Down the Great Unknown (6 page)

Powell purposely blurred the distinction between the diary he composed on the river and the account he published in 1875 as an official government report. The published journal is written in the present tense, in diary format, as if each entry had been composed by firelight at the end of a hard day on the river.
In fact, it was dictated
half a dozen years later to a secretary as Powell paced back and forth in his office, waving his cigar and gesturing as though he were addressing a vast lecture hall and not a lone listener.

For the most part, the reader is grateful for Powell's literary sleight of hand. His river diary is as dry as the Southwest it described, but the published account continues to draw new readers even after a century and a quarter. What other government publication can say as much? At a glance, few books look less inviting. The title, usually abbreviated to
Exploration of the Colorado River
, runs on for more than two dozen words; the publisher is the Government Printing Office; the text is introduced by a formal note carrying the signatures of the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But even in such an austere setting, Powell's personality bursts forth like a dancer from a birthday cake.

The government imprimatur gave Powell's version of events a credibility it did not always deserve.
*
Powell described his formal account as simply a carefully worked-out version of the telegraphic river diary. “I decided to publish this journal, with only such emendations and corrections as its hasty writing in camp necessitated,” he declared. This seems a stretch—the river diary contains only three thousand words, for example, in comparison with the published journal's nearly one hundred thousand—but diaries, after all, are not written for outsiders. And perhaps those three thousand words spoke to Powell even years later, summoning complete memories, as a scrap of melody can call forth a symphony. But at some points in this official report, Powell soared beyond his own adventure, magnificent as it was, and touched up stories or actually invented them.

May 25, the first full day on the river, was another day of bad weather and good spirits. The men were under way by six in the morning and made it until about nine-thirty before running into trouble. Then Powell ran aground on a sandbar and, before he had time to signal, so did the next boat and the one behind that. Bradley, trailing the others, just managed to steer to the right and sneak by. Two of the men jumped out of their boats and pushed everyone free.

They continued downstream for another hour. The rain continued to pelt down, and the men pulled ashore to try to wait it out. By this point, everyone was “wet, chilled, and tired to exhaustion,” Powell wrote, but with the help of a roaring fire and many cups of coffee they were soon “refreshed and quite merry.” (They also cooked up some “villainous bacon,” as Sumner put it, but that was less satisfactory.) When the sky looked as if it might clear, they set out again. After five or six miles, they saw some bighorn sheep on a cliffside and stopped to give chase. Two or three hours later, the hunters straggled home empty-handed. Only Hawkins had not struck out completely. He had found a sleeping lamb, which he had caught by the heels and thrown off the cliff, toward camp. The hunters consoled themselves for their failure by teasing Hawkins—they pretended to believe that the lamb was dead when he found it—but they all agreed it made a fine lunch.

It was now about four in the afternoon, time to move on. All the boats except
Kitty Clyde's Sister
soon ran aground on another sandbar and found themselves unable to budge. Bradley and Walter Powell managed to plant the
Maid
so firmly they had to pry her off with oars. It took “a great deal of tall lifting and tugging” to get free, Bradley wrote, which was especially irksome because Powell had given a danger signal and Bradley had decided to ignore it.

Their third day was another fairly easy one, noteworthy only for an entry in Bradley's journal. They had encountered, he wrote, “the largest and most difficult rapid yet seen.” From here on, Bradley's diary would be dotted with similar observations, as if to convince himself that
this time
they must have taken the river's worst blow. Sumner, no more inclined to bluster than the hard-to-faze Bradley, was just as impressed by the rapid. “It cannot be navigated by any boat with safety, in the main channel,” he wrote, though it was possible to hug the bank and scoot by safely.

Three of the boats made it through in fine fashion, but Hawkins and Hall, in the
Sister
(the shortened name they used for their boat) found themselves pinned on a rock. Hawkins climbed overboard and managed to pry the boat free. “No injury done except
one man took a bath
,” Bradley noted unsympathetically. The rain, which had continued throughout the day, kept up at night, but no one paid it much heed. The hunters, for once, had something to show for their efforts, and everyone tucked happily into an excellent dinner of duck and goose.

There was no great significance to running aground. Heavy boats moving fast on low water might almost be expected to beach themselves. But in pinning the
Sister
to a rock, even if only briefly, the river had provided a far more telling warning of the havoc it could unleash at any moment. It happens in an instant—one minute a boat is racing along and then, suddenly, it is sideways to the current, wrapped against a rock or another obstacle, and helpless. The river holds the boat in place with overwhelming force, like a sumo wrestler smothering a kitten. Worse still, it perpetually replaces itself as it flows, so that there is no wriggling out from under. A kitten might claw or bite a wrestler and sneak away in the ensuing confusion, but a river never “shifts its weight.” It simply persists in its assault, unceasingly and unforgivingly, until the obstacle in its way is an obstacle no longer.

“Wrapping is, in the estimation of many, the worst fate that can befall a riverboat,” writes the historian and river runner Roderick Nash. “In an upset, at least, the boat washes downstream where it can usually be recovered and righted. But a wrapped boat is bent around a rock and pinned there by the force of moving water. Some boats can be freed using lines from shore, but often they remain wrapped until the river shreds them into rubber ribbons or wooden or metal splinters.”

Nash tells the story of one recent wrap, on a rock in Crystal Rapid, one of the Grand Canyon's notorious danger spots. The boat was a thirty-foot-long rubber raft, motorized and carrying a dozen people. Many boatmen disdain such behemoths. They prefer small, oar-powered rafts, or elegant craftlike dories and kayaks that flit across the water like dragonflies. (The trade-off is that dories and kayaks are harder to patch after a wreck.) In comparison with its small, maneuverable rivals, a giant inner tube has all the grace of a brontosaurus. But though they are ungainly, these wallowing rubber beasts are as close to invulnerable as anything on the Colorado.

Close to invulnerable, but not all the way there. The rubber raft at Crystal turned sideways against a boulder near the top of an obstacle course called the Rock Garden. The river, rushing downstream, wrapped the raft's two ends tight to the rock. The raft sat glued in place, while passengers and crew scrambled up and out onto their new island home. They sat on the rock through the night, trapped in mid-rapid, listening to the water rise around them (the Colorado, dammed upstream of the Grand Canyon in the 1960s, rises and falls depending on electricity demand downstream). Dawn found the scared, chilled passengers still with a bit of rock to cling to, and the boat itself freed by the rising water and straining against the lines the boatmen had used to tie it in place. Boatmen and passengers climbed back into the boat, which was still tied down but now being yanked violently downstream. Three knives came out; on a signal, all three touched the mooring lines. A touch was all it took. With a crack like a whiplash,
the taut ropes snapped, and the boat and its passengers shot free.

The Green was not yet up to such malevolent tricks. May 27, the fourth day on the river, marked the end of the first and easiest leg of the journey. After a late, leisurely start and a quiet day on what Powell called a “placid stream,” the men reached the junction of the Green and Henry's Fork, a beaver stream the mountain men knew well. Here they found the barometers, chronometers, and sextants Powell had stashed earlier in the spring, still safe beneath the overhanging rock where he had hidden them. Powell and his crew settled in for a few days, making scientific observations, Powell displaying more enthusiasm than the men.

The rain continued (it had hardly let up since they set out), but the scenery had improved and spirits were high. The men had yearned for canyons. Now they had them. “The river winds like a serpent through between nearly perpendicular cliffs 1200 ft. high but instead of rapids it is deep and calm as a lake,” Bradley wrote. “It is the most safe of any part we have yet seen for navigation. Found some marine focils [fossils] in hard limestone—first yet found.”

The exuberant tone was new. At camp on the first night, Powell had climbed a cliff and struggled manfully to admire the view. “Barren desolation is stretched before me,” he had noted, “and yet there is a beauty in the scene.” Still looking with eyes accustomed to the rolling terrain of the green midwest, he had found himself bewildered. “The fantastic carving . . . with the bright and varied colors of the rocks conspire to make a scene such as the dweller in verdure-clad hills can scarcely appreciate.”

Even so, he had done his best to wax rhapsodic. “Dark shadows are settling in the valleys and gulches,” Powell wrote in an account of that first afternoon, “and the heights are made higher and the depths deeper by the glamour and witchery of light and shade.” Sumner was more succinct. “Country worthless,” he scrawled in his journal.

Now things were picking up, and there was no need to manufacture enthusiasm. “It is the grandest scenery I have found in the mountains and I am delighted with it,” Bradley exulted. “I went out to see the country this morning and found it grand beyond conception.”

Powell was just as excited. The Green at this point ran south, and the Uinta Mountains, running east-west, lay smack in its path, and “yet it glides on in a quiet way as if it thought a mountain range no formidable obstruction to its course. It enters the range by a flaring, brilliant, red gorge, that may be seen from the north a score of miles away.”

That gorge would be their first canyon. “We name it Flaming Gorge,” Powell wrote proudly. Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, where everything was new, Powell had the opportunity to bestow names as he chose.

CHAPTER FOUR

ASHLEY FALLS

 

For the next several days, life was easy. This was the trip as Powell had envisioned it, a scientific expedition rather than a mad dash. There were cliffs to explore and measure, repairs to make, fossils to find. Bradley and Powell climbed one day to a vantage point some one thousand feet above the river and surveyed the panorama—the long, sinuous curve of the Green, the valley of Henry's Fork stretching to the west, desert and hills and buttes to the north, the Uinta Mountains to the south, the peaks of the Wasatch just barely visible in the distance to the west.

Bradley went off exploring on his own early one morning, hoping for fossils, but came up empty. Worse still, he managed to spend the day lost in a driving rainstorm. After eleven hours, he finally made it back to camp, “tired and hungry and mad as a bear.” Powell was nearly immune from such frustration, in part because he had a gift for imbuing even the most mundane chore with drama. He and Sumner had spent most of a rainy day in camp repairing one of the barometers. The barometers were crucial—they were the tool used to determine altitude—but they were finicky and fragile. The repair was a matter of taking a long glass tube open at one end, adding mercury to it a few inches at a time, heating the tube (without cracking it) in order to create a vacuum, and then repeating the procedure again and again until the tube was filled to the proper volume. When the tedious repair was finally completed succesfully, Powell beamed with pleasure. “[We] are ready,” he cheered, “to measure
mountains once more.”

The men were harder to excite. “Tramped around most of the day in the mud and rain to get a few fossils,” Sumner wrote crabbily on May 27, and his journal entry the next day began with a weary “Still in camp.” But the crew was not being paid for their opinions (or for anything else), and Powell seemed unaware of the grumbling.

By May 30, after a morning hike to survey the local geology, even Powell was prepared to move on. “We are ready to enter the mysterious cañon, and start with some anxiety,” he wrote. They entered Flaming Gorge on a fast current and emerged into a little park and then, when the river swung sharply left, headed toward another canyon cut into the mountain. “We enter the narrow passage,” Powell continued. “On either side, the walls rapidly increase in altitude. On the left are overhanging ledges and cliffs five hundred—a thousand—fifteen hundred feet high. On the right, the rocks are broken and ragged, and the water fills the channel from cliff to cliff.”

Then, as if unsure of what to make of the mountains, the river made a sharp turn back to the right. In the lead boat, Powell strained to make sense of the chaos ahead of him. Bradley braced for trouble. “We took off boots and coats and prepared for a swim,” he wrote. Powell struggled to stay cool. “Here we have our first experience with cañon rapids,” he wrote. They had seen other rapids, in fact, but in comparison with what he now confronted, Powell seemed to consider them not worth mentioning. “I stand up on the deck of my boat to seek a way among the wave-beaten rocks. All untried as we are with such waters, the moments are filled with intense anxiety. Soon our boats reach the swift current; a stroke or two, now on this side, now on that, and 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; and then comes a feeling of great relief. Our first
rapid is run.”