The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  At the Society’s ninth annual meeting in late June 1866, Powell argued that the organization’s museum, which included his own mollusk collection, deserved recognition as a state treasure—and therefore should receive public funding. At first, his listeners found this amusing, but gradually became enthusiastic. He introduced a motion that would direct three professors, himself not included, to approach the state board of education to explore any such possibility. The motion passed. The delegation met with the board, which endorsed their going down to Springfield to meet with state legislators. It seemed obvious to all involved that Powell should be the one to make the case.

  Therefore early in 1867, Powell appeared three times before the general assembly, revealing for the first time his ability to put legislators under his powerful, imaginative spell. He analogized his natural history organization to the Royal Societies of London, Russia, Belgium, and Sweden, and to the Smithsonian in Washington. “All civilized nations,” he proclaimed, “deem it wise to foster such institutions.” Republican Illinois should take its rightful place. He laid his plan before them: a general commissioner and curator to be hired to oversee research and collections, and take charge of the museum. Those assembled agreed, appropriating $1,500 for the Society to pay a curator’s salary, plus $1,000 for books, apparatus, and supplies. In the meantime, Powell had convinced Normal to make him a professor of geology, with teaching responsibilities limited to winter months only.

  The Society applauded Powell’s success, then promptly voted him the curatorship. The minutes-old museum director then pulled from his pocket a prepared speech, which contained the astounding proposal that the Society put its newly bestowed discretionary funds toward a collecting trip out west, himself in charge. Ordinarily, so nakedly ambitious a proposition would have provoked a spirited resistance, but Powell adroitly steered the discussion away from himself toward the vision of a glorious future at the Society’s very fingertips: He was merely proposing to be the agent who would heap greater glory on this still slightly known institution and its patrons—to be embodied in grizzly bearskins, boxfuls of pressed columbines, and curious insects from the sparsely examined lands beyond. The truth was that the Midwest had no more to offer him. He had trolled all the state’s rivers for mollusks, had studied what was accessible of this flatland’s geology. The West—and the nation’s future—beckoned over the low Illinois skyline.

  The Society authorized Powell to spend half of his expense money on one of the nation’s first college field trips out west. At this meeting, it also voted to have the curator print up and conspicuously display in the museum a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans: “The visible things of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Powell obliged, then planned his trip.

  * * *

  The Society’s $500 certainly could not underwrite such an ambitious undertaking, but he leveraged it to raise more, drawing a matching grant from the new Illinois Industrial University in Urbana (today’s University of Illinois), then raising $100 more from the Chicago Academy of Sciences, which also agreed to pitch in tools and supplies. Powell promised in return a rich bounty of natural history specimens. He needed still more support, so in April the audacious young curator boarded a train for Washington to beseech his former commander—now general of the United States Army—for assistance. Ulysses S. Grant already knew Powell as a resourceful man of his word, but even the usually impassive general grew openly enthusiastic about the plan laid before him. If Grant had reservations about the propriety of putting federal resources toward a state venture, they soon dissolved before Powell’s extraordinarily persuasive depiction of Grant’s adopted home state winning the further glories it deserved. Write me a letter, Grant told the Major, with a formal request.

  In Washington, Powell arranged to meet Joseph Henry, the first secretary of the newly established Smithsonian Institution. The two got along well, marking the beginning of a long, rich collaboration that would prove as critical—perhaps more so in the long run—than Grant’s genuine goodwill. On the spot Henry wrote a letter of introduction to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Six days later, Powell delivered a clever request to Grant not for outright cash but “that the officers of the Commissary Department, on the route traveled by the party, may be instructed to sell supplies to it at government rates.”

  Powell had indeed stirred Grant up. “A party of Naturalists, under the auspices of the State Normal University of Illinois will visit the Mauvaises Terres [Bad Lands] of Southwestern Dakotah for the purpose of making a more thorough geological survey of that region,” read the general’s glowing letter of endorsement. “From thence the party will proceed to explore the ‘Parks’ in the Rocky Mountains.” The letter further authorized the U.S. Commissary Department to furnish Powell with supplies at low-cost government rates for an expedition a dozen strong and directed U.S. troops to escort the party from Fort Laramie through the Badlands.

  Now winged with meaningful federal support, Powell elicited passes worth $1,700 from four major railway lines. American Express and Wells, Fargo & Co. also agreed to help, waiving shipping costs for the voluminous mass of artifacts and specimens that Powell confidently planned to ship back to the Midwest. Joseph Henry loaned the shoestring operation expensive barometers and thermometers on the condition that Powell would submit the collected readings to the Smithsonian upon his return. With summer quickly approaching, Powell raced home to fill his ranks from among his friends, family, and students. Emma signed up first. Each participant would contribute the not-insignificant amount of $300. His sister Nellie’s husband, Almon Thompson, would come along as an entomologist, along with a Rock Island minister and several high-spirited undergraduates. With money from his own pocket, Powell now believed he would break even, if just barely. Still, throughout the expedition, he would need to borrow, cajole, and negotiate to keep it going.

  * * *

  Late that May of 1867, Powell and his wife headed west to Council Bluffs, Iowa, ahead of the rest of the team to buy wagons, draft animals, and supplies. The Chicago and North Western Railway had arrived only a little earlier that year, in the westernmost advance of the long eastern railroads. The small town, perched on either side of the Missouri north of the infall of the Platte River, had earned its name reputedly from an 1804 powwow between Lewis and Clark and the Otoe Indians. It thrived, soon becoming a busy steamship port and point of departure for the great wagon trains heading into the Missouri Territory and the Mormon exodus to the Utah Territory in the 1840s and 1850s. The Oregon and California trails struck off here also, funneling a mass of fortune seekers toward the 1849 and 1859 gold rushes in the California and Colorado territories. Powell chanced to meet Lieutenant General William T. Sherman, whom he had known during the war and was now commanding the sprawling Military Division of the Missouri, devoted to uniting nearly all western military organizations under a single command. Sherman shared his latest intelligence about the Dakota Badlands, in which the Lakota Sioux, the tribe of Red Cloud and Sitting Bull, had taken up arms in reaction to the postwar increase in white encroachment. Too dangerous to go there, Sherman advised, even under military escort. Powell knew Sherman as a man who rarely exaggerated, so took this warning to heart, a decision that would change history. Instead, the expedition would head directly to Denver City, the jumping-off spot for collecting in the Rocky Mountains, specifically in the three “parks,” vast mountain valleys on the western slope of the Front Range.

  For forty days, the small party drove their mule-drawn wagons along a clear trail paralleling the Platte over the plains from Council Bluffs to Denver City. Nighttime found them circling the wagons and building fires. This was by no means a virgin route: Stagecoach stations appeared every dozen or so miles, stores and military outposts less frequently. But the voyagers examined with great trepidation an abandoned wagon with a blood- and hair-smeared wheel. They found a victim of Indian retaliation sh
oveled into a shallow grave nearby. On July 6, 1867, they arrived in Denver City, finding a dusty, windblown town of fewer than five thousand people at the confluence of the South Platte and Cherry Creek. The stunning backdrop of snow-covered Rockies somewhat mitigated the dirt-road approach and the newborn city’s down-in-the-mouth appearance, even though it had just become the territorial capital that year. “You seem to be walking in a city of demons,” wrote the Englishman William Hepworth Dixon of the dozen hot and dirty streets, which boasted a total of two hotels, a bank, a theater, half a dozen chapels, fifty gambling houses, and a hundred grog shops. “Every fifth house appears to be a bar, a whisky-shop, a lager-beer saloon,” he continued. “Every tenth house appears to be either a brothel or a gaming-house. . . . In these horrible dens a man’s life is of no more worth than a dog’s.” With little access to wood, brick had become the primary building material. Another visitor noted that the aspiring city looked as if it “had been dropped out of the clouds accidentally, by some one who meant to carry it further on, but got tired, and let it fall anywhere.”

  Gold fever had slammed Denver City on the map eight years earlier, when nearby Cherry Creek yielded shiny pieces of the precious metal, creating an overnight boomtown with a gambler’s black heart. Its finest citizens reputedly engaged in epic poker games staking city lots as chips, blocks of the city changing hands in a single round. By the time the expedition arrived, the bluster had generally worn thin as the strike petered out—the town now surviving by catering to the area’s fledgling mining industries of silver ore, lead, and zinc. But Denver City no longer felt like a destination, just a stop on the way to somewhere else.

  Here Powell would meet another man who would turn out to be critical to his developing plans, which far exceeded leading a pack of greenhorns on a collecting trip. William Byers, the square-cut, handsome owner of the Rocky Mountain News, always had a strong opinion. He was a big personality in a town that bred colorful characters. Byers’s expansive boosterism could indeed take on the plain fanciful, a prime example being his publication of a Shipping News column. He set out to convince others that the Platte River, referred to jocularly by some as “mile wide and inch deep,” would soon become a major steamboat highway, a ludicrous bit of wishful thinking. Part huckster, part showman, Byers was nonetheless a shrewd businessman.

  As had so many others, Byers came to this outpost with high hopes of reinventing himself and making a fortune. The discovery of gold just before the war had brought a torrent of ’59ers into the area, he among them. But instead of arriving pick in hand, he had come out with his brothers-in-law at the head of two wagons in March 1859, one bearing the heavy, flat stone slabs upon which printers then laid out type, along with a press, paper, and font, bought from a defunct Nebraska printing business. He had no journalistic experience whatsoever, but figured that starting a paper was a far better bet than prospecting. Not knowing where he would land, he had named his new paper the Rocky Mountain News, selling ad space to Omaha merchants eager to attract business out west. He had laid out the first two pages before leaving, filled with by-now stock stories such as that of Commodore Perry’s opening up Japan five years before.

  After arriving at the junction of Cherry Creek and the Platte, he found the two competing communities of Denver City and Aurora facing one another across the big river. Hearing that another press was setting type for its first edition, Byers leaped into action, rented a room over a saloon, and set to work. His brothers-in-law pitched in by erecting a tarp against the wet winter snow that poured torrents of water through the unshingled roof. Early the next morning, clutching copies of his first smudged edition, Byers hit the dirt streets, beating out his competitor by twenty minutes. His defeated adversary sold Byers his press and type for $30.

  Byers would serve as a guide in the Rockies, taking Albert Bierstadt to Mount Evans from Idaho Springs, during which time the painter sketched a scene he would later immortalize in oils as “Storm in the Rocky Mountains.” Byers relished the chance to rub shoulders with the now-aging mountain men Kit Carson, Jim Beckworth, and Jim Baker, who frequented his table. Within a few years, he was claiming to know more about the Colorado Territory than any man alive. He had thoughts, too, about the development of the West, ideas that Powell would listen to. Four years before they met, Byers wrote that “more than one half of the total area of the United States cannot produce crops of grain or vegetables with certainty except by irrigation.” Therefore, he argued, “every drop of water that emerges from the great mountain chains of the west, in their thousands of streams, should be made useful.” When Powell met Byers a day or two after reaching Denver City, they would have much to talk about. The two different, but very savvy men fit together well. Powell had found just the local patron he needed.

  Snow blocked Berthould Pass, preventing the expedition from getting up into the Rockies and beginning their collecting activities, so Byers suggested that Powell climb what would later become known as Pikes Peak, a 14,000-foot mountain visible from Denver City—which the Major did on July 27 with several others of the expedition and, quite unusually, Emma, who rode a white-eyed Indian pony. They believed that she, outfitted in a felt hat, green veil, and long dress, was the first woman to attain the summit. She was not, having been beaten out nine years earlier, but her participation brought her acclaim for her courage and endurance. Powell simply stated that she “could ride all day on horseback like a veteran.”

  * * *

  Atop the peak, Powell cast his eyes westward to the Rockies, imagining what lay beyond. He had come out to Colorado not simply to collect, teach, and break in a new generation of young men or to plant the Illinois flag. All this had been merely a fistful of rationalizations for beginning a far, far larger quest: Quite simply, he hungered to finish what Lewis and Clark had commenced more than sixty years before, when they set out on their legendary expedition to explore the continent. Since then, the Dakota Badlands, Death Valley, the inhospitable salt flats of Utah, the rugged mountain country of the Grand Tetons—indeed all but one part of the continental nation—had been visited and described. The lone exception was an enigmatic tract of high mountain desert and canyonland, lying within a 100-by-300-mile rectangle covering southern Utah and northern Arizona. That land, 250 miles directly west of where Powell now stood, embraced some of the most hostile but extraordinarily scenic territory in the world. Therein lay America’s most improbably iconic land forms: the Grand, Zion, and Bryce canyons, all yet to bear European names, and today’s Canyonlands and Capitol Reef, an area that many decades later would boast one of the densest concentrations of national parks and monuments in America.

  That landscape had defied the most robust attempts to cross it in a straight line, its steep vertical interruptions both downward and skyward all combining to taunt its visitors with an inscrutable maze of mazes. Some of the most formidable explorers of that age had sought to conquer it. As the 32nd Congress drew to an end in early 1853, it appropriated funds for surveying different routes for a transcontinental railroad, including a central passage championed by Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The following year, Captain John Williams Gunnison led an expedition north across the 38th parallel, overcoming the Rockies on its way into northern Utah, to the Green River and on to Sevier Lake. The trip’s surgeon and de facto geologist, James Schiel, wrote that “if one considers the fantastic formations on the other side of the river, the churches, temples, houses, and towers, one cannot avoid the impression that at one time evil spirits had lived here and had found death in a struggle of extermination.” At the Green River ford, Gunnison split his party in two. Not long afterward, a band of Pahvant Utes surprised Gunnison’s own group, the captain dying when an arrow struck him as he knelt to wash his face in a stream. Seven of his men perished also.

  During 1853 and 1854, the great Pathfinder himself, John C. Frémont, sought a railroad-worthy tract along the 38th parallel just north of the Grand Canyon, but could not negotiate tho
se eerie chasms. Their supplies dwindling, Frémont’s party camped on the banks of the Green River, their leader forcing them to foreswear cannibalism. They lived off shoe leather and officers’ scabbards instead. Remarkably, only one man died. Frémont beat a hasty retreat from these threatening lands, abandoning all but his party’s most necessary supplies to stumble to the nearest Mormon outpost.

  Most recently, in 1858, Lieutenant Joseph Ives of the U.S. Army topographical engineers had reached the floor of the Grand Canyon itself near Diamond Creek. Ives had begun late the previous autumn from the Colorado River’s mouth on the shore of the Gulf of California, under instructions to steam upstream to establish a water route to the Great Basin. Just before embarking, news of the Utah War, pitting Mormon colonists against the U.S. Army, reached them—and the mission took on greater import as federal commanders demanded information about the river’s navigability for strategic purposes. Ives had commissioned a Philadelphia shipyard to build a crude 54-foot iron steamboat; crated in sections, the USS Explorer was shipped to California by way of Panama. Ives invited the geologist John Strong Newberry, the topographer F. W. von Egloffstein, and the artist Balduin Möllhausen to accompany his armed exploration.