Down the Great Unknown (3 page)

Five of the crew were “mountain men,” hunters and trappers by trade and human tumbleweeds by inclination. The mountain men were as savvy in the ways of the West as anyone on earth and twice as ornery, not much inclined to heed Powell or
any
leader. Their motives for joining the expedition varied, though vague but seductive notions of easy fortune played a key part. In a land almost unknown to white men, perhaps they would find game just waiting to be bagged and gold glistening unclaimed in the sunlight. Certainly they would find adventure, and that was perhaps the greatest temptation of all.

It was not simply that, by temperament, these men craved action. The times played a role as well. The Civil War had been agonizing, thrilling, boring, and terrifying. It was the most important event since the nation's birth and universally recognized as such. For the young men who survived it, it was clearly the most important thing that would
ever
happen to them. Few soldiers could echo the Gettysburg veteran who called that battle the most enjoyable three days of his life and a time of “joyous exultation.” But more than a few ex-soldiers did admit that sometimes civilian life seemed a bit humdrum, a shade anticlimactic. Most of Powell's men were in their twenties; the war had ended four years before. Against such a backdrop, the prospect of a glorious adventure, tempting at any time, beckoned all the more alluringly.

Powell's previous trips to the West—the first had been only two years before—had been in the company of eager and well-mannered college students. He liked to read aloud to them. Emerson and Scott and Longfellow were particular favorites. The men of this new expedition were a tougher lot. Campfires were places to drink and brag and swap tall tales. An attempt to read “The Lady of the Lake” aloud was unlikely to go well.

The expedition was strictly low-budget. Powell and six of his men were volunteers. (Powell, who took for granted that everyone felt as he did, noted blithely that the unpaid crew members “give their time, feeling remunerated by the opportunity for study.”) The other three men were to receive a small wage, one for taking measurements with the barometer, another for using the sextant, and the third for drawing maps. The wage, as spelled out in a homemade contract, was $25 per man per month. Even in an era when a carpenter or a stonemason earned only $3 a day and a hotel room cost $1 a night, this was far from lavish. In addition, the three men had been promised they would be given five days along the way to prospect for gold and silver and thirty days to hunt and trap. Finally, a long, meticulous list spelled out the prices Powell had agreed to pay for various skins: deer, $1.25 each; elk, $2; grizzly bear, $10; and so on, through two dozen animals.

The contract seemed routine, even optimistic in its presumption that there would be free time and good hunting. Only its last sentence hinted at darker prospects. “Should it be necessary to proceed on the journey without delay on account of disaster to boats or loss of rations,” it read, “then the time specified for hunting may not be required by either party, nor shall it be deemed a failure of contract to furnish supplies should such supplies be lost in transit.”

Powell's motives were different from those of his men. Hunting, prospecting, and general dare-deviltry held little appeal. For Powell, the expedition was primarily an
intellectual
adventure. “The object,” he declared, “is to make collections in geology, natural history, antiquities and ethnology,” in the hope of “adding a mite to the great sum of human knowledge.” This was sincere, if a bit coy. Powell was a man of vaulting ambition, and he rarely thought in “mites.” He intended to fill in a blank space on the map, as he freely declared. What was equally true, though Powell refrained from saying so outright, was that he intended to put
himself
on the map.

This is not to downplay Powell's passion for science, which was heartfelt. In the middle of the Civil War, for example, while his men dug trenches outside the besieged city of Vicksburg, Powell had combed the turned-up ground for fossils. In canyon country, where nature herself had dug trenches a mile deep, Powell's zeal for science would grow all the more fervent. Early on, at least, the men were bemused rather than irritated by the quirky and time-consuming obsessions of “the Professor.”

Let us gather the entire crew together for a moment. In the center stands John Wesley Powell, the undisputed leader. Powell was a formidable character—intelligent, impetuous, brave, driven, visionary, a jangle of primary colors with hardly a pastel in the mix. Every gesture was quick, every word emphatic. When he was caught up in an argument, for example, he would wave his maimed right arm, beating the air with his empty sleeve. (Powell made as little concession as possible to his injury, although it made even the most routine task a trial.
He could not wash
his own hand, for instance, and had to rely on someone else for help.) Magnificently self-assured, Powell had what a later generation would call charisma. He was, in the words of one contemporary, “eminently a magnetic man.”

Like Walt Whitman, who contained multitudes, Powell was a grab bag of contradictions. He was a democrat to the marrow of his bones, for instance, but also a firm believer in the privileges of rank. (The “boys” of his crew were “Billy” and “Sumner” and “Frank,” but Powell was always “the Major.”) He was so reckless that he put together an expedition that struck his contemporaries as more akin to a suicide pact, but so prudent that, to the men's dismay, he insisted on portaging rapid after rapid. He was gregarious, fond of reading aloud and singing, but on the river he often took his meals alone. He was “a Renaissance man,” in the judgment of one twentieth-century historian, but “as single-minded as a buzz saw” in the eyes of another.

One contradiction is especially jarring. Powell was honest and straightforward in his financial dealings—and this in the flamboyantly corrupt Gilded Age—but he was light-fingered as a pickpocket when it came to stealing credit from others. Sometimes it was merely a matter of embellishing a story. Sometimes it was bolder than that. Powell was a fine writer, and although his account of his historic expedition has become a classic, it combined reporting and invention in an intricate mix. “He wasn't all saint,” Powell's brother-in-law noted. “He could lie on occasion—be generous one minute and contemptible the next.”

The fudging began early on. “After three years' study of the matter,” Powell told the readers of the
Chicago Tribune
in a May 1869 letter announcing the aims of his expedition, “I think it doubtful whether these canyons have ever been seen by man.”

Even without three years' study, Powell knew better than that. For countless generations, Indians had not only seen the canyons of the Southwest but had lived in them. In the sixteenth century, they had guided Spanish explorers to the Grand Canyon's rim. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish had come back for a closer look. In 1857, the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers had surveyed a stretch of the Colorado beginning near its mouth and had descended into the Grand Canyon at two different spots. In 1861, in an official document entitled the
Report upon the Colorado River of the West
, the Corps had described its findings.

The early visitors had not been tempted to linger. “The region last explored is, of course, altogether valueless,” wrote Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives in concluding his 1861
Report
on the Grand Canyon. “It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.”

All this was common knowledge, and Powell had no reason to gloss over it. To have
seen
the Grand Canyon was one thing; to become the first to ride the wild Colorado through it was something else entirely. Powell's predecessors had gazed upon the dragon. They left to him the task of taking up a sword and battling it.

The second-ranking member of Powell's expedition was his younger brother Walter. A Civil War veteran himself and a onetime prisoner of the Confederates, Walter was as much a war casualty as his brother. Half crazy with all he had seen and endured, Walter was surly, sullen, alternately melancholy and bad-tempered. Even to the indulgent eye of his older brother, he appeared “silent, moody, and sarcastic.” One of the mountain men was even more direct. Walter Powell, he griped, was “about as worthless a piece of furniture as could be found in a day's journey.”

Among the others, Jack Sumner was first among equals. Sumner, another ex-soldier, was a guide and outfitter who ran a trading post at Hot Sulphur Springs in the Colorado Rockies. (“Trout fishing can now be indulged in to the fullest extent. Game is abundant. Mr. John Sumner has supplies of all kinds at the Springs. Come ye sweltering denizens of the plains to the mountains and enjoy life.”) Sumner was fearless, quietly competent, short-fused, sharp-eyed, and sharp-witted. He kept an acerbic journal that serves as a counterbalance to Powell's more polished and more politic account. Where Powell inclined to starry-eyed excess, Sumner favored a sly wink. He stood a fraction under five feet, six and was fair-haired and deceptively delicate in appearance.
*

Powell had met Sumner in the summer of 1867 when he ventured to the West for the first time, leading a group of eleven that included his wife, his brother-in-law, and several of his Illinois State Normal students on what amounted to an extended field trip. This was an era when the young nation still tilted eastward. The population of New York City had already neared one million and was climbing fast, but the West was barely settled. San Francisco, with a population of nearly 150,000 thanks to the gold rush, stood almost alone. Salt Lake City had fewer than 13,000 residents, Denver fewer than 5,000, Los Angeles fewer than 6,000. Las Vegas was an almost empty oasis in the desert. Brattleboro, Vermont, was a bigger city than Denver, and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, more of a metropolis than Los Angeles.

Powell made no claim to know the West—he freely acknowledged that his 1867 party consisted entirely of “amateurs like myself”—but he was never one to tiptoe into a new project if he could fling himself into it headlong. “Mountains, hills, rocks, plains, valleys, streams,” Powell exclaimed in delight, “all were new.” Let loose in the Rockies, Powell and his fellow amateurs began a frenzy of collecting that soon yielded box after box of birds and butterflies and plants and insects and rocks and minerals and fossils.

Sumner served as Powell's guide. Like many a guide, he was proud of his skills, and he liked to moan about the ignorance and naiveté of the dudes he was obliged to chaperone. “In our evening talks around the campfire,” he wrote, “I gave the Major some new ideas in regard to the habits of animals, as he had gotten his information from books, and I from personal observation of the animals themselves.”

A less prickly character than Sumner might have been more generous. Sumner had been raised not on a cloud-shrouded mountain or in a desert gulch but on an Iowa farm, and he had come to Colorado only in June 1866, just a year before Powell's first visit. Even so, Sumner's know-how was genuine, and his nerve was beyond question. Like life in the army, life in the West brought new experiences at faster than the accustomed rate. Last year's raw recruit was this year's grizzled veteran.

In the course of his first few years in the West, Sumner had nearly managed to lose his life a multitude of times. He was generally on good terms with the Utes, for instance—they called him “Jack Rabbit”—but once, while sleeping near the Fraser River, he found himself under ambush. Woken by the sound of his horse snorting, Sumner lifted his head, drew his gun, and took an arrow in the arm. He shot his attacker and escaped. As Sumner told the story later—he liked to show the scar the arrow had made—twenty Utes in war paint had followed him to his cabin. Sumner let three of them inside and argued that he had fired in self-defense. He sat perched on a keg of powder, revolver cocked, poised to fire into the powder and annihilate both himself and his guests if the need arose. It didn't.

The highlight of Powell's first summer in the West was a climb to the top of Pikes Peak. Powell's wife, Emma, resplendent in long dress, felt hat, and green veil, became only the second woman to have reached the summit. (
The party believed
mistakenly that Emma had been the first.) Decades later, Emma's hometown newspaper would recall her as “a very beautiful young woman with golden hair and blue eyes.” The skinny, bulb-nosed Powell was less attractive—“Wes,” his sister once exclaimed, “I think you're the homeliest man God ever made”—but he was immensely proud of his lovely and adventurous wife. She “could ride all day on horseback like a veteran,” he boasted, and he liked to point out that in months of travel through the West they had not seen another white woman.

The next year, in the summer of 1868, Powell had traveled to the Rockies again. This time he had a new and larger group in tow, as well as Emma, and an even more ambitious agenda. Again Sumner served as guide.

So when Powell set out on his dazzlingly ambitious Colorado River expedition, in 1869, it was natural that he turned first to Sumner. In response, Sumner helped enlist several of his own acquaintances. He recruited Oramel Howland, a native Vermonter who had transplanted himself to the West in a search for adventure. A hunter by choice and a printer (and sometime editor) by trade, Oramel was, at thirty-six, the oldest member of the expedition. With his long hair and longer beard, he reminded Powell of mad King Lear roaming the heath. Oramel enlisted his brother Seneca, younger by ten years. A former soldier who had been wounded at Gettysburg, Seneca was, Powell tells us, “a quiet, pensive young man.” Sumner also signed up yet another ex-soldier, a silent, mysterious character who gave his name variously as Billy Hawkins or Billy Rhodes. Rumor had it that Hawkins/Rhodes was only a step or two ahead of the law. The fugitive became camp cook at a salary of $1.50 a day.