Down the Great Unknown (2 page)

Neither Powell nor any of his men had ever run a rapid. As a young man with a bad case of wanderlust (and two arms), Powell had rowed the length of the Mississippi, rowed the Ohio and the Illinois and the Des Moines. But those were rolling, midwestern rivers that hardly bore comparison with the rambunctious Green and Colorado. One of the crew had perhaps put in some time in fishing boats off the New England coast. In comparison with the others, Powell was an old pro. He had
seen
white water, from a cliff he and his wife had climbed high above the Green River at the Gates of Lodore.

“Reading the river”—identifying a path through the chaos of colliding waves and protruding rocks and sucking whirlpools—is a skill as fundamental to a boatman as reading music is to a musician, but the river was a closed book to Powell and all his men. Powell claimed once that the nine men of his crew were “all experienced in the wild life of the country, and most of them in boating on dangerous streams,” but that was a stunning exaggeration. “We were all green at the business,” one of the men acknowledged.

There would be no choice but to learn on the fly while careening downstream. They could hardly have picked a more forbidding classroom. (Making matters worse, the ten men had only one life jacket among them, for Powell. The able-bodied men disdained such sissy stuff.) Stretches of the Green are still feared today, and the Colorado is near the top of any list of America's white-water rivers. Powell planned to portage rapids whenever that was possible, on the theory that the heavy labor of carrying the boats (and their tons of supplies) was preferable to drowning in them. But portaging was backbreaking work and dangerous besides, for a false step could mean a broken ankle or a boat impaled on a rock. The alternative was to “line” the boats downstream—to tie ropes to bow and stern and to hang on while clambering up and over the slick rocks along the river's edge. Lining a bucking boat through the rocky margin of a rapid carried all the appeal of dragging a skittish horse through an obstacle
course.

The only remaining choice, running the rapids, seemed suicidal. Even today, the big rapids on the Green and the Colorado are the stuff of dry mouths and pounding hearts. For amateurs seeing them for the first time, the rapids must have been a revelation, a rumbling, heaving nightmare. “To get an idea of the scale involved,” one modern-day river guide suggests, “think of yourself as sitting in a boat on the floor of your living room. The waves . . . can be as high as the ceiling of a room on the second story! Now think of being on the roof of that two-floor house and looking down twenty feet to the bottom of a dark, churning hole.”

Early in the journey, Powell and his men would still have the option of giving up, abandoning the river and hiking overland to safety. Even later on they could hope to find a side canyon that led to freedom. But that was a desperate hope. Without maps, no one could know how many miles it was to the next side canyon or where it led or whether it dead-ended in a sheer, unclimbable wall. For all anyone could know, there
was
no “next one.” Once the river had pinned itself between towering rock walls, there would be no chance of escape for days on end. In canyon country, the choice would be to run the river or die.

The problem was that there were only two exits, and both were blocked. First, retreat was impossible. To take a rowboat upstream through mighty rapids was unthinkable, like trying to push a boulder up a cliff. Second, trying to climb up and over the canyon walls, in a kind of outdoor jailbreak, was almost as unlikely. The legends that had grown around the Grand Canyon, for example, were close to the truth. As long ago as 1540, Spanish conquistadors (led by Hopi guides) had crept to the rim and gazed down in slack-jawed stupefaction. The view from water level is even more stunning. From the river, the canyon cliffs soar upward for a
mile
. Writers talk glibly of the “canyons” of Manhattan, but the analogy understates reality. You could stack one of the World Trade Center towers on top of the other, and they would reach only halfway to the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Once the canyon walls closed around them, Powell and his men would be as bound by their decision as sky divers falling through the air. All they could do would be to struggle on, knowing that each mile would carry them deeper into the earth, farther into the unknown, and farther from the possibility of rescue by the outside world.

Between their starting point and safety, though they could not have known it, stretched a thousand miles of river and nearly five hundred rapids. At spots beyond counting, a moment's inattention or the briefest of mistakes could prove fatal. Drowning was only the most obvious hazard. A capsizing that left the food stores soaked or sunk would mean death just as surely, though more slowly. A boat damaged beyond repair could be a calamity. A broken leg could be a death sentence. Skill and will counted only to a degree; luck and caprice were as important. The river could grab a boat and trap it in a “hole,” a kind of whirlpool turned on its side, or it could take a drowning man and spit him contemptuously to safety. The river doled out punishment with a kind of casual indifference, as a bored lion might flick a mighty paw.

Today's river runners can only shake their heads in disbelief. “By modern standards,” one of them writes, “[Powell's boats] were the technical equivalent of walnut shells.” But inadequate boats were only the beginning. Powell and his fellow novices would have been in desperate trouble even with the best of equipment, like beginning drivers trying to take a Ferrari down an icy mountain road.

All this was the penalty for being first. (Nor was there a crowded field of those vying for second place. The Colorado was so fearsome that as late as World War II, seven decades after Powell, only 250 people had ever been through the Grand Canyon in boats.)

In 1869, no one ran white water, and so no one knew what boats were suited to it or how best to maneuver them. Today, boat design and boating technique have had decades to evolve, and 3,500 private boaters a year run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. (They wait ten to fifteen years for the privilege.) The National Park Service, which oversees the sign-up process, requires that these boatmen have some degree of skill and experience. Today, Powell and his men would not qualify for a permit to run the Grand Canyon.

The private boaters are far from alone. Every year twenty thousand wet, happy, scared tourists opt for Grand Canyon trips run by commercial outfitters. Every one of those boatmen, whether private or commercial, has a store of information that Powell would have given his
other
arm for. They have maps that detail the river's course, and its hazards, mile by mile. They know from countless books and videos what they will see along the way. They know the boats to use and the food to bring and the gear to pack. They know how the rapids they will confront compare with other rapids they have run. They know that if all goes wrong, the Park Service will swoop down and helicopter them to safety.

Above all else, they have one priceless bit of knowledge whose lack tormented Powell and his companions. They know that what they are trying is possible.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CREW

 

Inside the palatial railroad car, the mirrors were French and the carpets Belgian, and the menu included such indulgences as raw oysters and lobster salad and omelets made with a splash of rum. A passenger crossing the Green River by train might have been forgiven for neglecting to glance out the window. And, in truth, even if a curious sightseer had turned his eyes from the sparkling chandeliers and the black-walnut woodwork, he might not have deemed the scene below him worthy of a second glance.

He would have seen, in the middle weeks of May 1869, an empty desert and a broad river and Powell's crew of novices struggling to learn how to handle their boats. Powell and his brother Walter, and the expedition's four boats, had arrived in town on May 11, by train from Chicago. By then the rest of the men had been impatiently hanging around Green River Station for three weeks. The town was shabby and tiny—it had only a hundred residents and had not existed a year before—and three weeks was a lengthy sentence.

In its brief heyday, during the single month when it had marked the transcontinental railroad's farthest advance west, Green River Station had bustled with activity, nearly all of it illicit. These end-of-the-line towns were known collectively as Hell on Wheels. Like the others, Green River Station had plenty to tempt hardworking railroad workers and to repel anyone else. “By day disgusting, by night dangerous, almost everybody dirty, many filthy, and with the marks of lowest vice,” wrote one newspaperman, “averaging a murder a day; gambling and drinking, hurdy-gurdy dancing and the vilest of sexual commerce the chief business and pastime of the hours.”

Those were the good old days. By the time Powell's men arrived in Green River Station, the railroad workers had been gone for six months and the town was almost deserted. The visitor who had sampled Jake Fields's homemade whiskey and Ah Chug's apple pie had largely exhausted Green River's amusements.

Powell had chosen Green River Station as a rendezvous not because of any virtue of the town itself but simply because the train stopped there. This was no ordinary train, but the transcontinental railroad, the marvel of the age. The name alone, in the nineteenth century, conveyed power, glamour, and pizzazz. And it was brand-new. On May 10, 1869, millions of Americans across the nation had waited eagerly for word of the driving of the golden spike that linked East and West. For six years, the Central Pacific's army of laborers had been racing east from Sacramento over the Sierra Nevada, digging their way through forty-foot snowdrifts and blasting tunnels through thousands of feet of solid rock. (Workmen, especially the Chinese, had died in such numbers that the expression “not a Chinaman's chance” came into common use.) In the meantime, the Union Pacific workforce, at its peak ten thousand strong, had raced westward from Omaha, laying track across the treeless plains and through the scorching
desert while fighting off Cheyenne and Sioux raiding parties.

Now, finally, the last link was forged. The spanning of the continent, the
New York Times
exclaimed, marked “the completion of the greatest enterprise ever yet undertaken.” At 12:47 p.m. on May 10, 1869, a telegraph operator tapped three dots, signaling “done.” The signal triggered a simultaneous nationwide celebration—the first ever. Fire bells rang in every hamlet in the land; cannons thundered in San Francisco and New York and Omaha and Sacramento; ten thousand residents of Chicago took to the streets and formed a parade that stretched seven miles. To an enthralled nation, it was an occasion as momentous as the announcement of victory at the end of a long war.

•      •      •

For John Wesley Powell, the train made feasible the assault on what he liked to call “the Great Unknown.” Rather than having to build his own boats on site with whatever materials he could scrounge together, like a desert-bound Robinson Crusoe, Powell could have first-rate, professionally made boats built in Chicago and sent west by train. He had placed his order with Thomas Bagley's boatyard in early spring, 1869. On May 11, Powell stepped off the train at Green River Station, collected his handsome new boats, and joined his restless crew.

For one moment, two of the epic sagas in American history occupied the same stage, though few ventures could have had as little in common as the transcontinental railroad and Powell's expedition. Like the space shuttle or the Concorde a century later, the transcontinental railroad was the racing, roaring embodiment of technological might and engineering elegance; Powell's rowboats were the products of a technology nearly as old as human culture. Newspapers across the country had lavished countless pages on the building of the railroad; John Wesley Powell and his men were all but anonymous. The federal government had backed the railroad with an unending succession of giveaways of cash and land; Powell had knocked on one closed door after another in Washington, looking for funding, and had come up next to empty. Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington and a host of other eager, striving men would make millions from the railroad, piling up fortunes that generations of descendants could barely dent; Powell
and his men worried about starving to death. The story of the railroad was an epic with a cast of thousands; Powell and his crew were a force of ten lone men.

Now the two expeditions found themselves at the same lonely spot in the desert, in a juxtaposition that seemed almost to have required time travel. It was as if, on a single parade ground, one could see a battalion of modern soldiers with automatic weapons and night-vision goggles and also a host of knights in battered armor, perched atop gaunt-ribbed stallions.

In their reliance on tiny boats and fragile oars and their own muscle and nerve, Powell's men were a new link in an ancient chain. In common with explorers in every age, they had willingly left the safety and familiarity of home to visit an unknown world beyond the reach of rescue. But unlike modern explorers, unlike astronauts in particular, Powell and the other nine men of the grandly named Colorado River Exploring Expedition were hardly an elite corps, certainly not the survivors of a rigorous selection program.

The crew—not Powell—bore a closer resemblance to a band of rough, experienced camping buddies in pursuit of the ultimate outdoor adventure. The very factors that would have sent more prudent men scurrying toward hearth and home drew these men on. Territory unknown? Death a possibility? Good! When do we start?

The youngest member of the group was barely into his twenties, the oldest thirty-six. Six of the men, in addition to Powell, were Civil War veterans. (All seven had fought on the Union side.) Each man preferred life outdoors with a blanket and a rifle (or, in Powell's case, with a collecting box for fossilized bones and shells) to a sheltered existence of weekly paychecks and regular mealtimes. Only Powell was married.