Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  As the rumor that Powell and his men had been lost flashed along the telegraph lines, it grew and mutated. On July 2, the Omaha Republican reported that nine of the ten members of the Powell expedition had drowned two weeks before. For “the particulars of their sad fate,” the Republican relied on the report of a trapper and Indian fighter named William Riley, who had been told the story by the expedition’s lone survivor. Riley had met this bereaved man, who gave his name as John Sumner, at Fort Bridger in Wyoming.

  The crisis supposedly came at a spot “Sumner” called Hell’s Gate, apparently somewhere below Brown’s Hole. “The water is precipitated down this gorge at a velocity of forty miles per hour,” the Republican reported, “hence not the shadow of a chance for escape presents itself.” This was not a challenge to an intrepid explorer but an invitation to suicide. “No boat ever built could possibly pass over these falls without being shattered to atoms.”

  The Republican hurried through the rest of the story, as if saddened to linger over such testament to human folly. Powell, the Republican noted regretfully, had been bent on glory no matter the cost. “Major Powell trusted too much to his long experience and superior intelligence . . . Warned time and again by those familiar with the nature of his route, he turned a deaf ear to every voice and pressed on. For the judgment of his followers we can only say that they are deserving a monument for their fidelity and the steadfast manner in which they confided and clung to him, as if, indeed, he was the great oracle to guide them on.”

  What was Powell’s story but the sadly predictable tale of a leader with a tragic flaw? “Our account is soon told. Ambition had a strong hold upon reason. Judgment was laid aside, and the Napoleonic Major, with his brave band of faithful companions, saving one who was ordered on shore . . . made every preparation, and then entered death’s portals—the awful, treacherous portals of Hell’s Gate.”

  Even in an era that preferred its rhetorical flourishes laid on with a trowel, this was a bit much. But the Republican was not quite done. No Fourth of July orator celebrating the patriots who had sacrificed their lives for their country could have outdone the fervor of the Republican’s tribute to the misguided explorer and his loyal men. “We can only say, they must have died as they had lived—heroes all; yielding up their spirits with the same quiet indifference and pure faith manifested during the horrible descent of the rapids in Brown’s Hole.”

  Tragedy draws crowds. The supposed loss of the expedition drew far more attention than its launching ever had. Emma Powell, whose faith in her husband was limitless, seems not to have given the story a moment’s credence. From her Detroit home, she set out at once to shoot the rumors down. Yes, John Sumner was with her husband’s expedition, Emma told the newspapers, but this supposed “Sumner” was highly unconvincing. “The John Sumner of the expedition in such a case would, I believe, have made his way or reported to Chicago or Detroit immediately. Sumner is a most reliable man and brother-in-law to William Byers, editor of the Denver News.” The last remark was a pointed hint that readers in search of truth rather than sensation might wait to see what Byers’s newspaper, properly called the Rocky Mountain News, had to say. (This was also the paper that employed Oramel Howland.)

  The Rocky Mountain News did quickly contact Fort Bridger and learned that no one from the Powell expedition had ever come to the fort. So much for “Sumner.”

  But a lie, Mark Twain remarked, can travel halfway around the world while truth is putting on its shoes. The first disaster story was soon superseded by one even more outlandish, based on a second sole survivor. The new man, who may have heard “Sumner’s” story, was called John A. Risdon. He spun a tale that left sobbing audiences pressing money on the devastated hero to pay his train fare home to Illinois.

  Risdon’s story sped across the nation’s telegraph wires and into its newspapers. The New York Times carried long accounts, reprinted from Western papers, under such headlines as “The Loss of the Powell Expedition,” and big-city dailies across the country did the same. Small papers plucked unattributed snippets from the bigger papers. The tiny Appleton (Wisconsin) Post, for example, reported that “Gen. Powell and 15 others, on an exploring expedition, crossing the Colorado River, was drawn into a whirlpool, and sunk forever. A man who was left to watch the mules, saw the sad catastrophe and he alone of all the party is saved. He was 150 miles from the nearest fort, but gathered up the baggage, and hastened to make known the sorrowful event.”

  On July 3, the Chicago Tribune told the story in breathless detail. A front-page headline read “Fearful Disaster,” and sub-headlines spelled out more of the grim tale. “Reported Loss of the Powell Exploring Expedition Confirmed,” the first one read, and then, “Twenty-One Men Engulfed in a Moment,” and “Arrival of the Only Survival at Springfield” and “His Statement of the Manner of the Accident.”

  The long story, overflowing with specifics, was based on an account that Risdon had provided Illinois’s Governor John Palmer. (Illinois had a special interest in Powell, a resident of the state.) The lone survivor’s integrity shone forth. “Mr. Risdon is an honest, plain, candid man, and told his story in a straightforward manner.” For all those onlookers who had heard Risdon choke out his anguished tale, the Tribune noted sadly, “the fate of Major Powell’s expedition is left without a doubt, and another name is added to the long roll of martyrs to science.”

  With the governor hanging on his every word, Risdon conjured up imaginary rivers and mountains and waterfalls, as delighted with his own creativity as a six-year-old with a new box of crayons. His trademark was an endless store of detail, which, all his listeners agreed, endowed his tale with the unmistakable ring of truth. Not only had Risdon been a member of the Powell expedition, he had served three years under Powell’s command in the Civil War, in Company B, First Illinois Artillery. Not only had he been with the expedition from the start, but he could rattle off the names of everyone in the party, in many cases down to the middle initial: there was Powell himself, of course, and also a pair of brothers, William C. Durley and Charles Durley, and Andrew Knoxton and T. W. Smith and William S. Dalton, and so on. The party also included “a half-breed named Chick-a-wa-nee,” who served as a guide, and two teamsters, Fred Myers and Thomas Walch, who drove the supply wagon.

  As Risdon told it, Powell and his crew had reached the Colorado River on May 7 or May 8, at a point near an Indian settlement the whites called Williamsburg. On May 16 or perhaps May 18—Risdon artfully “forgot” a name or date here and there, the better to enhance his credibility—Powell and his men set out to explore two tributaries of the Colorado, the Big Black and the Deleban. Powell’s boats had been left behind in favor of a large birch-bark canoe the Indians called a yawl. The entire party, except Risdon, climbed into one yawl. The river was exceedingly rough, with a fall of 160 feet in a mile and a quarter. (Niagara Falls, by way of comparison, is 170 feet.) Risdon, who had been assigned to scout the Deleban from shore, tried to convince Powell not to challenge the river. “But Major Powell said laughingly in reply: ‘We have crossed worse rapids than these, boys. You must be getting cowardly. If seven or eight men cannot paddle us across there, we will have to go under.’ ”

  On they went, in a scene straight from a boys’ adventure magazine. Twenty-five men in a single canoe “pushed out into the river with three hearty cheers, using seven paddles, the Major standing in the stern steering.”

  Risdon waved his hat at his departing friends. “You must be back in time for dinner,” he called heartily, “for I will have a good lunch for you when you return.”

  The men knew better. “Goodbye, Jack,” they called back. “You will never see us again.”

  A moment later Risdon saw the boat “commence whirling around, and like a living thing dive down into the depths of the river with its living freight, Major Powell standing at his post.” Alone on shore, the only survivor gaped in horror. Even afterward, in safety, it was painful to conjure up that awful time. “For two hours,” Risd
on recalled, “I lay on the bank of the river, crying like a baby.”

  Risdon added still more detail. He told how he had searched the river for any sign of the drowned men, and how he had spotted a bag and dived into the river to rescue it, and how it had miraculously turned out to contain Powell’s notes. Risdon had searched for another four long days. Sick with despair, he had reluctantly abandoned his quest. For eight days, he walked alone through empty country before reaching a military post where he finally delivered his dreadful news.

  It was a fine yarn, except that not a word of it was true. (It was a mark of how little known canyon country still was that newspapers across the country described Risdon’s imaginary geography without a second thought.) There was no guide named Chic-a-wa-nee, no Big Black or Deleban River, no canoe called a yawl, and no hapless crew of twenty-one or twenty-five squeezed into a single boat.

  Skeptics surfaced almost at once. The specifics that had done so much for Risdon’s credibility now conspired to trip him up. Powell’s mother, in Wheaton, Illinois, told the Chicago Evening Journal that she did not believe a word of Risdon’s account. Risdon had put Powell on the Colorado on a date when he was in fact just boarding the train in Chicago. Emma Powell was even more emphatic. “To one at all acquainted with the plans, aims and minutiae of the expedition,” she wrote, “the whole story is glaringly false, and betrays entire ignorance of the matter.”

  A few days later, Emma presented her case in full. Risdon said he had been with Powell since July 10, 1865, but Powell had not made his first trip West until 1867. Emma knew several of Powell’s men, but she had never heard of James A. Risdon or any of the other purported crew members. Risdon said the men had drowned on May 16 or 18, but Emma had a letter from her husband, sent from Green River Station, dated May 22. Four days after his supposed drowning, Powell had not even set out down the river.

  Newspapers that only a day or two before had hailed Risdon as a hero now competed to condemn him. On July 6, Powell’s hometown paper, the Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph, ran a story under the headline “The Pretended Loss of the Powell Expedition.” Risdon’s tale was “wholly false,” the Pantagraph thundered, “the invention of a liar or a crazy man.” The Detroit Tribune declared itself “justified in saying that the report of this man Risdon, beyond all reasonable doubt, is a tissue of fabrications from beginning to end.” The Rocky Mountain News went even further. “Risdon ought to be hung.”

  In another two weeks, any lingering doubts were resolved. The letter Powell had written to an Illinois State colleague and mailed at the Indian Agency had finally arrived. It was immediately turned over to the newspapers. “Camp at Mouth of Uintah, June 29, 1869,” the drowned man began cheerily. “Mr. Edwards: My dear sir: The party has reached this point in safety having run four cañons of about 25 miles each . . . All in good health—all in good spirits, and all with high hopes of success.”

  Meanwhile, his sad duty done, Risdon had bid the governor farewell and headed home. He stopped just long enough on the way to steal a horse from one man and some blankets from another. As inept a thief as a con man—he had already served one jail term for horse theft—he was quickly caught and almost as quickly recognized. Less than a month after it had begun, the career of the “last survivor” had ended, and John A. Risdon, alias Miller, alias Clark, stepped out of history’s pages and into a Logan County, Illinois, jail cell.

  Powell had hoped that his newspaper letters would find readers. Now his story had been trumpeted across the land. A nation hungry for heroes since the Civil War had found a new one. A public focused on the Western frontier, where the golden spike had been hammered home only the month before, had a reminder that much of the West was still wilderness, unknown and perilous. Alone in an empty desert and cut off from the outside world, Powell and his men had no idea that the country was buzzing about their fate.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  LAST TASTE OF CIVILIZATION

  Mark Twain would not write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer for another seven years, but the overheated news coverage of the last moments of the Powell expedition anticipates the famous scene where Tom and Huck Finn, supposedly drowned, reappeared at their own funeral. If they managed to emerge alive from the Grand Canyon, Powell and his men might eventually have a chance to enact a similar coup. But first they had to survive.

  The men whose agonized “deaths” had captured the nation’s attention had in fact been suffering no torment except boredom. The expedition had temporarily split in two; five men had set off to the Indian Agency (near present-day Whiterocks, Utah) to exchange letters and buy supplies, while the other five stayed in camp, surly and moping. Walter Powell and Andy Hall had been the first to leave for the agency. It was a forty-mile trek, but forty miles on foot across the desert beat sitting in camp with nothing to do. (They had tried rowing up the Uinta River but the current was too swift to fight.)

  Powell spent two days in camp pinning down his latitude and longitude, and then headed for the agency, too, along with Hawkins and Goodman. “It is a toilsome walk,” Powell wrote, “twenty miles of the distance being across a sand desert.” It was indeed a long slog and the men found themselves having to wade across the river several times, but it was not quite as arduous as Powell implied. “At noon met Hall coming for me with pony,” Powell noted in his river diary, although he left Hall and the pony out of his published account of the expedition.

  The remark about the pony is not especially significant in itself. But it marks a new stage of our tale, for it comes from the first entry in Powell’s river diary, dated July 2. (If Powell kept a diary for the first month of the trip, it has never been found.) From this point on, as in the case of the disappearing pony, we will have the chance to compare the river diary that Powell wrote by the campfire each night with the more elaborate version of his story that he published years later.

  The five men who had gone to the agency at least had a chance to see new faces and new scenery. (“It is rather pleasant to see a house once more, and some evidences of civilization, even if it is on an Indian reservation,” Powell noted.) The forlorn men stuck in camp—Bradley, Sumner, the Howland brothers, and Dunn—had little to do but kill time and battle mosquitoes. “We feel lonesome,” Bradley confessed, and the mosquitoes screaming around made life miserable. Bradley kept a fire going in front of his tent. The smoke helped keep the bugs away, but he complained that he had not seen mosquitoes as bold and as numerous as this even in Florida. These were muggers, not mosquitoes. “One of the men says that while out on the shore of the lake a mosquito asked him for his pipe, knife and tobacco and told him to hunt his old clothes for a match while he loaded the pipe.”

  Bradley tried berry picking to pass the time. Resolved to outlast the mosquitoes, he fashioned an elaborate costume. He draped a swath of netting over his hat and head and cinched it around his waist, donned gloves to protect his hands from bites, and completed his ensemble with a pair of knee-high boots to foil rattlesnakes. He emerged triumphant, with three quarts of currants.

  The days in camp dragged on. Powell’s expedition to the Rockies the year before had hit a similar dead spot. “I did nothing today,” one of the crew had written then, “and the other boys helped me.” By July 3, their sixth day stuck in the same spot, Powell’s men felt just as antsy. Bradley, who had whiled away as much time as he could cleaning rifles and pistols, turned his thoughts to finding other entertainment.

  With Hawkins, the cook, away at the agency, Bradley decided to fix a pot of beans. “Put on what I thought we could eat and set them to boiling,” he wrote. “They boiled and swelled and I kept putting in hot water until I had a large bread-pan that will hold ten or twelve quarts solid full of beans.” With the pan full to the brim, there was no space for water, so the beans scorched “a little.” The rest of the crew, in the meantime, had set off duck hunting and fishing and currant gathering, partly to have something to do and partly to obtain the makings of at least a rudimentary Independence Da
y dinner. “We shall have a poor 4 of July anyway,” Bradley fretted, “and we must make the best of it.”

  The Fourth bore out Bradley’s glum forecast. Powell and the others had yet to return from the agency, which made for some anxious thoughts that something had gone wrong. Worry soon gave way to self-pity. Bradley, a man sentimental and tough in equal measure, tormented himself with thoughts of home and hearth. “Three successive 4ths I have been in the wilderness . . . ,” he lamented, recalling the woes of his army days. “Where shall I be next 4th of July? Took a long walk tonight alone . . . and thought of home, contrasted its comforts and privileges with the privations we suffer here and asked myself why am I here? . . . With moistened eyes I seek again my tent where engaged with my own thoughts, I pass hours with my friends at home, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping until sleep comes and dreams bring me into the apparent presence of those I love.”

  Bradley wasn’t the only one taking stock. On July 5, at the agency, Frank Goodman told Powell that he had decided to leave the expedition. Goodman had nearly drowned at Disaster Falls and had lost all his gear and all his clothing except the underwear he was wearing. He had set out in search of adventure. By now, he told Powell, he had “seen danger enough.” The men liked Goodman, but they were matter-of-fact about his departure. Bradley noted simply that he was “one of those that lost everything in the wreck,” and Oramel Howland described him only as “one of the wrecked party [who] leaves us here.” (Howland had been a member of the wrecked party himself.)