Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  The much-praised, much-reviled lake formed by the dam is named Lake Powell. It is perhaps a tribute to Powell’s tangled character that his admirers cannot agree on whether this is an honor or a desecration. Those admirers, moreover, have nothing but Powell in common; though they share a hero, they can barely refer to one another without spitting in contempt. Edward Abbey, for instance, placed Powell high in his pantheon and advocated the bombing of Glen Canyon Dam. “Probably no man-made artifact in all of human history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long as Glen Canyon Dam,” Abbey wrote. But the Bureau of Reclamation, which built the dam, bestowed Powell’s name on the lake as the highest tribute it could offer.

  Easy as the river seemed as their boats passed through Glen Canyon, the men were jumpy about the rapids still to come. Bradley suspected trouble ahead, although he tried to convince himself that his fears were unfounded. For seventy-five miles upstream of Cataract Canyon, he noted, the river had wandered “through a dark calm cañon which a child might sail in perfect safety.” Then had come the madness of Cataract, but that had been followed by the long, gentle stretch of river through Glen Canyon. Perhaps Cataract had been a malevolent fluke?

  The expedition continued on its way, hoping for the best and fearing the worst. “Today the walls grow higher, and the cañon much narrower,” Powell noted on August 4. (This narrow spot would become the site of Glen Canyon Dam.) On they went, through “a perfect tornado with lightning and rain,” past canyon walls of creamy orange and bright vermilion and purple and chocolate brown and green and yellow. They advanced thirty-eight miles, a fine total for a single day, and made camp near the mouth of the Paria River.

  The Paria marked the end of one canyon and the beginning of another.

  No one knew it, but the expedition was poised on the brink of the Grand Canyon. “With some feeling of anxiety, we enter a new cañon this morning,” Powell wrote on August 5. “We have learned to closely observe the texture of the rock. In softer strata, we have a quiet river; in harder, we find rapids and falls. Below us are the limestones and hard sandstones, which we found in Cataract Cañon. This bodes toil and danger.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  GRAND CANYON

  They had camped just upstream of the Paria River, at a spot where the Mormons maintained a ferry. Indians had long crossed the river here as well, and Powell’s men were dismayed to see fresh moccasin prints. “We were in no condition for a fight or a foot race,” Sumner admitted.

  The crossing is known today as Lee’s Ferry, for John D. Lee, who was banished to this remote spot by Brigham Young in 1872. In his heyday a well-regarded member of the Mormon community—Lee was prosperous, handsome, a husband to nineteen wives, and an adopted son of Brigham Young himself—Lee ended up an outcast who met his death before a firing squad. In September 1857, Mormons and Indians had attacked a wagon train of “Gentiles” crossing southern Utah on their way to California. In what became known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, some 120 men, women, and children were slaughtered. (The exact number of victims is unknown.) Only children too young to talk were spared. The Mormon leadership did its best to pin all the blame on the Indians, but when the truth began to seep out, Brigham Young assigned the role of scapegoat to his adopted son.* Lee, one of many who had participated in the massacre, was excommunicated from the church, assigned sole blame for the killings, and sent off to the barren hideaway that his wife named Lonely Dell.

  Lee’s Ferry is now the put-in spot for every river trip through the Grand Canyon. Rapids and other landmarks along the Colorado are labeled by their mileage below Lee’s Ferry, which itself is designated as Mile 0. “It is desolate enough to suit a lovesick poet,” Sumner remarked, and when the governor of Arizona Territory saw Lonely Dell, he remarked that he, too, would take up polygamy if banished to such a place. It is still desolate, but no one in search of solitude nowadays would venture to Lee’s Ferry on an August morning. Easy access to the Colorado is a rare and valuable thing, and on summer days the boat landing at Lee’s Ferry looks like a parking lot.

  The boats—most of them inflatable rafts with an outfitter’s name or logo brandished across a huge pontoon—sit at the water’s edge, jostling one another like hippos. The boatmen, who will have worked through a blistering day and late into the night rigging their boats and checking their gear, do their best to deflect questions (“Are we gonna flip?”) and concentrate on last-minute chores. Vans shuttling back and forth from nearby motels unload groups of eager, nervous passengers. They step out of the air-conditioning and into the sunlight, blinking, and take a first, wary look at the river they will be living on for the next week or two. When all the passengers have arrived and packed their clothes and sleeping bags away into waterproof rubber bags, the boatmen introduce themselves and give a lesson on adjusting a life jacket. It must be cinched tight, so that surging, whirling currents cannot yank it over a helpless swimmer’s head. The trip leaders inject a small joke or two into their mandatory safety talks, and everyone laughs a little too loudly.

  At nearly the same spot a century and a third ago, Powell’s men were jumpy, too. “Just below our camp a fine rapid commences that is roaring pretty loud and I can see the white foam for quite half a mile,” Bradley wrote on August 4, 1869. “We have all learned to like mild rapids better than we do still water,” he went on. “But some of the party want them very mild.”

  Bradley had fretted about the river and the weather almost from the day the trip began, and he had grown increasingly disdainful of Powell. But, until now, except for some muttering directed toward the hunters, he had never directed any criticism toward his fellow crewmen. Even here, he named no names. But Bradley’s charge was clear enough—after seven hundred miles and uncounted rapids, some of the men were losing their nerve.

  The next day he recanted a bit. “I said yesterday that we had learned to like rapids, but we came to two of them today that suit us too well. They are furious cataracts.” The men had risen early and run one long rapid and then a dozen more in the next eight miles. Forced to portage around a rapid with a fifteen-foot drop, they lost their grip on the Emma Dean and stove a hole in her side while trying to carry her over the rocks. They made emergency repairs, then another brief run, and then another portage that even Powell acknowledged to be “long and difficult.” By day’s end, they had advanced twelve hard-won miles.

  The men were beat. “Very hard work,” Sumner scribbled in his journal that evening, and night brought no relief. Rain poured down and the wind howled. “Am very tired tonight,” Bradley wrote. “Hope a good sleep will do me good but this constant wetting in fresh water and exposure to a parching sun begins to tell on all of us.” Bradley’s discouragement was especially noteworthy because he had become the expedition’s most enthusiastic white-water boatman.

  August 6 was a short day but a grueling one. The day’s first task was repairing the Emma Dean properly. Then came what seemed like endless rapids and endless portaging. By day’s end, Sumner, who often enlivened his journal with sharp observations and wry asides, had only enough strength for a bare-bones summary. “Made 3 portages and ran 10 bad rapids in 10 1/2 miles. Walls of cañon 2000 ft. and increasing as we go. River about 50 yds. wide, rapids and whirlpools all the way.” Bradley expressed his by-now-customary hope. “Three times today we have had to carry everything around rapids,” he wrote, “but the last few miles we came tonight we found the rapids less furious and I hope we are out of the worst of this series.”

  In one stretch where the river ran between vertical cliffs, the expedition found itself forced to repeat the difficult and dangerous “leapfrog” maneuver they had devised a few weeks earlier. The three boats formed a precarious line, the first anchored to a rock, the second farther downstream and hanging on a line attached to the first, and the third still farther downstream and hanging on a line attached to the second. Then the last boat found a spot where it could anchor itself, and the upstream boats cast themselves free. Like the “ca
tcher” in a trapeze act, whose job is to grab the daring young men somersaulting through the air to him, the downstream boat had to reel in its runaway companions and pull them to safety. It was a maneuver whose only merit was that the alternatives were worse, but it worked. Powell described the procedure at length, but Bradley, as if eager to put the whole desperate episode behind him, cut more quickly to the bottom line. “We succeeded in landing all our boats safely,” he noted, and left it at that.

  For decades to come, the rapids that had provided Powell and his men such a hostile welcome to the Grand Canyon would prove dangerous, even deadly. The next man after Powell to lead an expedition down the Green and the Colorado was one Frank M. Brown, a large, cheery, impatient, and recklessly optimistic Denver businessman. In 1889, Brown organized the grandly named Denver, Colorado Canyon, and Pacific Railroad Company and named himself president. Brown had looked at Colorado’s coal, and at southern California’s growing population, and seen a fortune beckoning. He planned to build a railroad line to carry that coal to market; the tracks would follow the course of the Colorado (thus, efficiently, running downhill all the way) as it cut its way through Cataract Canyon, Glen Canyon, and Grand Canyon on its way from the Rockies to the Gulf of California. A final section of track would cut across southern California toward San Diego.

  Brown organized a team of sixteen men, with himself in charge. Robert Brewster Stanton, a railroad engineer, was second in command. Brown purchased five sleek but unsuitable wooden boats, each fifteen feet long, just over three feet wide, and round-bottomed. Long, skinny, and round, the boats were nearly as unstable as floating logs. At only 150 pounds apiece, they were featherweight. Knowing how Powell’s men had struggled to carry their massive boats, Brown had opted for boats that would be easy to portage. He overdid it. The boats were “thin, light, red cedar,” and so fragile that two of them had cracked end to end while still on the train to the Green River (Utah—not to be confused with Green River Station, Wyoming, Powell’s starting point). When he first laid eyes on the boats, Stanton wrote later, “my heart sank within me.”

  All the crew were novices. Worse, many were cocky novices. Brown seemed to regard the whole expedition as a lark, and it fell to Stanton to press the case for prudence. But Stanton was a bit of a dry stick and more than a bit of a pedant, and the convivial Brown tended to brush his warnings aside. Stanton had proposed that the party include four experienced boatmen. Brown took Stanton’s list and crossed off the boatmen’s names, in favor of two Denver lawyers and men about town he wanted to impress. “I, with Reynolds and Hughes, who are to be guests of the expedition, will take their places and keep the boats up with the survey,” Brown announced. A “thunderstruck” Stanton could only gulp and give in. Stanton had requested life jackets, too, and Brown vetoed that request as well. (Curiously, Stanton, like Powell, had only one good arm. Though he “could not swim a stroke,” he followed Brown’s orders and canceled the life jackets.)

  They planned to pack the gear and much of the food in watertight, zinc-lined boxes three feet long, one for each boat. But the fully loaded boxes nearly swamped the boats, so they lashed them together into a clumsy raft. Stanton’s two black servants, who had been dragooned into this makeshift navy as cooks, were assigned to drag the raft behind their boat.

  On May 25, 1889, the expedition set out from Green River. Almost at once they had to stop to seal a leak in the cooks’ boat. Five miles downstream, the first rapid tore three holes in another boat. Still, this was easy water, and by May 30, the Brown-Stanton expedition had reached Cataract Canyon. There the trouble began in earnest. “It would be a great relief, if it were possible,” Stanton wrote later, “for me to blot out all remembrance of the two weeks following this evening of May 31st.”

  The supply raft was the first casualty. Just upstream of the first rapid in Cataract Canyon, the cooks’ boat tried to pull to shore. Caught in the swift current and further hampered by the ungainly raft tied to them, the Brown Betty swept helplessly toward the brink of the fall. In desperation, the two men cut the rope to the supply raft and pulled for shore. They made it; the raft did not. The zinc boxes smashed into the rocks, flew apart from one another, and ricocheted wildly through the rapid. Some were eventually found downstream (with the food inside still intact), turning circles in eddies like toy boats in a pond.

  From here on, one man recalled, it would be “disaster every day.” On June 3, one boat hit a rock and sank; the crew swam to safety and even managed to rescue the boat, though nearly all its contents were lost. On June 4, Hughes and Reynolds, the two “guests,” capsized. They grabbed their runaway boat and clung to it for half a mile while it dragged them through a rapid. Finally they righted the boat and climbed in, but the boat was full of water and uncontrollable. For another half mile, the two would-be investors sped and spun along until a merciful eddy swung them to shore. On the same day, the same rapid snatched another boat that the men had been lining and spat it downstream. And still on the same day, the Brown Betty hit a rock and sank while the men were trying to line it past a rapid. Nearly all the pots and pans and much of the rest of the cooking gear went to the bottom, along with most of the food. “The matter of supplies . . . ,” Stanton noted, “begins to look serious.”

  The expedition struggled on, making a mere mile or two a day. Each day brought new smashups and desperate swims and runaway boats. Even Stanton, a proud stoic, seemed nearly overwhelmed. “Such work as we had in Cataract Canyon, with our frail boats, being thrown into the water bodily every day, and working in water almost up to one’s armpits for days at a time, guiding boats through the whirlpools and eddies, and, when not thus engaged, carrying sacks of flour and greasy bacon on one’s back, over boulders half as high as a house, is not the most pleasant class of engineering work to contemplate.”

  Soon nearly all the food was lost or too spoiled to eat. For six days, breakfast and dinner consisted of a bit of bread washed down by coffee and a little condensed milk. Lunch was three lumps of sugar and all the river water you could drink. Morale, already low, fell even further when the men found a human skeleton in a pile of driftwood. “Ghastly suggestion of what might be our fate,” Stanton shuddered. On June 16, the men took the most damaged boat, the Mary (named for Brown’s wife), and chopped it apart to get desperately needed wood for repairs on the other boats. Brown watched and wept.

  The Grand Canyon, when they finally reached it, made Cataract Canyon seem like a holiday jaunt. Food was no longer a concern, because it was easy to leave the river near Lee’s Ferry, and Brown had ridden ninety miles to the town of Kanab and bought supplies. (This option was unavailable to Powell. There were no horses or mules to borrow in 1869, because what would become Lee’s Ferry was then only another unnamed, uninhabited spot in the desert.) Half Brown’s original crew, including both “guests,” took this opportunity to return home. One man, a trapper and miner named Harry McDonald, joined the expedition.

  But even with starvation no longer a threat, the Colorado itself presented more than enough danger. Brown’s expedition entered the Grand Canyon on July 9, 1889. They made ten miles that first day, without mishap, and portaged the two biggest rapids, Badger and Soap Creek.

  Brown woke up jumpy on July 10. He had slept poorly, troubled by dreams of rapids. This was uncharacteristic, for Brown’s unrelenting good cheer was his most marked trait. Odder still, the only rapid in sight was Soap Creek, which was upstream and no longer a problem. Brown and Harry McDonald were on the river shortly after six o’clock. Stanton followed close behind, at 6:23.

  Brown’s boat turned sideways in what is now called Salt Water Riffle. It looked like nothing more than a series of small, harmless waves, but when the boat crossed an eddy line—the always treacherous boundary between the main current, headed downstream, and the eddy, moving upstream—it flipped in an instant. Brown and McDonald were thrown overboard. Brown found himself in a whirlpool along the eddy line. McDonald was thrown into the fast-moving water in m
idstream. Brown surfaced first. McDonald spotted him and called to him. “Alright,” Brown hollered back.

  The river swept McDonald downstream, where he saw his runaway boat speeding away, about fifty feet in front of him and upside down. Two hundred yards farther on, he crawled ashore. He climbed a rock, spotted Brown still struggling, and ran back upstream. Brown had been flung nearer to shore than McDonald but was in fact farther from safety. Even if he had been able to break free from the whirlpool and had swum toward the riverbank, he would have had to fight his way across the strong eddy current. There was another possibility—swimming away from shore and into the main current in hopes of washing ashore farther downstream, as McDonald had—but that, too, would have meant breaking out of the whirlpool.

  McDonald ran near the spot where he had seen Brown. By this time, Stanton’s boat had reached the scene. Stanton saw McDonald waving and screaming. After a few moments, he deciphered the frantic shout: “Mr. Brown is in there.” Stanton fought his way out of the rapid. Brown had vanished, but suddenly his pocket notebook shot high above the surface. Peter Hansbrough, a crewman in Stanton’s boat, plucked it from the river.

  The men scanned the churning water. Without a life jacket, and weighed down by shirt, pants, and coat (and, perhaps, boots), Brown had not lasted long. From the moment Brown’s boat flipped to the instant he disappeared beneath the waves, perhaps ninety seconds had gone by. For the rest of the day, the men carried out a fruitless search of the riverbank for miles below the scene of the accident, hoping at least to find a body they could bury. Hansbrough cut a careful inscription, complete with ornate capitals, into the rock near the bit of shore that Brown had tried to reach. “F. M. Brown Pres. D.C.C. & P. RR Co was drowned July 10 1889 opposite this point.”

  The survivors could easily have left the canyon by hiking up Salt Water Wash and then walking to Lee’s Ferry, but they chose to stay with the river instead. The next morning, having found Brown’s boat safe in an eddy, the men set out again. For three days, they struggled along, running and portaging and lining the rapids known today (for their distance from Lee’s Ferry) as the Roaring Twenties. Then came Sunday, a day of rest, and then Monday, July 15.