Down the Great Unknown

by Edward Dolnick

  The lesson of the West, this astonishingly optimistic man declared, was that not all things are possible. The empty West was fundamentally different from the crowded East and always would be. The differences all had to do with water—the West was dry—and Powell insisted that every intelligent discussion of the settling of the West had to begin with that stark fact. Even if every river in the region were diverted from its banks, there would not be enough water to turn the West green. The Jeffersonian vision of an endless checkerboard of small farms reaching from shore to shore, the vision that had launched Lewis and Clark, was an impossibility.

  Powell propounded those views in a variety of conspicuous forums. Like John Glenn a century later, he took his fame and reputation and founded a political career on it. In Powell’s case, he followed up his second Grand Canyon trip with further surveys of the West and with studies of Indian languages and customs. In surprisingly short order, this formidably able and ambitious man came to know the West as deeply as anyone in the United States. At the peak of his career, in the early 1880s, Powell was simultaneously director of the U.S. Geological Survey and director of the Bureau of Ethnology (dedicated to the study of Indian cultures), an organization he had founded.

  Powell’s prominence and his insistence that the West could not be turned into a shimmering green oasis kept him permanently at the center of political controversy. For the legions of boosters, politicians, and land speculators chanting “Go west, young man!” and loudly insisting that “Rain follows the plow,” Powell was a pariah. One of the loudest of those voices belonged to William Gilpin, the bombastic orator and spokesman for Manifest Destiny who had once worried aloud about whether “that grand explorer, Major Powell” would emerge alive from the Grand Canyon. Now Gilpin and Powell were archenemies. “In readiness to receive and ability to sustain in perpetuity a dense population,” Gilpin thundered, “[the West] was more favored than Europe.” Powell responded with statistics-laden reports and maps of rainfall patterns.

  In the end, the boosters won, and the onetime titan of government science was driven out of town. The canyons of the Colorado had proved easier to negotiate than the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.

  • • •

  In 1889, after the Brown-Stanton expedition lost three men by drowning, the New York Tribune came to Powell for comment. How was it, the reporter asked, that Powell had not only succeeded in making it through the canyons but had succeeded on his first try?

  “I was lucky,” Powell replied.

  This was indisputably true, but Powell and his crew were also brave, resourceful, and resolute in the face of danger and hardship that far surpassed anything they had foreseen. Though Powell alone rose to fame after the expedition, he and all his men were true American heroes.

  In 1895, Powell published a new edition of Exploration of the Colorado. Brusque and autocratic though he could sometimes be, he struck a gentler note as he looked back almost three decades to his “noble and generous companions” on the first expedition. “Many years have passed since the exploration, and those who were boys with me in the enterprise are—ah, most of them are dead, and the living are gray with age. Their bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon.”

  Powell died in 1902, at sixty-eight, at his summer home in Brooklin, Maine. In death as in life, he inspired strong and conflicting responses. The Washington Post ranked Powell with Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark. The New York Times made do with a few curt paragraphs (“Noted Ethnologist Dies”) alongside news of a flower show that featured a “Large Display of Dahlias.”

  At first, as so often with public figures, the tributes tended toward the vague and grandiose. Powell was “a moral giant” and the “brightest exemplar of human knowledge.” A few years would have to pass before this complicated man came into sharp focus.

  In 1918, at a ceremony to honor Powell’s memory, the secretary of the interior caught the essence of the man in a mere handful of words. “Major Powell, throughout his life, was the incarnation of the inquisitive and courageous spirit of the American. He wanted to know and he was willing to risk his life that he might know.”

  Notes

  This PerfectBound e-book edition of Edward Dolnick’s Down the Great Unknown contains hyperlinks to certain of the author’s notes.

  Simply click on the link and you will be able to read the note.

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  He could not wash: On the river, this task fell to Hawkins, the cook.

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  The party believed: The first woman whose name we know who reached the summit of Pikes Peak was Julia Archibald Holmes, in 1858.

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  There he would stand: This description is from Powell, Exploration, p. 91: “I stand on deck, supporting myself with a strap, fastened on either side to the gunwale.”

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  Somehow the taciturn: Bradley, in turn, did not know that Powell and Sumner kept journals. (See Bradley, UHQ, June 13, p. 37.)

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  In fact, it was dictated: Gilbert, “John Wesley Powell” (Part V: “The Investigator”), p. 289. In the interest of brevity, I use such expressions as “On Aug. 5, Powell wrote . . . ,” but the reader should bear in mind Powell’s actual style of composition.

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  Instead, the stick caught: In similar fashion, beginning boaters today often jam an oar in shallow rocks. They are unlikely to get thrown overboard, but they may well break an oar.

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  At about this point: Manly reports that the inscription “Ashley, 1824” was “painted in large black letters.” (See Death Valley, p. 80.) According to Sumner, “Ashley, 1825” was “scratched on evidently by some trapper’s knife.” (See Sumner, UHQ, June 2, p. 178.)

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  “When I told Chief Walker”: Manly, Death Valley, pp. 93–4. “[Wakara] undoubtedly saved our little band from a watery grave,” Manly went on, “for without his advice we had gone on and on, far into the great Colorado cañon, from which escape would have been impossible and securing food another impossibility, while destruction by hostile Indians was among the strong probabilities of the case. So in a threefold way I have for these more than forty years credited the lives of myself and comrades to the thoughtful interest and humane consideration of old Chief Walker.” (See Death Valley, p. 99.)

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  Since water cannot squeeze: More precisely, the rate of flow at a given point is the product of the river’s cross section and its velocity. If the area of the cross section decreases, the velocity must increase proportionally.

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  “War was a proving”: Author interview, April 19, 2000. Powell rose quickly, and so did many other capable and ambitious men. In 1861, the permanent army numbered only sixteen thousand men; a year later, Northern and Southern forces together totaled nearly one million.

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  At the war’s outset: Some did. William Tecumseh Sherman predicted that the war would bring hundreds of thousands of deaths and was ridiculed and called insane. Sam Houston made a similarly accurate and gruesome prediction of what war would mean. Houston had as little impact on his Southern audiences as Sherman did on his Northern ones.

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  “the most confused”: Marshall’s comment is from his foreword to Wile
y Sword’s Shiloh: Bloody April, p. vii. A library has been written on the Civil War. The total is well over fifty thousand books, about one for every day since the war’s end. At times, the meticulous reconstructions of the various battles impose a seeming order on what were in truth scenes of hellish disarray. This was especially true at Shiloh.

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  What the factory: A total of ninety Americans were killed and wounded at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War, for the Americans, was Camden. American casualties numbered one thousand.

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  Southern troops made at least: The fighting at the Hornets’ Nest raises a number of tangled questions. First is the number of Confederate assaults. The count ranges anywhere from seven to fourteen, depending on the historian. Second, many writers describe the Hornets’ Nest as the site of the fiercest fighting at Shiloh. Third, many accounts of the battle describe the Confederates making near–suicidal charges across Duncan Field. Stacy Allen, who has studied the issue in detail, disputes nearly all the conventional wisdom. He argues, convincingly, that there were seven confirmed assaults and possibly two more; that fighting elsewhere at Shiloh was more deadly than in the Hornets’ Nest; and that most of the assaults on the Hornets’ Nest were through dense thickets, not across open fields.

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  As the barrage continued: This account is from McDonough, Shiloh, pp.146–49 and Daniel, Shiloh, pp. 210–13. Allen survived and went on to become governor of Louisiana.

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  In two spring days: Union losses at Shiloh were 1,754 men killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 captured, for a total of 13,047. Confederate losses were 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing, for a total of 10,694. The overall casualty rate was 24 percent. The figures are cited in Foote, The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville, p. 350. Most of the men listed as missing were captured by the enemy.

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  With a death toll: It is not the case, though the claim often appears in print, that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all the nation’s other wars combined. From the American Revolution through the Gulf War but excluding the Civil War, 638,560 Americans died in combat. In the Civil War alone, 558,052 Americans lost their lives.

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  “Hell’s Half Mile”: Powell, Exploration, June 15, p. 28. The name was not given until the second expedition down the Green and the Colorado, in 1871.

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  In the narrowest stretches: Kieffer measured the speed of Grand Canyon rapids and found a top figure of thirty–three feet per second, in Hermit Rapid. (See “Hydraulics and Geomorphology,” p. 338.) (Thirty–three feet per second is twenty–two miles per hour.) In Kieffer’s “1983 Hydraulic Jump,” she reports that at one point the rapid reached a speed of fourteen meters per second (at a flow of fifty thousand cubic feet per second). See p. 399. (Fourteen meters per second is thirty–one miles per hour.)

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  “optic flow”: Curtis Rist, “Roll Over, Newton,” Discover, April 2001, p. 49. According to Rist, even the twenty–inch height difference between an SUV and an ordinary car changes a driver’s perception of speed. An SUV driver going sixty miles an hour feels as if he is only driving at forty.

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  When boatmen of their skill: Michael Ghiglieri rejects this argument. “Modern boatmen are spoiled by having experience—and conditioned responses—only with top–notch and more appropriate boats,” he insists. “When you go from a modern, lightweight dory to one of Powell’s boats, it’s like going from a sports car to a Flintstone car, where you have to kick your feet. If you only knew Whitehall haulers, you’d figure out how to row them.” (Author interview, Mar. 19, 2001.)

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  See the notes: The most relevant entry in any contemporary account was Bradley’s journal entry on Aug. 28. Bradley had gotten in trouble in a rapid but found a way to rescue himself. “By putting an oar first on one side then on the other I could swing her around and guide her very well,” he wrote, and the remark seems hard to reconcile with the boat having had a sweep oar. (See Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 28, p. 71.) But Powell described the same episode, although he did not write his account until 1875: “Bradley seizes the great scull oar, places it in the stern rowlock, and pulls with all his power.” (See Powell, Exploration, Aug. 28, p. 101.)

  Which man had it right? When we come to Aug. 28, we will see that Powell’s account of the day’s events is suspect in other regards, but there is no denying that we have to make a judgment call here. A fuller discussion of this issue can be found in the notes for Aug. 28, in Chapter Twenty–five.

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  “Climbed the mountain”: Bradley, UHQ, July 8, p. 46. “We have named the long peninsular rock on the other side Echo Rock,” Powell wrote. “Desiring to climb it, Bradley and I take the little boat and pull up stream as far as possible, for it cannot be climbed directly opposite.” (See Exploration, p. 33.) Then he continued with the story as told here. Echo Rock was far upstream, and Sumner, Bradley, and Howland each described it; none of them mentioned a word about a climbing mishap. Powell’s reference to Echo Rock must have been a slip of memory or, perhaps, a literary flourish intended to provide a suitably grand backdrop for a monumentally dramatic scene.

  It is possible to read Bradley’s account as not quite confirming Powell’s. Perhaps Powell merely needed assistance (“In one place Major . . . couldn’t get up”), not rescue. But this reading seems strained. The story of the drawers seems to indicate that Powell was in a desperate plight, as do the words “he got up safe.”

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  “except a glorious ducking”: Bradley, UHQ, July 12, pp. 48–9. Like Powell’s story of Bradley rescuing him with his drawers, Powell’s account of Bradley’s swamping is hard to evaluate. Bradley does describe a “big wave . . . knocking me over the side so that I held the boat by one hand,” but does not say that his foot was pinned beneath his seat. Does the discrepancy between Bradley’s brief account of his “glorious ducking” and Powell’s more elaborate version reflect Bradley’s modesty or Powell’s tendency to embellish a good yarn?

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  the bigger of the two: Sumner judged the Green to be 70 or 80 yards wide and the Grand 125. Sumner, UHQ, July 16, p. 114.

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  “Climbed ‘Cave Cliff’ ”: Drifter Smith called my attention to Powell’s repeated references to “Bradey” rather than “Bradley.” Martin Anderson, in turn, had pointed out the misspelling to Smith. The transcript of Powell’s river diary in the UHQ silently corrects this error, but the handwritten original shows “Bradey” for “Bradley.” In his published accounts of the expedition, Powell did spell Bradley’s name correctly. Bradley never complained in his diary that Powell called him “Bradey,” so presumably Powell knew his name.

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  Powell, inclined by nature: Powell built his journal account from his river diary, which was markedly richer than Bradley’s diary but far more restrained than Powell’s journal account would be. Powell’s diary entry for July 20, 1869, read as follows: “Climbed ‘Cave Cliff’ with Bradey. Summit of cliffs full of caves, hence name. Pinnacles in the red sandstone. The terraces, the monuments of the stages of erosion. Found a cool spring in gulch on our way up. One cave 75 paces long, dome, skylight at each end connected by fissure 6 or 8 inches wide, from 10 to 40 ft. wide, 51/2 ft. high.”

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  Forty years would pass: Nathaniel Galloway made the first successful run, in 1909. See Nash, Big Drops, p. 87.

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  The two sides agreed: Brower, Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run, pp. 26–7. Brower, one of the towering figures in the environmental movement, deserved much of the credit for keeping dams out of the Grand Canyon. But he castigated
himself for having given in to the Glen Canyon compromise, which he saw as the great mistake of his life. “Glen Canyon died in 1963,” he wrote in the foreword to The Place No One Knew, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure.”

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  But the Bureau of Reclamation: Powell’s legacy is so confused, in part, because of a tendency to forget that he was a man firmly of the nineteenth century. We tend today to lump together the words “preservationist” and “conservationist,” but, as the historian Patricia Limerick notes, the two terms had sharply different meanings in the 1800s. Powell was a conservationist, which meant, in his day, that he favored conserving scarce resources, water chief among them. He favored reclaiming the land, not preserving it unspoiled like a colossal museum exhibit. Powell talked happily of “conquered rivers” and looked to a future where rivers would be tamed by man “as wild beasts have been domesticated for his use.” The alternative to dams and reservoirs, Powell wrote repeatedly, was that rivers would “run to waste,” spilling their treasure uselessly into the sea. See Limerick, Desert Passages, pp. 169–72, and Aton, Inventing John Wesley Powell. For a typical expression of Powell’s views, see his essay on the Johnstown flood, “The Lesson of Conemaugh.” For a book–length attempt to place Powell’s views in their historical context, see Worster’s River Running West.

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  It looked like nothing more: Writing independently, P. T. Reilly and Michael Ghiglieri, both of them Grand Canyon boatmen and white–water historians, described this scenario as their best guess. McDonald himself apparently pinned the blame on an underwater current. “Just as we turned, in what seemed to be smooth waves,” McDonald wrote, “a heavy wave came up out of a whirl on upper side of boat & instantly upset boat, throwing us both into river away from the boat.” Stanton endorsed McDonald’s view but Reilly dismissed it contemptuously. “Since the three deaths which ensued from the use of this equipment [the boats] did not result from that which Stanton called defective, it is interesting to see him grope for explanations and advance such things as ‘up–shoots’ and ‘boiling fountains.’ ” (See Reilly, “How Deadly?” pp. 254–5; Ghiglieri, Canyon, p. 158; Stanton, Down, pp. 78–9.)