Down the Great Unknown (32 page)

Brown organized a team of sixteen men, with himself in charge. Robert Brewster Stanton, a railroad engineer, was second in command. Brown purchased five sleek but unsuitable wooden boats, each fifteen feet long, just over three feet wide, and round-bottomed. Long, skinny, and round, the boats were nearly as unstable as floating logs. At only 150 pounds apiece, they were featherweight. Knowing how Powell's men had struggled to carry their massive boats, Brown had opted for boats that would be easy to portage. He overdid it. The boats were “thin, light, red cedar,” and so fragile that two of them had cracked end to end
while still on the train
to the Green River (Utah—not to be confused with Green River Station, Wyoming, Powell's starting point). When he first laid eyes on the boats, Stanton wrote later, “my heart sank within me.”

All the crew were novices. Worse, many were cocky novices. Brown seemed to regard the whole expedition as a lark, and it fell to Stanton to press the case for prudence. But Stanton was a bit of a dry stick and more than a bit of a pedant, and the convivial Brown tended to brush his warnings aside. Stanton had proposed that the party include four experienced boatmen. Brown took Stanton's list and crossed off the boatmen's names, in favor of two Denver lawyers and men about town he wanted to impress. “I, with Reynolds and Hughes, who are to be
guests
of the expedition, will take their places and keep the boats up with the survey,” Brown announced. A “thunderstruck” Stanton could only gulp and give in. Stanton had requested life jackets, too, and Brown vetoed that request as well. (Curiously, Stanton, like Powell, had only one good arm. Though he “could not swim a stroke,” he followed Brown's orders and canceled the life jackets.)

They planned to pack the gear and much of the food in watertight, zinc-lined boxes three feet long, one for each boat. But the fully loaded boxes nearly swamped the boats, so they lashed them together into a clumsy raft. Stanton's two black servants, who had been dragooned into this makeshift navy as cooks, were assigned to drag the raft behind their boat.

On May 25, 1889, the expedition set out from Green River. Almost at once they had to stop to seal a leak in the cooks' boat. Five miles downstream, the first rapid tore three holes in another boat. Still, this was easy water, and by May 30, the Brown-Stanton expedition had reached Cataract Canyon. There the trouble began in earnest. “It would be a great relief, if it were possible,” Stanton wrote later, “for me to blot out all remembrance of the two weeks following this evening of May 31st.”

The supply raft was the first casualty. Just upstream of the first rapid in Cataract Canyon, the cooks' boat tried to pull to shore. Caught in the swift current and further hampered by the ungainly raft tied to them, the
Brown Betty
swept helplessly toward the brink of the fall. In desperation, the two men cut the rope to the supply raft and pulled for shore. They made it; the raft did not. The zinc boxes smashed into the rocks, flew apart from one another, and ricocheted wildly through the rapid. Some were eventually found downstream (with the food inside still intact), turning circles in eddies like toy boats in a pond.

From here on, one man recalled, it would be “disaster every day.” On June 3, one boat hit a rock and sank; the crew swam to safety and even managed to rescue the boat, though nearly all its contents were lost. On June 4, Hughes and Reynolds, the two “guests,” capsized. They grabbed their runaway boat and clung to it for half a mile while it dragged them through a rapid. Finally they righted the boat and climbed in, but the boat was full of water and uncontrollable. For another half mile, the two would-be investors sped and spun along until a merciful eddy swung them to shore. On the same day, the same rapid snatched another boat that the men had been lining and spat it downstream. And
still
on the same day, the
Brown Betty
hit a rock and sank while the men were trying to line it past a rapid. Nearly all the pots and pans and much of the rest of the cooking gear went to the bottom, along with most of the food. “The matter of supplies . . . ,” Stanton noted, “begins
to look serious.”

The expedition struggled on, making a mere mile or two a day. Each day brought new smashups and desperate swims and runaway boats. Even Stanton, a proud stoic, seemed nearly overwhelmed. “Such work as we had in Cataract Canyon, with our frail boats, being thrown into the water bodily every day, and working in water almost up to one's armpits for days at a time, guiding boats through the whirlpools and eddies, and, when not thus engaged, carrying sacks of flour and greasy bacon on one's back, over boulders half as high as a house, is not the most pleasant class of engineering work to contemplate.”

Soon nearly all the food was lost or too spoiled to eat. For six days, breakfast and dinner consisted of a bit of bread washed down by coffee and a little condensed milk. Lunch was three lumps of sugar and all the river water you could drink. Morale, already low, fell even further when the men found a human skeleton in a pile of driftwood. “Ghastly suggestion of what might be our fate,” Stanton shuddered. On June 16, the men took the most damaged boat, the
Mary
(named for Brown's wife), and chopped it apart to get desperately needed wood for repairs on the other boats. Brown watched and wept.

The Grand Canyon, when they finally reached it, made Cataract Canyon seem like a holiday jaunt. Food was no longer a concern, because it was easy to leave the river near Lee's Ferry, and Brown had ridden ninety miles to the town of Kanab and bought supplies. (This option was unavailable to Powell. There were no horses or mules to borrow in 1869, because what would become Lee's Ferry was then only another unnamed, uninhabited spot in the desert.) Half Brown's original crew, including both “guests,” took this opportunity to return home. One man, a trapper and miner named Harry McDonald, joined the expedition.

But even with starvation no longer a threat, the Colorado itself presented more than enough danger. Brown's expedition entered the Grand Canyon on July 9, 1889. They made ten miles that first day, without mishap, and portaged the two biggest rapids, Badger and Soap Creek.

Brown woke up jumpy on July 10. He had slept poorly, troubled by dreams of rapids. This was uncharacteristic, for Brown's unrelenting good cheer was his most marked trait. Odder still, the only rapid in sight was Soap Creek, which was
up
stream and no longer a problem. Brown and Harry McDonald were on the river shortly after six o'clock. Stanton followed close behind, at 6:23.

Brown's boat turned sideways in what is now called Salt Water Riffle. It
looked like nothing more
than a series of small, harmless waves, but when the boat crossed an eddy line—the always treacherous boundary between the main current, headed downstream, and the eddy, moving upstream—it flipped in an instant. Brown and McDonald were thrown overboard. Brown found himself in a whirlpool along the eddy line. McDonald was thrown into the fast-moving water in midstream. Brown surfaced first. McDonald spotted him and called to him. “Alright,” Brown hollered back.

The river swept McDonald downstream, where he saw his runaway boat speeding away, about fifty feet in front of him and upside down. Two hundred yards farther on, he crawled ashore. He climbed a rock, spotted Brown still struggling, and ran back upstream. Brown had been flung nearer to shore than McDonald but was in fact farther from safety. Even if he had been able to break free from the whirlpool and had swum toward the riverbank, he would have had to fight his way across the strong eddy current. There was another possibility—swimming
away
from shore and into the main current in hopes of washing ashore farther downstream, as McDonald had—but that, too, would have meant breaking out of the whirlpool.

McDonald ran near the spot where he had seen Brown. By this time, Stanton's boat had reached the scene. Stanton saw McDonald waving and screaming. After a few moments, he deciphered the frantic shout: “Mr. Brown is in there.” Stanton fought his way out of the rapid. Brown had vanished, but suddenly his pocket notebook shot high above the surface. Peter Hansbrough, a crewman in Stanton's boat, plucked it from the river.

The men scanned the churning water. Without a life jacket, and weighed down by shirt, pants, and coat (and, perhaps, boots), Brown had not lasted long. From the moment Brown's boat flipped to the instant he disappeared beneath the waves, perhaps ninety seconds had gone by. For the rest of the day, the men carried out a fruitless search of the riverbank for miles below the scene of the accident, hoping at least to find a body they could bury. Hansbrough cut a careful inscription, complete with ornate capitals, into the rock near the bit of shore that Brown had tried to reach. “F. M. Brown Pres. D.C.C. & P. RR Co was drowned July 10 1889 opposite this point.”

The survivors could easily have left the canyon by hiking up Salt Water Wash and then walking to Lee's Ferry, but they chose to stay with the river instead. The next morning, having found Brown's boat safe in an eddy, the men set out again. For three days, they struggled along, running and portaging and lining the rapids known today (for their distance from Lee's Ferry) as the Roaring Twenties. Then came Sunday, a day of rest, and then Monday, July 15.

Henry Richards, one of Stanton's black servants, and Peter Hansbrough, the man who had carved Brown's epitaph, pushed out into 25 Mile Rapid. In the lower section, the force of the current beating sharply against a steep limestone wall had cut an overhanging shelf a few feet above the water. Hansbrough and Richards seemed in fine shape, sweeping along in midstream, when suddenly the current grabbed them and pushed them left, toward the cliff and the overhang. In a moment, they were against the cliff, caught in swirling water.

The two men shipped their oars and tried to push off the rock, to keep from being shoved under the shelf. Richards shoved the bow of the boat clear of the cliff; Hansbrough, in the stern, had been caught under the shelf but managed to push himself clear as well. Stanton, watching from shore, relaxed. “They are all right now,” he said, but at precisely that moment, their boat flipped and the two men were flung into the water.

McDonald and another man jumped into a boat and sped toward Richards, but he disappeared before they could reach him. Hansbrough had vanished beneath the waves the moment the boat capsized. Both men drowned. “I then realized fully what it meant to be without life preservers, in such work on such a river,” Stanton lamented.

With the crew near mutiny and, in any event, too few men left to portage the boats, Stanton decided to abandon the expedition.
*
The disheartened group continued downstream only far enough to find a place where they could hike out of what they now thought of as “death's canyon.” On July 17, as they climbed a side canyon to safety, Stanton glanced back at the Colorado and saw “something like a large bundle floating down the river.” It was Brown—the men recognized his coat—but the current carried his body out of view long before the two men who had rushed after him could get anywhere near.

John Wesley Powell had inspired Brown's expedition. Twenty years before Brown's death, on August 6, 1869, Powell ordered his crew to stop early “at a place where it seems possible to climb out.” (The innocuous-sounding remark had a macabre flip side, for the unspoken message was that at many places there was no way out.) The next day, the almanac said, would bring an eclipse of the sun. By measuring the exact moment the sun disappeared and comparing that figure with the time forecast in the almanac, Powell would be able to determine his longitude precisely.

Powell had been looking forward to this chance for weeks; he anticipated the eclipse with all the excitement of a five-year-old trying to fall asleep the night before his birthday. Countless Americans shared that eagerness. “The line of totality was almost one continuous observatory, from the Pacific to the Atlantic,” one scientific journal reported in November 1869. Powell's men felt no such zeal. “Tomorrow is the eclipse,” Bradley grumbled, “so we have to stop and let Major climb the mountain to observe it.”

Early on the morning of August 7, Powell and his brother Walter set out on a climb to the canyon rim, lugging their measuring gear with them. After four hard hours, they reached the summit and stacked some rocks into a viewing platform. Then they sat down to wait for the great moment to arrive, “but clouds come on, and rain falls, and sun and moon are obscured.”

Miserably disappointed, the one-armed Major and his half-mad brother set out on the return climb to camp. Night overtook them, and the two men inched their way along for two or three hours, feeling their way in the dark. “At last we lose our way, and dare proceed no farther. The rain comes down in torrents, and we can find no shelter. We can neither climb up nor go down, and in the darkness dare not move about, but sit and ‘weather out' the night.”

Stuck in place on the cliff, like gargoyles on a cathedral, the brothers passed an endless night in the pouring rain. They had spent the previous day fervently hoping to see the sun disappear; now their only prayer was for it to appear quickly. Dawn finally arrived. “Daylight comes, after a long, oh! how long a night,” Powell moaned, “and we soon reach camp.”

While Powell and Walter had been climbing and waiting, the men in camp had been repairing the boats. Bradley had replaced four of his boat's ribs and recaulked her seams and noted proudly that “she is tight again as a cup.” Even so, the boats as well as the men were nearing the limits of their strength. “Constant banging against rocks has begun to tell sadly on them,” Bradley wrote, “and they are growing old faster if possible than we are.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

TIME'S ABYSS

 

“Though it is Sunday,” Bradley wrote on August 8, “it brings no rest for us.” Indeed, the work the men were now called on to perform made a mockery of the notion of a day of rest. (Bradley's weekly complaint about Powell's impiety had become their only Sunday ritual.) “Pulled out early and did a terrible hard work,” Sumner wrote. Even Powell painted a somber picture. “It is with very great labor that we make progress,” he wrote, “meeting with many obstructions, running rapids, letting down our boats with lines, from rock to rock, and sometimes carrying boats and cargoes around bad places.” They portaged five rapids—their record for a single day—and advanced only three and a half miles.