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The oldest rocks: Price, An Introduction to Grand Canyon Geology, p. 23. The oldest rock in the Grand Canyon is Vishnu Schist. The oldest exposed rocks in the world, on the shores of Canada’s Great Slave Lake and in Greenland, are four billion years old.
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“the Great Unconformity”: At Blacktail Canyon, as Ann Zwinger notes in Downcanyon, a hiker can span the missing 1.2 billion years of the Great Unconformity with her hands. (See Zwinger, p. 103.)
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By the time Powell: It is impossible to know exactly what rapids Powell faced in 1869. Some Grand Canyon rapids have changed since his day (Soap Creek was unrunnable, for instance; today’s much–feared Crystal was not much more than a riffle; MNA did not exist). Floods, debris flows, rock falls, and the level of the river can all transform the rapids.
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Powell was the first: Webb, Grand Canyon, p. 142. Perhaps Bradley deserves at least a share of the credit. In his journal on Aug. 18, he wrote, “Rapids very numerous and very large. A great many lateral cañons come in almost as large as the one in which the river runs and they sweep down immense quantities of huge rocks which at places literally dam up the river, making the worst kind of a rapid because you can see rocks rising all over them with no channel in which to run them.”
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“Still, on we speed”: Powell, Exploration, Aug. 14, pp. 82–3. Bradley wrote: “The little boat being too small for such a frightful sea filled soon after starting and swung around head up river almost unmanageable but on she went and by the good cool sense of those on board she was kept right side up through the whole of it (more than half a mile).” (See UHQ, Aug. 14, p. 63.)
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On August 16: August 16 is an educated guess, not a hard fact. On Aug. 15 Bradley wrote, “Howland had the misfortune to lose his notes and map of the river from Little Colorado down to this point.” (See Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 15, p. 64.) Sumner described Powell rebuking Howland. He did not specify a date but wrote, “Then, after having had a spat with Howland in the forenoon, Major Powell at the noonday camp informed Dunn that he could leave the camp immediately or pay him fifty dollars a month for rations as long as he was with the outfit.” (See CRC, p. 201.)
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Remarkably, they lost nothing: Bradley’s account and Powell’s disagreed on whether the oars were lost. Bradley wrote, “Fortunately nothing was lost but a pair of oars.” (See Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 19, p. 67.) Powell wrote, “The oars, which fortunately have floated along in company with us, are gathered up.” (See Powell, Exploration, Aug. 19, p. 90.) I have chosen to follow Bradley, generally considered the most reliable diarist on the expedition.
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“What a conflict”: Powell, Exploration, Aug. 25, p. 95. It is worth noting that Powell’s enthusiasm here was not an after–the–fact addition. His river diary betrays the same fascination with the lava as does his 1875 account, though the language is less polished.
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Up they climbed: Powell added a long story here about finding himself trapped on the cliff, unable to advance or retreat, “suspended 400 feet above the river, into which I should fall if my footing fails.” He called for help, and his men (unnamed) managed a complicated rescue. No mention of the incident appears in Powell’s river diary, or in Sumner’s or Bradley’s. (Powell’s only reference to climbing in his Aug. 27 diary was “Spent afternoon in exploration.” See Powell, UHQ, Aug. 27, p. 131, and Powell, Exploration, Aug. 27, p. 97.) Some modern white–water historians insist there is no spot on the canyon walls that fits Powell’s description. See Anderson, “John Wesley Powell’s Explorations . . . Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?” p. 378, or Marston, “Separation Marks,” p. 7.
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Powell woke Walter: Hawkins told a different version, in which he played a decisive role. In this account, Powell came to Hawkins and said, “Well, Billy, we have concluded to abandon the river for the present.” Hawkins asked if Powell would sell his boat to him and Hall, so they could continue downstream. “Then the Major said, ‘Well, Billy, if I have one man that will stay with me I will continue my journey or be drowned in the attempt.’ ” (See Hawkins, CRC, pp. 150–1.)
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“Three men refused to go”: Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 28, p. 70. Hall saw the separation in much the same light. In a letter to his brother in September 1869, he wrote, “Just before we came out of the canyon three of the men left us on the head of rapids. They were afraid to run it so they left us in a bad place.” (See UHQ, v. 16–17, 1949, p. 507.)
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“The men that were left”: Powell, in Bell, New Tracks. Reprinted in UHQ, p. 25. Powell wrote the account reprinted in Bell’s book in 1870. By 1875, he had made a curious change in his description, writing, “We are behind a curve in the cañon, and cannot see up to where we left them, and so we wait until their coming seems hopeless, and push on.” (See Powell, Exploration, p. 101.) This description of “a curve in the canyon” that prevented the two groups from seeing one another is incorrect; the Colorado runs straight for two miles beyond Separation Canyon.
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“On I went”: Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 28, p. 71. As remarked in the notes to Chapter Thirteen, this passage figures in the controversy about whether the boats had a sweep oar at the stern. Bradley’s description of “putting an oar first on one side then on the other” would seem to speak against the existence of sweep oars, but Powell’s 1875 account described “Bradley seiz[ing] the great scull oar.” (See Powell, Exploration, Aug. 28, p. 100.) In other instances where Bradley and Powell disagree on matters of fact, most historians have gone with Bradley.
Much of the confusion stems from Powell’s flimflammery with dates. Powell mounted a second expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1871, this time with photographers and artists, and the boats on this second expedition definitely did have steering oars. The problem is that Powell lifted several incidents from the 1871 trip and inserted them into his 1869 narrative. Similarly, the text of his 1869 adventure was illustrated with drawings of his 1871 boats.
Making matters worse, much of the eyewitness testimony was recorded decades after the fact and is hard to evaluate. In 1907, for example, Robert B. Stanton tracked down Billy Hawkins and convinced him to write a short account of the 1869 expedition. At one point, declared Hawkins, “the high waves . . . were over fifteen feet in height, but Hall had the boat under such headway that I could manage it with my steering oar.” (See Hawkins, CRC, p. 152.) But then what do we make of a second account of the 1869 trip that Hawkins wrote in 1919, shortly before his death and fifty years after the events it describes? On the first day on the river, Hawkins wrote, “I was steering the boat with one oar behind.” (See Bass, Adventures, p. 20.) This seems unequivocal, but, as Brad Dimock noted, Powell’s boats did not have steering oars on the first day of the trip. Michael Ghiglieri suggests that on the trip’s first day, when the river was swift but there were no rapids to speak of, Hawkins may have left the rowing to Hall and taken an oar to the stern to use as a makeshift rudder. (Author interview, Mar. 19, 2001.) And, steering oars aside, Hawkins’s account contained glaring mistakes of chronology and geography. (He put Island Park upstream of Disaster Falls, for instance, but the expedition reached Disaster Falls two weeks before Island Park.) In the end, we are left dangling.
Some skeptics have taken a different approach. Drifter Smith notes that the 1869 expedition became a race for survival and wonders if the men would have gambled their precious time on carving steering oars. Smith notes the problem of raw materials as well. The men had trouble finding wood that would do for an ordinary oar. A piece of wood suitable for a sweep oar would have been longer and presumably even harder to find.
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Here was confirmation, then: Hamblin hea
rd a slightly different version of the tale from one of the Indians after the official meeting broke up. In this account, the Shivwits had given the three men food and sent them on their way. Soon after, “an Indian from the east side of the Colorado” appeared, carrying news of a group of miners who had killed an Indian woman in a drunken brawl. Furious, the Shivwits had set out after the Howlands and Dunn and killed them in the mistaken belief that they were the “miners.” (See Powell, Exploration, pp. 130–1.)
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He never sought to punish: The killings are sometimes attributed to one To–ab, based on a hearsay account written decades later by Anthony Ivins, a prominent Mormon and onetime mayor of St. George, Utah. To read Ivins’s account is to realize that the case against To–ab is virtually nonexistent. (See Ivins, “A Mystery of the Grand Canyon Solved.” Ivins’s essay can also be found in Pioneer Stories, edited by Preston Nibley.)
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If the inscription is a hoax: Harvey Butchart, author of Grand Canyon Treks and the great authority on hiking the Grand Canyon, doubts that the inscriptions are authentic, on the grounds that “the three men would be trying to get to St. George without any touristy detours. The view from the top wouldn’t help them find waterholes or the best route.” Private communication.
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both men kept: Their critiques of Powell appear in Robert Stanton’s Colorado River Controversies, a book with a curious history. Stanton was the engineer who had hoped to build a railroad through the canyon and who saw three of his companions drown in the Colorado’s rapids. He became the second man to lead an expedition through the Grand Canyon. In 1891, he ran into a grizzled prospector who asked if he could spare any tobacco. The man turned out to be Jack Sumner. Stanton and Sumner began to chat, Stanton referred to Powell’s famous Exploration of the Colorado, and Sumner grumbled that “there’s lots in that book besides the truth.”
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The crew was new: The new boats were slightly modified versions of the 1869 ones. The original boats had two bulkhead sections, one fore and one aft. The new boats had a third covered section in the middle, an improvement that made it less likely the boats would fill with water. (Powell lashed a chair to the middle deck so that he could scan downriver for trouble ahead.) The new boats also had a long sweep oar at the stern, a great advantage for maneuverability.
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Instead of feisty: Since the first expedition, Powell had sharpened his sense of how to appeal to the public. This time the crew members included a professional photographer and a talented amateur artist. The best–known early photographs of the Grand Canyon date from the second expedition. (The first–ever photographs of the Grand Canyon were taken by Timothy O’Sullivan, with the Wheeler expedition in 1871.) See Pyne’s How the Canyon Became Grand for a sophisticated history of attempts to depict the Grand Canyon in words and pictures.
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The second expedition endured: As remarked in the footnote in the text, many of the men on the second expedition felt that Powell had robbed them of the credit they deserved. Even Frederick Dellenbaugh, who became the youngest member of Powell’s crew, at seventeen, and was smitten with a case of hero worship that lasted throughout his long life, ventured a criticism of Powell on this point. “It has always seemed to me,” he wrote, “that the men of the second party, who made the same journey, who mapped and explored the river and much of the country roundabout, doing a large amount of difficult wok in the scientific line, should have been accorded some recognition.” (See Dellenbaugh, Romance, preface, p. vi. For a defense of Powell on this point, see Worster, River Running West, pp. 256–7.)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anyone writing about the Grand Canyon comes to rely on Earle Spamer’s superlative Bibliography of the Grand Canyon and the Lower Colorado River, 1540–1980. It is available in a free, updated, searchable version on the Internet. See http://www.grandcanyon.org/biblio/bibliography.htm.
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire. New York: Ballantine, 1968.
Adams, George Worthington. Doctors in Blue: The Medical History of the Union Army in the Civil War. Dayton, Ohio: Morningside, 1985.
Allen, Stacy D. “Shiloh: The Campaign and First Day’s Battle.” Blue and Gray Magazine, Feb. 1997.
———. “Shiloh: The Second Day’s Battle and Aftermath.” Blue and Gray Magazine, April 1997.
Ambrose, Stephen. Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.
Anderson, Martin J. “Artist in the Wilderness: Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Grand Canyon Adventure.” Journal of Arizona History, v. 28 (Spring 1987), pp. 47–68.
———. “First Through the Canyon: Powell’s Lucky Voyage in 1869.” Journal of Arizona History, v. 20 (Winter 1979), pp. 391–408.
———. “John Wesley Powell’s “Exploration of the Colorado River: Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?” Journal of Arizona History, v. 24 (Winter 1983), pp. 363–80.
Ashley, William. “Ashley’s 1825 Diary.” William H. Ashley Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis.
Aton, James M. “Inventing John Wesley Powell: The Major, His Admirers and Cash-register Dams in the Colorado River Basin.” Distinguished Faculty Lecture No. 9, Southern Utah State College, Dec. 1, 1988.
———. John Wesley Powell. Boise State University Western Writers Series No. 114, 1994.
Babbitt, Bruce, ed. Grand Canyon: An Anthology. Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1978.
Bain, David Howard. Empire Express: Building the First Transcontinental Railroad. New York: Viking, 1999.
Baker, Marcus. “Major J. W. Powell: Personal Reminiscences of One of His Staff.” Open Court, v. 17 (1903), pp. 348–51.
Barber, Lynn. The Heyday of Natural History. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980.
Barnard, Frederick A. P. “Inaugural Discourse.” Proceedings at the Inauguration of Frederick A. P. Barnard as President of Columbia College. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1865.
Barry, Patricia. Surgeons at Georgetown: Surgical and Medical Education in the Nation’s Capital, 1849–1969. Franklin, Tenn: Hillsborough, 2001.
Bass, William Wallace. Adventures in the Canyons of the Colorado. Grand Canyon, Ariz.: 1920.
Beer, Bill. We Swam the Grand Canyon: The True Story of a Cheap Vacation That Got a Little Out of Hand. Seattle: Mountaineers, 1988.
Belknap, Buzz. Belknap’s Waterproof Grand Canyon River Guide. Evergreen, Col.: Westwater Books, 1989.
Belshaw, Michael. “The Dunn-Howland Killings: A Reconstruction.” Journal of Arizona History, v. 20 (Winter 1979), pp. 409–22.
Beus, Stanley S., and Michael Morales, eds. Grand Canyon Geology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Blaustein, John. The Hidden Canyon. San Francisco: Chronicle, 1999.
Bonner, Thomas D., ed. The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
Boorstin, Daniel J. The Americans: The National Experience. New York: Random House, 1965.
Boslough, John. “Rationing a River.” Science 81 (June 1981), pp. 26–37.
Bowles, Samuel. Across the Continent. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1865.
———. The Switzerland of America. New York: American News, 1869.
Bradley, George Young. “George Y. Bradley’s Journal.” Utah Historical Quarterly, v. 15 (1947), pp. 31–72.
Brewer, William H. “John Wesley Powell.” American Journal of Science, v. 14 (1902), pp. 377–82.
Brodie, Fawn M. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. New York: Knopf, 1945.
Brooks, Juanita. “Jacob Hamblin: Apostle to the Lamanites.” Pacific Spectator, v. 2 (Summer 1948), pp. 315–30.
———. John Doyle Lee: Zealot—Pioneer Builder—Scapegoat. Glendale, Cal.: Clark, 1962.
———. The Mountain Meadows Massacre. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press,
1962. (Originally published 1950.)
Brower, David. Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
Bruce, Robert V. The Launching of Modern American Science 1846–1876. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
Bulger, Harold. “First Man Through the Grand Canyon.” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society (July 1961), pp. 321–31.
Butchart, Harvey. Grand Canyon Treks. Bishop, Cal.: Spotted Dog Press, 1997.
Cadell, H. M. “The Colorado River of the West.” The Scottish Geographical Magazine. v. 3 (1887), pp. 441–60.
Calvin, William H. The River That Flows Uphill: A Journey from the Big Bang to the Big Brain. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Carothers, Steven W., and Robert Dolan. “Dam Changes on the Colorado River.” Natural History, v. 91, no. 1 (1982), pp. 75–83.
Castel, Albert, ed. “The War Album of Henry Dwight” (Part III: Shiloh), Civil War Times Illustrated (May 1980), pp. 32–6.
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