Down the Great Unknown (11 page)

In another thirty feet, Sumner continued, “nothing could have saved them, as the river was turned into a perfect hell of waters that nothing could enter and live.” Certainly not the
No Name
. “The boat drifted into it and was instantly smashed to pieces,” Sumner wrote. “In half a second there was nothing but a dense foam, with a cloud of spray above it, to mark the spot.”

After the rescue came the recriminations. What had gone wrong? First of all, the boatmen of the
No Name
had failed to allow for the speed and power of the current. On the first day of the trip, by this point almost an ancient memory, Hall and Hawkins had tried pulling to shore but started too late and missed the campsite by four hundred yards. It had been an embarrassing but harmless mistake, as if a skier on a slope too difficult for him had tried to pull to the side to stop but had badly overshot his destination. Now the Howlands and Goodman had made the same mistake, this time with a hungry rapid waiting to gnaw their bones.

On a big river, things can go bad in a hurry; to react, rather than to anticipate, is almost always to respond too late. And the river was wild as well as swift. The rapids had come in such quick succession, Oramel Howland wrote, that there was no time to bail. At precisely the moment that quick responses were vital, the
No Name
had “so much water aboard,” Howland recalled, “as to make her nearly or quite unmanageable.” Howland would have been in grave difficulty even without a wave or two in his boat. With that extra weight, he had no chance. For a driver skidding across our demonic highway, it would be as if the power steering chose that moment to quit working.

But why was the
No Name
caught by surprise? Powell's plan, after all, called for him to precede the slower boats and signal them about what lay ahead. This was a touchy subject at the time, and it has stayed that way. For nearly a century, Powell partisans and critics have fought over those signals. Were they sent? Were they seen? We have several descriptions of the first moments after the
Emma Dean
had pulled to shore to scout the new rapid. “I walk along the bank to examine the ground,” Powell wrote, “leaving one of my men with a flag to guide the other boats to the landing-place.” Sumner, the lead boatman in the
Emma Dean
, provided a similar description. “The scouting boat came to a place where we . . . pulled ashore on the east side and the freight boats [were] instantly signaled to land with us.”

Oramel Howland, in the
No Name
, was the target of those signals. Howland's account is not quite clear, although he seems to have seen some kind of signal. “About one o'clock,” he wrote, “the signal boat signaled at the foot of a very bad rapid to go ashore; boats nearly full of water—two were made fast, but owing to not understanding the signal, the crew of the
No Name
failed very effectually, owing in the main, to having so much water aboard as to make her nearly or quite unmanageable; otherwise, the mistake was seen by us in time to save her.”

Later, though, Sumner would provide a far different account. “As soon as Howland got out of the boat after the rescue Major Powell angrily demanded of him why he did not land,” he wrote. “Howland told him he saw no signals to do anything, and could not see the other boats that had landed until he was drawn into the rapid, when it was too late. I asked Hawkins and Bradley in charge of the other boats if they saw signals to land, and they said no signals were given, but as they saw me turn in they suspected something wrong and followed suit at once.”

It may be that these accounts can be reconciled. Powell may indeed have given a signal to land, and Howland, fighting for his life on the river, may have missed or misunderstood it. The story of the angry confrontation is more troubling. Powell and his men were a long way from help and a longer way still from their destination. Bad blood between leader and crew boded ill.

In the meantime, there were more pressing problems to confront. No one had drowned, but the
No Name
was gone. The men climbed along the shore to search for the wreckage. Half a mile downstream, they spotted what remained of the boat in the middle of the river, wedged into some rocks. There was nothing but a few battered boards and the splintered stern bulkhead. Powell decided that no one should risk his life to see if it contained anything worth salvaging.

Gone was about a ton of cargo, one-third of the total—great stores of food, three rifles and a revolver, ammunition, all Oramel Howland's maps, half the mess kit, and many of the scientific instruments. The Howland brothers and Goodman lost all their gear, their bedding, and all their clothes except the ones on their backs. (That didn't leave much. Because clothing dragged a swimmer down, the men had taken to running the river clad in only their underwear.)

Powell was despondent. As a precaution against accidents like this one, he had made sure that the three freight boats all carried the same cargo. But somehow all three barometers had been placed in the
No Name
. The fundamental purpose of the entire expedition, in Powell's eyes, was to provide a scientific description of the territory they were passing through. The barometers were crucial to that work, and now they were gone.

The barometers had a practical role fully as important as their role in mapmaking. Although they could not reveal how much farther the men had to go, the barometers
did
show the river's altitude. By comparing that figure with the known elevation at their downstream destination, the men could know how much farther the river had to fall. That was hardly a full picture, for there was no way of knowing whether the drop was sudden or gradual, but it was better than nothing. A relatively flat river, even if it stretched a long way, was a far more docile beast than a sharply dropping (and therefore rapid-infested) river. Without barometers, no one could know if they had already survived the worst or if their troubles so far only hinted at the ordeal still to come.

Powell spent a sleepless night. The barometers had been in the
No Name
's stern bulkhead, which the men had seen caught on the rocks in mid-river. Was there a chance that the fragile glass tubes were still in the wreckage? Could they possibly have survived the smashup? “But, then,” Powell asked himself miserably, “how to reach them! The river is rising. Will they be there to-morrow?” Perhaps it would be better, he thought, to abort the trip and hike to Salt Lake City, where he could order new barometers from New York City.

The men were scarcely cheerier. “We are rather low spirrited tonight,” Bradley acknowledged, “for we must camp right at the head of a roaring rapid more than a mile in length and in which we have already lost one of our boats and nearly lost three of our number.”

Powell later named the rapid Disaster Falls.

Everyone was up at sunrise the next day, June 9. The men began the weary work of unloading the remaining boats and hauling the cargo up and over the rocks along the river's edge. Then it was time for more lining. In the meantime, Powell set out to examine the wreckage of the
No Name
. As he had feared, the river had dislodged it during the night. As he had not dared hope, it had drifted only another fifty or sixty feet downstream and had run aground on a sandbar. In the wreck's new position, Powell decided, it might be reachable.

Sumner and Andy Hall volunteered to try. (Powell gave the credit, mistakenly, to Sumner and Dunn. The biggest of big-picture thinkers, Powell was not much for dates and other details. In his published journal, for example, he inadvertently put the crew of the
Maid of the Cañon
in the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
and vice versa.
This
mistake is worth noting, though, because we will want to keep an eye on Powell's dealings with Dunn. At this juncture, Powell evidently thought well enough of Dunn to praise him even where no praise was due.)

Sumner and Hall made it to the
No Name
's remains more or less unscathed. “Away they went and got to it safely, after a few thumps on the rocks,” Sumner reported with his customary third-person brevity. (Bradley was a bit more effusive. The two boatmen, he noted admiringly, had overcome “great risk.”) They found all three barometers, unbroken, as well as some spare barometer tubes, two thermometers, one pair of old boots, some sole leather, and an untapped ten-gallon cask of whiskey that Oramel Howland had smuggled aboard at Green River Station. Everything else had vanished.

Then came the problem of getting back to shore. It took “an hour's floundering” and several dashes through “pretty rough passes,” Sumner recalled, but they made it back to their colleagues' eager welcome. “The Professor was so much pleased about the recovery of the barometers,” said Sumner, “that he looked as happy as a young girl with her first beau.”

The men were happy, too. They had all watched Sumner and Hall whooping in glee in mid-river as they unpacked the
No Name
's treasures, but no one could see what the two had found. Powell had been delighted by the one-for-all-and-all-for-one good fellowship. “The boys set up a shout, and I join them,” he wrote, “pleased that they should be as glad to save the instruments as myself.”

He soon learned about the whiskey keg, “which is what the men were shouting about.” A good leader is adaptable, though, and on this night, at least, no one could accuse Powell of being a martinet. “They had taken it aboard, unknown to me,” Powell admitted, “and now I am glad they did, for they think it will do them good, as they are drenched every day by the melting snow, which runs down from the summits of the Rocky Mountains.”

Drenched every day and cold and bone-weary and three men nearly drowned, and the trip just begun. Disaster Falls changed everything. A few days before, life had seemed almost carefree. Then, when one-third of the supplies vanished in an instant, the trip that Powell had envisioned as a contribution to science threatened to become a test of survival instead. Would the food last? Would the rapids worsen? Could the boats hold up? They had lost one boat already. The loss of another would be a calamity, for two boats could not possibly carry ten men. Already it was impossible to deny that the river was gaining power, and so far they had seen only the Green. What would happen downstream when the Green and the Grand merged and Powell and his men at last confronted the full might of the Colorado?

They had been under way two weeks.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHILOH

 

The success of the expedition—the
survival
of the expedition—would depend on Powell's skills as a leader and his ability to persevere in the face of calamity. Powell had been tested before. For the men of his generation, the Civil War was the great, bloody swath that cut their lives in two. “
War was a proving ground
,” notes Stacy Allen, the historian at Shiloh National Military Park, “and in that first year and a half, you saw some meteoric rises and you saw some disappearances.” In May 1861, Powell had entered the army as a private. When he left, in January 1865, he was a major and a changed man—wounded, perpetually in pain but burning with ambition, fond of command, and confident that he could keep his head in the worst circumstances that man or fate could throw his way.

Like many of his contemporaries, Powell had known responsibility from an early age. His father, Joseph Powell, was a halfhearted farmer and a dedicated preacher. Nearly always on the road, Joseph left the great bulk of the farmwork to his oldest son. By the age of twelve, John Wesley, known to the family as Wes, had charge of clearing and planting the family's sixty acres and then hauling the crops to market and selling them. That left little time for formal schooling. Though he would eventually spend part of a year at Oberlin College, Powell's education was always a patchwork affair.

Many nineteenth-century farm boys had similar backgrounds. But in two respects, Wes Powell stood apart from most of his peers. He had grown up in a fiercely abolitionist household at a time when few whites gave more than a passing thought to slavery. (Part of Oberlin's appeal was its strong antislavery stance.) And he was plagued by an itch, compounded of intellectual restlessness and wanderlust, that seemed not to afflict many others. “People in those days mostly stuck close to home,” the historian Bruce Catton observed. “They had to, because it was so hard to move about . . . A young man stayed at home, and his fatherland was what he could see from his bedroom window, along with the few square miles he might tramp about in the area near his home. Everything else he took on faith.”

Powell, the least complacent of men, never took much on faith. As we have seen, he had set out to explore the great rivers of the nation's heartland, on his own, as soon as he could free himself from the family farm. Then, when war came, Powell found that there was more to him than he could have known. He was familiar with hard work and long days, but he did not know command, did not know what it was to make life-and-death decisions, did not know if he could keep his head when death loomed.

In later years, a geologist colleague of Powell's would summarize the lessons that wartime service had taught his old friend. Powell had learned the arts of “reaching prompt decision, giving authoritative command, delegating work to others, and securing loyal obedience from his subordinates,” William M. Davis noted. Just as important, he had learned to act quickly even when hampered by incomplete information. “It does not follow that the decisions reached were always the wisest possible,” Davis noted, “still they were the best available, and action had to be taken on them without hesitating deliberation.”

In ways both obvious and subtle, the war would stay with Powell for the rest of his life. His stump of an arm tortured him without letup, and, though he grew to detest war, the sights and sounds of battle would ever after come unbidden to his mind. Even when he discussed subjects as far removed from the battlefield as geology, Powell favored warlike imagery. Snow and rain were “missiles” in the “storm of war,” and crumbling rocks broken down by that attack “fled to the sea” like panicky soldiers running from the front lines. Geology properly understood revealed a tale as violent as the
Iliad
, “a history of the war of the elements.” Similarly, the buttes that marked Western landscapes looked to Powell “as if a thousand battles had been fought on the plains below,” with warriors of titanic size in deadly combat, “and on every field the giant heroes had built a monument.”