“To add to our troubles,” Sumner lamented, “there was a nearly continuous rain and a great rise in the river that created such a current and turmoil that it tried our strength to the limit. We were weakened by hardships and ceaseless toil for twenty out of twenty-four hours of the day. Starvation stared us in the face. I felt like Job: it would be a good scheme to curse God and die.”
• • •
As if to mark their misery, a festering feud between Powell and Dunn came to a head. “At noon one day when the boats were being let over a bad place,” Hawkins wrote, “Dunn was down by the water’s edge with a barometer, taking the altitude.” Somehow a rope fastened to one of the boats caught him under the arms and knocked him into the water. Dunn had nearly drowned, but he had managed to catch hold of a rope and drag himself to safety. Though Dunn was unhurt, he had been carrying a watch that belonged to Powell—the man measuring altitude was assigned to note the exact time—and the watch was ruined. Powell told Dunn that he would have to pay $30 for the watch (about ten days’ pay for a skilled workman) or leave. “Dunn told him a bird could not get out of that place, thinking the Major was joking,” Hawkins went on, “but all of us were very quickly convinced that every word the Major said was meant.”
Dunn “really should have been a little more careful” on the day of the dunking, Sumner conceded, but “the Major evidently wanted to impress his military standing upon Dunn, and proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing that roused his ire to such a pitch that I think only the fact that the Major had but one arm saved him from a broken head, if nothing worse.” The crew had sided with Dunn, and the sniping grew nasty. When Sumner remarked that Dunn had come close to drowning, Walter Powell muttered that it would have been no great loss.
Hawkins had fixed dinner. He poured each man a cup of coffee, and they began eating. Powell sat a few yards from the others, as he often did. The routine called for Hawkins to serve Powell. Not this night. If Powell wanted to eat, Hawkins snarled, “he would have to come and get his grub like the rest of the boys.” Walter took his brother dinner.
The immediate crisis had passed like a fast-traveling thunderstorm, but the tension lingered, like an electric charge in the air. Like it or not, the men were utterly dependent on one another and stuck with each other’s company. They had not seen another human being in nearly six weeks, since the Uinta Indian Agency (and Bradley, Sumner, the Howland brothers, and Dunn had been stuck in camp and missed even that slight diversion). Two weeks is a long trip in remote country, a month an eternity. Powell and his men had been on the river more than eighty days. Cabin fever is a hazard of every prolonged trip. For these men, condemned to rowboats careening down a wild river, in perpetual danger of drowning and on the edge of starvation, the homeliest cabin would have seemed like a castle. Dunn, Sumner, and Powell in particular spent all day together, every day, fearing for their lives and crammed in the sixteen-foot-long Emma Dean. It was not a setup to soothe ruffled tempers.
On August 16, a day spent stuck in camp repairing the boats and cutting oars, Powell tore into Oramel Howland for losing the maps. Howland and Powell had been quarreling over the maps since Disaster Falls, when Howland had lost his first set of maps, his gear, and nearly his life. Powell had chewed Howland out more than once since then, and Sumner had tried to intervene on his friend’s behalf. Now Powell started in on Howland again, and Sumner stepped in again. The war was over, he reminded Powell, and “he couldn’t come any damned military there.”
Then Powell turned to Dunn, his other whipping boy. Powell snarled at Dunn, and Dunn snapped back. Powell cursed Dunn out, and Dunn said that if Powell weren’t a cripple, he would make him take it back. Half-mad, ox-strong Walter Powell leaped in, shouting that he was no cripple. Eyes flashing in fury, he charged Dunn, screaming that he would kill him.
Hawkins grabbed Walter by the hair and shoved his head underwater. “For God’s Sake, Bill, you will drown him!” Dunn cried, and Howland and Dunn together dragged Walter from the water and threw him down on a sandbar. Walter coughed and choked and, once he had caught his breath, shouted that Hawkins was a coward and a lowlife, a “Missouri puke.” Walter stormed off to get his gun, vowing to shoot both Dunn and Hawkins. As Walter bent over to unlash the gun from the deck of his boat, Andy Hall came up behind him and slugged him on the side of the head. Walter whipped around. Hall stood, gun in hand, shouting at Walter to back off before Hall took his head off. Walter backed off.
The next day, with a fragile peace in place, the leaky boats and the feuding men “pulled out again for more of the Great Unknown.” The contrast with the jaunty party that had left Green River Station not quite three months before was hard to miss. “There was not much talk indulged in by the grim squad of half-starved men with faces wearing that peculiar stern look always noticed on the faces of men forming for a charge in battle,” Sumner wrote.
Nearly all the men had indeed seen battle. Bad as their predicament was now, the war had been worse. The Civil War had been a kind of horrific canyon journey of its own, a marathon that wended through unknown and unspeakably perilous territory, with long, dull stretches punctuated by episodes of sudden, shocking violence, and with no good way out but straight ahead, come what may.
They could not help thinking of what they had endured before, but even the memory of hardships overcome seemed little consolation now. “This part of the canyon is probably the worst hole in America, if not in the world,” Sumner wrote. “The gloomy black rocks . . . drive all the spirit out of a man. And the excessive drenching and hard work drive all the strength out of him and leave him in a bad fix indeed.”
Bad fix or not, they had no choices left. “We had to move on or starve,” Sumner wrote, and even Powell agreed. “We must make all haste possible,” he wrote. “If we meet with difficulties, as we have done in the cañon above, we may be compelled to give up the expedition, and try to reach the Mormon settlements to the north.” The precious barometers had broken, too, so there was no longer any way to tell how far the river still had to fall.
They had begun as a scientific expedition, more or less, but the time for science had long passed. Angry, hungry, exhausted, scared, Powell and his eight companions were in a race for their lives. They had ten days’ rations remaining, and they could only guess how much farther they had to go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MISERY
They needed to race, but they had to crawl. “Although very anxious to advance,” Powell wrote, “we are determined to run with great caution, lest, by another accident, we lose all our supplies. How precious that little flour has become! We divide it among the boats, and carefully store it away, so that it can be lost only by the loss of the boat itself.”
On August 17, Powell and the men set out at eight in the morning. They sped along for three miles but ground to a halt when they came to a rapid too big to run. As they lowered the boats on ropes, the Maid leaped ahead on her line while the men tried futilely to rein her in, and smashed into a rock. Rain fell in intermittent bursts that proved more maddening than a steady downpour would have. “Have been thoroughly drenched and chilled,” Powell wrote, “but between showers the sun shines with great power, and the mercury in our thermometers stands at 115°, so that we have rapid changes from great extremes, which are very disagreeable.”
They stopped to repair the Maid, finally returned to the river, and promptly came to another impassable rapid. They lined it, too, only to run into still another rapid they could not run. For the third time in a day, they took on the dreaded task of lowering the boats by rope. This last time was the worst. It took all afternoon, and, when it was finally over, the men found still another “very bad” rapid that they would have to line first thing the next morning.
Bruised and exhausted by the day’s labor, the men sat down to a dinner of unleavened bread. When the sun sank, the temperature plummeted and the rain picked up. The weather in the Grand Canyon is as extreme as the scenery. Clear days can be not just sun
ny but scorching, as if the sunlight has passed through the lens of a magnifying glass. The most nondescript hat seems like a priceless boon. When it rains, Powell noted, it seems as if “some vast spout ran from the clouds.” Few sights are as magnificent as a thunderstorm sweeping through the Grand Canyon, few experiences as miserable as being caught in a downpour at night without a tent or a ledge to hide under, trying against all odds to fall asleep.
“It is especially cold in the rain to-night,” Powell wrote. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless. The rubber ponchos, with which we started from Green River City, have all been lost; more than half the party is without hats, and not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece. So we gather drift wood, and build a fire; but after supper the rain, coming down in torrents, extinguishes it, and we sit up all night, on the rocks, shivering, and are more exhausted by the night’s discomfort than by the day’s toil.”
When the long night finally ended, the wet, wretched men set out downstream again. The rapids were “very numerous and very large,” Bradley wrote on August 18, and “the worst kind of a rapid because you can see rocks rising all over them with no channel in which to run them.” A day spent portaging and lining earned them only four miles. “Hard work and little distance seems to be the characteristic of this cañon,” Bradley wrote wearily, and meals of coffee and moldy flour were “not sufficient to anything more than just to sustain life.”
While the crew manhandled the boats through the rapids, Powell set off alone to climb the cliffs, intent on geology. Both leader and crew may have welcomed a break from one another. (“Major Powell . . . was a nuisance in the work of portaging,” Sumner wrote. “His imperious orders were not appreciated. We had troubles enough without them.”) Up Powell climbed, past the black granite and the rusty sandstone and the greenish shale to the base of the red-stained limestone. “I climb so high that the men and boats are lost in the black depths below, and the dashing river is a rippling brook; and still there is more cañon above than below. All about me are interesting geological records. The book is open, and I can read as I run. All about me are grand views, for the clouds are playing again in the gorges. But somehow I think of the nine days’ rations, and the bad river, and the lesson of the rocks and the glory of the scene is but half seen.”
In the afternoon, the cavorting clouds gave way to storm clouds. “This P.M. we have had a terrible thunder-shower,” Bradley wrote. “We had to fasten our boats to the rocks and seek shelter from the wind behind bowlders. The rain poared down in torrents and the thunder-peals echoed through the cañon from crag to crag making wild music for the lightning to dance to. After a shower it is grand to see the cascades leap from the cliffs and turn to vapor before they reach the rocks below. There are thousands of them of all sizes, pure and white as molten silver.”
Such hymns to nature were more in Powell’s line than Bradley’s, but Powell’s spirits were so low that he managed only to moan, “Still it rains.” Bradley’s “pure and white” cascades of rain seemed only to heighten the contrast with the swollen, muddy river, now so full of dirt and grit that the men could no longer drink it. (They could have filled a bucket or a big pot with river water and let the mud settle to the bottom overnight, but ever since the fire, when they lost so much of their mess kit, they had not even had enough cups to go around. Now they drank rainwater puddled up in the rocks.)
On his climb, Powell had peered downstream in the hope of seeing the river emerge from the dreaded granite. He strained to see some encouraging sign of change in the cliffs but could make out “only a labyrinth of deep gorges.”
On August 19, it rained all day. “Still we are in our granite prison,” Powell noted bleakly. They began the day with a rapid they could run, for once, but it nearly did them in. “The waves were frightful and had any of the boats shipped a sea it would have been her last for there was no still water below,” Bradley wrote. “We run a wild race for about two miles, first pulling right—then left, now to avoid the waves and now to escape the bowlders, sometimes half full of water and as soon as a little could be thrown out it was replaced by double the quantity.”
They paused for lunch, such as it was, and ate on a cliff side as the rain poured down. Back in the boats again, the men came at once to a “furious” rapid. It had no rocks, though, and Powell decided to run it. The Emma Dean went first but immediately swallowed a wave and flipped, flinging Powell, Sumner, and Dunn into the river. Helpless, the three men managed at least to cling to the overturned boat as it raced downstream. Bradley and Walter Powell, in the Maid of the Cañon, saw what had happened and did their best to come to the rescue, but “the whirlpools below caught us and our furious speed threw us against the rocks with terrible force.” Reeling but still afloat, the Maid staggered toward the Emma Dean. “It seems a long time before they come to our relief,” Powell wrote. “At last they do come; our boat is turned right side up, bailed out, . . . and on we go, without even landing.”
Remarkably, they lost nothing but a pair of oars. The clouds cleared, and soon after the men found some driftwood lodged in the rocks and built a huge fire. The flames leaped up and stars twinkled overhead, but it was hardly paradise. The expedition had advanced not quite six miles in another gruesome day. Even with the fire, all the bedrolls were sopping wet, as they had been for a week. Come morning, the sun rose in a cloudless sky but the men were too miserable to push on. Much as they needed to hurry, they needed to rest and dry their gear even more. Powell and the crew spent the morning in camp.
Life had become an endless round of work, and the first men to explore one of the world’s greatest natural wonders found themselves stuck in a colossal rut. Each day was, in Sumner’s words, “a ceaseless grind of running or letting down rapids with lines, varied in places by making portages of boats and contents. The contents were a small item, but the boats, water-logged and very heavy, taxed our strength to the limit.” John Henry, the ex-slave, supposedly died with a hammer in his hand, building the railroad. Powell’s men were John Henry’s contemporaries. If they did not drown or starve, it began to seem as if they, too, might work themselves to death.
Powell had lightened up a bit, though, at least according to Sumner. After the debacle in camp, “everything was as smooth as with two lovers after their first quarrel and make-up. Major Powell did not run the outfit in the same overbearing manner after that. At a portage or a bad let-down he took his geological hammer and kept out of the way.”
The pace picked up. On August 20, the men advanced eight miles after their morning break. Bradley dared to hope that they were nearly home. “We must be getting near to where the Mormons run the river,” he wrote, “for they have run it 65 miles above Callville and one would think we had run rapids enough already to be allowed a respite soon.”
The river had other plans. The next day ranked “first for dashing wildness of any day we have seen or will see if I guess rightly,” Bradley wrote. After six bad rapids in seven miles, they came to what Sumner called “a perfect hell—a rapid with a fall of 30 ft. in 300 yards.” (This was not their first “perfect hell.” Sumner glimpsed hell almost as often as Bradley spotted the worst rapid conceivable.) After a sharp bend to the left, the river swung sharply back to the right.The Emma Dean was flung broadside to the current, somehow not capsizing but uncontrollable, as helpless in the pounding waves as a bobbing cork. The river’s twists cut off the view ahead, but there was no cutting off the sound of roaring rapids. Black granite walls rose to the sky on both sides of the channel, squeezing the river between its walls and amplifying its thunder. There was no place to pull to shore, no chance of portaging or landing, nothing to do but hang on and hope.
Powell stood on deck, clutching a strap tied across the boat, ducking the crashing waves. Sumner and Dunn struggled to row, their backs to the action. For ten miles the boat leaped and bounded and spun. “The excitement is so great that we forget the danger,” Powell wrote, “until we hear the so
und of a great fall below; then we back on our oars, and are carried slowly toward its head, and succeed in landing just above, and find that we have to make another portage.”
That was melancholy news (although the thrilling run had at least broken the routine), but after the portage came a fabulous discovery. “Just here,” Powell rejoiced, “we run out of the granite!”
“Ten miles in less than half a day, and limestone walls below,” Powell exclaimed. “Good cheer returns. We forget the storms, and the gloom, and cloud covered cañons, and the black granite, and the raging river, and push our boats from shore in great glee.”
The good news came just in time. With the crushing work and the nasty feuding and the pounding rain and the lack of food, no one had much in reserve. “I feel more unwell tonight than I have felt on the trip,” Bradley wrote. “I have been wet so much lately that I am ripe for any disease and our scanty food has reduced me to poor condition, but I am still in good spirits.” If he ever made it back to civilization, Bradley vowed, he would eat to bursting.
Then, as suddenly as the vanishing of a dream, the good times fled. The rain resumed and kept up all day. No sooner had the exultant men set out again than they found the river carrying them in precisely the wrong direction. “We wheel about a point again to the right, and turn, so as to head back in the direction from which we come, and see the granite again, with its narrow gorge and black crags.”
The return to the granite was only half the bad news. The river that they fervently prayed would head west toward civilization and safety now turned almost due east. “What it means I don’t know,” Bradley wrote, “but if it keeps on in this way we shall be back where we started from.”
Down the Great Unknown Page 30