Powell, a bit of an artist and more than a bit of a geologist, found himself as intrigued as Sumner’s words implied. He tried, with only sporadic success, to convey his fascination to his crew. On June 23, their first day out of the most recent canyon, most of the men stayed in camp to patch up the boats, which were leaking again. Powell and Bradley hiked off to examine a puzzling fold in the rocks and hunt for fossils.
The others preferred faster-moving quarry. “Wonderful to relate,” Bradley noted sarcastically, the hunters finally succeeded. Hawkins brought down a deer, a fine, fat buck that had been standing two thousand feet above the river. “He stopped to take a look at me,” Hawkins recalled, “and I shot just as he stopped and broke his neck.” With Goodman carrying one of the forequarters, the proud hunter managed to bring both the deer’s hindquarters to camp. They left the other forequarter hanging in a tree, thinking they might fetch it later. To celebrate his hunter’s triumph, Powell named the spot where he had bagged his deer Mount Hawkins. The others, in hopes of game and glory of their own, all clamored for a crack at the wildlife. “The men are on tiptoe, and each swears by everything he can name that some little innocent deer must die by his hand tomorrow,” Bradley teased. “We shall see.”
The excitement over Hawkins’s kill showed how heartily sick everyone was of beans and bacon and rice, the drab fare that Powell archly called “our cuisine.” But as welcome as it was, fresh meat from a single deer was only a diversion. Divided among ten hungry men, it would vanish in a day or two. “Have spread the rations to dry and find one sack of rice spoiled,” Bradley had observed only the day before, but then he had waved the problem of short supplies aside. “We are glad to get rid of it, for our boat is too much loaded to ride the waves nicely but is all the time growing lighter as we eat the provisions.”
The day after Hawkins’ successful outing was spent near camp. As usual, Powell set out exploring. Bradley, convinced that the hunters had succeeded only by a fluke, headed up the cliff to bring in the deer’s forequarter. He found it, untouched, at a spot that the barometer showed was 2,800 feet above the river rather than the 2,000 feet they had guessed at. “I am so used to climbing . . . now that I hardly notice it,” Bradley observed, “yet it came very hard at first.”
After climbing the cliffs, Bradley had taken the opportunity to see what the river had to offer. The view was encouraging if you looked far downstream but worrying if you focused closer in. “The river about four miles below here cuts this . . . mountain chain in two and comes out on the other side,” Bradley noted. That was not how rivers were supposed to behave—rivers did not slice mountains apart—but once the Green reemerged on the far side, it seemed to settle down and behave. “We can see for 50 or 60 miles that it is all valley and island covered with cottonwood groves and the cañon cannot be very long,” Bradley wrote hopefully.
Oramel Howland compared the colors of the cliffs to “a muddy looking rainbow.” Powell, who saw the world through rosier lenses, was more effusive. “The park is below us,” he wrote from a cliff-top perch, “with its island groves reflected by the deep, quiet waters. Rich meadows stretch out on either hand, to the verge of a sleeping plain, that comes down from the distant mountains. These plains are of almost naked rock, in strange contrast to the meadows; blue and lilac colored rocks, buff and pink, vermilion and brown, and all these colors clear and bright.”
From his vantage point high above the river, Powell could see the canyon they had just floundered through. They had named it Whirlpool Cañon. For Powell it was something out of a Gothic novel, “a gloomy chasm, where mad waves roar.” But their new camp, which they had named Island Park, was a haven that dispelled any melancholy thoughts. From high above, with the sun beating down and the river seeming “but a rippling brook,” it was easy to hope that the worst danger lay behind them.
They set out eagerly the next day, knowing that it was not far to their first true milestone, the junction of the Uinta River and the Green, where they planned to stop for several days. They would be in the Uinta Valley, territory they all knew well. It was, moreover, as much of a crossroads as any place in this lonely corner of the world could be, for the valley marked one of the few places where the Green could be crossed. Nearly a century before, in September 1776, Spanish missionaries, guided by Indians, had made the first documented crossing of the Green near this river junction. They had been searching (futilely, it would turn out) for a new route from Santa Fe to California. In the nineteenth century, wagon trains heading West had crossed the Green at the same spot.
Powell and his men would be sticking with the Green, not fording it. For them, the beckoning prize was the Uinta Indian Agency, a small headquarters for a newly established reservation. The area “reserved” for the Indians stretched across two million bleak and barren acres for which the federal government could imagine no use. The immense tract of land, Brigham Young had assured his followers, was “one vast contiguity of waste.”
The agency consisted of a couple of wooden huts and a handful of employees. But for Powell and his crew, who had not seen another human being since their departure from Green River Station a month before, it offered the promise of a link with the outside world. They could replenish their supplies, but that was the least of it. Like campers or soldiers or prisoners, the men longed for a chance to read letters from home and send heartfelt replies.
Before they could take that welcome break, Powell and his men would have to negotiate the curious geological beast that Powell would later name Split Mountain Cañon. Here the Green ran headlong into a mountain ridge, “splitting [it] for a distance of six miles nearly to its foot,” in Powell’s words.
Since early in the trip, the Green’s course had perplexed them all. The river seemed to flow without any design whatever, violating laws of nature and common sense willy-nilly. Oramel Howland decided that the Green acted not out of ignorance but out of malevolence. “The river seems to go for the highest points within the range of vision,” he wrote, “disemboweling first one and striking for the next and serving it the same, and so on, indefinitely.” The Green tore into a mountain at one point, made one sharp turn after another, “whirling, splashing and foaming as if in fury to think so tiny an obstacle should tower 3,000 feet above it to check its progress.”
For Howland, bright and curious though he was, this was a puzzle more than a preoccupation. Powell’s interest, in contrast, was anything but casual. The prospect of investigating just such geological riddles was one of the lures that had spurred him to risk his life in canyon country in the first place. For the time being, though, he would have to put such pleasures to one side.
On June 25, Powell and the men set out at seven in the morning. “We enter Split Mountain Cañon,” Powell wrote, “sailing in through a broad, flaring, brilliant gateway.” They ran two or three rapids and portaged two more but then decided to stop for the day because Sumner had fallen ill. (Sumner was no more inclined to coddle himself than anyone else. “One of the men sick,” he noted curtly in his journal.) By evening, he felt better. Powell had spent the previous couple of days not quite well himself.
The next day began with a portage, which was as miserable as ever, and then continued with a portage in the rain, which was worse. While the men worked, Powell climbed the hills looking for fossils. “Spent two hours to find one,” Sumner complained, “and came back to find a peck that the men had picked up on the bank of the river.” By mid-afternoon, the portages were complete. Four fast river miles brought everyone out of the canyon, and then, wrote Sumner, “all at once the Great Uinta Valley spread out before us as far as the eye could reach. It was a welcome sight to us after two weeks of the hardest kind of work, in a canyon where we could not see half a mile, very often, in any direction except straight up.”
Spurred by the sight of their goal, “all hands pulled with a will,” Sumner wrote, “except the Professor and Mr. Howland. The Professor being a one-armed man, he was set to watching the geese”—in
the hope of roast goose for dinner—while Oramel Howland was exempt from rowing because he had to map the country they were passing through. Sumner’s brief mention of Powell’s injury was rare. In all the first-person accounts of the expedition, including Powell’s own, this passing remark was one of perhaps half a dozen such comments.
The slyly mocking tone of Sumner’s references to “the Professor” was telltale, a not-so-subtle reminder that it was Sumner, not Powell, who truly knew the West. In the next sentence, Sumner changed the allusion but not the message. “Our sentinel,” he wrote, “soon signaled a flock of geese ahead.”
For once the hunters, who had come in for so much teasing, aimed true. When the crew made camp shortly afterward, they carried ten fresh-killed geese. Bradley managed a perfunctory grumble (the geese were “very poor at this season”), but everyone was in high spirits. The men calculated that the day’s run had brought them thirty miles, and Sumner was nearly well again. Bradley even seemed to have taken on a bit of Powell’s fondness for geology. “Found a fine lot of foccils in the last cañon and have added three new varieties to our number and found them in great abundance,” he noted contentedly.
The next day, June 27, lived up to the promise of its predecessor. The boats sped “down a river that cannot be surpassed for wild beauty of scenery,” Sumner wrote, “sweeping in great curves through magnificent groves of cottonwood. It has an average width of two hundred yards and depth enough to float a New Orleans packet. Our easy stroke of eight miles an hour conveys us just fast enough to enjoy the scenery, as the view changes with kaleidoscopic rapidity.”
Only two weeks before, the men had spent a day of killing labor and limped into camp in the evening with only three miles’ progress to show for it. Now they reckoned they had covered sixty-three miles in a single day and, as a bonus, had bagged eight more geese. Though hardly the fat, domesticated birds of a Dickensian Christmas feast—these geese were scrawny, wild, half-grown things with puny pinfeathers that left them unable even to fly to safety—the birds provided diversion, if not quite sport, and they had the great virtue of not being bacon.
The “easy stroke” downriver that Sumner celebrated was not quite as easy as all that. For weeks, the expedition had been bedeviled by rapids; now the men were finding that rowing in flat water was perhaps as bad, if not as dangerous. As the valley broadened, the river grew wide and sluggish. “We have had a hard day’s work,” Bradley wrote, “which comes harder to us than running rappids.” And though Bradley conceded that the valley they were traveling through was indeed “beautiful” and filled with green islands, he pointed out that the bluffs were still “dry and barren” and the camp was swarming with mosquitoes.
It would take more than mosquitoes to mar the big picture. The expedition had set out a month and three days before. They estimated that they had already come roughly 350 miles, perhaps one-fourth or one-third of the distance to their final destination. (In fact, they had covered 258 miles. The next major milestone, the point where the Green and the Grand joined to form the Colorado, was another 245 miles downstream.) A progress report on the journey so far, an outsider might have guessed, could have gone either way. On the one hand, the expedition had made it safely for hundreds of miles, through countless rapids, with everyone not only alive but cheerful. On the other hand, they had already lost one boat, three men had nearly drowned, game was hard to find, the food had begun to spoil, and there was every reason to fear that the worst part of the journey had yet to begin.
But as Powell and his crew approached this first milestone, with its promise of news from the outside, no one seemed ambivalent. Not even the ever-wary Bradley could hide his optimism. “We must be very near the Uinta River which everybody said we could never reach,” he crowed, “but everybody will be mistaken for we are nearing it so fast and so easily that we are certain of success.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
HOAX
At about three o’clock on the afternoon of June 28, Powell and his men pulled ashore near the mouth of the Uinta River. They made camp under a large cottonwood tree on the Green’s west bank. This was open country and congenial scenery. Across the river lay “a splendid meadow,” Bradley wrote, “. . . without exception the finest mowing land I ever saw, as smooth and level as a floor and no rocks.”
As pleasant as the Uinta Valley was, especially in contrast with the barren canyons they had been traveling through, the men had little interest in looking around. Wagon trains en route from Denver to Salt Lake City had once crossed the Green here, in low water, but Sumner noted that the wagon trail was “not much of a road” and lately seemed to have been neglected by all travelers except “wolves, antelope, and perhaps a straggling Indian.” Tired but restless, the men were induced to linger only by the prospect of letters from home. “Hope to receive a good lot and think I shall,” Bradley wrote.
All the men started in on letters of their own. Andy Hall wrote to his brother. Young Hall sounded as breathless as a teenager who had just zoomed upside down and backward on a six-story roller coaster. “We had the greatest ride that ever was got up in the countenent,” he exclaimed. “the wals of the canone where the river runs through was 15 hundred feet in som places.”
Powell, Oramel Howland, and Sumner wrote personal letters and also composed accounts of the trip to send to newspapers. The newspaper stories served a twofold purpose. They delivered the welcome news that the men were still alive, and they shone the light of publicity on the expedition. For Powell, who had high hopes that this venture would launch his career, the public relations value of the story was not to be slighted. Powell wrote up the trip himself, and Howland (a printer and editor) happily set to work on a letter to his colleagues at the Rocky Mountain News. Sumner was a harder sell. In response to Powell’s insistent arm-twisting, he grudgingly worked up his notes into a story for the Missouri Democrat. “I have written this with many misgivings,” he complained, “being more used to the rifle, lariat and trap, than the pen.”
He signed his account “Jack Sumner, Free Trapper,” the title a proud declaration that Sumner was not a hired drone on a company payroll but a freelancer who survived by his own wits and skill. Powell sent a brief note with Sumner’s diary to smooth its way into print. His letter gives a hint of the patronizing attitude that the men often complained about. “I send manuscript journal of one of the trappers connected with the Colorado River Exploring Expedition,” Powell wrote. “I think you will find them somewhat lively, and may be able to use them. Of course they will need ‘fixing’ a little, may be toning somewhat. Jack Sumner, the writer, has seen much wildlife and read extensively. He has prepared the manuscript at my request. Should you conclude to publish he will send more.”
That is the entire letter. It contains nothing overtly objectionable—the tone of apology, which Sumner would have resented, was at least in part a business letter convention—but it does seem to betray a telltale lack. What is missing is any hint that Powell saw his men as more than hired hands. Sumner was, after all, crucial to the expedition’s success. The lead man in Powell’s own boat, he was responsible (with Dunn) for bringing Powell and the Emma Dean through the rapids right side up and in one piece. After Powell and Walter, Sumner was the highest-ranking man in the expedition. He and the Major spent hours together every day drenched by the same waves and threatened by the same rocks. Daily he risked his life (as did all the others) for the expedition as a whole. At Disaster Falls, he had set out alone to rescue the Howland brothers and Goodman from the island where they were marooned. Perhaps he could be excused for chafing a bit at “the Professor” for taking him for granted.
Powell was the head of a team of proud and touchy men. By now, they were not only proud and touchy but tired and wet and hungry. A prudent leader would have gone out of his way to make sure that they did not feel unappreciated as well.
That was not Powell’s strength. Strong-willed and self-confident, he took for granted that others felt as he did. On June 2
9, he wrote a letter to a colleague at Illinois State Normal University. “The party has reached this point in safety and having run 4 cañons of about 25 miles in length each . . . ,” he began. Then came a quick mention of some of the hardships they had overcome, and then an utterly characteristic coda. “Personally, I have enjoyed myself much, the scenery being wild and beautiful beyond description. All in good health—all in good spirits, and all with high hopes of success.” As telltale as the upbeat tone was Powell’s automatic assumption that what he felt “personally,” “all” the others felt as well.
While Powell and his men sat writing cheery letters home, the nation awoke to startling news. “It is reported that the Powell exploring expedition was lost in the rapids of the Colorado river, with the exception of one man, who has come to Green River City,” the St. Louis Democrat announced on June 28. “He stated that he had not embarked with the party in the rapids, but followed along the banks and saw the party perish.”
As with many rumors, the story of Powell’s drowned expedition had its roots in a true event. Just after Powell and his men launched their boats from Green River Station, a man named Theodore Hook (in some accounts his name is given as H. M. Hook) set out down the Green with an exploring party of his own. What a one-armed tenderfoot from back East could do, he could do better.
Hook was mistaken. Barely under way, in the chasm that Powell had named Red Canyon, he perished in a rapid. The expedition collapsed, and the rest of the party scrambled for home. Powell and his crew had taken only a week to reach Red Canyon. Word of the drowning spread at once, and somehow a true story about a prospecting party led by a man named Hook became a false story about an exploring expedition led by Powell.
Two years later, another expedition found grim evidence of the tragedy in Red Canyon. “I do not know how far they expected to go but this was as far as they got,” wrote one member of the 1871 group. “Their abandoned boats . . . still lay half-buried in sand on the left-hand bank, and not far off on a sandy knoll was the grave of the unfortunate leader marked by a pine board set up, with his name painted on it. Old sacks, ropes, oars, etc., emphasized the completeness of the disaster.”
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