Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  It will always be vivid, I think, the memory of that foam-filled abyss, and how we hung above it, and the stroke slowed us a little, and then a wondrous vagary of last-chance current skirting the brim to go down the Gut took us with it. We were in and then out of danger in perhaps five seconds.

  For the Powell expedition, danger had become a traveling companion who showed no signs of leaving. Powell had portaged Big Drops 2 and 3, but the portages were dangerous and exhausting, the boats were leaking badly again, and the river was “still one foaming torrent” as far downstream as anyone could see.

  Nor did trouble confine itself to the river. The cliffs and side canyons proved as life-threatening as the rapids. On July 26, after struggling by the Big Drops, Powell, Bradley, Seneca Howland, Hall, and Walter Powell set out up a side canyon, hoping to climb to the top and collect tree sap to caulk the boats. Eventually they found themselves in an enormous amphitheater topped with unclimbable walls. The men split up, each trying to find his own route to the top. Powell, characteristically, decided to spend the time hunting for fossils instead. Then, spotting a rock slide that seemed to offer a path up, he changed his mind and began climbing again. He emerged onto a narrow shelf, followed it a short distance, and found a narrow, vertical fissure leading up to another shelf perhaps forty feet higher on the cliff face.

  “I have a barometer on my back, which rather impedes my climbing,” Powell wrote. “The walls of the fissure are of smooth limestone, offering neither foot nor hand hold. So I support myself by pressing my back against one wall and my knees against the other, and, in this way, lift my body, in a shuffling manner, a few inches at a time.” Powell crept upward about twenty-five feet, and then the fissure widened ever so slightly.

  Unable to climb any higher (because he could not press his knees hard enough against the far wall to gain any purchase), Powell tried instead to retreat the way he had come. He found he could not move lower without falling. Unable to move higher or lower, he found he could at least move horizontally, into a kind of alcove. “So I struggle along sidewise, farther into the crevice, where it narrows. But by this time my muscles are exhausted, and I cannot climb longer; so I move still a little farther into the crevice, where it is so narrow and wedging that I can lie in it, and there I rest.”

  After five or ten minutes gathering his strength, Powell crabbed his way sideways back to the main chimney. This time, he managed to make it upward past the wide spot in the fissure and finally emerged onto the upper shelf. After another hour’s climbing, Powell struggled out onto the summit. On top at last, he could finally turn his attention to the point of this whole excursion, gathering resin from the piñon pines to seal up the leaks in the boats.

  “But I have with me no means of carrying it down,” Powell realized. Considering that he had just risked his life precisely so that he could retrieve tree sap, this was a remarkable oversight. Powell tried, fruitlessly, to improvise. “The day is very hot, and my coat was left in camp, so I have no linings to tear out.” Then, finally, he had a brainstorm. “It occurs to me to cut off the sleeve of my shirt”—which was, as always, dangling uselessly—“tie it up at one end, and in this little sack I collect about a gallon of pitch.” A missing arm, to hear Powell tell it, seemed a stroke of fortune.

  All that remained was to return to camp with the pitch. But few excursions that involved Powell were routine. Powell was a magnetic man, and, somehow, he was as adept at drawing trouble as he was at drawing people. Things happened when he was around.

  For an hour or so, Powell had gathered pitch, measured the altitude with his barometer, and wandered about the cliff top sightseeing. “Suddenly I notice that a storm is coming from the south. I seek a shelter in the rocks; but when the storm bursts, it comes down as a flood from the heavens, not with gentle drops at first, slowly increasing in quantity, but as if suddenly poured out.” Powell was drenched, almost washed away. Half an hour later the clouds had passed, the sun shone again, and Powell started his downhill climb.

  Desert thunderstorms are unlike anything familiar in more evenly watered regions of the globe. “People die in chubascos [the proper term for what are commonly called monsoons],” writes the natural historian Craig Childs, “when twenty minutes earlier they didn’t even think there would be weather. Most of a year’s precipitation can easily be unloaded in six minutes, while one mile away the ground might not even be dampened.” The storms truly come out of the blue, often in groups “like packs of feral dogs,” and then they vanish as suddenly as they appeared.

  The rains bring floods. “The waters that fall, during a rain, on these steep rocks, are gathered at once into the river,” Powell noted, awestruck. “They could scarcely be poured in more suddenly, if some vast spout ran from the clouds to the stream itself.” Tiny streams that an eight-year-old could hop over become angry rivers. A pickup truck parked in a dusty, eroded gulch can suddenly be swept away like a twig blasted by a fire hose.

  “I have stood in the middle of a broad sandy wash with not a trickle of moisture to be seen anywhere, sunlight pouring down on me and on the flies and ants and lizards, the sky above perfectly clear,” the writer Edward Abbey recalled, “listening to a queer vibration in the air and in the ground under my feet—like a freight train coming down the grade very fast—and looked up to see a wall of water tumble around a bend and surge toward me.”

  In canyons, the flood system plays out at its most dramatic. “Canyons are basically nets that catch water,” Childs explains. “Branches and fingers and tributaries scour the land above, sending everything down, so that when a storm passes, all of its rainwater is driven toward a single point. Water can run from tens of miles down hundreds of feeder canyons, spilling into deeper and deeper, fewer and fewer canyons until the volume of the flood has jumped exponentially into one final chasm where everything converges.”

  Flash floods are common in the West. In 1997 and again in 1999, for example, flash floods hit Bright Angel Trail, the most popular hiking trail in the Grand Canyon. The nine-mile trail runs from the South Rim at the top to Phantom Ranch at the bottom. Often it is as crowded (and as cosmopolitan) as a Manhattan sidewalk, bustling with tourists chatting in French and German and Japanese as well as English. But the floods—and the refrigerator-sized boulders they toss about—make plain that the Grand Canyon is not a stage set. Two people were killed in 1997; four were injured in 1999, and another twenty-seven were evacuated from the canyon by helicopter.

  The floods move quickly, but the danger comes not necessarily from the water’s speed. As we have noted, even the fastest rivers move at only 20 miles an hour; in comparison, avalanches race at 100-plus miles an hour. Most often, the greatest danger in a flash flood comes from being trapped in a steep, unclimbable passage while the water rises.

  “An entire oak tree paused at the margin of a falls, then tumbled, branches prying away as I watched,” Craig Childs wrote of one flood he witnessed from a perch on a canyon ledge. The water crashed against rocks and sent them flying into the air, “pelting anything nearby, breaking into shrapnel. I could not count fast enough. Maybe ten rocks a second, six hundred rocks a minute, into the air. The tree was pulverized at the bottom. Any jag or protrusion was beaten down. If I were to stick my hand in there, my bones would splinter.”

  Childs continued to stare, hypnotized. “The flood bounded over immovable boulders, churning into whirlpools. It had a texture like a rapid boil, sending debris up, sucking it down, each roil a barrel rising to the surface. Nothing stayed on top for more than a couple of seconds. The trunk of a cottonwood tree showed through. Smaller boulders, three feet across, stabbed and rolled against the larger ones.”

  Such was the creature at Powell’s heels. He scrambled down a side canyon, hoping to outpace his pursuer before it gathered its strength. “I find a thousand streams rolling down the cliffs on every side, carrying with them red sand; and these all unite in the cañon below, in one great stream of red mud.”

  But the rain
had never reached the canyon’s lower reaches, and the racing water vanished into the dry, sandy ground. “Although it comes in waves, several feet high and fifteen or twenty feet in width, the sands soak it up, and it is lost. But wave follows wave, and rolls along, and is swallowed up; and still the floods come on from above.” Powell managed to stay ahead of the floodwaters. “I hasten to camp, and tell the men there is a river coming down the cañon. We carry our camp equipage hastily from the bank, to where we think it will be above the water. Then we stand by, and see the river roll on to join the Colorado.”

  • • •

  The returning hero met a sullen reception in camp. Hectic and danger-filled as the day had been, it had brought the expedition only a mile and a half nearer its destination. The men’s grousing, which to this point had reflected little more than the understandable weariness of the overworked and underfed, began to take on a sharper edge. “Another day wasted foolishly,” Bradley complained to his diary. “. . . Major wished to land and climb the mountains so five of us started on a wild-goose chase after pitch but it was so hot we all backed out except the Major who says he climbed the cliff, but I have my doubts.”

  Bradley’s explicit criticism of Powell marked an escalation in the tensions swirling around the expedition. The distrust of Powell’s claim was all the more telltale in that it was unfounded—of the five men who had set out to reach the top of the cliff, only Powell had made it. Sumner did acknowledge Powell’s accomplishment, but he was grudging, at best, in his praise of the one-armed climber who accomplished what none of the able-bodied men could match. “5 of the men tried to climb the cliff to get some rosin from the pine trees at the top,” he wrote, “but all failed but the Professor, he being lucky enough to get about 2 lbs.”

  The mood improved considerably the next day, although not until late afternoon. The day began with a portage of two hundred yards, a marathon for men carrying boats and supplies on their backs, over boulders, in the desert heat. It continued through a string of “very bad” rapids, which called for still more lining. At the same time, the canyon was narrowing ominously. “In many places [the walls] meet the water on both sides,” Bradley wrote, “so that if we meet an impassable rapid we shall have to run it with all the risk, or abandon the expedition.”

  The men had seen such fearsome spots before, but they had tried to convince themselves that they had made it through the worst of the tight squeezes. As recently as three days before, Bradley had reassured himself that there was “no place in the Colorado where we could not land on either side of the river.” Now that hope, like so many others, had been yanked away.

  But the good news, which temporarily banished any worries, was that the hunters managed to shoot two bighorn sheep. The men rounded a bend, saw the sheep in the rocks, and raced to shore. While one anxious faction pulled the boats against the rocks, out of sight, some of the men hurried off in pursuit of dinner. They bagged one sheep at once and lost the others, but then the flock turned and ran straight toward the boats. When the sheep were within twenty yards, one of the men took up his rifle and fired.

  Everyone was overjoyed. “In the present reduced state of our ration,” Bradley wrote, the killing of two sheep was “hailed as the greatest event of the trip.” Sumner hailed the bounty as “a Godsend,” for “sour bread and rotten bacon is poor diet for as hard work as we have to do.” (The bacon had been salted and smoked to preserve it, but bacon was best stored in a cool, dry pantry, not dunked in a river and exposed to the desert sun. After two months, the bacon fat had turned rancid.) The men happily set to work dressing the kill and then lashed the prizes to the deck of one of the boats.

  Downstream a bit, when they had found a good camp, they would prepare dinner. “But fresh meat is too tempting for us,” Powell wrote, “and we stop early to have a feast. And a feast it is! Two fine, young sheep. We care not for bread, or beans, or dried apples tonight; coffee and mutton is all we ask.”

  Revived by their feast, Powell and the crew set out early the next morning. At once, the river did its best to dispel any lingering good cheer. The morning was largely taken up with two hard portages, one of them the longest on the Colorado thus far. By midday, the expedition had advanced only two discouraging miles.

  The pace picked up after lunch, when the river seemed to turn less nasty. Quickly it became clear that the pace was too fast. At the foot of one steep stretch, the river made a sharp right, and the water piled up against the cliff that stood in its way. Out of control, the men pulled with all their might to stay off the cliff, but plunged straight toward it. Before the boats smashed against the rock wall, though, the waves rebounded off the rock and against the boats, sending them careening downstream helpless and full of water but safe.

  Almost at once, as if to show just how broad its repertoire of tricks could be, the river played an equally malicious but quite different prank. Powell and the men had just learned what it was to see disaster looming directly in front of them and be helpless to avoid it. Now they would run along half blind, sensing danger just ahead but unable to make it out. Like Columbus’s sailors, but with better reason, Powell and his men believed that at any moment they might plunge over the edge of the world.

  They had been pinned between sheer cliffs before, but never for so long and never with so limited a downstream view. “The walls suddenly close in,” Powell wrote, “so that the cañon is narrower than we have ever known it. The water fills it from wall to wall, giving us no landing place at the foot of the cliff; the river is very swift, the cañon is very tortuous, so that we can see but a few hundred yards ahead; the walls tower over us, often overhanging so as to almost shut out the light.”

  Powell stood on deck, gazing downstream with “intense anxiety,” watching for boulders in the channel or the spray of whitecaps or, the most dreaded sight of all, the clean horizontal line that signified a waterfall. The men at the oars sped backward to a fate they could only guess at. For a mile and a half, the river swept along between high rock walls that never permitted a long view.

  Finally the narrow gorge opened into a more open, broken section of canyon. By three o’clock, the expedition had emerged, safe, from the dreaded Cataract Canyon.

  The ordeal had lasted perhaps fifteen minutes, a short enough time in ordinary circumstances. For Powell and the crew, the time seemed endless, as if they had been sentenced to race down a booby-trapped stairwell in the dark knowing that at any moment they could find themselves stepping helplessly into empty air.

  That single excruciating episode captured, in a way, the great burden that Powell and his men confronted. Uncertainty sucked out their strength and resolve more surely than any other hazard, even if, in the end, nothing happened. “Now that it is past,” Powell wrote, with magnificent understatement, “it seems a very simple thing indeed to run through such a place, but the fear of what might be ahead made a deep impression on us.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TO THE TAJ MAHAL

  It had been two months since the expedition set out from Green River Station. While Powell and his men struggled through rapids and whirlpools, like Ulysses and his crew in some modern retelling of the Odyssey, the rest of the world had been left with no clue to their fate but a handful of out-of-date letters.

  A conversation between two strangers in a stagecoach revealed how completely Powell and his men had vanished. Richard Townshend was a blue-eyed, curly-haired young Englishman in search of experiences beyond those available at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1869, he had set out to see the American West. (Frank Goodman, who had left the Powell expedition in the Uinta Valley, was not the only Englishman smitten with the romance of the Wild West.) Townshend seemed bound for trouble—his nickname was “Cherub”—but he thrived among his new gold-seeking, gun-packing acquaintances. On a stagecoach, he happened to meet one of the West’s most colorful characters, William Gilpin. A biography of Gilpin would make a fat and lively book, and the scene changes would give a reader whiplash.
Raised a Quaker, Gilpin became a renowned soldier. Born in the East, he became one of the great spokesmen for Manifest Destiny and the vital role of the American West. Along the way, he explored Oregon with Frémont, served as Colorado’s first territorial governor (appointed by Abraham Lincoln), and made a fortune in land speculation.

  An acclaimed orator, Gilpin had an overblown rhetorical style that was excessive even by the standards of the day. In full bray, he sounded more than a bit like a nineteenth-century W. C. Fields. “The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent,” he thundered, “to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean . . . to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries—to teach old nations a new civilization—to confirm the destiny of the human race—to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point . . . to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity—to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!”

  On the day Townshend met him, Gilpin was preoccupied with Powell and the Grand Canyon. “The greatest gash on the earth’s surface, Mr. Townshend,” Gilpin declared. “It is 500 miles in length and a mile in vertical depth. . . . Never has it been traversed by mortal man. Dead bodies of Indian braves have been washed down it, bodies of Utes or Navajos or Apaches slain in their tribal wars and given to the current, but never yet has any living human being passed that way.”

  Now, “that grand explorer, Major Powell” and his “brave companions” had set out to do what had never been done. Gilpin had his doubts about whether they could succeed. “The torrent may have swallowed them up; the Indians may have destroyed them; their boats may have been wrecked with the loss of all their provisions; and they may consequently have been starved to death; we know nothing.” He begged Townshend to keep his ears open for any news as he continued his roaming.