Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Like the five-year-old with a hose, Powell understood perfectly well that a narrow channel meant fast, tumultuous water. The difference is that Powell was on the receiving end of the waterpower, like a ladybug caught in a hose’s blast.

  The problem for Powell and his crew of novices was that their experience in other domains, such as driving wagons, provided little guidance in river running. In similar fashion, beginners today often run into trouble because they assume that a boat on a river will behave like a car on a highway. But in crucial ways, rivers and highways are opposites.

  On man-made roads, traffic speeds up on the straightest, broadest stretches and slows down where the road suddenly shrinks from six lanes to two. With rivers, as we have seen, the opposite applies. The more a river narrows, the faster it flows. To picture the plight of novices in white water, imagine a highway where drivers have only the most rudimentary control of their car’s steering wheel, gas pedal, and brakes. Suppose, further, that each car’s speed changes automatically and inevitably, depending on the road conditions. Picture, in particular, that the worse the road—the more suddenly it squeezes itself into a single lane with a cliff on one side and a sheer drop on the other—the faster each car hurtles along. On such a diabolical highway, we might begin to appreciate the special, unnerving qualities of white water.

  In fact, it is worse than that. The speed of the current is not the greatest hazard in a rapid. Waves in a rapid ricochet off rocks and cliffs and collide with one another; water rushes over rocks and dives down into holes and moves upstream to fill in “empty” spaces behind obstacles. The problem is not that the current is moving so fast but that it is flowing in so many different directions at so many different speeds, downstream and upstream and even straight down toward the bottom of the river. Think of our diabolical highway again, and this time throw in not only a bottleneck but a hairpin curve and some potholes and patches of ice and broken-down cars abandoned in the middle of the road. If this highway behaved like a river, it would not only speed up as it narrowed but would form itself into a complex series of mini-roads, some heading straight into a ditch, others speeding toward junked cars or ice slicks or—perhaps—safety.

  The rocks in the river, it should be noted, provide a double dose of danger. They make trouble, first of all, by choking the channel and providing the structures that create waves and falls and boat-sucking holes. But even in their passive role, as obstacles rather than as creators of chaos, rocks can be formidable. The risk, as Powell’s men had already found, is in getting hung up sideways against a boulder, pinned against an unyielding obstacle by the concentrated force of a surging river. Here highway analogies fall short. Think instead of a python’s prey, immobile in the giant snake’s relentless coils, struggling fiercely but futilely against a vastly stronger opponent.

  • • •

  On June 7, Powell and some of the men climbed the cliffs to survey the new canyon. It was not an easy climb, for the rocks were split with dark, threatening fissures. The cliff top, which proved to be 2,085 feet above the river, provided a river view of some six or seven miles. From this vantage point, the Green looked small and harmless, almost inviting. On returning to the river, the men quickly found that rapids that looked easy from half a mile above were not so easy when seen from a bucking, tossing rowboat. Andy Hall, undaunted, dredged up from his memory a bit of English verse by Robert Southey about a waterfall’s “Rising and leaping, / Sinking and creeping, / Swelling and sweeping,” and so on. The poem, which continued on in singsong fashion for another hundred-plus lines, was called “The Cataract of Lodore,” and Hall proposed the name Lodore for the canyon they were passing through. Sumner was not pleased—“the idea of diving into musty trash to find names for new discoveries on a new continent is un-American, to say the least,” he grumbled—but Powell liked the name, and Lodore it is to this day.

  On the following day, no one was reciting poetry. It brought, Sumner wrote, “as hard a day’s work as I ever wish to see,” and it was as dangerous as it was difficult. The morning alone saw a dozen bad rapids to line and portage, each one seemingly worse than the ones before. The scenery, for those in the mood for sightseeing, was spectacular. The men stopped for lunch at the foot of a perpendicular, rose-colored wall some fifteen hundred feet high. At one o’clock, they started up again.

  In half a mile, they came to a maelstrom that earned Bradley’s customary description as “the wildest rapid yet seen.” This time Sumner echoed him. They had reached “a terrible rapid,” he wrote, a place “where we could see nothing but spray and foam.” The lead boat, the Emma Dean, pulled safely to shore above the rapid.

  So did the Maid of the Cañon. Powell began climbing the rocks along the shore to size up their predicament. Then he heard a shout—the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman, in the No Name, were speeding down the river in midstream, out of control and headed for the rapid. In the meantime, where was the Sister? Unable to help the No Name, Powell ran back upstream to try to warn the Sister to land. Racing along the rocks, shouting, waving, he saw nothing. Then, rounding a bend and pulling hard to shore and safety, there she was. Powell turned around yet again, chasing desperately back downstream in search of the No Name.

  Where was she? The first part of the rapid was a drop of ten or twelve feet, which was bad but perhaps manageable, and then came a steep, boulder-strewn stretch of forty or fifty feet, beaten into foam and churned by whirlpools. Powell scrambled over the rocks and finally caught sight of the No Name, straining to pull toward shore. Suddenly she hit a rock, tipped alarmingly, and filled with water. The men lost their oars. Helpless, the three men sat while the boat raced sideways several yards, crashed into another rock, and broke in two. The three crew members—none of them in life jackets—struggled frantically toward the broken boat and grabbed on to a chunk of its bow in the surging waters. Down they drifted a few hundred yards into another rapid, this one, too, filled with huge boulders. Twice the men lost their grip on the fractured bow and sank into the water; twice they managed to struggle back again.

  At one point, the river carried them near a sandbar, almost a mini-island, in midstream. Oramel Howland made a leap, found himself momentarily protected from the current by a rock, and dragged himself ashore. Frank Goodman tried the same move but vanished into the river. One hundred feet downstream, Seneca Howland leaped and pulled himself onto the same sandbar.

  Goodman reappeared a few seconds later, clinging to a barrel-sized rock in the middle of the torrent, gagging on river water, and calling for help. Oramel Howland found a branch that had washed up onto the sandbar. Wading into the river as near Goodman as he dared, he extended the branch toward him. Goodman let go of his rock, dove for the branch, and Howland pulled him to safety. “And now the three men are on an island,” Powell wrote, “with a swift, dangerous river on either side, and a fall below.”

  Worse yet, the river was rising. “Our position on the bar soon began to look serious,” noted Oramel Howland, a hard man to rattle. It fell to Sumner to rescue Howland and his fellow castaways. The men unloaded the Emma Dean, so that Sumner would be able to maneuver her more easily, and then lined her past the upper rapid. Then it was up to Sumner. He managed to cut a diagonal path to the island. “Right skillfully he plies the oars,” Powell wrote, “and a few strokes set him on the island at the proper point.” Now the trick would be to get back across a river that was running “with the speed of a racehorse” while carrying three extra passengers and without getting swept into the rapid.

  Sumner and the other men dragged the boat upstream and then waded out with it as far as they could into the river. Three of them clambered aboard while the fourth stood perched on a rock, holding Emma ready. Then he pushed the boat’s nose into the current and flung himself aboard. Fearful that a false stroke meant “certain destruction,” Sumner instructed his passengers to lie flat on the bottom of the boat while he alone manned the oars. At one point, he struck a rock and the boat tipped up at a forty-f
ive-degree angle, but it slid safely off. Pulled downstream by the current, Sumner and his three beat-up passengers made it back to shore a scant twenty-five yards above a madhouse of waves and foam. “We are as glad to shake hands with them,” Powell wrote, “as though they had been on a voyage around the world, and wrecked on a distant coast.”

  It had nearly been a calamity. Sumner was rarely one to exaggerate. (He disposed of his role in the rescue in a single sentence, in the third-person voice he used whenever he had pulled off anything especially difficult. “The trapper,” he wrote, “crossed over and brought them safely to shore on the east side.”) But not even he could deny the narrowness of the three men’s escape. Seneca Howland, Oramel’s nearly silent younger brother, had been the last to leap to the safety of the sandbar from the wreckage the men had ridden through the waves. “Had he stayed aboard another second,” Sumner wrote, “we would have lost as good and true a man as can be found in any place.”

  In another thirty feet, Sumner continued, “nothing could have saved them, as the river was turned into a perfect hell of waters that nothing could enter and live.” Certainly not the No Name. “The boat drifted into it and was instantly smashed to pieces,” Sumner wrote. “In half a second there was nothing but a dense foam, with a cloud of spray above it, to mark the spot.”

  After the rescue came the recriminations. What had gone wrong? First of all, the boatmen of the No Name had failed to allow for the speed and power of the current. On the first day of the trip, by this point almost an ancient memory, Hall and Hawkins had tried pulling to shore but started too late and missed the campsite by four hundred yards. It had been an embarrassing but harmless mistake, as if a skier on a slope too difficult for him had tried to pull to the side to stop but had badly overshot his destination. Now the Howlands and Goodman had made the same mistake, this time with a hungry rapid waiting to gnaw their bones.

  On a big river, things can go bad in a hurry; to react, rather than to anticipate, is almost always to respond too late. And the river was wild as well as swift. The rapids had come in such quick succession, Oramel Howland wrote, that there was no time to bail. At precisely the moment that quick responses were vital, the No Name had “so much water aboard,” Howland recalled, “as to make her nearly or quite unmanageable.” Howland would have been in grave difficulty even without a wave or two in his boat. With that extra weight, he had no chance. For a driver skidding across our demonic highway, it would be as if the power steering chose that moment to quit working.

  But why was the No Name caught by surprise? Powell’s plan, after all, called for him to precede the slower boats and signal them about what lay ahead. This was a touchy subject at the time, and it has stayed that way. For nearly a century, Powell partisans and critics have fought over those signals. Were they sent? Were they seen? We have several descriptions of the first moments after the Emma Dean had pulled to shore to scout the new rapid. “I walk along the bank to examine the ground,” Powell wrote, “leaving one of my men with a flag to guide the other boats to the landing-place.” Sumner, the lead boatman in the Emma Dean, provided a similar description. “The scouting boat came to a place where we . . . pulled ashore on the east side and the freight boats [were] instantly signaled to land with us.”

  Oramel Howland, in the No Name, was the target of those signals. Howland’s account is not quite clear, although he seems to have seen some kind of signal. “About one o’clock,” he wrote, “the signal boat signaled at the foot of a very bad rapid to go ashore; boats nearly full of water—two were made fast, but owing to not understanding the signal, the crew of the No Name failed very effectually, owing in the main, to having so much water aboard as to make her nearly or quite unmanageable; otherwise, the mistake was seen by us in time to save her.”

  Later, though, Sumner would provide a far different account. “As soon as Howland got out of the boat after the rescue Major Powell angrily demanded of him why he did not land,” he wrote. “Howland told him he saw no signals to do anything, and could not see the other boats that had landed until he was drawn into the rapid, when it was too late. I asked Hawkins and Bradley in charge of the other boats if they saw signals to land, and they said no signals were given, but as they saw me turn in they suspected something wrong and followed suit at once.”

  It may be that these accounts can be reconciled. Powell may indeed have given a signal to land, and Howland, fighting for his life on the river, may have missed or misunderstood it. The story of the angry confrontation is more troubling. Powell and his men were a long way from help and a longer way still from their destination. Bad blood between leader and crew boded ill.

  In the meantime, there were more pressing problems to confront. No one had drowned, but the No Name was gone. The men climbed along the shore to search for the wreckage. Half a mile downstream, they spotted what remained of the boat in the middle of the river, wedged into some rocks. There was nothing but a few battered boards and the splintered stern bulkhead. Powell decided that no one should risk his life to see if it contained anything worth salvaging.

  Gone was about a ton of cargo, one-third of the total—great stores of food, three rifles and a revolver, ammunition, all Oramel Howland’s maps, half the mess kit, and many of the scientific instruments. The Howland brothers and Goodman lost all their gear, their bedding, and all their clothes except the ones on their backs. (That didn’t leave much. Because clothing dragged a swimmer down, the men had taken to running the river clad in only their underwear.)

  Powell was despondent. As a precaution against accidents like this one, he had made sure that the three freight boats all carried the same cargo. But somehow all three barometers had been placed in the No Name. The fundamental purpose of the entire expedition, in Powell’s eyes, was to provide a scientific description of the territory they were passing through. The barometers were crucial to that work, and now they were gone.

  The barometers had a practical role fully as important as their role in mapmaking. Although they could not reveal how much farther the men had to go, the barometers did show the river’s altitude. By comparing that figure with the known elevation at their downstream destination, the men could know how much farther the river had to fall. That was hardly a full picture, for there was no way of knowing whether the drop was sudden or gradual, but it was better than nothing. A relatively flat river, even if it stretched a long way, was a far more docile beast than a sharply dropping (and therefore rapid-infested) river. Without barometers, no one could know if they had already survived the worst or if their troubles so far only hinted at the ordeal still to come.

  Powell spent a sleepless night. The barometers had been in the No Name’s stern bulkhead, which the men had seen caught on the rocks in mid-river. Was there a chance that the fragile glass tubes were still in the wreckage? Could they possibly have survived the smashup? “But, then,” Powell asked himself miserably, “how to reach them! The river is rising. Will they be there to-morrow?” Perhaps it would be better, he thought, to abort the trip and hike to Salt Lake City, where he could order new barometers from New York City.

  The men were scarcely cheerier. “We are rather low spirrited tonight,” Bradley acknowledged, “for we must camp right at the head of a roaring rapid more than a mile in length and in which we have already lost one of our boats and nearly lost three of our number.”

  Powell later named the rapid Disaster Falls.

  Everyone was up at sunrise the next day, June 9. The men began the weary work of unloading the remaining boats and hauling the cargo up and over the rocks along the river’s edge. Then it was time for more lining. In the meantime, Powell set out to examine the wreckage of the No Name. As he had feared, the river had dislodged it during the night. As he had not dared hope, it had drifted only another fifty or sixty feet downstream and had run aground on a sandbar. In the wreck’s new position, Powell decided, it might be reachable.

  Sumner and Andy Hall volunteered to try. (Powell gave the credit, mista
kenly, to Sumner and Dunn. The biggest of big-picture thinkers, Powell was not much for dates and other details. In his published journal, for example, he inadvertently put the crew of the Maid of the Cañon in the Kitty Clyde’s Sister and vice versa. This mistake is worth noting, though, because we will want to keep an eye on Powell’s dealings with Dunn. At this juncture, Powell evidently thought well enough of Dunn to praise him even where no praise was due.)

  Sumner and Hall made it to the No Name’s remains more or less unscathed. “Away they went and got to it safely, after a few thumps on the rocks,” Sumner reported with his customary third-person brevity. (Bradley was a bit more effusive. The two boatmen, he noted admiringly, had overcome “great risk.”) They found all three barometers, unbroken, as well as some spare barometer tubes, two thermometers, one pair of old boots, some sole leather, and an untapped ten-gallon cask of whiskey that Oramel Howland had smuggled aboard at Green River Station. Everything else had vanished.

  Then came the problem of getting back to shore. It took “an hour’s floundering” and several dashes through “pretty rough passes,” Sumner recalled, but they made it back to their colleagues’ eager welcome. “The Professor was so much pleased about the recovery of the barometers,” said Sumner, “that he looked as happy as a young girl with her first beau.”

  The men were happy, too. They had all watched Sumner and Hall whooping in glee in mid-river as they unpacked the No Name’s treasures, but no one could see what the two had found. Powell had been delighted by the one-for-all-and-all-for-one good fellowship. “The boys set up a shout, and I join them,” he wrote, “pleased that they should be as glad to save the instruments as myself.”

  He soon learned about the whiskey keg, “which is what the men were shouting about.” A good leader is adaptable, though, and on this night, at least, no one could accuse Powell of being a martinet. “They had taken it aboard, unknown to me,” Powell admitted, “and now I am glad they did, for they think it will do them good, as they are drenched every day by the melting snow, which runs down from the summits of the Rocky Mountains.”