Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  The story is a true cliffhanger, and it sounds more like a scene from a dime novel or a Perils of Pauline film than like real life. Indeed, Powell’s first detailed account of his river trip—published in Scribner’s Monthly, one of the most popular magazines of the day—ran with a series of dramatic illustrations. “The Rescue” showed Bradley lifting Powell to safety. (Though Powell barely mentioned his amputated arm, the artist had no such qualms. He also took the liberty of conjuring up a pair of pants for Bradley to cover his nakedness.)

  Powell described the adventure not only in Scribner’s but again in his Exploration of the Colorado. Unaccountably, he set the story at Steamboat Rock, a hundred miles upstream and not in Desolation Canyon at all. But we know it happened, for Bradley recorded it in his diary on July 8, in the all-in-a-day’s-work tone that was de rigueur whenever any of the men found himself describing his own accomplishments. “Climbed the mountain this morning,” Bradley wrote, “found it a very hard one to ascend but we succeeded at last. In one place Major having but one arm couldn’t get up so I took off my drawers and they made an excellent substitute for rope and with that assistance he got up safe.”

  With Powell safe at last, he and Bradley resumed their climb to the top as if everything had proceeded according to plan. The view from the summit can hardly have helped settle their shaky nerves. From a thousand feet above the river, the outlook was “wild and desolate,” with sharp, jagged peaks in all directions. Bradley judged they were about halfway through the canyon “but not the worst half,” for the rapids had grown more threatening throughout the day. Bradley ranked one of them, yet again, as “the worst we ever run.”

  Even so, Bradley was eager to carry on. It would be too much to say that he had come to welcome rapids, but there was no denying that running a rapid woke a man up. “It is a wild exciting game,” Bradley declared, “and aside from the danger of losing our provisions and having to walk out to civilization I should like to run them all for the danger to life is only trifling.”

  Bradley’s exhilarated tone was more significant than the words themselves. Powell’s men knew by now that nearly everything was against them—they had no life jackets and the wrong boats and not enough food and too little experience. And they were trying to do what no one had ever done. The one thing they had going for them was courage. These were men who genuinely saw the prospect of being flung overboard into a wild river as a splendid “game.” The question was how far their courage could take them.

  No one could find lining or portaging rapids exhilarating. But it was up to Powell, not Bradley, to decide whether they would run a rapid or struggle around it instead, and Bradley’s taste for “wild excitement” played no role in Powell’s decision-making. Late that afternoon, Powell made his usual call, and the men camped at the head of another “unrunnable” rapid. Before knocking off for the day, the crew managed to line the Emma Dean and one of the freight boats past the white water and carried about half the supplies on a path along the shore. They left the rest for the following morning. “I should run it if left to myself . . . ,” Bradley wrote. “Major’s way is safe but I as a lazy man look more to the ease of the thing.” Bradley had hated the army, but, for now at least, he obeyed orders like a good soldier.

  It would be hard to find men less lazy than Bradley and the others. Their eagerness to challenge the river reflected impatience and growing confidence, not sloth. The men were still raw, but by now they had seen scores of rapids and had begun to break the code. They had figured out early on to look for a V-shaped tongue of smooth water and follow it downstream, and now they had detected other patterns. Solitary bits of commotion in the river—an isolated patch of churning, splashing water, say—usually meant trouble. Regular features—a line of five waves, for example—were marginally less risky.

  They had learned something, too, of the ways of water and rock. Pourovers, for example, form where the water flows over a barely submerged rock. From upstream, the boatman sees a smooth line of water. An untutored eye might see an invitation, a bit of order amid the whitecapped anarchy. In fact, pourovers can form “holes,” and holes can be deadly. Water passing over a rock or a boulder is suddenly confined to a smaller “channel,” so it speeds up. As it plummets off the boulder’s far edge, gravity speeds it further. Smacking into the river, this mini-waterfall then dives downward, creating a “hole” where it hits, and often, on the hole’s downstream side, a breaking wave that can reach fifteen or twenty feet. The true trouble begins as the river rushes to fill the hole. The result is a kind of perpetual motion nightmare, as a steady stream of falling water continues to re-dig the hole and the river labors just as insistently to fill it back up. A boat or a swimmer trapped in a hole can be recirculated endlessly, held in a remorseless, watery fist.

  First, the trapped swimmer is driven beneath the river’s surface by the water crashing onto him as it cascades over the boulder. Then his natural buoyancy and his life jacket spit him up to the surface, where he will try desperately to take in a gulp of air while he has a chance. A lucky swimmer may break free, but if the hole is deep and powerful, he will likely be caught in the backwash of water moving upstream to fill in the hole. Then, like a prisoner strapped to an underwater Ferris wheel, he will find himself carried back to the starting point and driven under the surface a second time by the water pounding down from the rock above. The cycle repeats endlessly, while the swimmer grows weaker and more frantic.

  For the same reason, fishermen standing near the base of dams sometimes drown. A man-made dam is perfectly smooth and regular, so the water flowing over it can form a hole with no “weak points” where a swimmer can pop free. It is a particularly cruel death because the instinctive and desperate urge to stay on the surface and breathe is precisely what allows the hole to retain its grip. A swimmer trapped in a bad hole may be unable to break away while wearing his buoyant life jacket. If he could somehow make the jacket vanish for a split second, he might be able to sink deep beneath the surface and escape from the hole, but the last thing he would want is to have to swim the rest of the rapid without a jacket to keep him afloat.

  A boulder standing high out of the water creates trouble of a different sort. Here the water that hits the sides of the rock flows around it while the water that smacks head-on into the rock’s midsection “pillows” up for a moment before finding its path around the sides. The problem is that the “pillow” extends considerably farther upstream than a beginner might guess, and the pillow behaves like an extension of the rock. A boat that nestles up against this pillow can find itself broadside to the current, the boat’s downstream side up out of the water and its upstream side held under the river’s surface by the onrushing current. The river will happily leap aboard that upstream edge, like a malicious giant jumping on a child’s seesaw, and a boat can flip in an instant.

  Despite the men’s increasing familiarity with the river’s ways, Powell continued to insist on lining and portaging. What Powell took to be prudent, his men saw as maddeningly overcautious. What they saw as bold, he took to be reckless. This was trouble. Every day brought a profusion of new rapids. If the muttering about how to deal with them grew into outright rebellion, the expedition might well fall apart.

  The disagreement between Powell and the crew did not reflect differences in temperament so much as differences in responsibility. Powell was as bold as any of his crew. But as leader and organizer of the trip, he had different responsibilities and priorities than his men. That made for built-in conflict. “If you’re the leader and you have the welfare of the whole expedition in mind,” explains Michael Ghiglieri, a boatman who has led trips on rivers around the world, “then you know that prudence is the wiser course, however much pain is involved. But if you’re one of the crew, and you’ve got big, nasty bruises on both shins and your knees are bleeding and your toes are cracking from fungal infections and your hands are raw from ropes burning through them, and then the leader says, ‘Let’s line this one,’ that�
�s hard to take.”

  Lining and portaging are painful, and in addition they are painfully slow. A rapid that might take thirty terrifying seconds in a boat can eat up agonizing hours on foot. “Lining is galling work,” says Ghiglieri. “It’s also fatiguing, it’s also hurting, and it delays everything. It’s all bad. The only thing that’s good about it is that when you finish you probably still have all your stuff. So for the men, there’s a tremendous temptation to just get in the boats and go. But for Powell, the pull was just as strong the other way. He learned the hard way right off the bat, at Disaster Falls, what happens when things screw up. And if he lost one more boat, he was out of business, it was over. It was two strikes and you’re out, not three.”

  For the expedition as a whole, a fragile coalition to begin with, here was still another potent source of dissension. As the men grew ever more tired and hungry and beat-up, it seemed certain to grow uglier.

  A gale of hot, dry wind blasted through camp on the evening of July 9, making the prospect of the next morning’s portaging all the more burdensome. The air was so thick with blowing sand that the men covered their heads to breathe. The rapids’ unending roar ratcheted the tension up another notch. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton’s most vivid conceptions of Hell,” Bradley lamented.

  As if insulted that Bradley had taken it lightly, the river the next day was in as foul a mood as the men. The morning of July 9 was “the wildest day’s run of the trip thus far,” a nerve-racking journey through “a succession of rappids or rather a continuous rapid with a succession of cataracts for 20 miles.” The men ran some of the rapids and lined two. Twenty-four hours earlier, Bradley had waved aside the dangers of hiking out of the canyon and had clamored for a chance to run rapids. Today he had the hurry knocked out of him. “We are quite careful now of our provisions as the hot blasts that sweep through these rocky gorges admonish us that a walk out to civilization is almost certain death,” he wrote, “so better go a little slow and safe.”

  The men spent July 10 in camp making observations and repairing the boats. Sumner was practicing with the sextant, learning how to determine latitude and longitude. Powell and Oramel Howland climbed the cliff with a barometer, measuring the thicknesses of the various strata as they climbed. This called for an odd combination of athleticism and scientific precision. A barometer’s reading changes with altitude but also with the weather; in order to make sure that the difference between the readings on two barometers is a true indication of the differences in altitude between them (and has not been skewed by a change in the weather), the measurements must be simultaneous. A man in camp took a barometer reading at half-hour intervals. Powell and Howland, in the meantime, raced ahead with their barometer, struggling to reach the base of one rock level or the top of another precisely on the half hour so that they could take a reading of their own. Later they would compare the two sets of figures. Thin strata found Powell and Howland waiting cockily for the half hour to arrive. On thick strata, they ran and stumbled to meet their deadline.

  Early in the afternoon, they reached the plateau, four thousand feet above the river. (Hikers who have struggled up the manicured Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon know that this was no casual jaunt.) Howland set off in pursuit of some deer he had seen in the distance, and Powell went off to climb a mountain. By the time they met again (Howland was empty-handed), it had grown late, and the sun was sinking fast. Running and jumping their way downhill, the two men made it as far as they could. But darkness caught them still high on the cliff side, and they had to feel their way the rest of the trek home, guided only by the light of the campfire in the distance. “A long, slow, anxious descent we make,” Powell wrote.

  Only two days before, Powell’s exasperating caution had driven the crew to the edge of their patience. Now, as if defying anyone to pigeonhole him, the mercurial leader had provided a matching display of recklessness. It was not merely that racing down a cliff in fading light was asking for trouble. Powell was a fine climber, but he knew he was adding extra risk to what was risky enough in any case. A companion on a different expedition has left us a record of climbing with Powell: “On the way back the Major’s cut-off arm was on the rock side of a gulch we had followed up, and I found it necessary, two or three times, to place myself where he could step on my knee, as his stump had a tendency to throw him off his balance. Had he fallen at these points the drop would have been four hundred or five hundred feet. I mention this to show how he never permitted his one-armed condition to interfere with his doing things.”

  Bradley, who had been in camp throughout Powell and Howland’s cliff-side adventure, might have preferred to be caught in the dark himself. Instead, he had spent the day working on his journal and doing his best to endure Andy Hall’s exuberance. Playful as a puppy, the boisterous Hall had been singing. Hall had “a voice like a crosscut saw,” in Bradley’s judgment, but he was not bashful about displaying it. Over and over again came the booming chorus: “When he put his arm around her she bustified like a forty pounder, look away, look away, look away in Dixie’s land.”

  The next day was a Sunday. To Bradley’s dismay, Powell again showed no inclination to honor the Sabbath. Instead, the men set out early and, in about three-quarters of a mile, came to the day’s first rapid. Bradley had scouted it the day before—it struck him as “bad” but runnable despite “very heavy” waves—and Powell evidently shared his judgment. Everyone made it through, but Powell’s boat, the Emma Dean, broke one oar and lost another. That left her with only two oars rather than four, so that only one man could row. They had no spare oars and could not find any pieces of driftwood suitable for sawing, but they figured they could limp on. Downstream, when they reached a point that permitted an easy climb to the plateau, they could hike to the top and cut new oars from a tree.

  Soon they approached another rapid. Standing up to study it, Powell decided that it could be run. Once in the rapid, when it was too late for second thoughts, he saw that the channel veered sharply to the left and the river hit hard against the cliff face that blocked its way. Powell gave the order to land upstream from the cliff, but it was too late, especially with only one man at the oars. The boat swept downstream, overpowered and out of control, headed toward a boulder in midstream. Somehow they made it by, but a wave rebounded off the boulder and filled the Emma Dean to the gunwales. Then another wave hit her. Bradley, watching from his own boat, saw the Emma Dean “rowled over and over” and Powell, Sumner, and Dunn flung into the river. “I soon find that swimming is very easy, and I cannot sink,” Powell wrote later. Powell had a life jacket, but swimming one-armed through the swirling chop can hardly have been easy.

  By the time Powell located the Emma Dean, she was twenty or thirty feet away, still afloat but tumbling, right side up one minute and upside down the next. Powell swam toward her, trying to keep his head above water but occasionally finding himself pummeled by giant waves and gasping for breath. Finally he reached the boat and found Sumner and Dunn there already, doing their best to hold on. Dunn lost his grip and disappeared underwater, but Sumner quickly hauled him back to the surface. They were drifting faster now, approaching another rapid. Holding the boat and kicking with all their strength, the three men struggled toward shore, the rapid ever closer. Finally, still clinging to the boat and just upstream of the rapid, they managed a crash landing into a pile of driftwood.

  Once ashore, the men made camp and built an enormous fire to dry their clothes. It had been a hellacious day. They had advanced less than a mile, and Sumner and Dunn might well have drowned. “We broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments,” Sumner observed. “Major Powell said he lost three hundred dollars in bills. I lost my temper and at least a year’s growth—didn’t have anything else to lose.” The only good news was that there would be no need to climb a cliff to look for wood to make oars. The driftwood provided plenty of raw material.

  Powell put the day’s losses at two guns, one baromet
er, and some blankets. The gear had been thrown from the open compartment of the Emma Dean when the boat rolled over. “The guns and barometer are lost,” Powell wrote, “but I succeeded in catching one of the rolls of blankets, as it drifted by, when we were swimming to shore.” (The last claim sounds unlikely, even for as fine an athlete as Powell. Could a one-armed man swimming in high waves and strong current while helping to pull a boat to shore also nab a floating bedroll? Powell may have indulged in an understandable bit of exaggeration in describing how he helped rescue the Emma Dean. Bradley’s account sounds more plausible: “Major had to leave the boat and swim to land, as he has but one arm and her constant turning over made it impossible for him to hold onto her with one hand, but the other two [Jack and Dunn] brought the boat in below safe.” While he swam, Powell may well have spotted his bedroll and grabbed it.)

  In the privacy of his diary that night, Bradley gloated just a bit. Perhaps Powell would be less inclined from now on to treat Sunday as just another day. “Sunday again,” he wrote, “and Major has got his match.”

  Bradley’s own match came soon enough. At noon the next day, just when everyone was beginning to relax after successfully running several rapids, “we came suddenly upon an old roarer.” Boulders strewn along the channel’s left side pushed the water right, beneath a rock ledge that jutted out from the cliff face. They stopped to scout, and, curiously, Powell decided that this was one they could run. The plan was to stay as far left as possible, skirting the rocks but staying well clear of the overhanging ledge on the river’s right side.