Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Sumner tried hard to seem unimpressed at finally meeting the Grand—“not timber enough within 10 miles to supply one family 6 months,” he griped—but even he was struck by the scene in front of him. Here was “an apparently endless cañon in 3 directions—up the Grand, up the Green, and down the Colorado; the walls 1250 ft. high.”

  Powell was the most excited of all. Even the geological passages in his journal, purportedly nothing more than somber explanations, conveyed unmistakably the notion that everything led up to this. Powell had begun his account of the expedition not with a description of himself or his men but with several pages on the natural forces that had shaped the Western landscape.

  He began with rivers. Through the course of the winter, Powell wrote, snow accumulated high in the mountains. Then, “when the summer-sun comes, this snow melts, and tumbles down the mountain-sides in millions of cascades. Ten million cascade brooks unite to form ten thousand torrent creeks; ten thousand torrent creeks unite to form a hundred rivers beset with cataracts; a hundred roaring rivers unite to form the Colorado, which rolls, a mad, turbid stream into the Gulf of California.”

  That “mad, turbid stream” had been beckoning them from the moment they had left Green River Station nearly two months before. Now they were poised to go where no one, as far as they knew, had ever gone.

  This was what they had come for.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  OUTMATCHED

  The euphoria at finally reaching the Grand quickly burned off under the pitiless desert sun. There was no shade in camp, but the exhausted men could not push on until they had rested a bit and patched their boats. No one knew what games the river would get up to next, but it seemed prudent to assume the worst. The men would be riding on the merged back of two mighty rivers, where before there had been only one, and the newcomer, the Grand, was the bigger of the two. Just downstream this merged monster hurled itself into a narrow, stone chasm. Trouble seemed inevitable.

  But trouble turned up ahead of schedule, when the men took advantage of their break to look closely at the food stores. “Our rations, . . . we find, are badly injured,” Powell wrote. “The flour has been wet and dried so many times that it is all musty, and full of hard lumps.” Sumner had been the one to make the unhappy discovery. The only food left for the rest of the trip was “about 500 pounds of flour and a little bacon and dried apples,” he wrote, and the flour was “a miserable mess of green fermentation.”

  Sumner and Oramel Howland sifted the flour through an improvised sieve made from mosquito netting. Almost half the total, two hundred pounds, was beyond salvaging and had to be thrown away. They put the rest on a sheet to dry in the sun. By Powell’s reckoning, that left food for two months. The arithmetic was discouraging. At the start, seven weeks before, they had packed supplies intended to last ten months. In less than two months, then, they had used or lost or ruined eight months’ worth of food. From here on, they would be down to near-starvation rations—Powell’s estimate that five hundred pounds of food would last two months meant that each man would get less than a pound per day. They had no idea how much farther they had to go.

  The pressing question was not Where had it all gone? but How much longer would it last? If ten months’ supplies had provided food for two months, how long would two months’ supplies last? With the looming prospect of worse rapids just ahead, this was bad news at a bad time, and everyone seemed edgy. It had stormed the night before, and the lightning and thunder, Bradley wrote, “seemed as if commissioned to make doubly desolate this regeon set apart for desolation.”

  Powell and Oramel Howland set to squabbling once again. The trouble between the two had begun weeks before, when each had blamed the other for the loss of the No Name at Disaster Falls. “From that date there was more or less rag-chewing on the part of Major Powell, nearly always directed at Howland,” wrote Sumner. Most often the disputes centered on Howland’s mapmaking. Only a few days before, at the mouth of the San Rafael, Powell had rebuked Howland for not keeping his charts up-to-date. Now, with the worrisome discovery that they were low on food, Howland took the opportunity to snipe about Powell’s foolishness for not having bought more supplies back at the Indian agency.

  Sumner sided with his old friend Howland against their boss. “Howland would sometimes get a little behind in platting up his survey work, as he had his other work to do the same as the rest of the men,” Sumner wrote. “That always brought censure from Major Powell.” Sometimes, though, Sumner admitted, Howland “got things somewhat confused.” Sumner tried to smooth things over, but Powell insisted that “discipline” must be maintained. Sumner didn’t buy it. “Military martinets and civilians very often disagree,” he growled.

  Food became a preoccupation. The easy confidence that the hunters could augment the supplies by bringing in fresh meat had long since vanished. Often the canyons and cliffs revealed no signs whatever of game (and, to the men’s frustration, the river rarely gave up its fish). When the men did spot an occasional deer or sheep, it almost always fled before they could get near enough to bring it down. The hunters’ few triumphs would, in ordinary circumstances, hardly have been worth noting. On the first day in camp after they had reached the Grand, for example, the men managed to kill two beavers. “They are quite decent eating and the tails make excellent soup . . . ,” Bradley wrote. This was not so much a tribute to the tastiness of beaver flesh as a reminder that, in comparison with beans and smoked, salted, half-rancid bacon, almost anything qualified as banquet fare. “We find any kind of fresh meat palatable,” Bradley went on, “even the poor . . . geese, so poor they can’t fly and just off the nest, go good to us when long fed on bacon.”

  In the past, when the men had fretted about what lay ahead, their fears had nearly always centered on how bad the next rapids might be. Now a new fear squeezed its way next to the old one. From here on, the twin specters of drowning and starving would never be far off, like a pair of malevolent spirits haunting the canyon cliffs. Powell and the crew examined the vexing matter of supplies from every angle, though they tended to tiptoe around the real issue. They focused their complaints on the miserable quality of the rations, not on their fear of running out of food altogether. On July 19, for example, after a long, hot, miserable day in camp (for several days the temperature had hovered around 100 degrees), the men sat down to another dismal meal. Like castaways on a desert island or polar explorers on the ice, they found their thoughts flying to favorite dishes they vowed they would never again take for granted. “While we are eating supper,” Powell wrote, “we very naturally speak of better fare, as musty bread and spoiled bacon are not pleasant.”

  For Powell, a man who truly saw the skies as not cloudy all day, this was a remarkable concession. After the sorry meal, Hawkins wandered off to take measurements with a sextant. He had never shown any interest in scientific chores and Powell, befuddled, asked what he was up to. Hawkins explained that he was trying to find the latitude and longitude of the nearest pie.

  The joking and grousing about the food masked darker concerns, but those were the stuff of private journal entries and not a fit subject for campfire conversation. There had been no choice about stopping to repair the boats, but an emergency stop was one thing and dawdling was quite another. They had to make better time, Bradley wrote, “for we cannot think of being caught in a bad cañon short of provisions.”

  The men had no illusions about how dangerous the river was, but since they had to confront those dangers sooner or later, sooner was better. Only Powell seemed immune from the urge to hurry. He had wanted to camp at the junction of the Grand and Green until August 7, when a solar eclipse was forecast. Armed with tables that pinpointed the time of the eclipse, Powell hoped to make a precise calculation of his longitude. But the eclipse was three weeks off, and with the food supply so low, even Powell conceded that three weeks in one spot was out of the question. Still, the junction of the Southwest’s two most important rivers was a crucial spot, and no mapm
aker knew its proper position to within 100 miles. Everyone agreed to stay at the junction until they had mapped its location carefully.

  In the meantime, the men sulked and sweated in the sun and worked on the boats. The Indian name for this area, Toom-pin Tu-weap, meant “Land of Standing Rock,” and the view from the river was of countless buttes perched on the canyon rim like colossal sentries from an alien world. To Bradley, with his religious cast of mind, the stone formations looked like church steeples. “Sunday again,” he wrote on July 18, “and though a thousand spires point Heavenward all around us yet not one sends forth the welcome peal of bells to . . . remind us of happier if not grander scenes.”

  While the men worked on the boats, Powell spent most of his time exploring. Dazzled by the views from the canyon rims, he felt little of his men’s frenzy to get under way. Instead, like Marco Polo gazing in awe at wonders that his homebound audiences had never dreamt of, Powell found himself trying to come to terms with the strange new landscape before him. He began by emphasizing what the canyon lands were not. Nothing in the teeming cities of the East or the rolling farmlands of the midwest prepared the eye for this desert landscape. Both the scenery itself, and that scenery’s epic scale, were utterly unfamiliar. “We must not conceive of piles of boulders, or heaps of fragments, but a whole land of naked rock,” Powell cautioned his readers, “with giant forms carved on it: cathedral shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet; cliffs that cannot be scaled, and cañon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes, and tall pinnacles, and shafts set on the verge overhead, and all highly colored—buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate; never lichened; never moss-covered; but bare, and often polished.”

  On July 20, Powell and Bradley climbed the cliffs to reconnoiter. (“Climbed ‘Cave Cliff’ with Bradey,” Powell wrote in his river diary. It is perhaps a sign of Powell’s high-handed manner that, although Bradley had long since proved himself an invaluable member of the expedition and had even saved Powell’s life, Powell never spelled his name right.) The temperature at camp was ninety-five degrees in the shade. The climb could hardly have been more difficult. Bradley and Powell set off up a gulch and climbed over and around boulders for an hour until they found their way blocked. They thought they saw a route up and to the left and followed it for half an hour, but found that it made a dead end. “Then we try the rocks around to the right, and discover a narrow shelf, nearly half a mile long. In some places, this is so wide that we pass along with ease; in others, it is so narrow and sloping that we are compelled to lie down and crawl.” They continued along, stopping occasionally to peek down over the shelf’s rim to the rolling river eight hundred feet below.

  The two men continued climbing and found themselves in an area honeycombed with vertical caves or crevices, each one a kind of twisting tunnel with a natural skylight at the top. There seemed to be no paths leading up, but “we determine to attempt a passage by a crevice, and select one which we think is wide enough to admit of the passage of our bodies, and yet narrow enough to climb out by pressing our hands and feet against the walls. So we climb as men would out of a well. Bradley climbs first; I hand him the barometer, then climb over his head, and he hands me the barometer. So we pass each other alternately”—Powell doing all this, it went without saying, with one hand—“until we emerge from the fissure, out on the summit of a rock. And what a world of grandeur is spread before us!”

  Powell was ecstatic. He could see the Green in its narrow, winding gorge, and the Grand in what seemed a bottomless canyon, and occasional glimpses of the Colorado as it swept for mile after mile through the next canyon to come. The rocks were a match for the rivers. “Away to the west are lines of cliffs and ledges of rocks—not such ledges as you may have seen where the quarryman splits his blocks, but ledges from which the gods might quarry mountains . . . and not such cliffs as you may have seen where the swallow builds its nest, but cliffs where the soaring eagle is lost to view ere he reaches the summit.”

  Powell’s delight and astonishment at the sheer scale of the West’s natural wonders echo that of his contemporary Melville, celebrating the grandeur of whales. Each man felt that the glories of his subject could scarcely be compressed to human scale. “Give me a condor’s quill!” Melville cried. “Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” and Powell was no less fervent.

  Bradley, characteristically, was harder to enthrall. “The scenery from the top,” he wrote, “is the same old picture of wild desolation we have seen for the last hundred miles.”

  The difference in tone reflected a genuine difference in style between Powell, a romantic who saw the world as if it were a Thomas Moran landscape, and Bradley, the prototype of the down-to-earth, pomposity-piercing common man. The difference in temperament was magnified by the contrasting ways in which the two men composed their journals. Bradley, who had next to no impulse to rhapsodize in the first place, jotted down his notes at the end of long, draining days. Powell, inclined by nature to operatic excess, wrote at his leisure years later, with all the time in the world to buff and hone his memories.

  As practical as he was in many ways, Powell had more than a little of a Don Quixote in him. Embarked on the quest of a lifetime, he found himself endlessly dazzled by sights of almost supernatural splendor. Bradley took the Sancho Panza role, seeing scrawny chickens and angry publicans where Powell marveled at giants and castles and princesses.

  Finally, on July 21, the repairs and the measurements were complete, and the expedition set off downstream once more. Powell now seemed as eager as the men to be heading into the unknown. “We start this morning on the Colorado,” he wrote excitedly, but almost at once the new river showed that they had been right to fear it. “Rapids commenced about two miles from the junction and have now become continuous,” Bradley wrote. “We can’t run them or rather we don’t run many of them, on account of our rations. We are afraid they will spoil and if they do we are in a bad fix.”

  Afraid to run the rapids, the men had to line or portage them. It was even crueler work than usual. “Two very hard portages are made during the forenoon,” Powell wrote. As lavish as he was with the likes of “grand” and “superb,” Powell was just as stingy with “hard” and “difficult.” But to unload the boats and carry hundreds of pounds of supplies along a rocky trail in 100-degree heat, and then to stagger along under the weight of three waterlogged wooden rowboats besides, was enough to sap the spirit of the strongest man. To know that the reward for doing it once was to repeat the entire process around the next bend was nearly unbearable.

  In a crushing day, the expedition advanced a total of eight and a half miles. The men lined several rapids and portaged four. In one of the few rapids they had tried to run, the Emma Dean had been swamped yet again. “We are thrown into the river, we cling to her, and in the first quiet water below she is righted and bailed out,” Powell wrote, “but three oars are lost in this mishap.” The two other boats, having witnessed the Emma Dean’s struggle, pulled ashore upstream of the rapid, but it took them all afternoon to portage it. “Have made two portages within 100 yds. above,” an exhausted Bradley wrote at day’s end, “and there is another waiting not a hundred yds. below.”

  Even when the men had dragged themselves ashore at the end of the day, their labors were not quite done. The camp they had found was so boulder-strewn there was scarcely room to lie down. The remedy was to dig out the sand that had collected near the biggest boulders and carry it to a spot where it could be patted into a pallet of sorts. Bradley managed a wry summary of this first, discouraging day. “So I conclude the Colorado is not a very easy stream to navigate,” he observed.

  Back on the river the next morning, the men quickly came to a huge pile of driftwood along the riverbank. They set to sawing new oars for the Emma Dean from some cottonwood logs. The boats already needed repairs again, too, for they had taken a pounding in the previous day’s giant waves. They had advanced a paltry mile and a half down
stream. Powell and Walter set out to measure the height of the cliffs and, while they were at it, to gather some sap for recaulking the boats from the pine trees growing on the rim.

  On the third day on the Colorado, July 23, the Powell expedition found itself outmatched again. “We come at once to difficult rapids and falls, that, in many places, are more abrupt than in any of the cañons through which we have passed,” Powell wrote. Bradley agreed. They had never seen rapids like these, either in number or in severity. “All the way rapid,” Bradley wrote, in a kind of private pidgin. “Much of the last three miles we have let down with ropes.” The canyon seemed to be closing in ominously. “Rapids get worse as we advance and the walls get higher and nearly perpendicular.”

  The rapids continued without letup. In a single half-mile stretch, Sumner reckoned, they ran five bad rapids and portaged four. The hard day’s labor won them only five and a half miles. “We camp tonight above a succession of furious cataracts,” Bradley wrote. “There are at least five in the next mile around which we shall have to make portages.” Powell’s descriptions were, as usual, more lyrical and less focused on the chores to come. “Our way . . . is through a gorge, grand beyond description,” he wrote, with nearly vertical walls rising some sixteen hundred feet above the river. In a section where the river ran swiftly but relatively peaceably, “we seem to be in the depths of the earth, and yet can look down into waters that reflect a bottomless abyss.”

  They were in the depths of the earth, or near enough. What in ordinary circumstances would be merely a mishap could be deadly here. Twenty years later, one of the first men to try retracing Powell’s route made camp in this same difficult canyon. Climbing near camp, he lost his balance and wedged his leg into a tight spot between two boulders. “It was only a few seconds, but it seemed an hour while I was waiting to hear those bones snap,” he wrote later. “In that short time, I realized the whole situation; where we were, the height of the limestone cliffs, the distance to outside assistance, the heat of the summer, and that when those bones gave way—the end. Not a sudden blotting out of existence, that was not what I feared, but with a mangled leg, a sure, but lingering, death in that hot desolate canyon.”