The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  provide land grants: Donald R. Brown, “Jonathan Baldwin Turner and the Land-Grant Idea,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 55, no. 4 (Winter 1962): 373–74.

  transformation of the Midwest: James Mak and Gary M. Walton, “Steamboats and the Great Productivity Surge in River Transportation,” The Journal of Economic History 32, no. 3 (September 1972): 620.

  “a young man of enterprize”: Timothy Flint, A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States, or the Mississippi Valley, Vol. 1 (Cincinnati: E. H. Flint, 1828), 213.

  the summer of 1856: Scientific American 59, no. 7 (August 18, 1888): 103.

  “annual processions of mighty rafts”: Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (New York: P. F. Collier & Son Company, 1917), 18–19.

  set the transit record: Mak and Walton, 632.

  French bateaux with pointed bow: Malcom L. Comeaux, “Origin and Evolution of Mississippi River Fishing Craft,” Pioneer America 10, no. 1 (June 1, 1978): 76–79.

  surface geology and agriculture: Robert G. Hays, State Science in Illinois: The Scientific Surveys, 1850–1978 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980), 24.

  Just topping five feet: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Washington D.C., NARA Series: Passport Applications, 1795–1905; Roll 290–01 Apr 1887–15 Apr 1887.

  CHAPTER 3: THINKING BAYONETS

  “the integrity of the Union”: Mrs. M. D. Lincoln, “John Wesley Powell. Part II: The Soldier,” The Open Court 17 (1903), 14.

  a slim meal: Ira Blanchard, I Marched with Sherman (San Jose: toExcell, 2000), 20–21.

  “a very extravagant opinion”: Andrew Brown, Company K. Twentieth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Roster and Record (Yorkville, IL: Kendall Country Record Print, 1894), 60.

  a French village: John H. Brinton, Personal Memoirs (New York: The Neale Publishing Company, 1914), 95–96.

  “beautiful girls here”: Charles W. Wills, Army Life of an Illinois Soldier (Washington, D.C.: Globe Printing Company, 1906), 62.

  critically placed Fort D: Mary Ann Andersen, ed., The Civil War Diary of Allen Morgan Geer (Tappan, NY: R. C. Appleman, 1977), 9.

  median age of his recruits: Worster, A River Running West, 89.

  did “nothing carelessly”: Brinton, 38.

  “One of my superstitions”: David Nevin, The Road to Shiloh (Alexandria, VA: Time-Life Books, 1983), 45.

  the “efficient officer”: Grant to Captain Chauncey McKeever, from Cairo, October 9, 1861. John Y. Simon, ed., The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vol. 3: October 1, 1861–January 7, 1862 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 29–30.

  “a very beautiful young woman”: (Bloomington) Daily Pantagraph, June 7, 1909.

  “a disorganized, murderous fistfight”: Shelby Foote quoted in Geoffrey Ward, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 267.

  “a great herd of lions”: Winston Groom, Shiloh 1862 (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2012), 269.

  “Men fell around us”: William E. Bevens, Reminiscences of a Private: William E. Bevens of the First Arkansas Infantry, C.S.A. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 71.

  simply abandoned everything: Hurlbut to Major John A Rawlins, August 18, 1862, in “Reports of Brigadier General Stephen A. Hurlbut, U. S. Army, commanding Fourth Division, Army of the Tennessee, including correspondence related to the Thirteenth Ohio Battery abandoning its position and equipment during the battle,” The Civil War Archive, www.civilwararchive.com/RESEARCH1/1862/shilohusa6.htm [inactive].

  the Union infantry: Frederick Welker’s Missouri battery, private communication with Stacy Allen.

  swung Powell onto the saddle: Powell letter to Colonel Cornelius Cadle, May 15, 1896, 5, courtesy of Shiloh National Military Park.

  a ghastly heap: John A. Cockerill, “A Boy at Shiloh,” Sketches of War History, 1861–1865: Papers Read Before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United State, Vol. 6 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1888), 25.

  “Now, now,” gasped Powell: Darrah, Powell of the Colorado, 58.

  “Amputations were abundant”: “Extract from a Narrative of his Service in the Medical Staff, XXXVIII,” The Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1870), 41.

  complicated facial reconstruction: The Olney (Illinois) Times, March 12, 1858, 1.

  “Retreat? No. I propose”: Bruce Catton, Grant Moves South (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 241.

  “a lump of sugar”: Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2001), 203.

  “I wanted to pursue”: Ibid.

  “vessel sailing through the air”: Jalynn Olsen Padilla, “Army of ‘Cripples,’ Northern Civil War Amputees, Disability, and Manhood in Victorian America” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2007), 42.

  “I can’t spare this man”: Smith, Grant, 205.

  scrawled a letter: Decatur Herald, May 14, 1916.

  credited her continued presence: Lincoln, “ Powell: Part II,” 19.

  “the most hazardous & desperate moves”: Sherman to Ellen Sherman, April 23, 1863, in Brooks D. Simpson and Jean V. Berlin, eds. Sherman’s Civil War: Selected Correspondence of William T. Sherman, 1860–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 455.

  bridges of lumber: William L. Shea and Terrence J. Winschel, Vicksburg Is the Key: The Struggle for the Mississippi River (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 91.

  reassembled their gun carriages: Manning F. Force, “Personal Recollections of the Vicksburg Campaign,” Sketches of War History, 1861–1865: Papers Read Before the Ohio Commandery of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United State, Vol. 1 (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1888), 296.

  impaled what remained: Shea and Winschel, Vicksburg, 108.

  searching the waterfall: T. A. Conrad, “Observations on the Eocene formation, and descriptions of one hundred and five new fossils of that period, from the vicinity of Vicksburg, Mississippi,” Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 3, no. 11 (September–October 1847).

  male family teams: Janet Hewett, Supplement to the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Wilmington, NC: Broadfoot Pub. Co., 1994–2001), Vol. 79, U.S. Colored Troops (Union)–Infantry, 292–94.

  “a straightforward and attentive officer”: United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1892, Series 1, Vol. 39, Part 3, 618–19.

  pressed Powell into service: War of the Rebellion, Series 1, Vol. 49, Part 2, 780.

  “mad as he could be”: Worster, A River Running West, 101.

  Of the ten men: 20th Illinois Infantry Regiment, Company “H” muster rolls, The Illinois Civil War Project, www.illinoisgenweb.org.

  CHAPTER 4: FIRST THOUGHTS WEST

  “a cripple was a cripple”: William H. Rideing, “Patched-Up Humanity,” Appletons’ Journal 13, no. 326 (June 19, 1875): 783.

  “cripple for life”: Padilla, 55.

  “cruel and bloody Rebellion”: Brian Matthew Jordan, “Living Monuments: Union Veteran Amputees and the Embodied Memory of the Civil War,” Civil War History 57, no. 2 (2011): 121, 133.

  “cost rivers of blood”: Ibid., 139.

  “nonsense of science”: Darrah, Powell of the Colorado, 72.

  “He made us feel”: J. B. Taylor, “In the Wesleyan, ’63–’69,” The Illinois Wesleyan Magazine 5, no. 1 (April 1900), 68; Helen E. Marshall, Grandest of Enterprises: Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1957 (Normal: Illinois State Normal University Press, 1956), 119.

  “Scientia et Sapientia”: This means “Knowledge and Wisdom.”

  “All civili
zed nations”: Marshall, 120.

  nation’s first college field trips: Worster, A River Running West, 118.

  display in the museum: Marshall, 121, quoted from Proceedings of the Board of Education (Normal, IL), March 26, 1867, 10.

  “at government rates”: Simon, ed., Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, Vol. 17: Jan. 1–Sept. 30, 1867 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 406.

  “A party of Naturalists”: Scientific Expedition to the Rocky Mountains. Preliminary Report of Prof. J. W. Powell to the Illinois State Board of Education (Peoria, IL: N. C. Nason, Printer, 1867), 1.

  “a city of demons”: W. H. Dixon, Collection of British Authors, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1867), 111.

  “dropped out of the clouds”: Rose Kingsley, South By West (London: W. Isbister & Co., 1874), 44.

  Byers hit the dirt streets: Robert F. Karolevitz, Newspapering in the Old West (New York: Bonanza Books, 1965), 60–62.

  taking Albert Bierstadt to: William Newton Byers, “Bierstadt’s Visit to Colorado,” Magazine of Western History 11, no. 3 (January 1890): 237–40.

  Kit Carson, Jim Beckworth: Mrs. Wm. N. Byers, “The Experiences of One Pioneer Woman,” Typescript in Western History Department, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO.

  “except by irrigation”: Rocky Mountain News, December 21, 1864.

  “could ride all day”: Mrs. M. D. Lincoln, “John Wesley Powell, Part III: The Professor” Open Court 17 (1903), 90.

  “struggle of extermination”: James Schiel, The Land Between: Dr. James Schiel’s Account of the Gunnison-Beckwith Expedition into the American West, 1853–1854 (Los Angeles: Western Lore Press, 1957), 90.

  “We were shooting swiftly”: Joseph C. Ives, Report Upon the Colorado River of the West Part 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1861), 81–82.

  “shall be forever unvisited”: Ibid., 110.

  “Though valueless to the agriculturalist”: Captain J. N. Macomb, Report of the Exploring Expedition from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to the Junction of the Grand and Green Rivers of the Great Colorado of the West in 1859 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1876), 54.

  “more worthless and impractical region”: Ibid., 6.

  “prospect for a fatal termination”: John Charles Frémont, Memoirs of My Life, Vol. 1 (New York: Belford, Clarke & Company, 1887), 200.

  A broad plain opened: Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles & Company, 1869), 69–70.

  “regular hunter’s abode”: Henry Ellsworth Wood, Typescript journal, Henry Ellsworth Wood Papers, 1854–1932, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, August 4, 1868, entry 27; William Henry Jackson’s photographs of Hot Sulphur Springs, shot while on the Hayden Survey in 1874, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

  a pocket edition of Kit Carson: Chauncey Thomas, “Recollection of Jack Sumner,” William Culp Darrah Papers, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, UT, P-2435.

  One of eight children: U.S. Census, 1850.

  corporal in the 32nd Iowa: Guy E. Logan, ed., “Historical Sketch Thirty-Second Regiment Iowa Volunteer Infantry,” Roster and Record of Iowa Troops in the War of the Rebellion, Vol. 5 (Des Moines, IA: Emory H. English, State Printer, E. D. Chassell, State Binder, 1911), 3–19.

  a voracious reader: “Capt. Sumner is No More,” Grand Junction Sentinel, July 10, 1907, provided by Ray Sumner.

  “after several windy fights”: Robert Brewster Stanton, Colorado River Controversies (Boulder City, NV: Westwater Books, 1982), 170.

  “Peaks, Parks, and Plains”: Daily Colorado Tribune, November 1, 1867.

  “pleasing and persuasive”: Daily Colorado Tribune, November 6, 1867.

  Powell planned to return: Rocky Mountain News, November 6, 1867.

  “over two thousand pounds”: (Bloomington, IL) Daily Pantagraph, August 19, 1867.

  a human scalp: Chicago Republican, September 3, 1867.

  “successful beyond expectations”: Scientific Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 9-13.

  “sixteen hours a day”: (Bloomington, IL) Daily Pantagraph, January 25, 1868.

  “the best geological section”: Congressional Globe, Part 3, May 25, 1868, 2564.

  “purely one of science”: Ibid.

  would obtain scientific information: Ibid., 2563.

  backdoor way of organizing expeditions: Ibid., 2564.

  “a very novel proceeding”: Ibid., 2565.

  “detrimental to the interests”: Ibid., 2566.

  twenty-three members: Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1868, 4.

  to secure sixty-seven pairs: Wood journal, July 4, 1868, 3.

  “knew nothing about mountaineering”: L. W. Keplinger, “The First Ascent of Long’s Peak” in Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society 1915-1918, Vol. 14, ed. William E. Connelley (Topeka: W. R. Smith, 1918), 347.

  “no more artists”: Rocky Mountain News, July 3, 1868.

  “great cañon of the Colorado”: Rocky Mountain News, July 14, 1868.

  “no living creature”: Rocky Mountain News, September 23, 1864.

  “a dry-goods counter”: Stanton, 170.

  dragging the wagon’s party: Wood journal, August 4, 1868, 27.

  buckskin of dark, oleaginous luster: John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 120.

  “[Powell] doesn’t get along much”: Wood journal, August 8, 1868, 31.

  enjoyed so much: Ibid., August 3, 1868, 27.

  more than two hundred bird species: Bowles, Switzerland, 82.

  Sumner killed three grizzlies: Powell, Exploration, 120.

  raspberries and gooseberries: “Diary of Lyle H. Durley, Aug. 14, 1868,” Darrah Papers, Box 3, 9.

  “’Tis most stupid work”: Worster, A River Running West, 143.

  “water of the arid region”: “J. W. Powell-Report [1890],” typescript, Records relating to the Powell Irrigation Survey, National Archives (Washington, D.C.), 57.6.12, Box 1.

  “so ignorant of itself?”: Samuel Bowles, A Summer Vacation in the Parks and Mountains of Colorado (Springfield, MA: Samuel Bowles & Company, 1869), 84.

  “Utes and Prof Powell”: Springfield (MA) Republican, October 31, 1868.

  “that Arabian presence”: Thomas L. Johnson, Letters of Emily Dickinson, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1958), no. 643.

  “The whole field of observation”: Bowles, Vacation, 86.

  “had fun at our expense”: Keplinger, “The First Ascent,” 343.

  “a castle with defenses”: Mike Caldwell, quoted in Ruth M. Alexander, “People and Nature on the Mountaintop: A Resource and Impact Study of Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park,” A Project funded by the Rocky Mountain Cooperative Ecosystems Study Unit, Rocky Mountain National Park, and Colorado State University, 2010, 1.

  Grizzly indeed pitched: Chicago Tribune, September 10, 1868.

  “Hello, Jack, what’s the matter?”: Keplinger, “First Ascent,” 343.

  at 10 a.m.: William N. Byers, personal journal, Byers family papers, Denver Public Library, Denver, CO, provided to author by Raymond Sumner.

  “accomplishing what others thought impossible”: Keplinger, “First Ascent,” 345.

  badly bruising his stump: Rocky Mountain News, September 28, 1868.

  “I have explored”: Elmos Scott Watson, The Professor Goes West (Bloomington: Illinois Wesleyan University Press, 1954), 24.

  “to think was to dare”: (Bloomington) Daily Pantagraph, July 1, 1869.

  “jovial good fellow”: Powell, Exploration, 123.

  contributions toward equipment and groceries: Don Lago argues that Byers gave Powell a series of loans and outright gifts to buy equipment and such. See Don Lago, “New Evidence on t
he Origins and Disintegration of the Powell Expedition,” in Reflections of Grand Canyon Historians, ed. Todd R. Berger (Grand Canyon, AZ: Grand Canyon Association, 2008), 121.

  receiving $25 per month: Michael P. Ghiglieri, First Through the Canyon (Flagstaff, AZ: Puma Press, 2003), 49.

  CHAPTER 5: DESCENT

  laid out a city: W. A. Bell, “Major J. W. Powell’s Report on His Explorations of the Rio Colorado in 1869,” in New Tracks in North America, Vol. 2 (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870): 559.

  “the rocks h-e-a-p h-e-a-p high!”: Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1869.

  century and a half later: For the James White story, see Tom Myers, “Why James White’s 1867 Raft Trip Doesn’t Float—At Least through Grand Canyon,” and Brad Dimock, “The Case for James White’s Raft Trip Through Grand Canyon: The Story of White’s Story,” in Reflections of Grand Canyon Historians: Ideas, Arguments, and First-Person Accounts, ed. Todd R. Berger (Grand Canyon, AZ: Grand Canyon Association, 2008), 125–30, 131–36; Stanton, 3-93; Virginia McConnell Simmons, Drifting West: The Calamities of James White and Charles Baker (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007); Eilean Adams, Hell Or High Water: James White’s Disputed Passage through Grand Canyon, 1867 (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001).

  river was high: Don Lago. The Powell Expedition: New Discoveries about John Wesley Powell’s 1869 River Journey (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018), 25.

  “I entered the canyon”: Wm. H. Brewer, “John Wesley Powell,” American Journal of Science, 4th series, 14 (1902): 381.

  “savors of foolhardiness”: “Powell’s Expedition,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1869, 2.

  “it is doubtful”: “The Canon of the Colorado: A Letter from Prof. Newberry,” Chicago Tribune, June 4, 1869, 2.

  among the most eager: Henry P. Zuidema, “Discovery of Letters by Lyell and Darwin,” The Journal of Geology 55, no. 5 (September 1947): 439.

  “only decent meal we tasted”: Mark Twain, Roughing It (Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1875), 105.

  “tough as a badger”: Ghiglieri, 12.

  Goodman signed on right there: E. G. Evans, “Historic Article: Life Story of Francis Valentine Goodman,” The Outlaw Trail Journal (Winter 2004): 31–39.