Sumner was perhaps a shade more sympathetic. “Goodman, having had all the experience his health called for, stopped at the post,” he recalled later. “He had had several close calls, and possibly ran out of nerve. He was a fine singer of sea songs, and we missed him around the evening camp.” Powell focused on the practical. “As our boats are rather heavily loaded,” he observed, “I am content that he should leave, although he has been a faithful man.”
Now they were nine.
Despite Goodman’s departure and Bradley’s melancholy, morale was not at all bad. Hall was the cheeriest of all. An excursion down a wild and untamed river was a rollicking good time, the kind of adventure a person didn’t find every day. And unlike the surly mountain men, Hall had no quarrel with Powell’s leadership. “The major is from near Blumington, Ill.,” he wrote his brother. “I suppose you never herd off him and he is a Bully fellow you bett.”
Powell himself felt pleased with how things were going. In the same letter where he had told his friend and colleague Edwards that he was alive and well (and thereby put an end to Risdon’s hoax), he had delivered still more good news. “The boats seem to be a success; although filled with water by the waves many times, they never sink, the light cabins at each end acting well as buoys.” Not sinking was indeed one criterion of success, although hardly a demanding one. By this time, Powell knew that the boats were not only hard to sink but hard to maneuver as well, and he suspected that the river would grow worse in the weeks ahead. Even so, Powell’s optimism was genuine and unforced. He had the natural leader’s knack for automatically framing every situation in such a way that some bit of welcome news dominated the picture. Gloomier possibilities, if they could be glimpsed at all, were relegated to the background.
But there was no denying how hard the trip had been. Even the rambunctious Hall hoped that the river had no surprises left. “i think that we ar now through the worst off the water now.” Sumner held off from guessing about what lay ahead. “So far,” he noted simply, “we have accomplished what we set out for.”
On July 5, the same day that Goodman resigned, everyone else returned from the agency. The visit had been a disappointment. The reservation was nearly empty—most of the Indians had gone to see the newly completed transcontinental railroad, and Pardyn Dodds, the agency’s top man, was off to Salt Lake City. What was worse, Dodds had gone to buy supplies because the agency had run low. Powell brushed aside the discouraging news (though even if there had been ample supplies on hand, he had little money to pay for them), but there was no denying that this was a blow. Nor, despite their hopes, did anyone receive mail from home. Bradley had been even more eager than the others for “letters from home and friends,” and his diary entries for July 5 and 6 were brusque and grumpy.
Mail would have been a bonus but food was essential, and the agency represented the expedition’s last certain chance to stock up. Powell bought what he could afford and managed to barter some of the expedition’s coffee and tobacco for a bit more. In the end, Bradley noted, “[Powell] has got 300 lbs. flour which will make our rations last a little longer.” Sumner was more caustic. “Major Powell was gone five days, and brought back a shirt-tail full of supplies,” he complained later. “I thought at the time it was a damned stingy, foolish scheme, as there was plenty of supplies to be had, to bring back such a meagre mess for nine to make a thousand-mile voyage through an unknown canyon, but as I wasn’t boss I supposed I ought to keep still about it.”
Sumner’s remark about “plenty of supplies” was unfair, but everyone shared his concern about whether they had enough food. Even Powell acknowledged that they might be headed for trouble. “Our rations . . . have been wet so many times that they are almost in a spoiling condition,” he noted. “In fact we have lost nearly half now by one mishap or another.”
At this juncture, as the men return to their boats, we should take a moment to consider one of the most vexing questions of the entire saga. It sounds arcane, but it is deadly practical. The question is this: Did Powell’s boats have a steering oar at the stern, so that one man (facing forward) could steer while his two backward-facing companions rowed?
The great majority of accounts of Powell’s 1869 expedition, even the best ones, simply take for granted that Powell’s boats had steering oars. So do all the films, and even such quasi-official sources as a U.S. stamp issued in 1969 to commemorate the Powell centennial. That stamp, labeled “John Wesley Powell 1869 Expedition,” depicts two men rowing and Powell himself at the steering oar.
A steering oar (also called a sweep oar) would have been an immense help. The man at the sweep would have been facing forward, so that he could have seen the hazards lying in wait downstream. More to the point, he would have had a chance of avoiding them. Picture, in contrast, the plight of two men at the oars of a heavy, hard-to-maneuver boat without a sweep, pulling with all their might into a rapid they could only glance at.
With so much in favor of steering oars, it seems that Powell’s boats must have had them. Brad Dimock, a white-water historian, has rowed modern replicas of Powell’s boats. Such replicas have been built more than once, and all the replicas have had sweep oars. “They’re much more difficult to run without a sweep,” Dimock says. “I mean really much, much tougher, to the point that it’s almost completely impossible. And that’s an interesting point, because Powell started without them.”
To crew a sweep-oared boat, you need three men, one at the sweep and two at the oars. “But when Powell started out,” Dimock goes on, “he had ten men and four boats, and you do the arithmetic on that and you don’t have sweep oars.” At the start of the Powell expedition, only the Emma Dean and the No Name carried three men.
Sumner and Dunn were at the oars in the Emma Dean. Powell was the third man, and in theory he might have been able to handle a sweep, but if it happened, neither he nor anyone else ever saw fit to mention it. For a man of Powell’s bravura, that seems unlikely. (Powell’s problem would have been keeping his balance while being buffeted by ten-foot waves. To keep from being washed overboard, a boatman with two arms would hold the sweep with one hand and a strap of some sort with the other. With his good hand on the sweep, Powell would have needed to rig some kind of loop that could have supported him by the stump of his amputated arm.)
The No Name, too, carried three men, Goodman and the Howland brothers. Oramel Howland, though, had his maps to prepare. Howland rode downstream, Sumner wrote, “perched on a sack of flour in the middle of one of the large boats, mapping the river as we rowed along.” If the No Name did have a sweep oar, then, as in the case of the Emma Dean, no one ever said so. That would be a curious oversight, especially considering all the talk about the No Name when the boat was lost at Disaster Falls.
But Dimock’s remark about Powell starting out without sweep oars raises a broader question—did Powell’s boats ever have sweep oars? After the No Name sank, after all, the arithmetic worked in Powell’s favor. Then there were ten men (or, after Goodman left, nine) and only three boats. These were resourceful, quick-thinking men. Seeing the predicament they were in, did they cut a twelve- or thirteen-foot-long sweep oar from a promising piece of driftwood and fashion an oarlock for it?
Regan Dale, a highly regarded river runner with many years’ experience, feels certain that Powell had sweep oars, mainly because he cannot imagine surviving the rapids without them. Dale rowed Powell replicas for IMAX in 1983 and for German public television in 1999. He recalls the experience with a kind of wary respect, the way you might remember basic training. “They’re definitely not the kind of boats that you’d want to do very much white water in,” he remarks. “They’d barely pivot. They went in a straight line really well, but they didn’t pivot at all, so it was really hard to hit waves straight on.” The boats hardly pivoted, Dale emphasized, even with a sweep oar. “Without the sweep,” he says flatly, “it’d be impossible to turn them.”
Dimock and Dale are stars of the river-running fraternity. When
boatmen of their skill and experience say they cannot conceive of navigating rapids in Powell’s boats without sweep oars, it becomes hard to imagine that nineteenth-century novices could do it.
And so we are confronted with two possibilities. One is to reason, with Dimock and Dale and many other boatmen, that Powell must have hit on the steering-oar idea sooner or later. (But then why did Sumner describe Howland riding downriver perched in splendor on his flour sack, weeks beyond Disaster Falls?) The second alternative is simpler. Perhaps the river really was next to unmanageable in long, heavy boats without sweep oars. Perhaps that is why Powell portaged and lined whenever he could and why, in the many rapids that he found himself forced to run, he floundered out of control so often.
We cannot resolve the uncertainty by turning to drawings or photographs of the 1869 boats because, as noted earlier, no such depictions exist. (One major source of confusion is that the earliest photographs of boats on the Green and Colorado, from 1871, do clearly show steering oars.) And the journals, which one might hope would clear up the mystery, leave matters ambiguous. Neither Bradley nor Sumner ever mentioned sweep oars. Nor did Powell in his river diary, nor any of the others in the letters or newspaper articles they wrote at the time. (On the other hand, we know from accounts written many years later that Powell wore a life jacket, and no one ever mentioned that at the time either.)
In the river-running community, a handful of historically minded boatmen and a few white-water historians have mulled over the sweep-oar question for years. There is no consensus, but many on both sides are big names in their fields; the pro-sweep and anti-sweep camps could each muster an all-star team. (See the notes for a closer examination of the controversy.)
But nearly all outsiders have written as if the existence of sweep oars is settled fact. That is to prejudge a question that remains defiantly open. And that, in turn, is to risk underestimating the challenges and the dangers that Powell and his men confronted. We do not know whether Powell’s boats had sweep oars. We do know that even for today’s best boatmen, as one of them observes, “It would have been a tremendous handicap not to have had a sweep.”
On July 6, Powell and his men were finally ready to set out again. They pulled into the river at ten in the morning. “Was exceedingly glad to get away for I want to keep going,” Bradley wrote. “Don’t like long stopping.” Sumner liked it even less. “After 7 days of weary, useless waiting,” he moaned, “we are at last ready to cut loose from the last sign of civilization for many hundred miles.”
Only two miles later, they spotted one more sign of civilization, a garden growing on a small mid-river island, with no gardener in sight. Fed up with beans, flour, and salted meat, the men raced ashore to grab what they could. Andy Hall suggested that potato tops made good greens. Powell took pains, in his account of the episode, to explain that they were no raiding party. The year before, he wrote, he and his guides had met a hunter named Johnson who had told Powell of his “intention to plant some corn, potatoes, and other vegetables on this island in the spring, and, knowing that we would pass it, invited us to stop and help ourselves, even if he should not be there.”
Bradley told a simpler tale. “We had read that ‘stolen fruit is sweet’ and thought we would try it,” he wrote. Sumner seconded Bradley. “The Professor, Dunn and Hall stole their arms full of young beets, turnips, and potatoes.” The men returned to the boats and pulled to shore a mile downstream to enjoy their plunder in the shade of a cottonwood tree. Oramel Howland passed up the feast altogether, and Bradley took one taste and threw his meal away, but everyone else dug in.
Back on the river and only another mile downstream, they began to repent of their crime. “Such a gang of sick men I never saw before or since,” Sumner wrote. “Whew! It seems I can feel it yet. . . . [Hall] ripped out an oath or two, and swore he had coughed up a potato vine a foot long, with a potato on it as big as a goose egg.” Sumner noted, deadpan, that “Hall was somewhat given to exaggeration, and he might have stretched the matter a bit.” Powell was in as rough shape as the others. The men pulled to shore, he wrote, “and we tumble around under the trees, groaning with pain, and I feel a little alarmed, lest our poisoning be severe.”*
By evening they had begun to feel better. Sumner remarked that, all things considered, he “didn’t think potato tops made a good greens for the sixth day of July.” Bradley, as pleased with himself as a hale man on an ocean liner full of seasick passengers, noted smugly that he expected “we shan’t eat any more potato-tops this season.”
They set out the next morning at seven o’clock. Almost without noticing it, they had entered another canyon. The water was quiet, “with no more current than a canal,” and the river cut great sweeping curves as it swung back and forth between stone walls. The open valley and the “splendid meadow” that Bradley had delighted in only days before now seemed a remote memory. The cliffs grew steadily taller. By ten o’clock, when the men stopped to take measurements, the clifftop towered 1,050 feet above the river.
Side canyons were rare here and the walls almost continuous. The expedition was truly cut off now, as if traveling through a meandering stone maze. The cliffs were perpendicular in some places, eroded into great sloping terraces in others. Powell dubbed one especially striking formation Sumner’s Amphitheater.
At one point, Bradley went off on his own while the others took measurements. “I . . . put my name on a flat stone with name of expedition and date and fastened it up very strong,” he wrote. “Think it will stand many years. It is the first time I have left my name in this country for we have been in a part where white men may have been before but we are now below their line of travel.”
The nine remaining men of the Colorado River Exploring Expedition were well and truly on their own.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
TRAPPED
The next day, July 8, brought scene after scene of discouraging bleakness. The river grew rougher, and the canyon was a study in grays and browns. Erosion had done its work, yielding great piles of broken rocks and strangely carved crags and towers. “The walls are almost without vegetation,” Powell noted with dismay. “A few dwarf bushes are seen here and there, clinging to the rocks, and cedars grow from the crevices—not like the cedars of a land refreshed with rains, great cones bedecked with spray, but ugly clumps, like war clubs, beset with spines. We are minded to call this the Cañon of Desolation.”
Powell and Bradley set out, as usual without ropes or other safety gear, to climb the cliffs to measure their height. The routine outing, on the morning of July 8, turned into one of the strangest episodes of the entire journey. “We start up a gulch,” Powell wrote, “then pass to the left, on a bench, along the wall; then up again, over broken rocks; then we reach more benches, along which we walk, until we find more broken rocks and crevices, by which we climb, still up, until we have ascended six or eight hundred feet; then we are met by a sheer precipice.”
Stymied for a moment, the two men soon found a route they could try. They made their arduous way upward, Powell in the lead. Making matters more complicated, they were carrying a barometer to measure the elevation when they finally got to the top. On the hardest parts of the climb, this made for a laborious kind of baton passing—while Bradley held the barometer, Powell inched his way upward a foot or two and then waited as Bradley passed the barometer up. Once Bradley had climbed over him, Powell would return the barometer to Bradley and scramble on a step or two farther, and so on.
With excruciating slowness, they made it nearly to the top. “Here, by making a spring,” Powell went on, “I gain a foothold in a little crevice, and grasp an angle of the rock overhead. I find I can get up no farther, and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand, and cannot reach foot-hold below without.” This easy-to-overlook reference to “my hand” (an ordinary climber would have said “my left hand”) was one of the few times Powell reminded his readers that he was not only taking on a mighty river and thousand-foot cliffs but do
ing it one-handed.
Picture his predicament—Powell was clinging to a rock face hundreds of feet above a river, keeping his balance only by grasping a protrusion in the rock. He could not see a nearby ledge that he could climb to, and, unlike any other trapped climber, he could not even probe the rock face for a new hold with one hand while holding on with the other.
Powell called to Bradley for help. After a moment, Bradley found a route that let him scramble to a ledge above Powell, but he could not reach him. Bradley looked for a stick that he could extend to Powell or a tree he could break a branch from. Nothing. He considered lowering the barometer case, but Powell didn’t think he could hold on to it.
They needed a plan, and fast. “Standing on my toes,” Powell wrote, “my muscles begin to tremble.” Rock climbers call this involuntary spasming “sewing machine leg.” It throws off a climber’s balance and saps his strength, and it can spread to other overburdened muscles. “It is sixty or eighty feet to the foot of the precipice,” Powell went on. “If I lose my hold I shall fall to the bottom, and then perhaps roll over the bench, and tumble still farther down the cliff.”
Bradley devised a desperate scheme. He was dressed in only a shirt and long underwear. Stripping off his drawers, he lowered them toward Powell. They hung straight down from the ledge Bradley stood on, dangling in the air above Powell’s head.
And, because Bradley’s ledge overhung Powell’s, the makeshift rescue line was behind the Major. Now came the key moment. To grab the drawers, Powell would have to release his handhold, lean back into space, and find the tattered underwear before he fell, empty-handed, to his death.
He let go, groped for the lifeline, grabbed it, and then hung on one-handed. Bradley struggled to haul Powell upward, like a fisherman who had hooked a monster (except that this fish prayed mightily for the line to hold). Each man concentrated all his efforts on his own grim test of strength: Powell clutched the underwear in his left hand, desperate not to lose his grip; Bradley, at 150 pounds not much bigger than Powell, at 120, strained every muscle to reel him in. Powell maintained his hold, and Bradley pulled him to safety.
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