a narrow, rock-choked channel.