Cadillac Desert (7 page)

Soap Creek Rapids, Badger Creek Rapids, Crystal Creek Rapids, Lava Falls. Nearly all of the time, the creeks that plunge down the ravines of the Grand Canyon will barely float a walnut shell, but the flash floods resulting from a desert downpour can dislodge boulders as big as a jitney bus. Tumbled by gravity, the boulders carom into the main river and sit there, creating a dam, which doesn’t so much stop the river as make it mad. Except for the rapids of the Susitna, the Niagara, and perhaps a couple of rivers in Canada, the modern Colorado’s rapids are the biggest on the continent. Before the dams were built, however, the Colorado’s rapids were
really
big. At Lava Falls, where huge chunks of basalt dumped in the main river create a thirty-foot drop, waves at flood stage were as high as three-story houses. There was a cycling wave at the bottom that, every few seconds, would burst apart with the retort of a sixteen-inch gun, drenching anyone on either bank of the river—two hundred feet apart. To run Lava Falls today, in a thirty-foot Hypalon raft, wrapped in a Mae West life jacket, vaguely secure in the knowledge that a rescue helicopter sits on the canyon rim, is a lesson in panic. The Powell expedition was running most of the canyon’s rapids in a fifteen-foot pilot boat made of pine and a couple of twenty-one-foot dories made of oak—with the rudest of life jackets, without hope of rescue, without a single human being within hundreds of miles. And Powell himself was running them strapped to a captain’s chair, gesticulating wildly with his one arm.

The river twisted madly. It swung north, then headed south, then back north, then east—east!—then back south. Even Powell, constantly consulting sextant and compass, felt flummoxed. The rapids, meanwhile, had grown so powerful that the boats received a terrible battering from the force of the waves alone, and had to be recaulked every day. As they ran out of food and out of caulk, Powell realized that the men were also beginning to run out of will. There was mutiny in their whisperings.

August 25. They had come thirty-five miles, including a portage around a spellbinding rapid where a boulder dam of hardened lava turned the river into the aftermath of Vesuvius. (That, as it turned out, had been Lava Falls.) There were still no Grand Wash Cliffs, which would signal the confluence with the Virgin River and the end of their ordeal. They saw, for the first time in weeks, some traces of Indian habitation, but obviously no one had lived there in years. Occasionally they caught a glimpse of trees on the canyon rim, five thousand feet above. They were in the deepest canyon any of them had ever seen.

August 26. They came on an Indian garden full of fresh squash. With starvation imminent, they stole a dozen gourds and ate them ravenously. “We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth,” wrote Powell. “And the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders.... But,” he added hopefully, “a few more days like this and we are out of prison.”

August 27. The river, which had been tending toward the west, veered again toward the south. The hated Precambrian granite, which had dropped below the riverbed, surfaced again. Immediately came a rapid which they decided to portage. At eleven o’clock in the morning, they came to the worst rapids yet.

“The billows are huge,” wrote Bradley. “The spectacle is appalling.” It was, Jack Sumner wrote, a “hell of foam.” The rapids was bookended by cliffs; there was no way to portage and no way to line. There wasn’t even a decent way to scout.

After the party had had a meal of fried flour patties and coffee, O. G. Howland asked Powell to go for a walk with him. The major knew what was coming. It saddened him that if there was to be mutiny, the leader would be Howland. He was a mountain man by nature and experience, but, after Powell, still the most literate and scientific-minded of the group. Nonetheless, Howland had been plagued by bad luck; it was he who had steered the
No Name
to its destruction in Lodore Canyon; he who had twice lost maps and notes in swampings. He had tested fate enough. In the morning, Howland told Powell, he and his brother Seneca, together with Bill Dunn, were going to abandon the boats and climb out of the canyon.

Powell did not sleep that night. He took reading after reading with his sextant until he was as positive as he dared be that they were within fifty miles of Grand Wash Cliffs. At the most, they ought to be four days from civilization, with the only remaining obstacle in view a wild twenty-second ride through a terrific rapid. Powell woke Howland in the middle of the night and poured out his conviction, but it was too late. His immediate reaction was two laconic sentences in his journal, but later he offered this version of what took place:

We have another short talk about the morrow, but for me there is no sleep. All night long, I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on? I go to the boats again, to look at our rations. I feel satisfied that we can get over the danger immediately before us; what there may be below I know not. From our outlook yesterday, on the cliffs, the canon seemed to make another great bend to the south, and this, from our experience heretofore, means more and higher granite walls. I am not sure that we can climb out of the canon here, and, when at the top of the wall, I know enough of the country to be certain that it is a desert of rock and sand, between this and the nearest Mormon town, which, on the most direct line, must be seventy-five miles away. True, the last rains have been favorable to us, should we go out, for the probabilities are that we shall find water still standing in holes, and, at one time, I almost conclude to leave the river. But for years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished, to say that there is a part of the canon which I cannot explore, having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on.

August 28. Breakfast was as “solemn as a funeral.” Afterward, Powell asked all of the men, for the last time, whether they planned to go ahead or climb out. The Howlands and Bill Dunn still intended to walk out; the rest would remain. The party gave the three some guns and offered them their equal share of the remaining rations. They accepted the guns. “Some tears are shed,” Powell wrote. “It is rather a solemn parting; each party thinks the other is taking the dangerous course.” Billy Hawkins stole away and laid some biscuits on a rock the mutineers would pass on their way up the cliffs. “They are as fine fellows as I ever had the good fortune to meet,” declared taciturn George Bradley, blinking away a tear.

As the others rowed cautiously toward the monster rapids in their two boats, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn had already begun climbing up one of the canyon arroyos. Powell felt himself torn between watching them and the approaching rapids. They plunged down the first drop. The hydraulic wave at the bottom inundated them, but the water was so swift that they were out of it before the boat could fill. They were launched atop a pillow of water covering a rock, slid off, then rode out a landscape of haystacks. As the
Maid of the Canyon
circulated quietly in the whirlpool at rapids’ end,
Kitty Clyde’s Sister
wallowed up alongside. The roar of the rapids was almost submerged by the men’s ecstatic shouts. They grabbed rifles and fired volley after volley into the air to show their erstwhile companions that it could be done. Unable to see around the bend in the river or to walk back up, they waited in the eddy for nearly two hours, hoping the others would rejoin them, but they never did.

A few miles below Separation Rapid, the party came to another rapid, Lava Cliffs, which, were it not now under the waters of Lake Mead, would perhaps be the biggest on the river. In a style so much like the man himself—exact and fastidious, yet felicitous and engaging—Powell wrote down what happened there:

[O]n [the] northern side of the canyon [is] a bold escarpment that seems to be a hundred feet high. We can climb it and walk along its summit to a point where we are just at the head of the fall. Here the basalt is broken down again, so it seems to us, and I direct the men to take a line to the top of the cliff and let the boats down along the wall. One man remains in the boat to keep her clear of the rocks and prevent her line from being caught on the projecting angles. I climb the cliff and pass along to a point just over the fall and descend by broken rocks, and find that the break of the fall is above the break of the wall, so that we cannot land, and that still below the river is very bad, and that there is no possibility of a portage. Without waiting further to examine and determine what shall be done, I hasten back to the top of the cliff to stop the boats from coming down. When I arrive I find the men have let one of them down to the head of the fall. She is in swift water and they are not able to pull her back; nor are they able to go on with the line, as it is not long enough to reach the higher part of the cliff which is just before them; so they take a bight around a crag. I send two men back for the other line. The boat is in very swift water, and Bradley is standing in the open compartment, holding out his oar to prevent her from striking against the foot of the cliff. Now she shoots out into the stream and up as far as the line will permit, and then, wheeling, drives headlong against the rock, and then out and back again, now straining on the line, now striking against the rock. As soon as the second line is brought, we pass it down to him; but his attention is all taken up with his own situation, and he does not see that we are passing him the line. I stand on a projecting rock, waving my hat to gain his attention, for my voice is drowned by the roaring of the falls. Just at this moment I see him take his knife from its sheath and step forward to cut the line. He has evidently decided that it is better to go over with the boat as it is than to wait for her to be broken to pieces. As he leans over, the boat sheers again into the stream, the stem-post breaks away and she is loose. 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 broad-side 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. But he is in a whirlpool. We have the stem-post of his boat attached to the line. How badly she may be disabled we know not. I direct Sumner and [Walter] Powell to pass along the cliff and see if they can reach him from below. Hawkins, Hall, and myself run to the other boat, jump aboard, push out, and away we go over the falls. A wave rolls over us and our boat is unmanageable. Another great wave strikes us, and the boat rolls over, and tumbles and tosses, I know not how. All I know is that Bradley is picking us up. We soon have all right again, and row to the cliff and wait until Sumner and Powell can come. After a difficult climb they reach us. We run two or three miles farther and turn again to the northwest, continuing until night, when we have run out of the granite once more.

August 30. At the confluence of the Colorado and the Virgin River, three Mormons and an Indian helper are seine-netting fish. They have been there for weeks, under orders from Brigham Young to watch for the Powell expedition. Since the members of the expedition have already been reported dead several times in the newspapers, the Mormons are really on the lookout for corpses and wreckage; they hope to salvage whatever journals and maps have survived in order that they might learn something about the unexplored portion of the region where they have banished themselves. Late in the morning, one of them flings a glance upriver and freezes. There are two boats coming down, and, unless they are ghosts, the people inside them seem to be alive.

It had taken three months and six days for the expedition to travel from Green River to Grand Wash Cliffs. Though wilder water than the Colorado is routinely run today, few river runners would dispute that the Powell expedition accomplished the most impressive feat of perilous river exploration in history. But the expedition ended, as fate would have it, on an ironically tragic note. While Powell and those who stayed with him were being fed and pumped for information by the Mormons, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn were lying dead on the rim of the Grand Canyon, murdered by a band of Shivwits Indians. Later there were rumors that they had molested a Shivwits girl, but the Indian wars were raging and they may have been killed simply for taking the band by surprise. That the Shivwits shot Powell’s companions full of holes contains a cold irony, for years later, after Powell had sat around many campfires with them, the Shivwits tribe would come to regard the one-armed major as their most faithful white friend.

When John Wesley Powell first left Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1867, bound for Denver and the valley of the Green River, the region he crossed was virtually empty. It was like modern interior Alaska, after removing Fairbanks. Indians were more common than whites, and buffalo were much more prevalent than Indians. By the time he reached the ninety-eighth meridian, about two-fifths of the way across Nebraska, the light dusting of settlers’ towns and farms had thinned out to nothing. Before him were another five hundred miles of virgin plains, almost uninhabited by whites; then there was Denver, a rowdy little town that owed its existence mainly to furs and gold, and not much else until one got to Salt Lake and California.