Down the Great Unknown (30 page)

Now, “that grand explorer, Major Powell” and his “brave companions” had set out to do what had never been done. Gilpin had his doubts about whether they could succeed. “The torrent may have swallowed them up; the Indians may have destroyed them; their boats may have been wrecked with the loss of all their provisions; and they may consequently have been starved to death; we know nothing.” He begged Townshend to keep his ears open for any news as he continued his roaming.

Despite the bluster, Gilpin had made a good guess about Powell's whereabouts. The expedition had not yet reached the Grand Canyon, but it was only a few days away. Better yet, the furies of Cataract Canyon seemed to have been left upstream. On July 28, for the first time in many days, Powell and his men had a long, almost routine, run that stretched a dozen miles. They passed a stream that joined the Colorado from the west and was not marked on any of their maps. “Is it a trout-stream?” Powell recalled someone calling out hopefully, but it was muddy, not clear, and strewn with flood-borne, rotting vegetation. Dunn, in the lead boat, shouted back disgustedly that it was a “dirty devil.”

“The water is about as filthy as the washing from the sewers of some large, dirty city,” Sumner complained, and later he amended that description to make it still more repellent. The Dirty Devil, as they named it, “stinks bad enough to be the sewer from Sodom and Gomorrah, or even hell. I thought I had smelt some pretty bad odors on the battle field two days after action, but they were not up to the standard of that miserable little stream.”

In light of what was soon to come, the vehemence of those descriptions is eye-catching. Hawkins would later dispute Powell's innocuous anecdote about the origin of the name Dirty Devil. As Hawkins told the story, it was Powell, not Dunn, who coined the name. More to the point, in Hawkins's version Powell chose “Dirty Devil” as an allusion to Dunn and a mark of contempt for him. On a trip as long and hard as this one, sulking and grousing were almost inevitable. Outright feuding, on the other hand, could be deadly.

Bradley mentioned the naming of the muddy river, too, but only in a single, hard-to-interpret sentence. “Major named the new stream ‘Dirty Devil's Creek,' ” he wrote, “and as we are the only white men who have seen it I for one feel quite highly complimented by the name, yet it is in keeping with his whole character which needs only a short study to be read like a book.” Bradley's meaning is unclear, though the critical tone comes through plainly enough. And if we pair this remark with Bradley's criticisms of Powell from only three days before, for frittering away precious time and telling tall tales, there seems little doubt that the mood in camp was deteriorating.

The criticism is especially telling because Bradley was a hard man to provoke. Powell moved him to occasional fits of sputtering frustration (though he nearly always kept his fuming confined to his diary), but, to a remarkable extent, Bradley managed to ignore what he could not change. He traveled week after week in the same boat with the sullen, moody, half-demented Walter Powell, for example, and virtually never mentioned him in his diary.

At the same time that the men were growing ever more tense, the river seemed to be feeling almost mellow, at least in comparison with what it had been. “Run 20 miles with ease,” Bradley wrote on July 29, one of the few references in two weeks to anything at all coming easily. “Found many small rapids or what we call small ones now but which would pass for full-grown cataracts in the States.”

Someone spotted the stone ruins of an Indian dwelling alongside the river and about two hundred feet above it. For once the men were nearly as willing as Powell to linger and explore. They spent two hours looking at rock etchings, gathering arrowheads, and picking through pottery shards. Bradley took the trouble to measure the dimensions of each room and pocketed a few especially fine pottery bits as souvenirs.

Neither Powell nor the men believed that a place was only discovered when the first white men arrived. But even if they
had
felt inclined to belittle the Indians who had once lived here, the signs all around them of what had been routine, ongoing life would have raised troubling questions. To men who were only a few bags of moldy flour away from starvation, the Indians seemed like figures to puzzle over and admire, not to deride. “How they contrived to live is a mystery to me,” Sumner marveled, for the country was “as destitute of vegetation . . . as the paper I write on.” (Animals were nearly as scarce as plants. Dunn shot a coyote on July 29, and the half-starved creature was the only animal anyone had seen in three days.)

Returning to the river and heading downstream again, the men soon found another group of ruins. They made camp, and as usual Powell set out to climb the cliffs so he could scan the countryside. Quite near the top, he found himself stymied, unable to climb higher. Looking around, he eventually discovered steps cut into the rock and, nearby, an ancient, rickety ladder. For Powell, a man fully as romantic as any poet contemplating mortality in a country churchyard, this was a powerfully poignant moment. He climbed to the cliff top in the steps of his anonymous predecessors. “Here I stand,” he wrote, “where these now lost people stood centuries ago, and look over this strange country.”

And there he stayed, gazing out at the distant mountains until it was too dark to see. This made for a difficult return to reality, and to camp. “It is no easy task to find my way down the wall in the darkness,” Powell wrote, “and I clamber about until it is nearly midnight, before I arrive.”

They had reached a lyrically beautiful spot they would soon name Glen Canyon. “Tranquility” was the last word anyone would associate with Cataract Canyon—“violence” would be a likelier choice—but Glen Canyon was, in many ways, a gentle place. In comparison with the Grand Canyon, just downstream, it was almost cozy, a mere thousand feet high in comparison with the Grand Canyon's five thousand.

The sense of imminent disaster that marked Cataract was absent here. Glen Canyon was marked more by sweeping curves than by sharp angles; the river that had crashed in fury through Cataract Canyon now meandered aimlessly along. Here and there the boats darted through riffles, but there were almost no rapids worthy of the name. Glen Canyon inspired dreamy reveries rather than nightmares.

“The curves are gentle,” Powell wrote, “and often the river sweeps by an arc of vertical wall, smooth and unbroken, and then by a curve that is variegated by royal arches, mossy alcoves, deep, beautiful glens, and painted grottos.” The sandstone cliffs rose from the water in great, swooping walls of orange and burnt red and purple-black. Enormous swatches of “desert varnish,” black or tan stains formed of dissolved manganese and iron, draped the walls like tapestries. Here and there, springs refreshed the rock, and mosses and ferns grew on the moistened sandstone. Where bigger springs burst from the cliffs, cottonwoods and willows and oaks took root.

Shortly after lunch on July 31, the expedition reached the mouth of the San Juan River, which joined the Colorado from the east. The temperature remained at 100 degrees and the rocks were “almost hissing hot,” but river junctions were always significant milestones and the men stopped to explore. Beautiful as it was, the canyon now revealed a harsh aspect that it had previously concealed. “The remainder of the afternoon is given to hunting some way by which we can climb out of the cañon,” Powell wrote, “but it ends in failure.”

There was no pressing need to climb out (except that a view from the rim would help in mapping the region), but this was a worrying sign even so. Later on, if the men lost another boat or found their way blocked by a waterfall, they would be hunting in earnest for such an escape route. Failure then could mean death.

Bradley was preoccupied not with beauty but with hunger. On the morning of August 1, the men saw three bighorn sheep but failed to shoot any. “They seem to have no fear of falling,” Bradley noted with melancholy admiration, “but will leap from rock to rock, never stumbling nor slipping though they will be a thousand ft. above us and a single mis-step would dash them to atoms.”

The talk of food took on a sharper edge. The endless monotony of the meals was no longer the chief complaint. Survival, not variety, was fast becoming the issue. “[The sheep] are very good eating and we need meat very much, not having over 15 lbs. of bacon in the whole outfit,” Bradley wrote. “We are short of everything but flour, coffee and dried apples and in a few days our rations will be reduced to that.” Those would be starvation rations even for idle men, let alone for men sentenced to long days of hard labor.

Powell made matters worse by showing no inclination to hurry. Through all the changes in the men's mood, and the river's, the one constant was Powell's fascination with geology. On August 1 the men pulled to shore to explore an alcove they could see from the river. On entering a little grove of box elder and cottonwood trees, they saw around a corner a vast chamber cut into the rock, two hundred feet high by five hundred long by two hundred wide. “And this,” Powell marveled, “is all carved out by a little stream, which only runs during the few showers that fall now and then in this arid country.”

Powell was face-to-face here with the great intellectual challenge posed by the seven hundred miles of canyon he had passed through and by the side canyons and caverns along the way. The challenge was to accept the dizzying lesson the rock landscape proclaimed—in the immensity of time, water prevails over stone and shapes it as it pleases. It is no great feat to mouth the words, but
believing
them is another matter. To try to grasp the unfathomable stretches of time required for a trickling stream to carve a cathedral-sized cavern is to risk a kind of intellectual vertigo. Geologists today call this time-induced dizziness rock-shock.

The shock was all the more profound in an era when it was still commonly believed that the earth was a mere six thousand years old. But for Powell, the rebellious son of a minister who believed in the Bible's literal truth, the notion of limitless time was a liberation rather than a consternation. It would become a central theme of his intellectual life and the great lesson he was to draw from the Grand Canyon.

The men camped on August 1 in the stone chamber that had astounded Powell. The Howland brothers and Bill Dunn scratched their names onto a smooth space on the wall. Walter Powell entertained the others with a Civil War ballad called “Old Shady”—he had sung it so often before that the men called
him
“Old Shady”—and Powell named their temporary quarters Music Temple in Walter's honor. Despite its bucolic-sounding title, this was a bitter, vengeful song, perhaps a good match for bad-tempered, war-damaged Walter Powell. “Old Shady” was a newly freed slave, and his song is his mocking farewell to his ex-master and to the South. “Good bye, Massa Jeff! Good-bye, Missus Stevens,” the singer calls to Jeff Davis and Davis's vice-president, Alexander Stephens, and he warns them that “Pretty soon, you'll see Uncle Abram's comin', comin'! Hail, mighty day.”

All the following day was spent in the same camp because Powell was intent on climbing the cliffs. After a false start or two, he reached “a point of commanding view” where he could see mountains in the distance on three sides and long stretches of the San Juan River and the Colorado. By this time, Bradley's journal included almost daily passages lambasting Powell for dawdling. “In the same camp,” Bradley complained while Powell explored, “doomed to be here another day.” Powell's journal entry recorded the same information in a tone of perfect contentment. “We sleep again in Music Temple,” Powell wrote, as cheerily as if he had finagled an extra day's vacation at a favorite weekend retreat.

Bradley fretted that perhaps they might be stuck in place even longer than a day. “Major has been taking observations ever since we came here and seems no nearer done now than when he began. He ought to get the latitude and longitude of every mouth of a river not before known, and we are willing to face starvation if necessary to do it but further than that he should not ask us to wait and he must go on soon or the consequences will be different from what he anticipates.”

Bradley's reference to “consequences” is ambiguous—was he threatening mutiny or merely forecasting bad times ahead?—but there is no missing his frustration with Powell. Indeed, this first explicit mention of starvation reflected dismay that passed far beyond frustration. “If we could get game or fish we should be all right,” Bradley went on, “but we have not caught a single mess of fish since we left the junction.”

In camp that evening, August 2, Bradley or one of the others confronted Powell about the urgency of getting under way. “Major has agreed to move on in the morning,” Bradley noted happily, “so we feel in good spirits tonight.” The following day brought more good news. In an “easy run,” the men advanced thirty-three miles downriver. Better still, Sumner managed to kill one of the elusive bighorn sheep. “The one we got today is quite fat and will weigh about 80 lbs. dressed,” Bradley exclaimed. The last sheep the men had killed had spoiled in the heat before they could eat their fill. This time they took the trouble to dry some of the meat.

They saw countless fish as they rowed downstream, but the fish refused to bite. “Where the water is still we could see them catching small flies that the river seems covered with,” Bradley noted. Nowadays the Colorado often runs cold and clear, because it is bottled up by dams that catch its sediment and form deep, frigid reservoirs. A fly fisherman can stand in the cold river in the hot desert and catch fish that are native to mountain streams. But in an era when the Colorado ran warm and muddy, most of the fish eluding Bradley were chub and sucker and squawfish, not trout. Squawfish, in particular, were prizes worth winning. Before the dams changed the Colorado, the biggest squawfish could reach six feet and eighty pounds. Old photographs often display one of these giants dangling from a hook, and next to it, for scale, a child no taller than the fish. Not this day. With fish all around them, Bradley and the others came up empty-handed.