Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Drenched every day and cold and bone-weary and three men nearly drowned, and the trip just begun. Disaster Falls changed everything. A few days before, life had seemed almost carefree. Then, when one-third of the supplies vanished in an instant, the trip that Powell had envisioned as a contribution to science threatened to become a test of survival instead. Would the food last? Would the rapids worsen? Could the boats hold up? They had lost one boat already. The loss of another would be a calamity, for two boats could not possibly carry ten men. Already it was impossible to deny that the river was gaining power, and so far they had seen only the Green. What would happen downstream when the Green and the Grand merged and Powell and his men at last confronted the full might of the Colorado?

  They had been under way two weeks.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SHILOH

  The success of the expedition—the survival of the expedition—would depend on Powell’s skills as a leader and his ability to persevere in the face of calamity. Powell had been tested before. For the men of his generation, the Civil War was the great, bloody swath that cut their lives in two. “War was a proving ground,” notes Stacy Allen, the historian at Shiloh National Military Park, “and in that first year and a half, you saw some meteoric rises and you saw some disappearances.” In May 1861, Powell had entered the army as a private. When he left, in January 1865, he was a major and a changed man—wounded, perpetually in pain but burning with ambition, fond of command, and confident that he could keep his head in the worst circumstances that man or fate could throw his way.

  Like many of his contemporaries, Powell had known responsibility from an early age. His father, Joseph Powell, was a halfhearted farmer and a dedicated preacher. Nearly always on the road, Joseph left the great bulk of the farmwork to his oldest son. By the age of twelve, John Wesley, known to the family as Wes, had charge of clearing and planting the family’s sixty acres and then hauling the crops to market and selling them. That left little time for formal schooling. Though he would eventually spend part of a year at Oberlin College, Powell’s education was always a patchwork affair.

  Many nineteenth-century farm boys had similar backgrounds. But in two respects, Wes Powell stood apart from most of his peers. He had grown up in a fiercely abolitionist household at a time when few whites gave more than a passing thought to slavery. (Part of Oberlin’s appeal was its strong antislavery stance.) And he was plagued by an itch, compounded of intellectual restlessness and wanderlust, that seemed not to afflict many others. “People in those days mostly stuck close to home,” the historian Bruce Catton observed. “They had to, because it was so hard to move about . . . A young man stayed at home, and his fatherland was what he could see from his bedroom window, along with the few square miles he might tramp about in the area near his home. Everything else he took on faith.”

  Powell, the least complacent of men, never took much on faith. As we have seen, he had set out to explore the great rivers of the nation’s heartland, on his own, as soon as he could free himself from the family farm. Then, when war came, Powell found that there was more to him than he could have known. He was familiar with hard work and long days, but he did not know command, did not know what it was to make life-and-death decisions, did not know if he could keep his head when death loomed.

  In later years, a geologist colleague of Powell’s would summarize the lessons that wartime service had taught his old friend. Powell had learned the arts of “reaching prompt decision, giving authoritative command, delegating work to others, and securing loyal obedience from his subordinates,” William M. Davis noted. Just as important, he had learned to act quickly even when hampered by incomplete information. “It does not follow that the decisions reached were always the wisest possible,” Davis noted, “still they were the best available, and action had to be taken on them without hesitating deliberation.”

  In ways both obvious and subtle, the war would stay with Powell for the rest of his life. His stump of an arm tortured him without letup, and, though he grew to detest war, the sights and sounds of battle would ever after come unbidden to his mind. Even when he discussed subjects as far removed from the battlefield as geology, Powell favored warlike imagery. Snow and rain were “missiles” in the “storm of war,” and crumbling rocks broken down by that attack “fled to the sea” like panicky soldiers running from the front lines. Geology properly understood revealed a tale as violent as the Iliad, “a history of the war of the elements.” Similarly, the buttes that marked Western landscapes looked to Powell “as if a thousand battles had been fought on the plains below,” with warriors of titanic size in deadly combat, “and on every field the giant heroes had built a monument.”

  Even late in his life, when Powell turned to philosophy, the squalid years in the trenches were never far away. A discussion on the nature of truth and falsehood might begin with abstractions but would quickly return to solid ground and the mystery of how it could be that a soldier struck by a splinter of wood “interprets it as a fragment of shell, has the illusion of being wounded, and feels the pain and expresses all the agony which a real wound may actually produce.”

  Powell felt a lifelong bond with those who had seen and endured what he had. When he met a Mississippi congressman, C. E. Hooker, who had lost an arm fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Vicksburg, Powell made a pact with his new friend and wartime enemy. Powell had lost his right arm, Hooker his left. Whenever either of the two bought a new pair of gloves, Powell proposed, he should send his friend the extra, useless glove. For thirty years, the two men kept to their bargain, shipping spare gloves back and forth.

  In the nineteenth century, Americans saw “duty” and “honor” and “courage” as the highest values and fervently believed that war was a test of manhood. A good soldier was a good man, and a dazed and overwhelmed one a coward and a failure. Combat was a diagnostic test that revealed what you were made of. Powell passed the test, in the world’s eyes and in his own. Small wonder that, when the war finally ended, he found himself in search of another outsized challenge.

  Powell’s first taste of battle came at a sleepy hamlet called Shiloh, in western Tennessee and just north of the Mississippi border. Shiloh would be the site of one of the Civil War’s first major battles. At the war’s outset, almost no one had a clue about what lay ahead. Leander Stillwell, a teenage soldier from Illinois, wrote that “what I didn’t know about war, at that stage of the proceedings, was broad and comprehensive, and covered the whole field.” He might have been speaking for Americans everywhere, on both sides.

  Americans who came of age at the time of the Civil War had no vivid picture of war. The War of 1812 was a fading memory, notable mainly for having inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The Mexican War, though more recent, had been a far-off skirmish against an outmanned foe. In 1861, young men in both the North and the South greeted the news of war with jubilation. Swept up in a vague but romantic vision of the brief, glorious struggle just ahead, they volunteered in droves. “They were convinced that they were committed to something which was larger and grander than life itself, perhaps even a kind of purification, a release from the pettiness of things,” a historian wrote of English recruits in World War I, and the description applies equally well to Americans in 1861. The young soldiers marched off to war to the cheers of happy crowds, the music of brass bands, and the waves of pretty girls in their best dresses.

  At Shiloh, 110,000 soldiers met in battle. Three out of four had never heard a gun fired in anger. “Do you think any of these men knew what they were getting into?” Stacy Allen, the Shiloh historian, angrily demands. “They’d never seen violence of this magnitude before—no one had. These were a deeply religious people. The only thing they could approximate this with was Armaggedon. It just seemed to them like the whole world had exploded, and they were caught up in the fire.”

  Shiloh was “the most confused battle of the Civil War,” in the judgment of the military historian S.L.A. Marshall. It was “
just a disorganized, murderous fistfight, a hundred thousand men slamming away at each other,” the historian Shelby Foote observed. “The generals didn’t know their jobs, the soldiers didn’t know their jobs. It was just pure determination to stand and fight and not retreat.”

  In 1862, Shiloh was a backwater, a remote spot a long way from Memphis and a longer way still from Nashville, the nearest cities of any size. The name comes from the long-vanished Shiloh Meeting House, a whitewashed square about thirty or forty feet on a side, with cracks large enough to take a man’s hand and places for windows but no glass. The name, from the Hebrew, is traditionally translated as “Place of Peace.”

  War came to this lonesome spot because it was a stopping-off point for the Union army. Shiloh was also called Pittsburg Landing, after a spot on the western bank of the Tennessee River where steamboats could deliver men and supplies. Major General Ulysses S. Grant, fresh off a victory at Fort Donelson near Tennessee’s northern border, intended to drive even deeper into Southern territory. The plan was for Grant’s 50,000 men and Major General Don Carlos Buell’s 35,000 to join forces at Pittsburg Landing, and then to march on Corinth, Mississippi, twenty-two miles farther south.

  Corinth was a target because it was a railroad junction, the crossing point of a north-south rail line and a vital east-west one. The Memphis & Charleston Railroad, which meandered more or less horizontally across much of the Confederacy, was known as “the vertebrae of the South.” The Union aimed to smash it at Corinth, as if it were killing a snake with a shovel.

  Grant had been assembling troops at Pittsburg Landing since mid-March while waiting impatiently for Buell, on his way from Nashville. Anticipating Grant’s move, the Confederacy had massed 44,000 soldiers in and around Corinth. Their plan was not to sit and wait to be attacked, but to march on Pittsburg Landing and attack Grant before Buell arrived to reinforce him. Grant, supremely confident, brushed off any talk of a surprise attack.

  He had established temporary headquarters in a borrowed town house at Savannah, Tennessee, nine miles downstream from his troops at Pittsburg Landing. (This stretch of the Tennessee River flows from south to north. Grant’s headquarters were north of Shiloh and on the opposite side of the river.) Union forces had occupied the small town. One newcomer to town was Emma Powell, who had married Powell four months before, and had taken up temporary residence in Savannah in order to be near him. Early in the war especially, it was not uncommon for wives to accompany their husbands in this way. Grant and Sherman, among others, sometimes went so far as to bring their children to war with them.

  The Southern plan was to march all day on April 3 and to attack Pittsburg Landing on April 4. Even in good weather, novice soldiers had little chance of covering the twenty miles from Corinth in a day. But rain poured down, and horses and cannons sank in the mud, and entire divisions wandered off, lost. It was late afternoon on April 5, too late to attack, before the Confederates were in position.

  By then, it was unclear whether a Confederate attack would be a surprise or an enormous blunder. The Southern commanders, and in particular General Pierre G. T. Beauregard, “the Napoleon of the South,” made an urgent argument for canceling the attack. The element of surprise was gone, Beauregard insisted. Confederate soldiers, worried that the rain had wet their powder and rendered their weapons useless, had fired off test shots that might have given the game away. Beyond that, the delay had provided Buell two extra days to join Grant. In addition, Grant’s men were surely dug in behind earthworks by this time.

  Albert Sidney Johnston, the supreme Confederate commander in the West, insisted on going ahead with the attack regardless. “I would fight them if they were a million,” he proclaimed. His troops seemed just as eager. Perhaps they had been inspired by Johnston’s rousing call to “offer battle to the invaders of your country” and “march to a decisive victory over the agrarian mercenaries sent to subjugate you and to despoil you of your liberties, your property, and your honor. Remember the precious stake involved; remember the dependence of your mothers, your wives, your sisters, and your children, on the result; remember the fair, broad, abounding land, and the happy homes that would be desolated by your defeat.”

  Grant had no idea that the Confederate army had spent the night only a mile from the nearest Union troops. It was not true, as the newspapers later reported, that Northern soldiers were bayoneted in their tents as they slept, but they had been badly surprised. At dawn on April 6, 1862, a lazy Sunday morning, many Union soldiers were just rousing themselves. Bored with waiting, or sick—dysentery was so common that the men had nicknamed it “the Tennessee two-step”—they were scarcely poised for battle. Camp was filled with the usual morning sounds of bacon sizzling in skillets and rifle butts grinding coffee beans into powder (each man ground his own beans because no supplier could be trusted to supply unadulterated coffee). Buell’s troops had, in fact, not yet been deployed.

  Suddenly a high-pitched wail pierced the morning quiet as thousands of Confederate soldiers in full rebel yell rushed from the woods. “My God,” cried General William T. Sherman, “we are attacked.” Grant, whose breakfast in Savannah was interrupted by the roar of cannons, hurried to the sounds of fighting.

  Powell, in the meantime, was seething with frustration. He was captain of an artillery battery, in charge of six cannons and about 110 men, along with roughly 100 horses that were needed to pull the guns. (The horses were considered more valuable than the men, because without them the guns were stuck in place and vulnerable to capture. It was standard practice for each side to train its weapons on the enemy’s horses.) Powell was “unassigned.” He had, in other words, arrived at Pittsburg Landing so recently that he had not yet been assigned to a particular division. Early on the morning of April 6, 1862, Powell recalled later, he was “awakened by the rattle of musketry and the roar of artillery,” and hurried to order the men of Battery F, Second Illinois Light Artillery to prepare for action. He paced about, waiting for orders. None came.

  Powell’s men, standing by their guns, gulped down a few bites of breakfast. Still no orders came. The sounds of battle grew louder. Wounded men, dragging themselves along or carried by their companions, moved slowly past Powell and away from the fighting. Terrified soldiers fleeing the front lines ran by as fast as they could move. Powell continued to fret. Finally, fearful that in the confusion of battle he might never receive orders, Powell moved forward on his own initiative. It was, he wrote later, about eight in the morning. With characteristic boldness and impetuosity—and utterly contrary to regulations—Powell set out to find a place to pitch in, as if the biggest battle America had ever seen were a snowball fight between rival schoolboys.*

  Shiloh was slaughter on an industrial scale. What the factory was to the lone craftsman in his cottage, the Civil War battlefield was to the village green at Lexington. The cannonball, that familiar battlefield icon, was one of the least horrifying projectiles flying around a Civil War battlefield. Cannons also fired canister, in effect a large tin can filled with some two dozen golfball-sized lumps of iron. The can itself would disintegrate in midair, sending a deadly metal hail in all directions as if from a colossal sawed-off shotgun. A single cannon firing a single canister could destroy everything within a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot space at a range of fifty yards. Trees and bushes, not to mention humans, were uprooted and ripped apart as though a tornado had touched down. “There is some places,” a dazed soldier wrote at Shiloh, “that it Looks as if a mouse could not get threw alive.”

  In the sense that a guillotine is a humane killing machine, a modern steel-jacketed bullet is humane. It travels through the air so quickly that it may be hot enough to cauterize the wound it makes. It may pass through the body entirely and is more likely to clip a bone neatly than to mangle it. It wounds cleanly and kills efficiently. Death on a Civil War battlefield was an uglier affair.

  By far the greatest number of wounds—94 percent—were inflicted by the innocuous-looking minié ball. Cone-shap
ed (though confusingly called a “ball”), a minié ball was a rifle bullet made of soft lead and weighing about an ounce. It was, says Shiloh’s Stacy Allen, “a beautiful, inhumane piece of killing machinery. The minute that piece of soft lead hits anything harder than it is—and your bones are harder—it’s going to mushroom to the size of your fist as it plows along. When it hits flesh and blood, it does amazing things. It rips muscles to shreds, it destroys arteries and veins, and if it hits bone, it shatters and pulverizes it. You might be hit by shattered bits of bone or teeth from the man standing next to you. And anything that soft lead engages as it enters a human body—dirt, filthy bits of clothing, wood, metal—it’s going to carry with it right into the wound, so we’re talking instantaneous infection.”

  The minié ball was shot from a rifle. Before the Civil War, Americans had fought with smooth-bore muskets, which were essentially powerful peashooters that sent a round ball rattling and ricocheting its way down the barrel and then wobbling through the air like a knuckleball. Muskets were notoriously inaccurate, with a deadly range of no more than eighty yards. A man with a musket standing a few hundred yards away, General Grant once observed, “might fire at you all day without you finding it out.”

  Rifles were not new—Daniel Boone and other sharpshooters had used them—but they had been uncommon until the Civil War, when “rifled” barrels could finally be mass produced. The word refers to a long, shallow groove that spirals along the barrel’s inside surface like a stripe on a barber pole. The groove imparted spin to the minié ball as it shot through the barrel, so that it cut through the air and held its line: not a knuckleball but a fastball.