Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Brisbin’s promise was echoed by writers of similar tracts. Some, like Brisbin, hoped to profit primarily from the sale of the books and pamphlets. Others—railroad companies, most notably—had land they wanted to sell. Still others were boosters of particular towns, counties and states.

  The sales pitch worked. Investors lavished money on the cattle business, filling the northern plains with livestock and causing cities to emerge where mere rail stops had existed before. Cheyenne, the capital of Wyoming Territory, became the San Francisco of the cattle rush. “Sixteenth Street is a young Wall Street,” a Wyoming editor remarked. “Millions are talked of as lightly as nickels, and all kinds of people are dabbling in steers.” Speculation became abstracted from the cattle themselves, and developed a dynamic all its own. “Large transactions are made every day in which the buyer does not see a hoof of his purchase, and very likely does not use more than one half of the purchase money in the trade before he has sold and made an enormous margin in the deal.” People quite ignorant of cattle and their habits jumped into the speculation with both feet. Lawyers were oddly susceptible, and apparently successful, the editor said. “A Cheyenne man who don’t pretend to know a maverick from a mandamus has made a neat little margin of $15,000 this summer in small transactions and hasn’t seen a cow yet that he has bought and sold.”

  THE BOOM LASTED UNTIL THE MID-1880S. AND THEN THE boosters, the investors, the ranchers and the cowboys discovered something crucial about the northern plains. The weather there could vary dramatically from year to year. The Indians might have told them this, had the Indians been asked. Some summers were drier than others; some winters colder. In the lifetime of an elderly Sioux, drought had stricken the plains several times, searing the grass and causing buffalo numbers to plunge. The Indians recalled these as hungry times. When a cold winter followed a dry summer, they suffered even more.

  The cattlemen learned the lesson in the punishing winter of 1886–1887. The massive die-off that terrible season cured tyros like Theodore Roosevelt of the notion that they might become cattle barons almost overnight. With much of his inheritance having floated down the Little Missouri on the ghoulish tide of frozen flesh, Roosevelt lacked the wherewithal to replenish his ranches. He refocused his energy on his first ambition, politics.

  Those who stayed in the cattle business retrenched and built a new industry on sturdier foundations. It wasn’t just the weather that produced the winter’s slaughter; it was the overstocking of the range. Most of the ranchers on the northern plains owned little of the land their cattle grazed on. The land was in the public domain, with the grass free for the taking by whoever got there first. Existing ranchers used strong-arm tactics to keep newcomers from encroaching on what they considered their territory. After Roosevelt had bought his ranch, he received a visit from a squad of gunslingers in the employ of one of his neighbors, a French aristocrat named the Marquis de Morès, who was projecting a cattle empire of his own. Roosevelt was away at the time, hunting bears in the Rockies, but the leader of the gunmen, a rough character named Paddock, left a message. Roosevelt could purchase grazing rights in the area from the marquis, or he could get out.

  Roosevelt, with confidence boosted by having bagged his grizzly, returned Paddock’s call. Armed with pistol and rifle, he demanded to know what Paddock meant by his message. Paddock—and the marquis—evidently had thought that the greenhorn from the East could be easily intimidated. When Roosevelt demonstrated that he wouldn’t go without a fight, Paddock explained that there had been a misunderstanding. Nothing more was said about Roosevelt’s paying de Morès for the right to graze on public land.

  Roosevelt’s refusal to back down was a personal triumph, but it contributed to the public problem: too many cattle for the range to support. The cattle were already overgrazing the range before the bad winter hit. Roosevelt himself had helped organize an association of ranchers on the Little Missouri as a first step toward dealing with the issue. Similar groups gathered elsewhere; the Wyoming Stock Growers’ Association was ceded control of the range by the Wyoming territorial legislature. But the cattle population on the range continued to grow. A first symptom of distress was falling prices for cattle. A second, much sharper, was the die-off of 1886–1887, which would have been less severe had the range and the cattle been in better shape before the blizzards came.

  The winter accomplished what the cattlemen couldn’t accomplish on their own. It convinced them they couldn’t rely so heavily on public lands in running their operations. Of their own volition they limited the size of their herds; they purchased land on which to grow hay for winter fodder; they fenced their land to keep others’ cattle out; they rotated their herds among fenced fields to let the range recover. They drilled wells to ensure a water supply. They imported Durhams and other breeds that, although less hardy than the longhorns, produced better beef.

  In sum, in a shift that mirrored the transformation of the mining industry, they moved from the model in which a person with few resources could enter the cattle business and thrive to one that required major investments. The corporatization of the cattle business, like the corporatization of mining, squeezed out most individual entrepreneurs.

  And it left the cowboy in the dust. Cowboys had always been hired hands. But they had had a great deal of freedom, and during much of the year they had plenty of leisure. Now they became industrial laborers, distinguishable from factory minions chiefly by working outdoors. “Cowboys don’t have as soft a time as they did eight or ten years ago,” one who experienced the transition remarked. “I remember when we sat around the fire the winter through and didn’t do a lick of work for five or six months of the year, except to chop a little wood to build a fire to keep warm by. Now we go on the general roundup, then the calf roundup, then comes haying—something that the old-time cowboy never dreamed of—then the beef roundup and the fall calf roundup, and gathering bulls and weak cows, and after all this, a winter of feeding hay. I tell you times have changed.”

  44

  INTO THE GREAT UNKNOWN

  TIMES WERE CHANGING ALL ACROSS THE WEST. TERRITORIES settled earlier were filling up and becoming states. California (1850) had been followed by Oregon (1859), Kansas (1861), Nevada (1864), Nebraska (1867) and Colorado (1876). Utah, where the armed conflict that had loomed in 1857 fizzled without a shot being fired, would have been granted statehood if not for the Mormons’ polygamy. Regions skirted by the early settlers as too remote or inhospitable yielded to exploration, typically sponsored by the federal government. The Lewis and Clark expedition of the nineteenth century’s first decade had its post–Civil War counterparts in journeys of discovery led by John Wesley Powell and Ferdinand Hayden.

  Powell tackled the great mystery of Western geography, a mystery that had its origins in the very first organized exploration of the West, by Coronado in the 1540s. Since Coronado’s lieutenant García López de Cárdenas had stumbled upon the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, almost nothing in detail and little enough in outline had been confirmed about the canyon, the river or the broad plateau the river bisected. By the middle of the nineteenth century, explorers and cartographers had surmised that the Grand River of Colorado and the Green River of Wyoming were upper branches of the river that ran through the canyon, and from the canyon to the Gulf of California, but this surmise came by process of elimination rather than by observation. The two northern rivers had to empty somewhere, and the southern river had to rise somewhere, and the likeliest conclusion was that the answer to each half of the puzzle was the other half. But no one had ever proven this. No one had started down the Green River or the Grand and emerged on the Colorado.

  No one, that is, had made the voyage and lived to tell of it. Lewis Manly and a party of forty-niners had sought a shortcut to California via the Green River and more than once nearly drowned. They finally abandoned the river at the urging of an Indian they met, who in sign language told them they could never survive its lower course. The canyon had swallowe
d all who had gone before. The alternative Manly’s party chose was only a little better; their group was the one that gave Death Valley its name.

  John Wesley Powell considered the ignorance about the Colorado an affront to modern science and a challenge to himself. Powell was a professor of geology and a Union veteran of the Civil War who had lost his right arm at the battle of Shiloh. He could have taken a medical discharge, but he was a stubborn fellow who insisted on finishing what he had started. By war’s end he commanded Union artillery in the Department of the Tennessee. He commanded, too, the respect of his superiors for his determination and grit.

  Powell’s reputation served him well after the war. He had previously floated down the Ohio and the Mississippi and concluded that there was no better way to learn about a country than by following its rivers. He conceived of applying the same principle to the Green and the Colorado. He would start in the Green and, braving its canyons, prove its connection to the Colorado and its canyons.

  Powell persuaded the army to sponsor him. He made his case in terms of science: the expedition would expand human knowledge about the geography and geology of the Colorado Plateau and of the large forces that shape the earth. He added an economic element: the river or its tributaries might be dammed, providing water for irrigated agriculture. It wasn’t inconceivable that the Colorado could be made navigable by dams and locks, giving the Rocky Mountain region a southern outlet to the Pacific.

  John Wesley Powell. The scientist, soldier and explorer completed the map of the West.

  To all this Powell added an emotional, even romantic argument. He related a tale the Indians told of the creation of the Grand Canyon. “Long ago, there was a great and wise chief, who mourned the death of his wife, and would not be comforted until Ta-vwoats, one of the Indian gods, came to him, and told him she was in a happier land, and offered to take him there, that he might see for himself, if, upon his return, he would cease to mourn,” Powell wrote. “The great chief promised. Then Ta-vwoats made a trail through the mountains that intervene between that beautiful land, the balmy region in the great west, and this, the desert home of the poor Nú-ma. This trail was the canyon gorge of the Colorado. Through it he led him; and when they had returned, the deity exacted from the chief a promise that he would tell no one of the joys of that land, lest, through discontent with the circumstances of this world, they should desire to go to heaven. Then he rolled a river into the gorge, a mad, raging stream, that should engulf any that might attempt to enter thereby.”

  Powell added, in his own voice, “More than once I have been warned by the Indians not to enter this canyon. They considered it disobedience to the gods and contempt for their authority, and believed that it would surely bring upon me their wrath.”

  BUT HE WAS DETERMINED TO DARE THE GODS AND MAKE THE journey. With army support he organized an expedition. In May 1869, Powell and nine comrades set out. “The good people of Green River City turn out to see us start,” he wrote in the log of the journey. “We raise our little flag, push the boats from shore, and the swift current carries us down.” Powell had designed the boats and had them constructed in Chicago, whence they had been transported by train to Green River City, where the recently completed Union Pacific crossed the Green River.

  Powell described the four vessels on which the success of the expedition, and the lives of the men, depended. “Three are built of oak; stanch and firm; double-ribbed, with double stem and stern posts, and further strengthened by bulkheads, dividing each into three compartments. Two of these, the fore and aft, are decked, forming watertight cabins. It is expected that these will buoy the boats should the waves roll over them in rough water.” The three boats were twenty-one feet long and, emptied of cargo, could be carried by four men each. “The fourth boat is made of pine, very light, but sixteen feet in length, with a sharp cut-water, and every way built for fast rowing, and divided into compartments as the others.” This was Powell’s flagship.

  They carried rations for a journey of ten months. They expected to winter on the river, and so packed warm clothing. They brought rifles and ammunition for hunting and self-defense, and traps to catch game. They brought tools for repairing boats and building cabins. Powell’s scientific instruments included chronometers, sextants, thermometers, barometers and compasses. The provisions, tools and instruments were divided among the boats, so that if any one boat were lost, the expedition wouldn’t wholly lack something essential.

  Into the unknown. Powell’s crew sets off down the Green River.

  The gear burdened the boats. “Only with the utmost care is it possible to float in the rough river without shipping water,” Powell recorded. They hadn’t traveled two miles before one of the flotilla ran into a sandbar. “The men jump into the stream and thus lighten the vessels, so that they drift over, and on we go.” A short while later, one of the boats broke an oar trying to avoid a rock. “Thus crippled, she strikes. The current is swift, and she is sent reeling and rocking into the eddy.” Two other oars were lost overboard and the men thoroughly disconcerted before the boat was freed from the eddy and the good oars retrieved.

  The men gradually got the feel of the boats, and three days passed with no greater mishaps. Then the Green River met the Uintah Mountains, and the canyon country began. “On the right, the rocks are broken and ragged, and the water fills the channel from cliff to cliff,” Powell wrote. The walls of the canyon were bright red sandstone; Powell called it Flaming Gorge. “Now the river turns abruptly around a point to the right, and the waters plunge swiftly down among great rocks; and here we have our first experience with canyon rapids.”

  Powell took the lead, standing on the deck of his boat to see as much of the way ahead as possible, and to be seen amid the waves by the boats behind. “Untried as we are with such waters, the moments are filled with intense anxiety,” Powell recorded. “Soon our boats reach the swift current; a stroke or two, now on this side, now on that, and we thread the passage with exhilarating velocity, mounting the high waves, whose foaming crests dash over us, and plunging into the troughs.”

  The four boats passed this first serious test; in less than a mile they shot out into calmer water. The men decided they liked their adventure. “Today we have an exciting ride,” Powell wrote on June 1. “The river rolls down the canyon at a wonderful rate, and, with no rocks in the way, we make almost railroad speed. Here and there the water rushes into a narrow gorge; the rocks on the side roll it into the center in great waves, and the boats go leaping and bounding over these like things of life.”

  They reached calm water, only to hear an ominous roar in the distance. Powell advanced carefully and discovered a waterfall. He directed the boats to shore. The men unloaded the vessels while he looked for a path around the falls. Several of the men lowered the lightest boat by rope to the brink of the falls. When they could no longer hold it against the force of the current, they let it go over the edge. Empty, and putting its watertight compartments to good use, it survived the plunge, bobbing on top of the waves below the falls. Others of the party, having been positioned below the falls, reeled it in via a rope tied to the bow.

  They repeated the process with the other boats, repacked the cargo, and continued on their way.

  A short distance farther Powell spied an inscription on the canyon wall, above the high water mark. “Ashley 1835,” it read, or “Ashley 1855”; the third digit was obscure and the men couldn’t agree. Powell recalled having heard from an old mountain man that someone named Ashley had descended the river. Apparently he had made it this far. Powell also recalled that several members of Ashley’s party had not come out of the canyon alive. “We resolve on great caution,” he recorded. “Ashley Falls is the name we give to the cataract.”

  In fact, William Ashley, the principal of the company that first hired Joe Meek, had been on the river in 1825, which accounted for the fading of the inscription. And indeed, most of his party had drowned in rapids below this spot.

  The cany
on displayed the immense forces at work in the creation of the rapids and falls. “The river is very narrow; the right wall vertical for two or three hundred feet, the left towering to a great height, with a vast pile of broken rocks lying between the foot of the cliff and the water,” Powell wrote. “Some of the rocks broken down from the ledge above have tumbled into the channel and caused this fall. One great cubical block, thirty or forty feet high, stands in the middle of the stream, and the waters, parting to either side, plunge down about twelve feet, and are broken again by the smaller blocks into a rapid below.”

  The men got better at handling the boats in rough water. But not quite good enough. Powell landed his boat above another falls, and signaled for the others to do the same, so that he could reconnoiter on foot. Two of the three boats did, but not the third. “I hear a shout, and looking around, see one of the boats shooting down,” he recounted. “I feel that its going over is inevitable.” The drop was steeper than he had thought. “The first fall is not great, only ten or twelve feet, and we often run such; but below, the river tumbles down again for forty or fifty feet, in a channel filled with dangerous rocks that break the waves into whirlpools and beat them into foam.” He ran along the bank, fearing the worst. “I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock, and, rebounding from the shock, careen and fill the open compartment”—where the men sat—“with water. Two of the men lose their oars; she swings around, and is carried down at a rapid rate, broadside on, for a few yards, and strikes amidships on another rock with great force, is broken quite in two, and the men are thrown into the river.”

  Powell scrambled over the rocks on the bank even while trying to keep the men, clinging to the wreckage of the boat, in view. “Down the river they drift, past the rocks for a few hundred yards to a second rapid, filled with huge boulders, where the boat strikes again, and is dashed to pieces, and the men and fragments are soon carried beyond my sight.”