Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  In the course of his first few years in the West, Sumner had nearly managed to lose his life a multitude of times. He was generally on good terms with the Utes, for instance—they called him “Jack Rabbit”—but once, while sleeping near the Fraser River, he found himself under ambush. Woken by the sound of his horse snorting, Sumner lifted his head, drew his gun, and took an arrow in the arm. He shot his attacker and escaped. As Sumner told the story later—he liked to show the scar the arrow had made—twenty Utes in war paint had followed him to his cabin. Sumner let three of them inside and argued that he had fired in self-defense. He sat perched on a keg of powder, revolver cocked, poised to fire into the powder and annihilate both himself and his guests if the need arose. It didn’t.

  The highlight of Powell’s first summer in the West was a climb to the top of Pikes Peak. Powell’s wife, Emma, resplendent in long dress, felt hat, and green veil, became only the second woman to have reached the summit. (The party believed mistakenly that Emma had been the first.) Decades later, Emma’s hometown newspaper would recall her as “a very beautiful young woman with golden hair and blue eyes.” The skinny, bulb-nosed Powell was less attractive—“Wes,” his sister once exclaimed, “I think you’re the homeliest man God ever made”—but he was immensely proud of his lovely and adventurous wife. She “could ride all day on horseback like a veteran,” he boasted, and he liked to point out that in months of travel through the West they had not seen another white woman.

  The next year, in the summer of 1868, Powell had traveled to the Rockies again. This time he had a new and larger group in tow, as well as Emma, and an even more ambitious agenda. Again Sumner served as guide.

  So when Powell set out on his dazzlingly ambitious Colorado River expedition, in 1869, it was natural that he turned first to Sumner. In response, Sumner helped enlist several of his own acquaintances. He recruited Oramel Howland, a native Vermonter who had transplanted himself to the West in a search for adventure. A hunter by choice and a printer (and sometime editor) by trade, Oramel was, at thirty-six, the oldest member of the expedition. With his long hair and longer beard, he reminded Powell of mad King Lear roaming the heath. Oramel enlisted his brother Seneca, younger by ten years. A former soldier who had been wounded at Gettysburg, Seneca was, Powell tells us, “a quiet, pensive young man.” Sumner also signed up yet another ex-soldier, a silent, mysterious character who gave his name variously as Billy Hawkins or Billy Rhodes. Rumor had it that Hawkins/Rhodes was only a step or two ahead of the law. The fugitive became camp cook at a salary of $1.50 a day.

  Bill Dunn, another acquaintance of Sumner’s, was a mountain man who dressed in greasy buckskin and wore a wild beard and long, black hair that fell down his back. Like Sumner, Hawkins, and Oramel Howland, he had helped guide Powell on his Rocky Mountain explorations.

  Powell himself recruited one last Civil War veteran, an unhappy career soldier named George Bradley. At 5 feet, 9 inches and 150 pounds, Bradley was not especially big, but in Sumner’s admiring words he was “as tough as a badger.” Powell had lured him with a promise to get him out of the army. With that incentive, Bradley said, he “would be willing to explore the River Styx.” (It was an age when such allusions abounded. Bradley had dropped out of school in the sixth grade.)

  At his best when times were worst, Bradley was sulky and conspicuously long-suffering whenever time permitted. “The Major as usual has chosen the worst camping-ground possible,” he complained to his diary at the end of one long day. “If I had a dog that would lie where my bed is made tonight I would kill him and burn his collar and swear I never owned him.”

  Two men rounded out the crew. Andy Hall, the youngest expedition member and a last-minute addition, was a twenty-year-old who had been idly fooling in a rowboat at Green River Station when he caught Powell’s eye. Ready for adventure and cheery under even the worst circumstances, Hall would become a sort of expedition mascot. One last man recruited himself. Frank Goodman, a round, red-faced, eager Englishman, had been roaming the West in pursuit of “experience.” He had come to the right place.

  • • •

  The newspaper editor Samuel Bowles had met Powell in 1868, at Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado. Bowles was influential and worldly, with interests that extended beyond the usual newsroom bounds—among other things, his Springfield Republican had been the first to publish Emily Dickinson’s poetry. He had already written one book on the exotic sights to be found in the American West and was gathering material for a second. Powell, who in 1868 was nearly as new to the West as Bowles himself, nonetheless dazzled the editor with his bold schemes, chief among them his plan to resolve the mysteries of the Colorado’s myth-shrouded canyon.

  Bowles warned his readers that, most likely, “whoever dares venture into this canyon will never come out alive,” but he believed that Powell had a chance if anyone did. “Professor Powell is well-educated, an enthusiast, resolute, a gallant leader . . . ,” Bowles wrote, “seemingly well-endowed physically and mentally for the arduous work of both body and brains that he has undertaken.” That task, Bowles went on, as if infected with Powell’s own strain of virulent impatience, was “more interesting and important than any [other project] which lies before our men of science.” The blank space on the map was an embarrassment, a rebuke that shamed a country trying to leave behind its gawky adolescence. “Is any other nation so ignorant of itself?” Bowles demanded reproachfully.

  The prize was there for the taking. If America’s men of science could fill that blank, they would make an invaluable contribution to knowledge and find themselves showered with honors besides. “The wonder,” Bowles wrote, “is they have neglected it so long.”

  They would neglect it no longer.

  Still, only a gambler with a taste for long shots would have bet on Powell and his men to make history. One of the leaders was maimed in body, another in mind, and most of the crew had as their outstanding credential a willingness to risk their lives for no very clear reason.

  Even a casual observer would have noted two looming problems. One was straightforward, the other harder to pin down, but both were crucial. The straightforward problem was simply put—the men were about to trust their lives to their boats, but there was not a single white-water boatman among them. The other problem had to do with psychology. The trip that Powell had planned—down an angry river through an empty desert, and alone—demanded on penalty of death that everyone work together like a well-rehearsed military team. But the Colorado River Exploring Expedition had nothing to bind it together but a name.

  The men were a ragtag band of friends and strangers, haphazardly assembled and essentially untrained. Worse still, with respect to the need for harmony, the leader was an ex-officer (as was his brother) who was accustomed to giving orders and having them unquestioningly obeyed. That expectation had not been much eroded by civilian life, for it had been only four years since the end of the war. In contrast, the other five ex-soldiers had all been enlisted men. They had not been delighted to take orders when they were obliged to, and they were damned if they were going to be ordered about now that the war was over.

  That went double for the mountain men, who were temperamentally unsuited to discipline in any form. (Walter Powell, complained Billy Hawkins, had “a bull-dozing way that was not then practiced in the West.”) Independence and self-reliance were a mountain man’s defining traits, as strength defined a blacksmith. Dunn’s contract with Powell specified that he was “to make barometrical observations night and morning of each day,” and, what was more difficult, that he was “to have the air of an assistant” while doing so.

  Contrary even in good times, these short-tempered outdoorsmen found themselves caught in especially irritating circumstances. Only the summer before, they had been the guides and Powell the wide-eyed rube. Now he presumed to command them.

  One last irritant was undeniable but unmentionable, protected by a strict taboo—Powell’s injury made his imperious manner that much harder to take. W
ith only a stump of a right arm, he could give orders but could not row, could not bail, could not line or portage, could not perform his share of any of a thousand daily tasks.

  Powell could issue whatever orders he liked. Whether his cantankerous and essentially unpaid crew would leap to obey the commands of the college professor turned conquistador was another matter.

  But with the excitement of their impending departure, no one had time to fret about hazards that might lie ahead. In late May 1869, Andy Hall stole a moment to write a brief letter home. “Dear Mother,” he began, “It is a long time since I wrote you but I want you to know I am still alive and well and hope you are the same.” He pointed out, in the manner of all sons writing obligatory letters, that he only had time to scribble a few words and then explained that he would not be able to write again for some time.

  “I am going down the Colorado River to explore that river in boats with Major Powell, the professor of the Normal college in Illinois. You need not expect to hear from me for some time ten or twelve months at least. You can write to me at Collvile, Arizona give my love to all.”*

  “Yours till death,” Hall concluded, and then he scrawled his signature. “Yours till death” was nineteenth-century rhetoric, not a premonitory shiver. But Hall’s warning that he was about to drop out of sight was no exaggeration. Both literally and figuratively, the ten men of the Powell expedition were about to disappear off the face of the earth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE LAUNCH

  The trip began well. Relieved to be under way at last and thrilled to find the river fast but manageable, the men raced along in high spirits. Most were new to boats and all were new to high-spirited rivers, but novelty was a good thing and novelty spiked with adrenaline better still. Sumner exulted in the “swift, glossy river,” and Bradley noted with unaccustomed good cheer that they swept along “almost without effort.”

  Powell was so pleased to be on the move that he saw his own exuberance mirrored in the fast-flowing river. The Green, he wrote, was “swollen, mad and seeming eager to bear us down through its mysterious cañons.” But, in truth, the first mysteries (and the first real danger) lay several days ahead. At this earliest stage of the journey, the Green cut through familiar territory. Powell and his guides had tramped over some of it on his natural-history excursions during the previous two years. They had seen the snowy Uinta Mountains, for example, and scouted stretches of the Yampa and the White Rivers, two tributaries of the Green, and peeked down into canyons from cliffside perches. On one of these excursions, Powell had even hidden a stash of barometers and other supplies for the boats to pick up later.

  This was bleak country, abundant in rock and deficient in nearly everything else. The badlands were sculpted in sandstone and shale, in layers of gray and green and brown and black unsoftened by soil or vegetation but for the occasional grove of cottonwood trees along the river’s edge. Erosion had carved buttes here and there, but the first canyons—the first grand and inspiring vistas—were miles downstream. The weather seemed a match for the scenery. “Raining hard,” reads one of the earliest journal entries, followed soon after by “Rained all day and most of the night,” and “Rained most of the day.”

  The men would quickly come to think of the river as moody and fickle. Dependent on its every whim, like fleas clinging to a psychotic dog, they would watch it with a wary and obsessive eye. But for now, they were delighted to find it in a forgiving mood. This was a good thing, for as Hawkins freely noted, “We knew nothing about a boat.”

  They set out as if to prove it. Hall and Hawkins, in the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, made it only a mile or two from the launch point before running aground on a sandbar in the middle of the river. (The Green was not quite so “swollen” as Powell had thought.) The two men jumped overboard, managed to push the boat clear, and relaunched themselves. They promptly ran aground again, this time on the riverbank. Eventually, to the whooping and teasing of the rest of the crew, Hall and Hawkins managed to catch up with the others and pull to shore. Hall came into camp sputtering indignantly about his boat’s unmanageability. He was an experienced mule driver—“Kitty’s crew have been using the whip more of late years than the oars,” Sumner noted gleefully—but even a mule seemed cooperative in comparison with a boat. The Kitty would “neither gee nor haw nor whoa worth a damn,” Hall cursed, and in fact it “wasn’t broke at all.”

  The others were having problems of their own. Even Powell, more inclined than his men to try to put a presentable face on chaos, described the journey’s start in a way that calls to mind Laurel and Hardy more than Lewis and Clark. “In trying to avoid a rock,” he wrote in his account of that first afternoon, “an oar is broken on one of the boats, and, thus crippled, she strikes. The current is swift, and she is sent reeling and rocking into the eddy. In the confusion, two others are lost overboard and the men seem quite discomfited, much to the amusement of the other members of the party.”

  These were mishaps, not crises, and the crew seemed to revel in the horseplay. But, as Hawkins noted, they were still on “very good water.” The men were having trouble staying afloat though the Green had yet to flex its muscles. For some seventy miles downstream from Green River Station, it wandered benignly this way and that across the barren landscape. Only when it left the badlands and smacked into the towering Uinta Mountains would the river truly rouse itself. Powell and his men, floundering already, were in the position of a boxer who is knocked to the mat by an opponent still shrugging off his robe.

  Even so, they were confident, the mood a happy mix of can-do optimism and “school’s out for summer” boisterousness after the dreary weeks at Green River Station. Ignorance was not quite bliss, but it veered in that direction. Powell, for one, took for granted that outdoor expertise in general would translate into river expertise in particular. “The hunters managed the pack train last year, and will largely man the boats this,” he wrote matter-of-factly. The tone implied that the switch from horses and mules to boats was trifling, akin perhaps to a switch from guitar to banjo.

  The men, especially those who had worked as guides, were less inclined to gloss over their inexperience. Fully aware of the gulf that separates amateurs from professionals, they knew they were no boatmen. But they subscribed to the logic that impels people to buy lottery tickets—they had as good a chance as anyone else. They did not claim to have knowledge they lacked, but they focused on the strengths they did have. Of the four ingredients crucial to success in exploration—skill, experience, equipment, and courage—they had two. Those seemed like decent odds. “If we fail,” Sumner noted cheerily, “it will not be for the want of a complete outfit of material and men used to hardships.”

  They were, indeed, hardy souls. “After supper,” Powell wrote in an account of one of the trip’s first nights, “we sit by our camp fire, made of drift wood caught by the rocks, and tell stories of wild life, for the men have seen such in the mountains, or on the plains, and on the battle fields of the South.”

  The stories they told vanished with the campfire smoke. Did Powell describe the carnage at Shiloh? Did Seneca Howland break his usual silence to tell the others what he had seen at Gettysburg? Did Sumner spin a yarn about the grizzlies he had killed two winters before? “It is late before we spread our blankets on the beach,” Powell wrote. (The men slept in pairs, sharing a blanket. The strangest bedfellows were Powell and Sumner, the college professor and the feisty frontiersman, one a mini-autocrat and the other a natural rebel allergic to authority in any form.)

  The men were tough and their gear was good, or so they felt. The boats, brand-new and well-made wooden rowboats, met with everyone’s approval. They were Whitehalls, a classic design that by most accounts originated in New York City in the 1820s and then spread across the nation. Speed was the Whitehall’s great virtue—indeed, an article in 1995 hailing a resurgence of interest in the design was entitled “Survival of the Fastest.” Wherever speed was crucial, there were Whitehalls. In New Y
ork Harbor, police relied on them; so did the thieves trying to make off with cargo stolen from ships lying at anchor; so did the “runners” for various waterfront businesses who raced one another across the water to bag new customers.

  In boat design, every choice represents a trade-off. A sea kayak, for example, is intended for long-distance travel in a straight line and is therefore long and skinny, like an arrow pointing toward a distant destination. It has relatively little “rocker,” or curvature from bow to stern, so that it touches the water almost all the way along its length. A white-water kayak, which is designed to pivot away from danger at the touch of a paddle, has a different design. Comparatively short and stubby, it has a good deal of rocker, meaning that bow and stern are lifted up out of the water, so the boat is easy to turn. (So easy, in fact, that beginners in a white-water kayak are usually unable to paddle in a straight line, even on a lake.) In the case of Powell’s boats, there were two main trade-offs. Whitehalls were heavy and sturdy, which made them rugged but hard to maneuver. They were round-bottomed, which made them fast but tippy in rough water.

  From the front, the Whitehall looked like a conventional rowboat. Viewed from the rear, the boat resembled a wineglass in cross section. The wineglass look reflected the design of the keel. From about the midpoint of the Whitehall to the stern, the keel—the “breastbone” that runs the length of a boat—thickened into a rigid fin that acted like a rudder fixed in the “straight ahead” position. It made for an elegant look, but the design was eminently practical. “Maneuverability was not a high priority,” notes Robert Stephens, a modern-day boat builder and Whitehall aficionado, “since two or more strong oarsmen could manhandle her in close quarters by backing and filling, but steady tracking was very desirable in the open waters of a large harbor. Above all, speed was the overriding criterion—especially speed under oars [the boat could also be rigged with a sail], speed which was essential for procuring business, delivering passengers, capturing criminals, or eluding police.”