Down the Great Unknown (20 page)

On June 25, Powell and the men set out at seven in the morning. “We enter Split Mountain Cañon,” Powell wrote, “sailing in through a broad, flaring, brilliant gateway.” They ran two or three rapids and portaged two more but then decided to stop for the day because Sumner had fallen ill. (Sumner was no more inclined to coddle himself than anyone else. “One of the men sick,” he noted curtly in his journal.) By evening, he felt better. Powell had spent the previous couple of days not quite well himself.

The next day began with a portage, which was as miserable as ever, and then continued with a portage in the rain, which was worse. While the men worked, Powell climbed the hills looking for fossils. “Spent two hours to find one,” Sumner complained, “and came back to find a peck that the men had picked up on the bank of the river.” By mid-afternoon, the portages were complete. Four fast river miles brought everyone out of the canyon, and then, wrote Sumner, “all at once the Great Uinta Valley spread out before us as far as the eye could reach. It was a welcome sight to us after two weeks of the hardest kind of work, in a canyon where we could not see half a mile, very often, in any direction except straight up.”

Spurred by the sight of their goal, “all hands pulled with a will,” Sumner wrote, “except the Professor and Mr. Howland. The Professor being a one-armed man, he was set to watching the geese”—in the hope of roast goose for dinner—while Oramel Howland was exempt from rowing because he had to map the country they were passing through. Sumner's brief mention of Powell's injury was rare. In all the first-person accounts of the expedition, including Powell's own, this passing remark was one of perhaps half a dozen such comments.

The slyly mocking tone of Sumner's references to “the Professor” was telltale, a not-so-subtle reminder that it was Sumner, not Powell, who truly knew the West. In the next sentence, Sumner changed the allusion but not the message. “Our sentinel,” he wrote, “soon signaled a flock of geese ahead.”

For once the hunters, who had come in for so much teasing, aimed true. When the crew made camp shortly afterward, they carried ten fresh-killed geese. Bradley managed a perfunctory grumble (the geese were “very poor at this season”), but everyone was in high spirits. The men calculated that the day's run had brought them thirty miles, and Sumner was nearly well again. Bradley even seemed to have taken on a bit of Powell's fondness for geology. “Found a fine lot of foccils in the last cañon and have added three new varieties to our number and found them in great abundance,” he noted contentedly.

The next day, June 27, lived up to the promise of its predecessor. The boats sped “down a river that cannot be surpassed for wild beauty of scenery,” Sumner wrote, “sweeping in great curves through magnificent groves of cottonwood. It has an average width of two hundred yards and depth enough to float a New Orleans packet. Our easy stroke of eight miles an hour conveys us just fast enough to enjoy the scenery, as the view changes with kaleidoscopic rapidity.”

Only two weeks before, the men had spent a day of killing labor and limped into camp in the evening with only three miles' progress to show for it. Now they reckoned they had covered sixty-three miles in a single day and, as a bonus, had bagged eight more geese. Though hardly the fat, domesticated birds of a Dickensian Christmas feast—these geese were scrawny, wild, half-grown things with puny pinfeathers that left them unable even to fly to safety—the birds provided diversion, if not quite sport, and they had the great virtue of not being bacon.

The “easy stroke” downriver that Sumner celebrated was not quite as easy as all that. For weeks, the expedition had been bedeviled by rapids; now the men were finding that rowing in flat water was perhaps as bad, if not as dangerous. As the valley broadened, the river grew wide and sluggish. “We have had a hard day's work,” Bradley wrote, “which comes harder to us than running rappids.” And though Bradley conceded that the valley they were traveling through was indeed “beautiful” and filled with green islands, he pointed out that the bluffs were still “dry and barren” and the camp was swarming with mosquitoes.

It would take more than mosquitoes to mar the big picture. The expedition had set out a month and three days before. They estimated that they had already come roughly 350 miles, perhaps one-fourth or one-third of the distance to their final destination. (In fact, they had covered 258 miles. The next major milestone, the point where the Green and the Grand joined to form the Colorado, was another 245 miles downstream.) A progress report on the journey so far, an outsider might have guessed, could have gone either way. On the one hand, the expedition had made it safely for hundreds of miles, through countless rapids, with everyone not only alive but cheerful. On the other hand, they had already lost one boat, three men had nearly drowned, game was hard to find, the food had begun to spoil, and there was every reason to fear that the worst part of the journey had yet to begin.

But as Powell and his crew approached this first milestone, with its promise of news from the outside, no one seemed ambivalent. Not even the ever-wary Bradley could hide his optimism. “We must be very near the Uinta River which everybody said we could never reach,” he crowed, “but everybody will be mistaken for we are nearing it so fast and so easily that we are certain of success.”

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

HOAX

 

At about three o'clock on the afternoon of June 28, Powell and his men pulled ashore near the mouth of the Uinta River. They made camp under a large cottonwood tree on the Green's west bank. This was open country and congenial scenery. Across the river lay “a splendid meadow,” Bradley wrote, “. . . without exception the finest mowing land I ever saw, as smooth and level as a floor and no rocks.”

As pleasant as the Uinta Valley was, especially in contrast with the barren canyons they had been traveling through, the men had little interest in looking around. Wagon trains en route from Denver to Salt Lake City had once crossed the Green here, in low water, but Sumner noted that the wagon trail was “not much of a road” and lately seemed to have been neglected by all travelers except “wolves, antelope, and perhaps a straggling Indian.” Tired but restless, the men were induced to linger only by the prospect of letters from home. “Hope to receive a good lot and think I shall,” Bradley wrote.

All the men started in on letters of their own. Andy Hall wrote to his brother. Young Hall sounded as breathless as a teenager who had just zoomed upside down and backward on a six-story roller coaster. “We had the greatest ride that ever was got up in the countenent,” he exclaimed. “the wals of the canone where the river runs through was 15 hundred feet in som places.”

Powell, Oramel Howland, and Sumner wrote personal letters and also composed accounts of the trip to send to newspapers. The newspaper stories served a twofold purpose. They delivered the welcome news that the men were still alive, and they shone the light of publicity on the expedition. For Powell, who had high hopes that this venture would launch his career, the public relations value of the story was not to be slighted. Powell wrote up the trip himself, and Howland (a printer and editor) happily set to work on a letter to his colleagues at the
Rocky Mountain News
. Sumner was a harder sell. In response to Powell's insistent arm-twisting, he grudgingly worked up his notes into a story for the
Missouri Democrat
. “I have written this with many misgivings,” he complained, “being more used to the rifle, lariat and trap, than the pen.”

He signed his account “Jack Sumner, Free Trapper,” the title a proud declaration that Sumner was not a hired drone on a company payroll but a freelancer who survived by his own wits and skill. Powell sent a brief note with Sumner's diary to smooth its way into print. His letter gives a hint of the patronizing attitude that the men often complained about. “I send manuscript journal of one of the trappers connected with the Colorado River Exploring Expedition,” Powell wrote. “I think you will find them somewhat lively, and may be able to use them. Of course they will need ‘fixing' a little, may be toning somewhat. Jack Sumner, the writer, has seen much wildlife and read extensively. He has prepared the manuscript at my request. Should you conclude to publish he will send more.”

That is the entire letter. It contains nothing overtly objectionable—the tone of apology, which Sumner would have resented, was at least in part a business letter convention—but it does seem to betray a telltale lack. What is missing is any hint that Powell saw his men as more than hired hands. Sumner was, after all, crucial to the expedition's success. The lead man in Powell's own boat, he was responsible (with Dunn) for bringing Powell and the
Emma Dean
through the rapids right side up and in one piece. After Powell and Walter, Sumner was the highest-ranking man in the expedition. He and the Major spent hours together every day drenched by the same waves and threatened by the same rocks. Daily he risked his life (as did all the others) for the expedition as a whole. At Disaster Falls, he had set out alone to rescue the Howland brothers and Goodman from the island where they were marooned. Perhaps he could be excused for chafing a bit at “the Professor” for taking him for granted.

Powell was the head of a team of proud and touchy men. By now, they were not only proud and touchy but tired and wet and hungry. A prudent leader would have gone out of his way to make sure that they did not feel unappreciated as well.

That was not Powell's strength. Strong-willed and self-confident, he took for granted that others felt as he did. On June 29, he wrote a letter to a colleague at Illinois State Normal University. “The party has reached this point in safety and having run 4 cañons of about 25 miles in length each . . . ,” he began. Then came a quick mention of some of the hardships they had overcome, and then an utterly characteristic coda. “Personally, I have enjoyed myself much, the scenery being wild and beautiful beyond description. All in good health—all in good spirits, and all with high hopes of success.” As telltale as the upbeat tone was Powell's automatic assumption that what he felt “personally,” “all” the others felt as well.

While Powell and his men sat writing cheery letters home, the nation awoke to startling news. “It is reported that the Powell exploring expedition was lost in the rapids of the Colorado river, with the exception of one man, who has come to Green River City,” the
St. Louis Democrat
announced on June 28. “He stated that he had not embarked with the party in the rapids, but followed along the banks and saw the party perish.”

As with many rumors, the story of Powell's drowned expedition had its roots in a true event. Just after Powell and his men launched their boats from Green River Station, a man named Theodore Hook (in some accounts his name is given as H. M. Hook) set out down the Green with an exploring party of his own. What a one-armed tenderfoot from back East could do, he could do better.

Hook was mistaken. Barely under way, in the chasm that Powell had named Red Canyon, he perished in a rapid. The expedition collapsed, and the rest of the party scrambled for home. Powell and his crew had taken only a week to reach Red Canyon. Word of the drowning spread at once, and somehow a true story about a prospecting party led by a man named Hook became a false story about an exploring expedition led by Powell.

Two years later, another expedition found grim evidence of the tragedy in Red Canyon. “I do not know how far they expected to go but this was as far as they got,” wrote one member of the 1871 group. “Their abandoned boats . . . still lay half-buried in sand on the left-hand bank, and not far off on a sandy knoll was the grave of the unfortunate leader marked by a pine board set up, with his name painted on it. Old sacks, ropes, oars, etc., emphasized the completeness of the disaster.”

As the rumor that Powell and his men had been lost flashed along the telegraph lines, it grew and mutated. On July 2, the
Omaha Republican
reported that nine of the ten members of the Powell expedition had drowned two weeks before. For “the particulars of their sad fate,” the
Republican
relied on the report of a trapper and Indian fighter named William Riley, who had been told the story by the expedition's lone survivor. Riley had met this bereaved man, who gave his name as John Sumner, at Fort Bridger in Wyoming.

The crisis supposedly came at a spot “Sumner” called Hell's Gate, apparently somewhere below Brown's Hole. “The water is precipitated down this gorge at a velocity of forty miles per hour,” the
Republican
reported, “hence not the shadow of a chance for escape presents itself.” This was not a challenge to an intrepid explorer but an invitation to suicide. “No boat ever built could possibly pass over these falls without being shattered to atoms.”

The
Republican
hurried through the rest of the story, as if saddened to linger over such testament to human folly. Powell, the
Republican
noted regretfully, had been bent on glory no matter the cost. “Major Powell trusted too much to his long experience and superior intelligence . . . Warned time and again by those familiar with the nature of his route, he turned a deaf ear to every voice and pressed on. For the judgment of his followers we can only say that they are deserving a monument for their fidelity and the steadfast manner in which they confided and clung to him, as if, indeed, he was the great oracle to guide them on.”

What was Powell's story but the sadly predictable tale of a leader with a tragic flaw? “Our account is soon told. Ambition had a strong hold upon reason. Judgment was laid aside, and the Napoleonic Major, with his brave band of faithful companions, saving one who was ordered on shore . . . made every preparation, and then entered death's portals—the awful, treacherous portals of Hell's Gate.”