Down the Great Unknown (25 page)

The strategy here involved a kind of high-stakes game of leapfrog. The men landed on a boulder in the river and, holding a rope tied to the
Emma Dean
, paid out the rope to its full length. The
Emma Dean
strained at her line like a German shepherd watching a squirrel just out of reach. But here was the clever bit—the
Emma Dean
had brought with her another long line, this one tied to the second boat (which was still waiting back upstream). On a signal, the second boat pushed out into the current, yanking against the line held by the men in the
Emma Dean
. In a moment, this line, too, was taut. Now
two
boats sat in mid-rapid, fighting against the lines constraining them. The
Emma Dean
was the farther upstream of the two, still held by the men standing on the boulder; the second boat sat farther downstream, held by the
Emma Dean
. A replay of the same trick brought the third boat into the game. It ended up the farthest downstream of all, held by the second boat.

It is hard to imagine a more precarious setup than three boats lashed one to the next in a wild rapid. Now came the hard part. The men in the third boat, who were the nearest to the flat water below the rapid, managed to pull into a cove along the left-hand cliff wall. Safe at last, they tied their boat up securely. Then they turned their attention to reeling in the other two boats as they swung by. The last task would be to rescue poor Bill Dunn, who had been left by himself, upstream on the boulder where the whole adventure had begun.

Dunn was a strong swimmer whose skill had earned him this dubious honor. He jumped into the river, swimming with one hand and holding on to the line that trailed behind the
Emma Dean
with the other, a tail to the
Emma Dean
's kite. Having the line to hold was a mixed blessing. It meant, on the one hand, that if the men could drag in the
Emma Dean
, they would bring Dunn in as well. But it also meant that Dunn was perpetually in danger of snarling himself in the rope and being dragged underwater. He tried to aim somewhere in the direction of the cove where the third boat had tied up, in the hope that he could be pulled to safety. And so he was.

What remained, Powell noted nonchalantly, was only “a short portage.”

•      •      •

It had been a grueling day, and night brought no solace. “We camp on a sand beach,” Powell wrote. “The wind blows a hurricane; the drifting sand almost blinds us; and nowhere can we find shelter.” Even for guests on the most luxurious of commercial river trips today, the sand can become oppressive if the wind is blowing hard. Sleeping bags become scratchy and gritty, and so do bathing suits. Eyes itch and burn. Salad, steak, even pudding all crunch disconcertingly. (To prepare for a river trip, one outfitter suggests, it is advisable to place pans full of sand around your home and then turn on a dozen or so industrial-strength fans.) Throw in a thunderstorm or a few too many dousings toward the end of a long day on the water and everyone's nerves start to fray. Honeymooners who have been cooing at each other begin to snarl instead. Doting parents snap at their children, and boatmen scowl at any passengers foolish enough to venture a question.

For Powell and his men, who were immeasurably more rugged than modern travelers, the sand was merely an irritation. But, having suffered irritation aplenty, they were in a mood to take it personally. “The wind continues to blow all night,” Powell wrote. “The sand sifts through our blankets, and piles over us, until we are covered as in a snow-drift. We are glad when morning comes.” This last, mild-sounding comment bears noting. These were men who referred to a near-drowning as “a glorious ducking,” and who hardly saw a reason to refer to a missing arm at all. We can presume that if they admitted they were “glad” to see morning come, then in truth the night must have been close to unbearable.

Morale was fast becoming a problem. After forty-nine days on the river, the men's reserves of optimism and enthusiasm were wearing thin. They were exhausted, bruised, sick unto death of beans and bacon, and endlessly worried about what lay ahead. By now, hunger and anxiety had become chronic, a kind of maddening background drone like a mosquito's buzzing. The last few days had heaped new woes on top of the old ones. The
Emma Dean
had catapulted Powell, Sumner, and Dunn into the river only two days before. Bradley had washed overboard the next day. That same day had brought the trickiest lining experience of the entire trip. Even the weather, with its baking sun and gusting winds and skin-flailing sandstorms, seemed newly malevolent.

And then, just when they most needed the river to relent, it did. “Pulled out early,” Sumner wrote on July 13, “and had an exciting ride of 18 miles, passing 19 rapids.” The river was swift and easy, the rapids big enough to be exhilarating but not so ominous as to present any great danger. For several days, the men's diary entries had talked of swamping and foundering and trudging and slipping and falling. Now, suddenly, it was as if a curtain had risen on a new play. “We glide along, mile after mile,” Powell noted with delight.

Did this represent a genuine change of heart on the river's part—by now it was almost impossible to avoid thinking in such terms—or was something more malevolent at work? Perhaps the river, like a cat with a particularly amusing mouse, had merely put a halt to today's torment in order to enjoy tomorrow's all the more. No matter. The mice were too relieved to ask questions.

On the dismal day when the
Emma Dean
had flipped, they had advanced less than a mile. Now they were on pace to gain forty miles in a single day. By noon on July 13 they had emerged from Coal Cañon. Instead of cliffs of sandstone and shale and vistas of brown and gray, the expedition found itself in what Bradley called “a barren parched dessert” swept by hot, swirling winds.

As the sun beat down on the bare sand, the haze of heat imparted a kind of shivering instability to the blue and gray and brown buttes and to snow-capped Uncompahgre Peak far off to the east. “Plains, and hills, and cliffs, and distant mountains seem vaguely to be floating about in a trembling, wave rocked sea,” Powell wrote, “and patches of landscape will seem to float away, and be lost, and then reappear.” Sumner, as usual, resisted the desert's spell. It was, he noted curtly, “as desolate a country as anyone need wish to see.”

But the fast pace had revived the men's spirits, at least temporarily. “We have run so many rapids we pay but little attention to them,” Bradley remarked, “and the weather and water boath being warm we rather enjoy getting wet and laugh at the one who gets wettest.” It helped, too, that they were nearing one of the crucial milestones of the trip. Somewhere, and soon, their rudimentary maps told them, they should reach the spot where the Green and the Grand joined to form the Colorado.

On the afternoon of July 13, the men came to one of the few spots where the Green could be forded. (It is today the site of the town of Green River, Utah.) Though the Green itself was largely uncharted, this crossing had long been known and formed part of the Old Spanish Trail from Santa Fe to California. When Powell and his men passed by, they found fresh footprints and a number of log rafts, newly made by Indians, tied up at the river's edge. “This is the place,” Powell wrote, “where the lamented Gunnison crossed, in the year 1853, when making an exploration for a railroad route to the Pacific coast.” The unfortunate Gunnison had been head of a surveying team looking for a railroad route across the Green. Pahvant Indians had killed him and seven others of his party and butchered the bodies. Powell decided not to linger.

The river seemed almost still now—so much for gliding along—and the men had to row hard in the broiling heat. Mid-July in the desert is the worst of the worst, but the crew toiled like slaves and made thirty-three miles. “As we get farther south,” Bradley noted, “the weather gets hotter and the sun shining on the sand-stone heats the whole cañon like an oven.” It hardly cooled at night, and the men felt as if they might suffocate. Still, Bradley insisted, neither the work nor the heat had sapped anyone's enthusiasm. If a stranger somehow appeared in camp, he would note at once “the cool deliberate determination to persevere” that possessed every man in the expedition.

Perhaps so, or perhaps Bradley felt momentarily in need of a self-administered pep talk. For in the same day's diary, he struck a considerably more somber note. “The whole country is inconceivably desolate,” he wrote, “as we float along on a muddy stream walled in by huge sand-stone bluffs that echo back the slightest sound. Hardly a bird save the ill-omened raven or an occasional eagle screaming over us; one feels a sense of loneliness as he looks on the little party, only three boats and nine men, hundreds of miles from civilization, bound on an errand the issue of which everybody declares must be disastrous.”

July 15 was just as hot and just as hard as its predecessor. At midday, the men pulled out a thermometer—one hundred degrees. They passed the mouth of the San Rafael River, which joined the Green from the west, and stopped for an hour or two to explore. Powell's description makes the brief stop sound pleasant as a picnic—“Arrowheads are scattered about, many of them very beautiful. Flint chips are seen strewn over the ground in great profusion, and the trails are well worn”—but Sumner left a more troubling, though cryptic, account. “Another chapter of the Powell-Howland squabble was commenced as we left the camp near the San Rafael,” he wrote. “A sad, bitter business. I wish I had put a stop to it long before I did.” Sumner gave no details, but Oramel Howland was in charge of mapmaking, and it seems likely that Powell had criticized him for doing poor work.

The river that once had swept the boats along at what seemed a locomotive's pace now seemed not to be moving at all. Rowing downstream was like rowing across an endless lake. Or, maybe, worse, for the river had revealed a new trick. As if to compound the misery caused by the merciless sun and a barely detectable current, the Green found a new way to toy with its victims.

“We go around a great bend to the right, five miles in length,” Powell wrote, “and come back to a point within a quarter of a mile of where we started. Then we sweep around another great bend to the left, making a circuit of nine miles, and come back to a point within six hundred yards of the beginning of the bend.” Powell seemed fascinated. “There is an exquisite charm in our ride to-day down this beautiful cañon,” he wrote. “It gradually grows deeper with every mile of travel; the walls are symmetrically curved, and grandly arched; of a beautiful color, and reflected in the quiet waters in many places.” The crew was less enchanted and more succinct. “River very crooked,” Sumner snapped.

For the men, laboring to the edge of their strength and nourished on only beans and rice (even the scrawny geese had vanished), this was exquisite torture. “The sun was so hot we could scarcely endure it,” Bradley wrote, “and much of the time the cañon was so closely walled in that the breeze could not reach us.” It had not been a terrifying or dramatic day, like some others, but it had been miserable in a grinding, spirit-sapping way. “We have worked as hard as we could to get only 25 miles . . . ,” Bradley went on. “Most of us have been unwell today from eating sour beans for supper last night.”

Powell struck a different note. “We are all in fine spirits, feel very gay, and the badinage of the men is echoed from wall to wall,” he wrote. Never much of a judge of other people's moods, he may simply have missed the men's sullenness. But he was writing years after the fact, with a sharp eye on history. More likely, he made a pragmatic decision that a portrait of indomitable pioneers would have more appeal than a tableau of weary, grouchy men clutching their bellies and moaning.

In honor of this latest canyon's graceful curves and twists, Powell named it Labyrinth Canyon.

Powell himself was indeed in fine spirits. As always, his fascination with the natural wonders around him lifted his mood. A geologist, and therefore a connoisseur of rock, Powell was nearly overwhelmed by the panorama before him. The sandstorms that had swept through camp only days before seemed to have vanished, from the canyons and from Powell's mind. “The landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock,” he marveled. “Cliffs of rock; tables of rock; plateaus of rock; terraces of rock; crags of rock—ten thousand strangely carved forms. Rocks everywhere, and no vegetation; no soil; no sand.”

Still new to such scenes, Powell found this “strange, weird, grand” region of the world hard to take in. More than a century later, a river runner and writer named Ellen Meloy spoke to Powell's puzzlement. The rivers and canyons of the Utah deserts, so new to Powell, were a kind of second home to Meloy. “What strange anomaly is a
desert river
?” she asked, as if speaking directly to the Major. “Bound by deep sandstone gorges for much of their course through Utah, the Green and Colorado water little along their banks. In many stretches there are no banks, merely a precipitous jumble of wall and cliff, a boulder or sandbar to stand on but no place to park towns or pasture or croplands. Think of the rivers not as a Tigris-Euphrates floodplain but as stone-encased, sky-vaulted blood vessels, their fluid pulled swiftly seaward by gradient and gravity.”

Powell was just learning to think in these unfamiliar terms, but for a geologist the world could hold no better classroom. He was not heedless of his men's concerns so much as preoccupied with his own far different ones. Like a person absorbed in a concert on the radio, he focused so intently that much of the everyday life around him faded into a kind of background murmur.

On July 16, the expedition reached the end of Labyrinth Canyon. But almost at once the river cut into still another canyon, this one with walls of red sandstone. Powell called it Stillwater Canyon, an apt name but a sign of frustration, too. The men were working without letup, and their labor never seemed to bring them any closer to their goal. Where was the Grand River?