American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

by H. W. Brands

  The first fifty miles were uneventful. The men acquired the feel of the boats and learned to appreciate the power of the current, swollen by the late-spring runoff from the snowfields of the Wind River Mountains. But just at the border between Wyoming and Utah the south-flowing river bent abruptly to the west before circling back to the east. The cause of the river’s confusion—already the men were anthropomorphizing the stream—was the wall of the Uinta Mountains, one of the few ranges in North America with an axis that runs east and west rather than north and south. The river is older than the mountains, which thrust themselves athwart its path, forcing the waters to seek a way around. To the west the rocks were too hard and rising too fast, which compelled the river to turn east for an escape route. The battle between water and rock produced Flaming Gorge, so called by Powell and his men for the fiery-hued cliffs that soar a thousand feet above the river. “The rocks are broken and ragged,” Powell wrote in his diary, “and the water fills the channel from cliff to cliff. Now the water turns abruptly around a point to the right, and the waters plunge swiftly down among great rocks; and here we have our first experience with cañon rapids.” The current hurled the boats down between the cliffs and among the rocks. “We thread the narrow passage with exhilarating velocity, mounting the high waves, whose foaming crests dash over us, and plunging into the troughs, until we reach the quiet water below.… Then comes a feeling of great relief.”4

  The relief at danger survived enabled the men to appreciate the beauty of the park—an open space, in this case of some three hundred acres, amid the mountains—through which the river proceeded. “The river is broad, deep, and quiet, and its waters mirror towering rocks,” Powell wrote. But the calm soon yielded to more rapids. “The river rolls down the cañon at a wonderful rate.… The water rushes into a narrow gorge; the rocks on the side roll it into the center in great waves, and the boats go leaping and bounding over these like things of life.”

  Again they passed the river’s test and again congratulated themselves on their skill and luck. Yet as the rush of the last rapids diminished, a new sound displaced it. “A threatening roar is heard in the distance.” Powell ordered a halt and walked along the bank till he could see the source of the noise: a waterfall over which the entire river plunged. The boats might weather the falls, he judged, but the men and cargo couldn’t. Powell ordered the craft unloaded and their cargoes carried around the cataract. The boats were then lowered down the falls by ropes.

  Just below the falls one of the party noticed writing on a rock face above the bank. “Ashley 18–5,” it read. “The third figure is obscure,” Powell remarked, “some of the party reading it 1835, some 1855.” In fact it was 1825, which helped explain the confusion. Powell had heard of Ashley from an old mountain man, who thought he remembered that party had come to a bad end, with at least one man drowning. “The word ‘Ashley’ is a warning to us,” Powell wrote, “and we resolve on great caution.”

  But not great enough. With each hazard overcome, the men gained self-assurance, till the rising curve of their confidence intersected the constantly falling curve of the river bed. The boats were maneuvering to shore above another falls when one of the boats passed the point of no return. The current grew too strong for the oars of the crewmen and the vessel was swept into the maelstrom. Powell on the shore watched in helpless dismay. “I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock and, rebounding from the shock, careen and fill the open compartment with water. Two of the men lose their oars; she swings around and is carried down at a rapid rate, broadside on, for a few yards, and strikes amidships on another rock with great force, is broken quite in two, and the men are thrown into the river.” The men clung to the remnants of the boat and were carried into another set of rapids, where the boat parts were pulverized further.

  Amazingly no one drowned, but the boat was lost, of course, along with most of the cargo. Powell had divided the provisions among the four boats so that the destruction of any one wouldn’t doom the expedition. But for some reason he placed all the barometers—for measuring altitude—in a single boat, the one that crashed. To the great luck of the group, however, the portion of the boat containing the instruments snagged on a rock, and the next day the men were able to salvage them—along with a three-gallon keg of whiskey a few of the men had smuggled aboard when Powell wasn’t looking. “Now I am glad they did,” Powell wrote, “for they think it will do them good.” While the men were building a fire to dry themselves and the salvaged instruments out, they discovered some old tin plates, a Dutch oven, and fragments of a boat. Powell concluded that this was where Ashley wrecked. “We adopt the name Disaster Falls for the scene of so much peril and loss.”

  The party proceeded more carefully. They portaged around a cataract they called Triplet Falls and a chute they labeled Hell’s Half Mile. On the evening of June 16, while the others prepared supper, Powell and a companion explored a defile from which a brook emptied in the main canyon, in hope of gaining a vantage.

  We climb up to the left for half an hour, and are a thousand feet above the river, and six hundred above the brook. Just before us, the cañon divides, a little stream coming down on the right, and another on the left, and we can look away up either of these cañons, through an ascending vista, to cliffs and crags and towers, a mile back and two thousand feet overhead. To the right, a dozen gleaming cascades are seen. Pines and firs stand on the rocks, and aspens overhang the brooks. The rocks below are red and brown, set in deep shadows, but above they are buff and vermilion and stand in the sunshine. The light above, made more brilliant by the bright-tinted rocks, and the shadows below more gloomy by the somber hues of the brown walls, increase the apparent depths of the cañons, and it seems a long way up to the world of sunshine and open sky, and a long way down to the bottom of the cañon glooms. Never before have I received such an impression of the vast heights of these cañon walls.

  Powell’s ability to scramble up sheer walls and find his way across narrow ledges made the others wonder what he could have accomplished with two arms. But sometimes his reach exceeded his grasp. Powell spotted a cliff whose summit seemed a likely spot for measuring altitude. George Bradley accompanied him. Up they went, with Powell as usual in the lead. “We are nearly to the summit. Here, by making a spring, I gain a foothold in a little crevice and grasp an angle of rock overhead. I find I can get up no farther, and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand and cannot reach foothold below without.” Powell shouted to Bradley for assistance.

  He finds a way by which he can get to the top of the rock over my head, but cannot reach me. Then he looks around for some stick or limb of a tree, but finds none. Then he suggests that he had better help me with the barometer case, but I fear I cannot hold on to it. The moment is critical. Standing on my toes, my muscles begin to tremble. It is sixty or eighty feet to the foot of the precipice. If I lose my hold I shall fall to the bottom, and then perhaps roll over the bench and tumble still farther down the cliff.

  At this instant it occurs to Bradley to take off his drawers, which he does, and swings them down to me. I hug close to the rock, let go with my hand, seize the dangling legs, and, with his assistance, I am enabled to gain the top.

  For seven weeks the party descended the river—running rapids, portaging falls, measuring cliffs, noting geology. In mid-July they reached the confluence of the Green River with the Grand. Powell had packed provisions for several months, but the loss of the one boat and various swampings and capsizings of the others ate into the supplies, leaving the men to live on musty flour, rancid bacon, redried apples, and black coffee. The canyon grew deeper than they had imagined a canyon could be—and then grew thousands of feet deeper still. “The walls now are more than a mile in height, a vertical distance difficult to appreciate,” Powell wrote. “Stand on the south steps of the Treasury building in Washington and look down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol Park, and measure this distance overhead, and imagine cliffs to
extend to that altitude, and you will understand what I mean. Or stand at Canal street in New York and look up Broadway to Grace Church, and you have about that distance.”

  The forms and colors of the canyon walls stunned the men into silence. “The gorge is black and narrow below, red and gray and flaring above, with crags and angular projections on the walls, which, cut in many places by side canons, seem to be a vast wilderness of rocks. Down in these grand, gloomy depths we glide.”

  The river rumbled, often roared. The men came to recognize the different sounds and associate them with the degrees of danger they represented—but not always in time. One of the boats was sucked into a whirlpool and swamped; when the vortex released the vessel it wallowed amid the waves of the main stream. “Breaker after breaker rolls over her, and one capsizes her. The men are thrown out.” The others watched helplessly, hoping for the men to surface amid the foam. They finally did, and clung to the overturned craft while the others attempted a rescue. It ultimately succeeded but not before the river claimed additional provisions.

  By late August they had been on the river more than three months. Powell’s readings of altitude and latitude suggested that less distance remained than they had already traversed, but whether the route ahead would be more difficult than that behind neither he nor any of the others could say. Nor could he guarantee they wouldn’t reach a point where the river became impassable and the cliffs unscalable. Then they would truly be trapped.

  Three of the men decided to take their chances climbing the walls while they still could. As they, like all the others, had volunteered for the expedition, Powell couldn’t order them to continue. He could only hope their example would not prove contagious. Some of the others did consider joining them but finally cast their lot with Powell and the river. “Two rifles and a shot gun are given to the men who are going out. I ask them to help themselves to the rations, and take what they think to be a fair share.” They declined, saying they could shoot their dinner after they reached the canyon rim.

  Later that day the others had reason to wish they’d left the canyon, too. A waterfall prompted Powell to order the boats lowered by ropes. Bradley took the helm of one of the boats, which got caught in a crosscurrent. Time and again the water smashed it against the sheer face of the canyon wall while the rope kept it from being washed free. Bradley determined to cut the rope before the boat shattered beneath him. But as he unsheathed his knife the stem post, to which the rope was fixed, tore away.

  With perfect composure Bradley seizes the great scull oar, places it in the stern rowlock, and pulls with all his power (and he is an athlete) to turn the bow of the boat down stream, for he wishes to go bow down rather than to drift broadside on. One, two strokes he makes, and a third just as she goes over, and the boat is fairly turned, and she goes down almost beyond our sight, though we are more than a hundred feet above the river. Then she comes up again on a great wave, and down and up, then around behind some great rocks and is lost in the mad, white foam below. We stand frozen with fear, for we see no boat. Bradley is gone, so it seems.

  But now, away below, we see something coming out of the waves. It is evidently a boat. A moment more, and we see Bradley standing on deck, swinging his hat to show that he is all right.

  He signaled too soon. A whirlpool seized the boat, and without the stem post he couldn’t fight the raging eddy. Powell and two other men leapt into their boat and followed Bradley over the falls. Now they became the victims of the river’s strength and cunning. “A wave rolls over us, and our boat is unmanageable. Another great wave strikes us; the boat rolls over and tumbles and tosses.” Powell perhaps hit a rock, for he lost consciousness. The next thing he remembered was being pulled from the water by Bradley, who somehow had escaped the whirlpool.

  As fortune would have it, this closest brush with death was their last. The very next day the canyon walls suddenly receded, the current slackened, and they reached the lower part of the river, which Powell recognized from the accounts of Mormons who had settled near there. The men savored their release, but none more than Powell, who had particular memories of confinement. “When he who has been chained by wounds to a hospital cot, until his canvas tent seems like a dungeon cell …,” he wrote, “at last goes out into the open field, what a world he sees!” Powell suddenly saw that new world again. “How beautiful the sky; how bright the sunshine!”5

  POWELL’S DESCENT OF the Colorado was the most dramatic of several postwar expeditions, but others drew scarcely less attention. Clarence King headed a survey of the West roughly along the 40th parallel, the object of which was “to examine and describe the geological structure, geographical condition and natural resources” of this central swath from Denver to Sacramento. King would assess railroad routes, assay mineral deposits, test soils, take temperatures, measure rainfall and stream flow, and, on return, publish his estimate of the uses to which the region might be put. The 40th parallel survey consumed several years starting in 1867 and concluded with King’s debunking a bizarre hoax involving planted diamonds, dizzying share prices, the ruin of investors, the murder of one of the principal perpetrators, and the mysterious disappearance of the other.6

  George Wheeler’s survey of the Southwest concentrated on topography: on mapping the Colorado Plateau and the basin-and-range district to its west. Wheeler found desert far starker than anything previous explorers had encountered. The expedition traversed Death Valley on a forty-mile path of what Wheeler described as “light, white, drifting sand.” (In fact this wasn’t the worst of the valley, where the sand gave way to salt.) Wheeler had chosen the toughest wilderness men of the West for his trek, but this hellish place was too much for even some of them: “The stifling heat, great radiation, and constant glare from the sand were almost overpowering, and two of the command succumbed near nightfall.” All counted themselves lucky to escape with their lives.7

  Ferdinand V. Hayden’s first survey, of western Nebraska, won him fame for its seeming confirmation of the theory promoted by a minority of scientists and a majority of western boosters that “rain follows the plow.” The idea was that turning the soil and planting crops released moisture that subsequently returned to earth as rain. Pleased proponents of the theory sponsored additional surveys, for which Hayden had the insight to hire a photographer, who captured for public consumption the wonders of the upper Yellowstone basin and the beauties of the Colorado Rockies. One of William H. Jackson’s prints, of the Mount of the Holy Cross (so named for the intersecting crevices near the summit, which caught snow in a cross-shaped pattern), allowed Americans of a mystically religious bent to see the hand of God in the work of the explorers. Hayden himself was moved to remark, “Never has my faith in the grand future that awaits the entire West been so strong as it is at the present.”8

  LIKE NEARLY ALL other emigrants to the Great Plains, Howard Ruede had heard of the Homestead Act of 1862 and its promise of free land to ordinary people. But like many of the others, he knew few details of the law’s operation. Ruede arrived in western Kansas in the spring of 1877 from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He was twenty-two and single and for some years had eavesdropped on conversations of elders who complained that Pennsylvania’s future wasn’t what it once had seemed. The depression of the 1870s set many of them back, and the Molly Maguire violence alienated others. More than a few told young Howard that if they were his age they’d leave. So in March 1877 he withdrew his life savings of seventy-five dollars from a Bethlehem bank and boarded a train for the West.

  Free land near the railroads had long since disappeared; the land for sale cost far more than Ruede could afford to pay. Besides, many of his fellow German Americans from Bethlehem had preceded him west to the vicinity of Osborne, fifty miles from the nearest railroad, and had established the “Pennsylvania Colony.” Ruede reached Osborne on a Sunday; the next morning the son-in-law of the colony’s founder appeared at Ruede’s hotel and offered to show him available tracts of land. How much Ruede paid the agent for h
is services is unclear, but he could hardly do without such a guide. On the featureless prairie outside Osborne it was impossible for a newcomer to tell what land had been taken and what remained for claiming. The 1862 law required homesteaders to live on their claims for five years, but those who actually did so were a minority. Some evaded the condition by erecting a flimsy structure, summoning a witness who then swore to the federal land agent that an abode existed, and then dismantling the building for reuse elsewhere. Efficiency-minded finaglers put their structures on wheels. One imaginative homesteader acquired three empty wood crates in which apple trees had been shipped from the East. On end each could just accommodate a short man standing; on a crate laid horizontal the same small fellow could uncomfortably lie down. The homesteader got two friends to try each configuration; the trio then traveled to the land office, where the friends testified that the claimant had erected a house on his property tall enough to walk around in and roomy enough for three men to spend the night, each in his own bed. The claimant received his papers, and the crates went on to better things.9

  Absentee homesteaders weren’t the only problem confronting a newcomer looking for land. The Homestead Act lay in a series of laws dating to 1796 designed to facilitate the transfer of land from the public domain to private ownership. The motivation for the laws was at once ideological and fiscal: to spread the wealth of America to ordinary Americans and to fund the operations of the federal government. The most important of the pre-Homestead acts was the Preemption Act of 1841, which allowed small landowners (of not more than 320 acres in any state or territory) to purchase a quarter section (160 acres) from the public domain at a very modest price, in most instances $1.25 per acre. The principal constraint was that the land be held for use and not immediately resold. The Homestead Act differed primarily in that it eliminated the purchase price (although it allowed the homesteaded land to be purchased at the preemption price of $1.25 after six months’ residence). Yet the Preemption Act remained in force, meaning that a person such as Howard Ruede could acquire a quarter section under the Homestead Act and another quarter section under the Preemption Act. A third land law, the Timber Culture Act of 1873, allowed a settler to claim an additional quarter section provided that forty acres of it were planted with trees. The three laws and their differences in conditions meant that many districts were patchworks of ownership impenetrable to outsiders. And, ownership aside, settlers weren’t above simply lying, telling newcomers that land—perhaps surrounded by the settlers’ claims—wasn’t available in that neighborhood.10