Cadillac Desert (6 page)

J
ohn Wesley Powell belonged to a subspecies of American which flourished briefly during the nineteenth century and went extinct with the end of the frontier. It was an estimable company, one that included the likes of Mark Twain, John Muir, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, and Hamlin Garland. They were genuine Renaissance men, though their circumstances were vastly different from those of Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. The founding fathers, the most notable among them, were urban gentlemen or gentlemen farmers who grew up in a society that, though it sought to keep Europe and its mannerisms at arm’s length, had a fair amount in common with the Old World. They lived in very civilized style, even if they lived at the edge of a frontier. Powell, Howells, Lincoln, and the others were children of the real frontier. Most grew up on subsistence farms hacked out of ancient forests or grafted onto tallgrass prairie; they lacked formal education, breeding, and refinement. Schooled by teachers who knew barely more than they did, chained to the rigors of farm life, they got their education from borrowed books devoured by the embers of a fireplace or surreptitiously smuggled into the fields. What they lacked in worldliness and schooling, however, they more than made up in vitality, originality, and circumambient intelligence. John Wesley Powell may be one of the lesser-known of this group, but he stood alone in the variety of his interests and the indefatigability of his pursuits.

Powell’s father was a poor itinerant preacher who transplanted his family westward behind the breaking wave of the frontier. As a boy in the 1840s, Powell moved from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Walworth County, Wisconsin, to Bonus Prairie, Illinois. Nothing was paved, little was fenced; the forests were full of cougars and the streams full of fish. To Powell, the frontier was a rapturous experience. Like John Muir, he got a vagabond’s education, rambling cross-country in order to become intimate with forests and fauna, with hydrology and weather. In the summer of 1855, Powell struck out for four months and walked across Wisconsin. Two years later he floated down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to St. Louis. A few months later, he was gathering fossils in interior Missouri. The next spring he was rowing alone down the Illinois River and up the Mississippi and the Des Moines River to the middle of Iowa, then a wilderness. Between his peregrinations Powell picked up some frantic education—Greek, Latin, botany, a bit of philosophy—at Wheaton, Oberlin, and Illinois College, but he never graduated and he never stayed long. Powell learned on the run.

When the Civil War broke out, Powell enlisted on the Union side, fought bravely, and came out a major, a confidant of Ulysses Grant, and minus an arm, which was removed by a steel ball at the Battle of Shiloh. To Powell, the loss of an arm was merely a nuisance, though the raw nerve endings in his amputated stump kept him in pain for the rest of his life. After the war he tried a stint at teaching, first at Illinois Wesleyan and then at Illinois State, but it didn’t satisfy him. He helped found the Illinois Museum of Natural History, and was an obvious candidate for the position of curator, but decided that this, too, was too dull an avenue with too visible an end. Powell, like the mountain men, was compulsively drawn to the frontier. In the United States of the late 1860s, there was but one place where the frontier was still nearly intact.

By 1869, the population of New York City had surpassed one million. The city had built a great water-supply aqueduct to the Croton River and was imagining its future subway system. Chicago, founded thirty years earlier, was already a big sprawling industrial town. The millionaires of San Francisco were building their palatial mansions on Nob Hill. New England was deforested, farms and settlements were spilling onto the prairie. However, on maps of the United States published in that year a substantial area remained a complete blank, and was marked “unexplored.”

The region overlay parts of what is now Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. It was about the size of France, and through the middle of it ran the Colorado River. That was about all that was known about it, except that the topography was awesome and the rainfall scarce. The region was known as the Plateau Province, and parties heading westward tended to avoid it at all costs.

Some of the Franciscan friars, who were as tough as anyone in the Old West, had wandered through it on the Old Spanish Trail. Otherwise, the Mormon Outlet Trail skirted the region to the west, the California and Oregon trails swung northward, and the El Paso-Yuma Trail went south. From a distance, one could see multicolored and multistoried mesas and cliffs, saurian ridges, and occasionally a distant snowcapped peak. There were accounts of canyons that began without reason and were suddenly a thousand feet deep, eroded more by wind than by water. A distance that a bird could cover in an hour might require a week to negotiate. The days were hot and the nights were often frigid, owing to the region’s high interior vastness, and water was almost impossible to find. Lacking wings, there was only one good way to explore it: by boat.

On the 24th of May, 1869, the Powell Geographic Expedition set out on the Green River from the town of Green River, Wyoming, in four wooden dories: the
Maid of the Canyon,
the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister,
the
Emma Dean,
and the
No Name.
For a scientific expedition, it was an odd group. Powell, the leader, was the closest thing to a scientist. He had brought along his brother Walter—moody, sarcastic, morose, one of the thousands of psychiatric casualties of the Civil War. The rest of the party was made up mostly of mountain men: O. G. Howland, his brother Seneca, Bill Dunn, Billy Hawkins, and Jack Sumner, all of whom had been collected by Powell en route to Green River. He had also invited a beet-faced Englishman named Frank Goodman, who had been patrolling the frontier towns looking for adventure, and Andy Hall, an eighteen-year-old roustabout whose casual skill as an oarsman had impressed Powell when he saw him playing with a boat on the Green River. There was also George Bradley, a tough guy whom Powell had met by accident at Fort Bridger and who had agreed to come along in exchange for a discharge from the army, which Powell managed to obtain for him.

For sixty miles out of the town of Green River, the river was sandy-bottomed and amiable. There were riffles, but nothing that could legitimately be called a rapid. The boatmen played in the currents, acquiring a feel for moving water; the others admired the scenery. As they neared the Uinta Mountains, they went into a sandstone canyon colored in marvelous hues, which Powell, who had a knack for naming things, called Flaming Gorge. The river bore southward until it came up against the flanks of the range, then turned eastward and entered Red Canyon.

In Red Canyon, the expedition got its first lesson in how a few feet of drop per mile can turn a quiet river into something startling. Several of the rapids frightened them into racing for shore and lining or portaging, an awful strain with several thousand pounds of boats, supplies, and gear. After a while, however, even the bigger rapids were not so menacing anymore—if, compared to what was about to come, one could call them big.

Beyond Flaming Gorge the landscape opened up into Brown’s Park, but soon the river gathered imperceptible momentum and the canyon ramparts closed around them like a pair of jaws. A maelstrom followed. Huge scissoring waves leaped between naked boulders; the river plunged into devouring holes. The awestruck Andy Hall recited an alliterative verse he had learned as a Scottish schoolboy, “The Cataract of Lodore,” by the English Romantic poet Robert Southey. Over Powell’s objection—he did not like using a European name—the stretch became the Canyon of Lodore.

As they approached the first big rapid in the canyon, the
No Name
was sucked in by the accelerating current before anyone had a chance to scout. “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,” wrote Powell in his serialized journal of the trip. “Two of the men lost their oars, she swings around, and is carried down at a rapid rate broadside on for quite a few yards and strikes amidships on another rock with great force, is broken quite in two, and then men are thrown into the river, the larger part of the boat floating buoyantly. They soon seize it and down the river they drift for a few hundred yards to a second rapid filled with huge boulders where the boat strikes again and is dashed to pieces and the men and fragments are soon carried beyond my sight.”

The three crew members survived, but most of the extra clothes, the barometers, and several weeks’ worth of food were gone. The next day the party found the stern of the boat intact, still holding the barometers, some flour, and a barrel of whiskey that Powell, who was something of a prig, did not realize had been smuggled aboard. When they finally floated out of Lodore Canyon into the sunlit beauty of Echo Park, Powell wrote in his journal that despite “a chapter of disaster and toil ... the canyon of Lodore was not devoid of scenic interest, even beyond the power of the pen to tell.” And O. G. Howland, who nearly lost his life in Disaster Falls, wrote haughtily that “a calm, smooth stream is a horror we all detest now.”

Desolation Canyon. Gray Canyon. They were now in territory even Indians hadn’t seen. The landscape closed in and opened up. Labyrinth Canyon. Stillwater Canyon. They shot a buck and scared a bighorn lamb off a cliff, their first fresh meat in weeks. Powell, climbing a cliff with his one arm, got himself rimmed and required rescue by Bradley, who got above him, dangled his long johns, and pulled Powell up.

‘The country grew drier and more desolate. Fantastic mesas loomed in the distance, banded like shells. The Grand Mesa, to the east, the largest mesa in the world, rose to eleven thousand feet from desert badlands into an alpine landscape of forests and lakes. Wind-eroded shiprocks loomed over the rubblized beds of prehistoric seas. Battlements of sandstone rose in the distance like ruins of empire. Deep in uncharted territory the Colorado River, then known as the Grand, rushed in quietly from the northeast, carrying the snowmelt of Longs Peak and most of western Colorado. The river’s volume had now doubled, but still it remained quite placid. Was it conceivable that they were near the end of its run? Powell was tempted to believe so, but knew better. There were four thousand feet of elevation loss ahead. On the 21st, after a short stop to rest and reseal the boats, they were on the water again, which was high, roiled, and the color of cocoa. In a few miles they came to a canyon, frothing with rapids. They lined or portaged wherever they could, ran if they had no alternative. Soon they were between vertical walls and the river was roaring mud. Cataracts launched them downriver before they had time to think; waves like mud huts threw them eight feet into the air. The scouts would venture ahead if there was room enough to walk, and return ashen-faced. The canyon relented a little at times, so they could portage, but the river did not. In one day, they made three-quarters of a mile in Cataract Canyon, portaging everything they saw.

During the daytime, the temperature would reach 106 degrees; at night the men shivered in their dank drawers. Some became edgy, prone to violent outbursts. Bradley’s incendiary moods lasted through most of a day, and he would run almost anything rather than portage. Powell’s instinctive caution infuriated Bradley, as did his indefatigable specimen gathering, surveying, and consignment of everything to notes. The pace was maddeningly uneven: they would do eight miles in a day, then a mere mile or two. Two months’ worth of food remained, most of it musty bread, dried apples, spoiled bacon, and coffee. Once, Billy Hawkins got up in the middle of dinner, walked to the boats, and pulled out the sextant. He said he was trying to find the latitude and longitude of the nearest pie.

On the 23rd of July they passed a foul-smelling little stream coming in from the west; they called it the Dirty Devil. The big river quieted. The hunters took off up the cliffsides and returned with a couple of desert bighorn sheep, which were devoured with sybaritic abandon. The sheep were an omen. For the next several days, they floated on a brisk but serene river through a canyon such as no one had seen. Instead of the pitiless angular black-burned walls of Cataract Canyon, they were now enveloped by rounded pink-and-salmon-colored sandstone, undulating ahead of them in soft contours. There were huge arched chasms, arcadian glens hung with maidenhair ferns, zebra-striped walls, opalescent green fractures irrigated by secret springs. Groping for a name that would properly convey their sense of both awe and relief, Powell decided on Glen Canyon. On August 1 and 2, the party camped in Music Temple.

By the 5th of August, they were down to fifteen pounds of rancid bacon, several bags of matted flour, a small store of dried apples, and a large quantity of coffee. Other than that they would have to try to live off the land, but the land was mostly vertical and the game, which had never been plentiful, had all but disappeared. They met the Escalante River, draining unknown territory in Utah, then the San Juan, carrying in snowmelt from southwestern Colorado.

The river on which they were floating was made up now of most of the mentionable runoff of the far Southwest. They were in country that no white person had ever seen, riding the runoff of a region the size of Iraq, and they approached each blind bend in the river with a mixture of anticipation and terror. Soon the soft sandstone of Glen Canyon was replaced by the fabulous coloration of Marble Canyon. Then, on August 14, the hard black rock of Cataract Canyon reemerged from the crust of the earth. “The river enters the gneiss!” wrote Powell. Downriver, they heard what sounded like an avalanche.