Down the Great Unknown (24 page)

Despite the men's increasing familiarity with the river's ways, Powell continued to insist on lining and portaging. What Powell took to be prudent, his men saw as maddeningly overcautious. What they saw as bold, he took to be reckless. This was trouble. Every day brought a profusion of new rapids. If the muttering about how to deal with them grew into outright rebellion, the expedition might well fall apart.

The disagreement between Powell and the crew did not reflect differences in temperament so much as differences in responsibility. Powell was as bold as any of his crew. But as leader and organizer of the trip, he had different responsibilities and priorities than his men. That made for built-in conflict. “If you're the leader and you have the welfare of the whole expedition in mind,” explains Michael Ghiglieri, a boatman who has led trips on rivers around the world, “then you know that prudence is the wiser course, however much pain is involved. But if you're one of the crew, and you've got big, nasty bruises on both shins and your knees are bleeding and your toes are cracking from fungal infections and your hands are raw from ropes burning through them, and then the leader says, ‘Let's line this one,' that's hard to take.”

Lining and portaging are painful, and in addition they are painfully slow. A rapid that might take thirty terrifying seconds in a boat can eat up agonizing hours on foot. “Lining is galling work,” says Ghiglieri. “It's also fatiguing, it's also hurting, and it delays everything. It's all bad. The only thing that's good about it is that when you finish you probably still have all your stuff. So for the men, there's a tremendous temptation to just get in the boats and go. But for Powell, the pull was just as strong the other way. He learned the hard way right off the bat, at Disaster Falls, what happens when things screw up. And if he lost one more boat, he was out of business, it was over. It was two strikes and you're out, not three.”

For the expedition as a whole, a fragile coalition to begin with, here was still another potent source of dissension. As the men grew ever more tired and hungry and beat-up, it seemed certain to grow uglier.

A gale of hot, dry wind blasted through camp on the evening of July 9, making the prospect of the next morning's portaging all the more burdensome. The air was so thick with blowing sand that the men covered their heads to breathe. The rapids' unending roar ratcheted the tension up another notch. “We need only a few flashes of lightning to meet Milton's most vivid conceptions of Hell,” Bradley lamented.

As if insulted that Bradley had taken it lightly, the river the next day was in as foul a mood as the men. The morning of July 9 was “the wildest day's run of the trip thus far,” a nerve-racking journey through “a succession of rappids or rather a continuous rapid with a succession of cataracts for 20 miles.” The men ran some of the rapids and lined two. Twenty-four hours earlier, Bradley had waved aside the dangers of hiking out of the canyon and had clamored for a chance to run rapids. Today he had the hurry knocked out of him. “We are quite careful now of our provisions as the hot blasts that sweep through these rocky gorges admonish us that a walk out to civilization is almost certain death,” he wrote, “so better go a little slow and safe.”

The men spent July 10 in camp making observations and repairing the boats. Sumner was practicing with the sextant, learning how to determine latitude and longitude. Powell and Oramel Howland climbed the cliff with a barometer, measuring the thicknesses of the various strata as they climbed. This called for an odd combination of athleticism and scientific precision. A barometer's reading changes with altitude but also with the weather; in order to make sure that the difference between the readings on two barometers is a true indication of the differences in altitude between them (and has not been skewed by a change in the weather), the measurements must be simultaneous. A man in camp took a barometer reading at half-hour intervals. Powell and Howland, in the meantime, raced ahead with
their
barometer, struggling to reach the base of one rock level or the top of another precisely on the half hour so that they could take a reading of their own. Later they would compare the two sets of figures. Thin strata found
Powell and Howland waiting cockily for the half hour to arrive. On thick strata, they ran and stumbled to meet their deadline.

Early in the afternoon, they reached the plateau, four thousand feet above the river. (Hikers who have struggled up the manicured Bright Angel Trail in the Grand Canyon know that this was no casual jaunt.) Howland set off in pursuit of some deer he had seen in the distance, and Powell went off to climb a mountain. By the time they met again (Howland was empty-handed), it had grown late, and the sun was sinking fast. Running and jumping their way downhill, the two men made it as far as they could. But darkness caught them still high on the cliff side, and they had to feel their way the rest of the trek home, guided only by the light of the campfire in the distance. “A long, slow, anxious descent we make,” Powell wrote.

Only two days before, Powell's exasperating caution had driven the crew to the edge of their patience. Now, as if defying anyone to pigeonhole him, the mercurial leader had provided a matching display of recklessness. It was not merely that racing down a cliff in fading light was asking for trouble. Powell was a fine climber, but he knew he was adding
extra
risk to what was risky enough in any case. A companion on a different expedition has left us a record of climbing with Powell: “On the way back the Major's cut-off arm was on the rock side of a gulch we had followed up, and I found it necessary, two or three times, to place myself where he could step on my knee, as his stump had a tendency to throw him off his balance. Had he fallen at these points the drop would have been four hundred or five hundred feet. I mention this to show how he never permitted his one-armed condition to interfere with his doing things.”

Bradley, who had been in camp throughout Powell and Howland's cliff-side adventure, might have preferred to be caught in the dark himself. Instead, he had spent the day working on his journal and doing his best to endure Andy Hall's exuberance. Playful as a puppy, the boisterous Hall had been singing. Hall had “a voice like a crosscut saw,” in Bradley's judgment, but he was not bashful about displaying it. Over and over again came the booming chorus: “When he put his arm around her she
bustified
like a forty pounder, look away, look away, look away in Dixie's land.”

The next day was a Sunday. To Bradley's dismay, Powell again showed no inclination to honor the Sabbath. Instead, the men set out early and, in about three-quarters of a mile, came to the day's first rapid. Bradley had scouted it the day before—it struck him as “bad” but runnable despite “very heavy” waves—and Powell evidently shared his judgment. Everyone made it through, but Powell's boat, the
Emma Dean
, broke one oar and lost another. That left her with only two oars rather than four, so that only one man could row. They had no spare oars and could not find any pieces of driftwood suitable for sawing, but they figured they could limp on. Downstream, when they reached a point that permitted an easy climb to the plateau, they could hike to the top and cut new oars from a tree.

Soon they approached another rapid. Standing up to study it, Powell decided that it could be run. Once in the rapid, when it was too late for second thoughts, he saw that the channel veered sharply to the left and the river hit hard against the cliff face that blocked its way. Powell gave the order to land upstream from the cliff, but it was too late, especially with only one man at the oars. The boat swept downstream, overpowered and out of control, headed toward a boulder in midstream. Somehow they made it by, but a wave rebounded off the boulder and filled the
Emma Dean
to the gunwales. Then another wave hit her. Bradley, watching from his own boat, saw the
Emma Dean
“rowled over and over” and Powell, Sumner, and Dunn flung into the river. “I soon find that swimming is very easy, and I cannot sink,” Powell wrote later. Powell had a life jacket, but swimming one-armed through the swirling chop can hardly have been easy.

By the time Powell located the
Emma Dean
, she was twenty or thirty feet away, still afloat but tumbling, right side up one minute and upside down the next. Powell swam toward her, trying to keep his head above water but occasionally finding himself pummeled by giant waves and gasping for breath. Finally he reached the boat and found Sumner and Dunn there already, doing their best to hold on. Dunn lost his grip and disappeared underwater, but Sumner quickly hauled him back to the surface. They were drifting faster now, approaching another rapid. Holding the boat and kicking with all their strength, the three men struggled toward shore, the rapid ever closer. Finally, still clinging to the boat and just upstream of the rapid, they managed a crash landing into a pile of driftwood.

Once ashore, the men made camp and built an enormous fire to dry their clothes. It had been a hellacious day. They had advanced less than a mile, and Sumner and Dunn might well have drowned. “We broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments,” Sumner observed. “Major Powell said he lost three hundred dollars in bills. I lost my temper and at least a year's growth—didn't have anything else to lose.” The only good news was that there would be no need to climb a cliff to look for wood to make oars. The driftwood provided plenty of raw material.

Powell put the day's losses at two guns, one barometer, and some blankets. The gear had been thrown from the open compartment of the
Emma Dean
when the boat rolled over. “The guns and barometer are lost,” Powell wrote, “but I succeeded in catching one of the rolls of blankets, as it drifted by, when we were swimming to shore.” (The last claim sounds unlikely, even for as fine an athlete as Powell. Could a one-armed man swimming in high waves and strong current while helping to pull a boat to shore
also
nab a floating bedroll? Powell may have indulged in an understandable bit of exaggeration in describing how he helped rescue the
Emma Dean
. Bradley's account sounds more plausible: “Major had to leave the boat and swim to land, as he has but one arm and her constant turning over made it impossible for him to hold onto her with one hand, but the other two [Jack and Dunn] brought the boat in below safe.” While he swam, Powell may well have spotted his bedroll and grabbed
it.)

In the privacy of his diary that night, Bradley gloated just a bit. Perhaps Powell would be less inclined from now on to treat Sunday as just another day. “Sunday again,” he wrote, “and Major has got his match.”

Bradley's own match came soon enough. At noon the next day, just when everyone was beginning to relax after successfully running several rapids, “we came suddenly upon an old roarer.” Boulders strewn along the channel's left side pushed the water right, beneath a rock ledge that jutted out from the cliff face. They stopped to scout, and, curiously, Powell decided that this was one they could run. The plan was to stay as far left as possible, skirting the rocks but staying well clear of the overhanging ledge on the river's right side.

The
Emma Dean
, running first, swallowed a wave but made it safely. So did the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
. Last in line came the
Maid of the Cañon
, with Bradley, Walter Powell, and Seneca Howland. The
Maid
got too far to the right and found herself swept down a chute into a cauldron of waves rebounding off the right-hand wall. A giant wave knocked Bradley overboard, but somehow one foot got snagged. The boat rushed along willy-nilly, Walter Powell flailing helplessly at the oars and Bradley dragging behind the boat like a tin can tied to a car's bumper. Unable to pull his foot free and unable to lift himself back into the boat, he could do no more than struggle to get an arm to the surface so that he could grab the gunwale and lift his head above the water for a moment.

The boat seemed only seconds from smashing into the jutting rock ledge on the river's right side. “To us who are below,” Powell wrote, “it seems impossible to keep the boat from going under the overhanging cliff.” At the last instant, Walter Powell, a man of bull-like strength, managed to pull away from the cliff. Then, with the boat finally in flat water, he grabbed Bradley and dragged him safely aboard.

Bradley brushed it all aside. No harm done, he wrote that night, “
except a glorious ducking
and a slight cut on one of my legs.”

To everyone's immense relief, this fearsome rapid seemed to mark the end of what Powell had named the Cañon of Desolation. Their emergence into more open country, they dared to hope, would also bring a change of fortune.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

“HURRA! HURRA! HURRA!”

 

It was not to be. On the afternoon of the same day that Bradley had washed overboard, they found themselves entering a new canyon, this one cut in gray sandstone. They named it Coal Cañon. (Today it is known as Gray Canyon.) The trouble began almost at once.

“About three o'clock in the afternoon,” Powell wrote, “we meet with a new difficulty.” The river filled the entire channel, hemmed in on both sides by vertical cliffs. Downstream a rapid waited. Portaging was out of the question, for there was no possibility of climbing past the rapid (to say nothing of climbing while carrying hundreds of pounds of supplies or a boat). Lining the boats along the edge of the rapid seemed impossible, as well, because there was no shoreline where the men holding the ropes could stand. And the rapid seemed too formidable to run.

Eventually they came up with a plan for a new kind of lining. It was complicated, as schemes to maneuver boats and ropes often are, but the difficulty was nothing in comparison with the danger. Every boatman knows that long ropes, heavy boats, and strong currents are a bad combination. Ropes can snap, boats can lurch, men can slip. A man caught on the downstream side of a rope tied to a careening boat can be pulled underwater and drowned before he has time to cry out.