Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  Henry Richards, one of Stanton’s black servants, and Peter Hansbrough, the man who had carved Brown’s epitaph, pushed out into 25 Mile Rapid. In the lower section, the force of the current beating sharply against a steep limestone wall had cut an overhanging shelf a few feet above the water. Hansbrough and Richards seemed in fine shape, sweeping along in midstream, when suddenly the current grabbed them and pushed them left, toward the cliff and the overhang. In a moment, they were against the cliff, caught in swirling water.

  The two men shipped their oars and tried to push off the rock, to keep from being shoved under the shelf. Richards shoved the bow of the boat clear of the cliff; Hansbrough, in the stern, had been caught under the shelf but managed to push himself clear as well. Stanton, watching from shore, relaxed. “They are all right now,” he said, but at precisely that moment, their boat flipped and the two men were flung into the water.

  McDonald and another man jumped into a boat and sped toward Richards, but he disappeared before they could reach him. Hansbrough had vanished beneath the waves the moment the boat capsized. Both men drowned. “I then realized fully what it meant to be without life preservers, in such work on such a river,” Stanton lamented.

  With the crew near mutiny and, in any event, too few men left to portage the boats, Stanton decided to abandon the expedition.* The disheartened group continued downstream only far enough to find a place where they could hike out of what they now thought of as “death’s canyon.” On July 17, as they climbed a side canyon to safety, Stanton glanced back at the Colorado and saw “something like a large bundle floating down the river.” It was Brown—the men recognized his coat—but the current carried his body out of view long before the two men who had rushed after him could get anywhere near.

  John Wesley Powell had inspired Brown’s expedition. Twenty years before Brown’s death, on August 6, 1869, Powell ordered his crew to stop early “at a place where it seems possible to climb out.” (The innocuous-sounding remark had a macabre flip side, for the unspoken message was that at many places there was no way out.) The next day, the almanac said, would bring an eclipse of the sun. By measuring the exact moment the sun disappeared and comparing that figure with the time forecast in the almanac, Powell would be able to determine his longitude precisely.

  Powell had been looking forward to this chance for weeks; he anticipated the eclipse with all the excitement of a five-year-old trying to fall asleep the night before his birthday. Countless Americans shared that eagerness. “The line of totality was almost one continuous observatory, from the Pacific to the Atlantic,” one scientific journal reported in November 1869. Powell’s men felt no such zeal. “Tomorrow is the eclipse,” Bradley grumbled, “so we have to stop and let Major climb the mountain to observe it.”

  Early on the morning of August 7, Powell and his brother Walter set out on a climb to the canyon rim, lugging their measuring gear with them. After four hard hours, they reached the summit and stacked some rocks into a viewing platform. Then they sat down to wait for the great moment to arrive, “but clouds come on, and rain falls, and sun and moon are obscured.”

  Miserably disappointed, the one-armed Major and his half-mad brother set out on the return climb to camp. Night overtook them, and the two men inched their way along for two or three hours, feeling their way in the dark. “At last we lose our way, and dare proceed no farther. The rain comes down in torrents, and we can find no shelter. We can neither climb up nor go down, and in the darkness dare not move about, but sit and ‘weather out’ the night.”

  Stuck in place on the cliff, like gargoyles on a cathedral, the brothers passed an endless night in the pouring rain. They had spent the previous day fervently hoping to see the sun disappear; now their only prayer was for it to appear quickly. Dawn finally arrived. “Daylight comes, after a long, oh! how long a night,” Powell moaned, “and we soon reach camp.”

  While Powell and Walter had been climbing and waiting, the men in camp had been repairing the boats. Bradley had replaced four of his boat’s ribs and recaulked her seams and noted proudly that “she is tight again as a cup.” Even so, the boats as well as the men were nearing the limits of their strength. “Constant banging against rocks has begun to tell sadly on them,” Bradley wrote, “and they are growing old faster if possible than we are.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  TIME’S ABYSS

  “Though it is Sunday,” Bradley wrote on August 8, “it brings no rest for us.” Indeed, the work the men were now called on to perform made a mockery of the notion of a day of rest. (Bradley’s weekly complaint about Powell’s impiety had become their only Sunday ritual.) “Pulled out early and did a terrible hard work,” Sumner wrote. Even Powell painted a somber picture. “It is with very great labor that we make progress,” he wrote, “meeting with many obstructions, running rapids, letting down our boats with lines, from rock to rock, and sometimes carrying boats and cargoes around bad places.” They portaged five rapids—their record for a single day—and advanced only three and a half miles.

  Late in the day they made one last portage and stumbled exhausted into camp. As the rain pelted down, Powell and the crew retreated beneath a ledge. It took a hard search to find even a few sticks of driftwood, only enough for a tiny fire and barely adequate even for making coffee. The expedition, never a grand affair, had taken on a decidedly shabby look. “We begin to be a ragged looking set,” Bradley wrote, “for our clothing is wearing out with such rough labor and we wear scarce enough to cover our nakedness for it is very warm with a sun pouring down between sand-stone walls 2000 ft. high.”

  Hawkins cut an especially striking figure. “I had a pair of buckskin breeches,” he wrote. “They were so wet all the time that they kept stretching and I kept cutting off the lower ends till I had nothing left but the waist band. When this was gone I was left with a pair of pants and two shirts. I took the pants and one shirt and put them in the boat’s locker [for safekeeping] . . . I cut holes in my shirt tail and tied the loose ends around my legs so they would not bother me in the water.”

  With the exception of the men themselves, the scenery was dazzling. Weary as everyone was, they all gazed around in wonder at walls that gleamed gray and pink and cream and purple. “The limestone is coming up again and there are some of the most beautiful marbles I ever saw,” Bradley wrote, “not excepting those in the Cap. at Washington. They are polished by the waves, many of them, and look very fine.” These walls were formed of immense, sheer blocks and looked unclimbable, as if built for the ramparts of some mythic castle. Bradley briefly considered hunting for a broken chunk of stone to take home but decided that “the uncertainty of adequate transportation” ruled out that idea.

  Powell, naturally, was more effusive. “And now, the scenery is on a grand scale. The walls of the cañon, 2,500 feet high, are of marble, of many beautiful colors, and often polished below by the waves, or far up the sides, where showers have washed the sands over the cliffs.” (Powell and the men may have known that the “marble” was in fact limestone, though perhaps “marble” had a more poetic ring.)

  “At one place I have a walk,” Powell went on, “for more than a mile, on a marble pavement, all polished and fretted with strange devices, and embossed in a thousand fantastic patterns. Through a cleft in the wall the sun shines on this pavement, which gleams in iridescent beauty.”

  Even Sumner was bowled over. “There is marble enough of all kinds to build forty Babylons, walls and all, with enough to spare to build forty other cities before it would be missed. If geology is true—and it certainly is, if anything is—what vast ages the little insects must have worked to furnish the material for two thousand feet of marble! And what a length of time it took to form the miles of lime and sandstone that overlie the marble! . . . And then, how long did it require the Colorado River to cut its channel through all the sedimentary rocks and twelve hundred feet and more into the Archean formation? Who knows? The testimony of the rocks cannot be impeached. I think Mose
s must be mistaken in his chronology as recorded in Biblical history.”

  To modern ears, “geology” is dry as dust, its subject matter lifeless in every sense. In the nineteenth century, geology was the stuff of drama and controversy. Powell was fascinated, and so were countless others. Though no one would have used the word, geology was sexy.

  The key was that geology was also theology. The common belief among educated people (though, by Powell’s day, no longer among scientists) was that God had created the earth a mere six thousand years before. The poet who described Petra as “a rose-red city half as old as time” meant his comparison literally. Then came the geologists brandishing pickaxes and fossils and spouting theories that contradicted Genesis. In a culture steeped in biblical doctrine, this was subversive. Geology might appear to be just another academic discipline, but both sides grasped the real issue. Sumner had put his finger on it. To study the age of rocks was to question the Rock of Ages.

  The great, dizzying discovery of the nineteenth century was that time stretched backward farther than the human mind could grasp. At the dawn of the century, man had presided at the center of a cozy new homestead built especially with him in mind. Now he found himself wandering lost and forlorn in an ancient, rambling labyrinth with an absentee landlord. The earth’s age could not be measured in thousands of years, the geologists declared, but in millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions. The notion left Victorians clutching their heads in bewilderment and dismay. Einstein would befuddle later generations with his paradoxical insights into the nature of time, but that would be an affair largely for intellectuals. This shock was visceral.

  Even a mere one million years is unimaginable in human terms. One million years is equivalent to fifty thousand human generations. Most people can, with considerable effort, imagine the world of their great-grandparents, three generations ago. One hundred generations bring us back only to the birth of Jesus, a hundred and sixty only as far as King Tut. To try to look back tens of thousands of generations brings the kind of queasy disorientation one gets from gazing down into a void. “It has taken several years of mountain climbing to cool my nerves, so that I can sit, with my feet over the edge, and calmly look down a precipice 2,000 feet,” Powell once wrote. Even so, he could not bear to watch anyone else perch so precariously. “I must either bid him come away, or turn my head.” Powell was referring to the view into a bottomless canyon, but he might have been describing anyone gathering his nerve to peer into time’s abyss.

  The reason the view back in time proved so unsettling had to do not with the age of the earth itself but with what the idea of unbounded time implied about mankind’s place in the scheme of creation. The one point that both devout believers and hardheaded scientists agreed on was that humans were newcomers on earth. That was fine if the earth was young. But if the earth was ancient and man was the pinnacle of God’s creation, why had He left the stage empty for so long? Mark Twain, a proud nonbeliever whose atheism was part intellectual exercise and part personal feud with God, put the challenge most starkly. “If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world’s age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for.”

  Powell believed with all his heart that science was the only path to truth and that religion was a tangle of myth and obfuscation. He was far too prudent a man to express himself with Twain’s gleeful sarcasm, but the explorer and the writer (who were almost exact contemporaries) were of one mind on the question of man’s place in the cosmos.

  In 1869, no topic was more fraught. The bombshell that was Darwin’s Origin of Species had exploded only ten years before. Evolution was more controversial than geology because its assault on religion and human dignity was even clearer. But the step from geology to evolution was a small one. Endless time made room for endless change. If small changes accumulating over endless eons could level mountains and dig canyons, then it became comparatively easy to imagine that life itself could slowly and inexorably change as the eons unrolled.

  For Powell, the Grand Canyon was the culmination of his expedition. Shutting his ears to his men’s pleas to get moving, ignoring the urgent message of the dwindling food supplies, striving to forget the rapids lying in wait, he reveled in the geological wonderland that rose around him on all sides.

  This was, finally, the land of fable, and Powell had penetrated to its core. Other scientists had seen it from above or even climbed down a side canyon to the river’s edge, but their views had been mere peeks in comparison with Powell’s detailed examination. No one had ever done anything to compare with this, and despite all the pressing reasons to stick to business, Powell made time to luxuriate in his surroundings.

  No man ever took more delight in the glories of geology than Powell. The sheer scale of the Grand Canyon made other men feel insignificant—even Powell wrote occasionally of man’s puniness in comparison with nature’s majesty—but in truth he seemed more exalted than humbled. “In the Grand Canyon,” he exclaimed, “there are thousands of gorges like that below Niagara Falls, and there are a thousand Yosemites. . . . Pluck up Mt. Washington by the roots to the level of the sea and drop it headfirst into the Grand Canyon, and the dam will not force its waters over the walls. Pluck up the Blue Ridge and hurl it into the Grand Canyon, and it will not fill it.” Here, truly, was “the most sublime spectacle on earth.”

  The canyon packed an intellectual punch that fully matched its visual power. Powell found running rapids thrilling, but toppling outmoded doctrines was even better sport. Truth, he insisted, was written in the rocks and not in the Bible. Reading those rocks, more than reading the river, was his great ambition. Scientists had explained long before that to look out in space is to look back in time, for the starlight that seems to have reached us instantaneously has in fact been inching across the heavens like a postcard in a mailman’s pouch. Today’s light carries yesterday’s news. Geology, Powell explained, teaches a parallel lesson. To scan a thousand-foot cliff in the Grand Canyon is to look back a hundred million years.

  The Grand Canyon was a “library of the gods,” Powell wrote, in which “ten thousand dark, gloomy alcoves” served as reading rooms. “The shelves are not for books, but form the stony leaves of one great book. He who would read the language of the universe may dig out letters here and there, and with them spell the words, and read, in a slow and imperfect way, but still so as to understand a little, the story of creation.”

  The difficulty in grasping this new story of creation reflected human limitations, not any flaw in the story itself. Looking at the buttes so common throughout the West, for example, Powell wrote that every one was “so regular and beautiful that you can hardly cast aside the belief that they are works of Titanic art. . . . But no human hand has placed a block in all those wonderful structures. The rain drops of unreckoned ages have cut them all from the solid rock.”

  The raindrops are easy to picture, but coming to terms with those “unreckoned ages” is the great hurdle that confronts all aspiring geologists. Perhaps a Swedish folktale comes as close to making the mystery palpable as any geological text. “High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.”

  Powell was sometimes hailed as a great geologist, though in truth he was not. But if he was not a brilliant innovator, he was a born teacher, with a knack for explaining complex ideas in simple language. Powell was not a detail man, but his boldness and his dramatic flair were well suited to geology’s sweep. When he looked at the landscape, he pictured mountains rising and crumbling and rivers slicing their way to the sea. He had taught himself to think—and to see—in geologic time.

  Seen over spans of tens of millions of years, the world is tran
sformed. The fixed and solid-seeming surface of the earth rises and falls like the ever-changing face of the sea. Rivers carry mountains to the sea, and the seafloor rises to form new mountains.* If we could see on a geologic time scale, John McPhee writes, “continents would crawl like amoebae, rivers would arrive and disappear like rainstreaks down an umbrella, lakes would go away like puddles after rain.”

  The changes are real but too slow for us to grasp. Though we are looking at a movie, we see only a single frozen frame. Our lives are simply too brief. A firefly, which lives a few short weeks, might as well be expected to comprehend that the four-year-old chasing after it with a glass jar will someday grow to resemble her arthritic grandmother watching from the porch.

  By geologic standards, ten million years is quick. One million years is the blink of an eye. Geologists are slow blinkers. Powell knew in his bones that, in a sense, a mountain is as fleeting and impermanent a feature of the world as a sand castle. Mountains rise up and fall down. The life span of a mountain range is on the order of sixty million years. The Rockies will crumble, Gibraltar will tumble.

  It was a sermon Powell loved to preach. Nature achieved its grandest effects, he wrote, “not by an extravagant and violent use of power, but by the slow agencies which may be observed generally throughout the world, still acting in the same slow, patient manner.” Like the claim that the earth was ancient, the claim that change was slow and uniform rather than sudden and violent had a double appeal for Powell. None of his nineteenth-century readers would have missed the unstated half of his argument—since the world is shaped and reshaped one grain of sand at a time, there is no need to talk of global floods and miraculously parting seas and the like. To the dustbin with all such superstitions.