Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  The key to this second expedition was a different approach to the problem of supplies. Rather than carry all the food from the outset, Powell intended to cache supplies ahead of time at various spots along the river. In the late summer of 1870, Powell was traveling in southern Utah in the expert company of Jacob Hamblin, the renowned Mormon scout, looking for manageable routes down to the Colorado. Hamblin, “the Leatherstocking of the Desert,” was an ardent Mormon who served Brigham Young, in the words of one historian, “with a loyalty that amounted almost to worship.”

  Near Mount Trumbull, Powell and Hamblin met with a group of Shivwits. With Hamblin serving as interpreter, Powell explained what he was after. “I tell the Indians that I wish to spend some months in their country during the coming year, and that I would like them to treat me as a friend. I do not wish to trade; do not want their lands . . . I tell them of many Indian tribes, and where they live; of the European nations; of the Chinese, of Africans, and all the strange things about them that come to my mind. I tell them of the ocean, of great rivers and high mountains, of strange beasts and birds. At last I tell them I wish to learn about their cañons and mountains, and about themselves, to tell other men at home; and that I want to take pictures of everything, and show them to my friends.”

  Hamblin translated the chief’s response. “We will be friends, and when you come we will be glad. We will tell the Indians who live on the other side of the great river that we have seen Ka-pu-rats [”Arm Off”], and he is the Indians’ friend. . . . We have not much to give; you must not think us mean. You are wise; we have heard you tell strange things. We are ignorant. Last year we killed three white men. Bad men said they were our enemies. They told great lies. We thought them true. We were mad; it made us big fools. We are very sorry. Do not think of them, it is done; let us be friends.”

  Here was confirmation, then, and from the Indians’ own mouths, of the story the newspaper had reported the year before. Powell seemed curiously unperturbed. “That night I slept in peace, although these murderers of my men, and their friends, the U-in-ka-rets, were sleeping not five hundred yards away.” He never sought to punish anyone for the killings and almost never referred to the murdered men again.

  It is a puzzling story, made all the more unsettling by Powell’s reliance on Hamblin to interpret for him. The Shivwits knew perfectly well how swift and careless frontier justice could be. In 1866, at nearby Pipe Spring, for example, someone had killed two white ranchers. An armed posse arrived, accused a band of Paiutes of the murders, and left eight of them dead. Would Indians in 1870 freely confess to a white man that they had murdered three of his companions?

  In camp below Separation Rapid on the night that the Howland brothers and Dunn hiked out, Sumner and the other men had tried to guess their friends’ fate. The consensus, as Sumner put it, was that “the red bellies would surely get them.” Sumner (though he was no friend of the Indians) disagreed. He feared that the three men “would not escape the double-dyed white devils that infested that part of the country. Grapevine reports convinced me later that that was their fate.”

  Sumner’s suspicions had begun to take shape almost at once. On the second day at the Virgin River, while the men devoured melons and swapped stories with their Mormon greeting party, they tried to work out a plan to rescue the Howlands and Dunn. One of the listeners suddenly perked up when Powell mentioned the valuables the men had with them. “From one with a listless demeanor,” Sumner wrote, “he instantly changed to a wide-awake, intensely interested listener, and his eyes snapped and burned like a rattlesnake’s, particularly when Major Powell told him of an especially valuable chronometer for which he had paid six hundred and fifty dollars.”

  Soon after, Sumner heard the story of how his three friends had been killed by Indians intent on revenge. He dismissed it at once and never saw fit to reconsider. “I am positive I saw some years afterwards the silver watch that I had given Howland,” he wrote in his old age. “I was with some men in a carousal. One of them had a watch and boasted how he came by it. I tried to get hold of it so as to identify it by a certain screw that I had made and put in myself, but it was spirited away, and I was never afterwards able to get sight of it. Such evidence is not conclusive, but all of it was enough to convince me that the Indians were not at the head of the murder, if they had anything to do with it.”

  There matters stood until 1980. Then Wesley Larsen, an amateur historian and a former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, found a letter that had lain undisturbed in a trunk with a jumble of other papers for ninety-seven years. The letter was written by one William Leany to John Steele and rediscovered in a trunk belonging to Steele’s great-grandson.

  Leany had been one of Brigham Young’s bodyguards. Steele was a judge and a militia officer in the Blackhawk Indian War (and the father of the first white child born in Utah Territory). Both men were devout Mormons, but, in the most notorious incident in Mormon history, Leany had run afoul of his church. In 1857, as noted earlier, a group of Mormons (and, possibly, Indians) had perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre, killing some 120 California-bound emigrants. Leany happened to see that ill-fated wagon train pass by as it wound its way across southern Utah headed in the direction of Mountain Meadows, and he recognized a man in the emigrant party. Years before, in Missouri, the man’s father had saved Leany from an anti-Mormon mob that was threatening to kill him. Now the emigrants were in trouble themselves, for the Mormons had agreed to deny food or other assistance to the Gentile interlopers.

  Seeing his rescuer’s son, Leany defied the ban and gave the man a meal, a roof for the night, and some vegetables. Leany’s fellow Mormons charged him with giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” To teach him a lesson, someone clubbed him over the head, fracturing his skull and leaving him for dead.

  Leany survived. By 1883, he and Steele were old men. Steele evidently suggested to his good friend Leany that the time had come for them both to repent of their sins. Leany wanted no part of it. The church had blood on its hands, but he had nothing to repent. Like an Old Testament preacher, Leany thundered that “thieving whoredom murder and Suicide & like abominations” reigned in the land. Then came the sentence that, a century later, electrified Wes Larsen: “You are far from ignorant of those deeds of blood from the day the picket fence was broken on my head to the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.” [italics added]

  Larsen (like the other players in the story, a good Mormon) embarked on a frenzied round of detective work. The reference to “our ward,” a local Mormon district run by a bishop, was the first clue. Leany and Steele had lived in the same ward only once through the years, in 1869. And in that same fateful year, Larsen found, only one trio of men—Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and Bill Dunn—had been reported missing or killed in southern Utah.

  Further, Larsen learned, only weeks before the Powell expedition reached Separation Rapid, Brigham Young had traveled throughout the region warning the faithful that the long-threatened invasion of Utah by Gentiles was imminent. When “war” came, Young warned his listeners, blood would rise “to their knees and even to their waist and to their horses’ bridle bits.” The Mormon leader ordered sentries posted at all the passes leading into southern Utah.

  Then, at the worst possible moment, three white strangers wandered into no-man’s-land spouting a cock-and-bull story about their trip down a river that everyone knew was impassable. The three men were dragged off and executed as spies, Larsen speculates, and the news of the unsanctioned executions triumphantly telegraphed to Salt Lake City. At virtually the same moment, church leaders in Salt Lake received word from the fishermen at the mouth of the Virgin River that John Wesley Powell had survived his trip down the Colorado. He had arrived alive, but he was asking after three of his men who had left the river and set out on foot across the desert.

  In Larsen’s scenario, the next step was an exact replay of the Mormon
response to the 120 killings at Mountain Meadows. First came cover-up (thus the reference in Leany’s letter to “the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood”), then a vow of silence on the part of those who knew the truth, and finally a finger of blame pinning the crime on the nearest Indians.

  Three theories, then, and none of them good. The first assumes that Indians would nonchalantly reveal that they had killed three white men (and the Shivwits had a reputation as peaceable). The next bases an accusation of triple murder on a stranger’s shifty eyes and Sumner’s certainty that he recognized a favorite watch. The last takes a cryptic sentence in a private letter and spins a tale of conspiracy, blood oaths, and cold-eyed executions.

  The only certainty is that Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and Bill Dunn hiked up Separation Canyon on August 28, 1869, and were never seen alive again. They should have made it to the plateau, for the climb up from the river is rugged but doable and the heavy rains would have left water standing in puddles. Once at the rim, they would have headed north toward the Mormon settlements. It would have been only a short distance to a high point called Blue Knob that offers a view over the countryside. From there, the next conspicuous landmark to the north was Mount Dellenbaugh, as it is now called, about twenty miles distant. The summit is an easy hike and would have made a good spot to look for Indian trails or water.

  Scratched into the rock near the mountain summit is an inscription, cut with a knife. “Dunn 1869,” it reads, and “Water,” above an arrow pointing north. If the inscription is a hoax, it is an old one. Ten years ago, a local historian tracked down a “hermit cowboy” who had lived near Mount Dellenbaugh since the early 1930s. He didn’t know if the inscription was genuine or not, the old man said, but he knew that it had been there as long as he had.

  The bodies of the Howland brothers and Dunn have never been found. The three men, along with their weapons, their papers, and the compasses and chronometers and other gear they carried, seem to have vanished into the air.

  EPILOGUE

  Frank Goodman, who left the expedition shortly after the wreck at Disaster Falls, settled in Utah and became the patriarch of a large family. (“He had the most sense of anybody in the whole expedition,” one modern boatman half-jokes. “He walked out when he had the chance.”) Goodman settled in Vernal, Utah, in the northeast corner of the state. Vernal happened to be the hometown of Nathaniel Galloway, the trapper who went on to invent the “face your danger” technique of river running. One white-water historian speculates that Galloway may have hit on the idea of taking rapids head-on, and the idea of building flat-bottomed, lightweight boats as well, by listening to Goodman’s tales of misfortune in Powell’s boats.

  George Bradley spent the rest of his life near San Diego running a small fruit orchard. In 1885, in poor health, he returned to Massachusetts to be near his family. Bradley died a few weeks later, at fifty, in his sister’s home. His death went unnoticed even in his hometown newspaper.

  The irrepressible Andy Hall returned to his old trade, driving mule teams, in Arizona Territory. On an August afternoon in 1882, Hall and another man were driving a six-mule train for the Wells Fargo Express Company. They carried the U.S. mail and a miscellany of other goods, including a large box containing a $5,000 payroll in gold. Just outside Globe, Arizona, the mule train reached a small gully next to a giant boulder. A volley of rifle shots tore into the mules. One animal fell dead, and the others ran off in panic. Hall saw the gunmen chase down the mule carrying the gold, divide up the loot, and ride off. He set out to track the thieves while his partner rode to Globe to round up a posse.

  The posse found a series of markers Hall had left. First were deep gouges he had scraped in the dirt with his boot heel, then (when the robbers moved into brush country) a trail of small, broken branches, and finally (when the route moved across bare rock) torn-up bits of handkerchief. In time, the posse found Hall himself, dead. He had been shot eight times.

  The killers were caught two days later and hanged from a sycamore tree in Globe. The Chamber of Commerce now marks the site with a plaque that notes that “the culprits had a fair hearing” and goes on to add that “saloons were closed and it was an orderly lynching.”

  Jack Sumner and Billy Hawkins also lived well into the new century.* Sumner became a prospector who roamed across Utah and Colorado for another three decades without ever hitting pay dirt. (In 1902, he looked back at the great adventure of his young manhood and compressed the entire odyssey into a single sentence. “May 24th 1869,” he wrote, “the Expedition pulled out into the swift current of Green River and Hell commenced and kept up for 111 days.”) Hawkins, reluctant cook and possible fugitive from justice, took up farming and ranching near Eden, Arizona, and became a well-respected justice of the peace, a distinguished figure sporting a great, bushy mustache.

  For a time, both men kept on good terms with Powell, but in the end the two men turned on their former leader. One great cause of the rift was a mistaken belief that Congress had appropriated $50,000 for the expedition and that Powell had kept back the men’s share of the money.

  Each man buttressed his case with further complaints. Hawkins focused on Powell’s autocratic ways. “I can say one thing truthfully about the Major,” he wrote in 1907, “that no man living was ever thought more of by his men up to the time he wanted to drive Bill Dunn from the party.”

  Proud, cantankerous Sumner came to feel that Powell had stolen not only the wages that were due him but the recognition he should have had as well. Bitter to the end, and past it, Sumner had the last word in an obituary that reads almost as if he had dictated it. The story focused on the 1869 expedition. “Without dwelling at length on the incidents of this thrilling and perilous journey—and there were many,” the Rocky Mountain News declared, “it may be truthfully asserted that it was due almost wholly to Sumner’s cool nerve, calm judgment and quick and ready resourcefulness in all circumstances and in the face of every trying situation that the party completed the journey.” Sumner, not Powell, had truly been in command. “He was its real leader, and to him alone is due the fact that the entire party did not go down in the awful currents of the mighty cañon.”

  “Powell’s Scurvy Trick,” the News labeled one further outrage. “Powell left the six men who had accompanied him at Fort Yuma, on the lower river, and returned East to become famous as an explorer. To Sumner he gave sufficient money to return home, but left the other five penniless. Sumner promptly divided the money with his companions, and from that day on had no use for the man whose life he had twice saved, and who owed so much to him for the services he had rendered.”

  Sumner died in 1907, Hawkins in 1919.

  Walter Powell lived a long, melancholy life. Plagued by depression and fierce headaches, he was unable to work after the early 1870s. One sister or another cared for him for many years, and when they could no longer cope, Walter was admitted to an asylum in Washington, D.C. “At one time, perhaps for two years he claimed to be a prophet,” the Major recalled. “I never knew [Walter] to be dangerous to any one except once when I was afraid he would kill one of my men.” Walter Powell died in 1915.

  The Colorado River, too, deserves a eulogy of sorts. The river Powell knew is no more, for it is now interrupted by a series of great dams. In long stretches the river still runs fierce and formidable, but it is a penned beast, like a zoo lion. The Colorado is “the world’s most regulated river,” according to the National Research Council, but it has worn away mightier dams than those that encumber it today, and, centuries from now, it will flow free again.

  Separation Rapid is gone, drowned in 1938 as the rising waters of Lake Mead pooled up behind Hoover Dam.

  Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon a hero and a celebrity, a kind of nineteenth-century astronaut. In a national series of lectures, the hardy explorer, “direct from scenes of his great exploits and discoveries,” painted his audiences a series of word pictures of the West’s greatest natural wonder.

 
; Soon, though, Powell forsook the crowds and returned to the desert. On May 21, 1871, he set out from Green River Station a second time, intent on redoing the entire grueling trip, determined this time to bring back a scientific picture of canyon country. The crew was new and again included no skilled boatmen. Instead of feisty and hardheaded mountain men, Powell now opted for a group composed almost exclusively of his own friends and relatives. (Of the first expedition’s crew, Powell invited only Sumner. He accepted, despite all his later condemnation of Powell, but heavy snows in the mountains kept him from joining the others.)

  The second expedition endured all the hazards of the first—near-drownings, runaway boats, a fire, feuds, rations barely adequate to stave off starvation. Finally, only halfway through the Grand Canyon, Powell decided it was time to stop. (On top of everything else, Hamblin, the Mormon scout, had sent word that it was not a safe time for whites to venture farther into Indian territory.) Powell told the crew that he had decided to cut the trip short, and, as one man wrote, “Everybody felt like praising God.”*

  Powell’s Grand Canyon trips were the most exciting and glamorous events of his life, but perhaps not the most important. Fittingly, Powell’s place in American history is as marked by paradox as was his character. Powell was not only the first to explore America’s greatest landscape but also its poet laureate, the first to convey the almost infinite depths of time and space the Grand Canyon represents. And yet at the same time as he was discoursing on infinity, Powell became the first great spokesman in American history for the notion of limits.