Down the Great Unknown

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by Edward Dolnick


  Now that they were somewhere near their destination and near the end of their food supplies as well, the river’s every twist and turn seemed a cruel mockery. The river giveth and the river taketh away. The mood in the boats veered wildly from hope to despair and back again a dozen times a day. Fast water raised the men’s spirits. Rain and portaging and the sight of black rocks knocked them back down. Sumner acknowledged the river’s treachery in a few terse words. “Ran the granite up and down again,” he wrote on August 21, meaning that the boats had escaped from their granite dungeon and then the river had sneeringly returned them to it.

  On August 22, Sumner recorded the same spirit-sapping message again. (On the same day, Powell noted forlornly that “a part of our flour has been soaked in the river again.”) Then, on August 23, came a change. “Camped on the south side between perpendicular walls 2000 ft. high,” Sumner wrote, “all marble.” The last two words, though easy to miss, were in fact a cry of joy. Reporting the same news, Bradley sounded more relieved than joyful, like a patient who has recovered from a lingering illness. “This P.M. we got out of the granite rock and . . . the river has now got back to its propper direction again.”

  August 24 began with a bad portage, but it turned into another encouraging day. The highlight was a fifteen-mile run through a narrow gorge (“all marble,” Sumner noted again, still thrilled). Despite pouring rain at night, Powell and the men lay snug and dry in an immense alcove cut into the stone. Sometime soon now, they reassured one another, they would come to the Grand Wash Cliffs, which mark the end of the Grand Canyon. “We cannot now be very far from it unless the river turns back again which it shows no sign of doing,” Bradley noted hopefully.

  The Mormons, who knew this area better than any other white men (which is to say, hardly at all), had guessed that the distance from the mouth of the Little Colorado to the Grand Wash Cliffs was seventy or eighty miles. Powell and the crew, zealously recording their mileage quarter mile by quarter mile, reckoned that they had already run more than 120 miles since the Little Colorado. How many times could this accursed river bend?

  “It is curious how anxious we are to make up our reckoning every time we stop,” Powell wrote, with remarkable restraint, “now that our diet is confined to plenty of coffee, very little spoiled flour, and very few dried apples. It has come to be a race for a dinner. Still, we make such fine progress, all hands are in good cheer, but not a moment of daylight is lost.”

  The boats were hardly fit for racing. All three were leaking so badly that the men had to caulk and recaulk them at nearly every stop. On August 25, they lined one of the freight boats down a rapid, holding a rope tied to an iron ringbolt in the bow. They had lined innumerable rapids before, but now the boats were near collapse. As the men strained at the rope, the bolt tore out like a tooth yanked from the diseased gums of a starving man. The boat leaped forward, but by good fortune, four of the crew were in the river with it, trying to help maneuver it downstream. Before the boat could make its getaway, the men managed to put a line through a ringbolt in the stern.

  The landscape changed again. Lava cones from extinct volcanoes sat perched on the canyon rim and a forty-foot-tall shaft of jet-black basalt now called Vulcan’s Anvil rose from the river itself. A million years ago, countless tons of molten lava spilled over the canyon rims here. That prehistoric dam rose 2,330 feet high in the Grand Canyon (Glen Canyon Dam is 710 feet) and transformed the ferocious Colorado into a placid puddle that may have extended the full 179 miles back upstream to Lee’s Ferry. It took the relentless river a mere quarter of a million years to wear the dam away and restore the status quo.

  For Powell, half-starved and lost on an endless river though he was, the signs of a geological battle on a grand scale conjured up a spectacle glorious to contemplate. “What a conflict of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock, running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!”

  The men spent three hours portaging Lava Falls, today one of the two or three most dreaded rapids in the Grand Canyon, and then ran another twenty miles of rapids. “Thirty five miles today. Hurrah!” Powell wrote, and Bradley noted optimistically that “the country begins to look a little more open and the river still improves.” They were not home yet. Bradley concluded his journal entry for August 25 on a more somber note. “We commenced our last sack of flour tonight.”

  Late in the morning on August 26, the men made a discovery they considered far more exciting than any extinct volcano. They found a carefully tended vegetable garden, with corn and melons and squash and no sign of the Indians who had planted it. The corn and melons were too young to eat, but the squash were large and tempting. Powell and the others raced off with a dozen squash, hurrying in case the Indians returned. “What a kettle of squash sauce we make!” Powell cheered. “True, we have no salt with which to season it, but it makes a fine addition to our unleavened bread and coffee. Never was fruit so sweet as these stolen squashes.”

  Dinner precisely duplicated lunch. No one complained. “What a supper we make,” Powell wrote, “unleavened bread, green squash sauce, and strong coffee. We have been for a few days on half rations, but we have no stint of roast squash.”

  The meals were the highlights of the day, but there was other good news. For the second day in a row, the weary party had advanced thirty-five miles. “A few days like this,” Powell wrote, “and we are out of prison.”

  The river responded as maliciously as if Powell had whispered his hope aloud. The next day it swung in the wrong direction yet again, this time heading south. The dark granite, which the men had left behind, now loomed ominously in the distance once more. Toying with its victims like a Lothario trifling with his admirers’ hearts, the river turned and twisted as if for sport. “Now and then the river turns to the west, and excites hopes that are soon destroyed by another turn to the south,” Powell wrote.

  Then came a sudden, cold end to the teasing. “About nine o’clock we come to the dreaded rock. It is with no little misgiving that we see the river enter these black, hard walls.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SEPARATION RAPID

  At noon on August 27, 1869, the expedition came to a rapid that outdid their worst forebodings. The men pulled to shore and stared in horror. “The water dashes against the left bank and then is thrown furiously back against the right,” Bradley wrote. “The billows are huge and I fear our boats could not ride them [even] if we could keep them off the rocks. The spectacle is appalling to us.”

  This latest bit of bad news might have been easier to take if it had been just one more dreary note in a long dirge. But the day before, the discovery of the Indian garden had sent everyone’s spirits soaring. Hope had begun stirring, whispering hints of a life outside prison walls. And then this.

  With the boats tied up on the right shore, Powell and the crew set out up the cliff in search of a path around the rapid. They climbed up and across the granite for a mile or two but saw no place where they could line or portage and no path through the rapid. “To run it,” Powell concluded bleakly, “would be sure destruction.”

  Everyone straggled back to camp, choked down lunch, and set out again, this time after crossing to the river’s other shore. Up they climbed, to the top of the granite, only to find that the crags and pinnacles made it nearly impossible to see down to river level. They wasted another hour climbing high above the river on the left, in a futile search for a useful vantage point. Giving up, they recrossed the river to search the right bank a second time, as if in the hope that this time the iron bars of their cell would somehow give way. A close look only confirmed how much trouble they were in. To transport the heavy boats around the rapid would mean climbing eight hundred feet to the summit of the granite, and then back down, while somehow belaying or carrying the boats. By Powell’s calculation, it would take ten days. Only five days’ food remained.

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p; “We appeared to be up against it sure,” Sumner wrote. “There were two side canyons coming into the Colorado nearly opposite each other, the river not being over fifty yards wide and running like a race horse. The first part of the rapid is caused by the big rocks carried out of the side canyon coming in from the south. The second part of the rapid is formed by rocks from the northside canyon and a granite reef that reaches one-third of the way across the river, making a Z-shaped rapid. We spent the day trying to solve the problem.”

  Oramel Howland and Dunn confided to Sumner that they had found a solution of their own. They intended to leave the river and try to make it overland to one of the nearby Mormon settlements. The rest of the party should hike out, too. The alternative was an almost certain drowning. “I did what I could to knock such notions out of their heads,” Sumner wrote, “but as I was not sure of my own side of the argument, I fear I did not make the case very strong.”

  Just two weeks into the trip, Howland had survived the wreck at Disaster Falls and emerged undaunted. Two weeks later, he had proclaimed that nothing was as abhorrent to him as “a calm, smooth stream” and nothing as appealing as the sight of “white foam” in a mad river. Now, after eight more weeks of rapids and half rations and rain and quarreling, this brave man had endured enough. “[Howland] had fully made up his mind to quit,” Sumner wrote, “since the rapids had become a holy terror to him.”

  Bradley had his nerves under better control, but even his sober assessment of the situation was deeply discouraging. “We have only subsistence for about five days and have been trying half a day to get around this one rapid while there are three others in sight below,” he wrote. “What they are we cannot tell only that they are huge ones. If we could get on the cliff about a hundred yards below the head of this one we could let our boats down to that point and then have foot-hold all the rest of the way, but we have tried all the P.M. without success.”

  Late in the afternoon, Powell climbed down from the cliff and announced his decision. The next morning they would lower the boats past the first waterfall, then run the rapid that extended to the head of the second fall, and then squirt down a chute Powell had spotted along the right side of that fall. Finally, they would pull for their lives across the river, to get to the left of the channel-blocking boulder before the angry river flung them into it headlong.

  It was more a prayer than a plan. Even the first step, lining the upstream waterfall, was one they had already dismissed as impossible. After Powell broke the news, he and the crew took the boats across the river and camped, forlornly, by a creek at a side canyon on the river’s left side.

  They drank their black coffee and gulped down chunks of unleavened bread and tried to ignore the rapid’s din. Scared and despondent, the men muttered to one another and tried to think things through. “There is discontent in camp tonight and I fear some of the party will take to the mountains but hope not,” Bradley wrote. “This is decidedly the darkest day of the trip.”

  Just after dinner, Oramel Howland approached Powell and asked if they could talk in private. The two men walked a short distance along the creek and talked out of earshot of the others. To take on the rapid, Howland said, was suicide. They should all abandon the river and take their chances on hiking out to safety. But regardless of what the others decided, Howland announced, he, his brother, and Dunn had made up their minds to leave.

  Powell might have tried ordering Howland to stay with the expedition, but instead he tried to persuade him not to leave. The canyon walls soared thousands of feet above their heads. They might be trapped, like children in the bottom of a well. They had hardly any food. If they did manage to climb out, could they make it across the desert to the nearest Mormon town? The best choice was to trust their lives to the river.

  In the end, neither man could sway the other. Howland grabbed his bedroll and headed off to find a place to sleep. It was a starry night, and Powell took out the sextant to measure their position. The straight-line distance to the mouth of the Virgin River, he estimated, was perhaps forty-five miles. No more than twenty miles upstream on the Virgin River were Mormon settlements, and safety. Even if the forty-five miles turned out to be ninety, because of the river’s meandering, they had to be nearly home. And the Colorado was known to be fairly tame for a long stretch above the mouth of the Virgin.

  Powell woke Howland and made his case one more time, this time drawing on his new calculations. No sale. “We have another short talk about the morrow, and he lies down again; but for me there is no sleep,” Powell wrote. “All night long, I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on?”

  Powell weighed and reweighed the possibilities through the night. He checked the rations again. The expedition had come down to this one judgment call, he knew, and decisive as he ordinarily was, Powell wavered. On the one hand, they had survived more rapids than they could count. On the other hand, they had never run a rapid that looked as bad as this one. On the one hand, this rapid could be a fluke, a one-time horror. On the other, it might be a preview of what the river had in store from here on. On the one hand, they might be able to climb out of the canyon. On the other, they would then have to survive a long trek across the desert. On the one hand, it had rained so much lately that, if they hiked out, they might find enough water to keep them alive. On the other, they might not.

  “At one time, I almost conclude to leave the river,” Powell wrote. “But for years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished, to say that there is a part of the cañon which I cannot explore, having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on.”

  Powell woke Walter and told him about Howland’s decision to leave. Walter said he would stay with his brother. Powell talked with Hawkins and Hall. The two men, boat mates in the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, were the expedition’s youngest, boldest members. They had come a long way, in every sense, since the first day of the trip when they had not known how to pull to shore even in easy water. They proclaimed their determination to stay with the river.

  Powell turned toward Bradley. Time after time, Bradley had favored running rapids that Powell had insisted on portaging. That choice had pitted a minute’s danger against hours of crushing labor. Now the choice was between a minute or two of hell and days wandering in the desert. Bradley chose the river. “I shall be one to try to run it rather than take to the mountains,” he had written the previous night just before falling asleep. “ ‘ ’Tis darkest just before the day’ and I trust our day is about to dawn.” With slightly more hesitation—he was worried that this looming rapid was only the first of a deadly series—Sumner made the same decision.

  • • •

  In the morning, no one had the heart to resume the debate. “At last daylight comes,” Powell wrote, “and we have breakfast, without a word being said about the future. The meal is as solemn as a funeral. After breakfast, I ask the three men if they still think it best to leave us.”

  Oramel Howland did, and so did Dunn. Seneca Howland tried to convince the pair to stick with the others. Failing in his plea, Seneca threw in his lot with his older brother and Dunn. That made three who planned to trust to the desert’s mercy, and six who “came to the determination,” in Bradley’s words, “to run the rapid or perish in the attempt.”

  The entire party crossed the river again. With only six men continuing downriver, two boats would do. The men unloaded the Emma Dean and left it behind, tied to the shore. (“Abandoned the small boat as useless property,” Sumner wrote, with characteristic unsentimentality, of the boat he had piloted for nine hundred miles.) Left on shore, too, as if in mute acknowledgment that the trip was a scientific expedition no longer, were the broken barometers and the collections of fossils and minerals, as well as some beaver traps.

  “With great labor,” and with the help of the Howlands and Dunn—who were parting from the expedition but lingered to h
elp with this last chore—the men managed to carry the two freight boats over a twenty-five-foot boulder. Once there, they snubbed a rope around a convenient pillar in the granite and lowered the boats into a little cove just barely big enough to hold them both.

  Then it was time for farewells. The three climbers took two rifles and a shotgun, in the hope they would find game when they reached the plateau. Well aware of the plight of the men they left behind, they refused Powell’s offer of a share of the rations but did take some lumps of dough that Hawkins had fixed. Powell gave Oramel Howland a letter to Emma, and Sumner gave him a watch to deliver to his sister as a keepsake in case he drowned. The trip records had been kept in duplicate, and Howland took one set. (In the haste and confusion, Powell inadvertently gave Howland two copies of some records and and no copies of others.)

  Howland pleaded with the others, one last time, to reconsider. It was folly to challenge this rapid. Downstream, the river seemed to veer south once again, deeper into the granite. A few more miles would exhaust what few rations remained and then it would be too late to climb out. “Some tears are shed,” Powell wrote. “It is rather a solemn parting; each party thinks the other is taking the dangerous course.”

  “Three men refused to go farther . . . and we had to let them take to the mountains,” Bradley wrote somberly. “They left us with good feelings though we deeply regret their loss for they are as fine fellows as I ever had the good fortune to meet.”

  The Kitty Clyde’s Sister, with Powell aboard, pushed out into the current. The Maid followed close behind. The Howland brothers and Dunn stood on a cliff, watching anxiously. “Dashed out into the boiling tide with all the courage we could muster,” Bradley wrote. The Sister raced along the foot of the wall, scraped against a boulder, then plummeted over a fall, careened into the waves at its foot, and filled with water. A huge boulder loomed downstream, blocking the channel’s right side. Caught in the torrent headed for the rock face, Hall and Hawkins pulled for their lives, desperate to get across the current and to the left of the boulder. The waves grew “too large to do anything but hold on to the boats.” Somehow—it happened so fast they could not figure it out—they were safely by, bobbing in the choppy water at the rapid’s downstream end.

 

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