Down the Great Unknown (39 page)

The respite was brief. An eddy had grabbed the
Emma Dean
the previous morning and thrown her against the rocks, and she needed emergency repairs. (Bradley's boat had escaped the same fate by two feet.) The men also needed to find wood suitable for cutting several new oars. It was a hard search, Sumner noted, for the river was “so terrific it seems to smash everything into pieces, leaving nothing large enough to make an oar.” Half a mile up Silver Creek, they discovered a huge pine log that a flash flood had tossed aside and began the arduous task of rolling it down to the beach on skids.

Everyone's nerves were frayed, rubbed raw by a routine that Sumner summarized as “rapids, daily duckings, and ‘heap hungry' all the time.” The weather seemed to know only two extremes: Either rain flooded down, or the sun beat down without mercy.
On August 16
, the canyon was a blistering 115 degrees, and making the oars was “considerable of a task.” Bradley was in Eeyore mode, feeling grumpy and put upon. “They have come to think that my boat should carry all the rations, go into all dangerous places first and get along with least,” he sulked. “So be it.” He consoled himself with the hope that “the trip is nearly ended.”

Turning the tension up another notch, Hawkins managed to worsen the already dire food situation. He had laid out the food on the riverbank to dry in the sun and had turned his attention to making oars. One of the boats swung around in the current, and its rope knocked the baking soda into the river. No more bread, then, except sodden lumps of dough. From here on, Sumner noted, meals would consist of “rotten flour mixed with Colorado River water.”

This was hardly an exaggeration. “Our rations are still spoiling,” Powell wrote. “The bacon is so badly injured that we are compelled to throw it away. . . . We now have only musty flour sufficient for ten days, a few dried apples, but plenty of coffee.” Even the fish in Silver Creek proved impossible to catch. Like the most famous desert wanderers of all, thousands of years before, the Powell expedition would from this point on subsist on little more than unleavened bread.

“To add to our troubles,” Sumner lamented, “there was a nearly continuous rain and a great rise in the river that created such a current and turmoil that it tried our strength to the limit. We were weakened by hardships and ceaseless toil for twenty out of twenty-four hours of the day. Starvation stared us in the face. I felt like Job: it would be a good scheme to curse God and die.”

•      •      •

As if to mark their misery, a festering feud between Powell and Dunn came to a head. “At noon one day when the boats were being let over a bad place,” Hawkins wrote, “Dunn was down by the water's edge with a barometer, taking the altitude.” Somehow a rope fastened to one of the boats caught him under the arms and knocked him into the water. Dunn had nearly drowned, but he had managed to catch hold of a rope and drag himself to safety. Though Dunn was unhurt, he had been carrying a watch that belonged to Powell—the man measuring altitude was assigned to note the exact time—and the watch was ruined. Powell told Dunn that he would have to pay $30 for the watch (about ten days' pay for a skilled workman) or leave. “Dunn told him a bird could not get out of that place, thinking the Major was joking,” Hawkins went on, “but all of us were very quickly convinced that every word the Major said was meant.”

Dunn “really should have been a little more careful” on the day of the dunking, Sumner conceded, but “the Major evidently wanted to impress his military standing upon Dunn, and proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing that roused his ire to such a pitch that I think only the fact that the Major had but one arm saved him from a broken head, if nothing worse.” The crew had sided with Dunn, and the sniping grew nasty. When Sumner remarked that Dunn had come close to drowning, Walter Powell muttered that it would have been no great loss.

Hawkins had fixed dinner. He poured each man a cup of coffee, and they began eating. Powell sat a few yards from the others, as he often did. The routine called for Hawkins to serve Powell. Not this night. If Powell wanted to eat, Hawkins snarled, “he would have to come and get his grub like the rest of the boys.” Walter took his brother dinner.

The immediate crisis had passed like a fast-traveling thunderstorm, but the tension lingered, like an electric charge in the air. Like it or not, the men were utterly dependent on one another and stuck with each other's company. They had not seen another human being in nearly six weeks, since the Uinta Indian Agency (and Bradley, Sumner, the Howland brothers, and Dunn had been stuck in camp and missed even that slight diversion). Two weeks is a long trip in remote country, a month an eternity. Powell and his men had been on the river more than eighty days. Cabin fever is a hazard of every prolonged trip. For these men, condemned to rowboats careening down a wild river, in perpetual danger of drowning and on the edge of starvation, the homeliest cabin would have seemed like a castle. Dunn, Sumner, and Powell in particular spent all day together, every day, fearing for their lives and crammed in the sixteen-foot-long
Emma Dean
. It was not a setup to soothe ruffled tempers.

On August 16, a day spent stuck in camp repairing the boats and cutting oars, Powell tore into Oramel Howland for losing the maps. Howland and Powell had been quarreling over the maps since Disaster Falls, when Howland had lost his first set of maps, his gear, and nearly his life. Powell had chewed Howland out more than once since then, and Sumner had tried to intervene on his friend's behalf. Now Powell started in on Howland again, and Sumner stepped in again. The war was over, he reminded Powell, and “he couldn't come any damned military there.”

Then Powell turned to Dunn, his other whipping boy. Powell snarled at Dunn, and Dunn snapped back. Powell cursed Dunn out, and Dunn said that if Powell weren't a cripple, he would make him take it back. Half-mad, ox-strong Walter Powell leaped in, shouting that
he
was no cripple. Eyes flashing in fury, he charged Dunn, screaming that he would kill him.

Hawkins grabbed Walter by the hair and shoved his head underwater. “For God's Sake, Bill, you will drown him!” Dunn cried, and Howland and Dunn together dragged Walter from the water and threw him down on a sandbar. Walter coughed and choked and, once he had caught his breath, shouted that Hawkins was a coward and a lowlife, a “Missouri puke.” Walter stormed off to get his gun, vowing to shoot both Dunn and Hawkins. As Walter bent over to unlash the gun from the deck of his boat, Andy Hall came up behind him and slugged him on the side of the head. Walter whipped around. Hall stood, gun in hand, shouting at Walter to back off before Hall took his head off. Walter backed off.

The next day, with a fragile peace in place, the leaky boats and the feuding men “pulled out again for more of the Great Unknown.” The contrast with the jaunty party that had left Green River Station not quite three months before was hard to miss. “There was not much talk indulged in by the grim squad of half-starved men with faces wearing that peculiar stern look always noticed on the faces of men forming for a charge in battle,” Sumner wrote.

Nearly all the men had indeed seen battle. Bad as their predicament was now, the war had been worse. The Civil War had been a kind of horrific canyon journey of its own, a marathon that wended through unknown and unspeakably perilous territory, with long, dull stretches punctuated by episodes of sudden, shocking violence, and with no good way out but straight ahead, come what may.

They could not help thinking of what they had endured before, but even the memory of hardships overcome seemed little consolation now. “This part of the canyon is probably the worst hole in America, if not in the world,” Sumner wrote. “The gloomy black rocks . . . drive all the spirit out of a man. And the excessive drenching and hard work drive all the strength out of him and leave him in a bad fix indeed.”

Bad fix or not, they had no choices left. “We had to move on or starve,” Sumner wrote, and even Powell agreed. “We must make all haste possible,” he wrote. “If we meet with difficulties, as we have done in the cañon above, we may be compelled to give up the expedition, and try to reach the Mormon settlements to the north.” The precious barometers had broken, too, so there was no longer any way to tell how far the river still had to fall.

They had begun as a scientific expedition, more or less, but the time for science had long passed. Angry, hungry, exhausted, scared, Powell and his eight companions were in a race for their lives. They had ten days' rations remaining, and they could only guess how much farther they had to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MISERY

 

They needed to race, but they had to crawl. “Although very anxious to advance,” Powell wrote, “we are determined to run with great caution, lest, by another accident, we lose all our supplies. How precious that little flour has become! We divide it among the boats, and carefully store it away, so that it can be lost only by the loss of the boat itself.”

On August 17, Powell and the men set out at eight in the morning. They sped along for three miles but ground to a halt when they came to a rapid too big to run. As they lowered the boats on ropes, the
Maid
leaped ahead on her line while the men tried futilely to rein her in, and smashed into a rock. Rain fell in intermittent bursts that proved more maddening than a steady downpour would have. “Have been thoroughly drenched and chilled,” Powell wrote, “but between showers the sun shines with great power, and the mercury in our thermometers stands at 115°, so that we have rapid changes from great extremes, which are very disagreeable.”

They stopped to repair the
Maid
, finally returned to the river, and promptly came to another impassable rapid. They lined it, too, only to run into still another rapid they could not run. For the third time in a day, they took on the dreaded task of lowering the boats by rope. This last time was the worst. It took all afternoon, and, when it was finally over, the men found still another “very bad” rapid that they would have to line first thing the next morning.

Bruised and exhausted by the day's labor, the men sat down to a dinner of unleavened bread. When the sun sank, the temperature plummeted and the rain picked up. The weather in the Grand Canyon is as extreme as the scenery. Clear days can be not just sunny but scorching, as if the sunlight has passed through the lens of a magnifying glass. The most nondescript hat seems like a priceless boon. When it rains, Powell noted, it seems as if “some vast spout ran from the clouds.” Few sights are as magnificent as a thunderstorm sweeping through the Grand Canyon, few experiences as miserable as being caught in a downpour at night without a tent or a ledge to hide under, trying against all odds to fall asleep.

“It is especially cold in the rain to-night,” Powell wrote. “The little canvas we have is rotten and useless. The rubber ponchos, with which we started from Green River City, have all been lost; more than half the party is without hats, and not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece. So we gather drift wood, and build a fire; but after supper the rain, coming down in torrents, extinguishes it, and we sit up all night, on the rocks, shivering, and are more exhausted by the night's discomfort than by the day's toil.”

When the long night finally ended, the wet, wretched men set out downstream again. The rapids were “very numerous and very large,” Bradley wrote on August 18, and “the worst kind of a rapid because you can see rocks rising all over them with no channel in which to run them.” A day spent portaging and lining earned them only four miles. “Hard work and little distance seems to be the characteristic of this cañon,” Bradley wrote wearily, and meals of coffee and moldy flour were “not sufficient to anything more than just to sustain life.”

While the crew manhandled the boats through the rapids, Powell set off alone to climb the cliffs, intent on geology. Both leader and crew may have welcomed a break from one another. (“Major Powell . . . was a nuisance in the work of portaging,” Sumner wrote. “His imperious orders were not appreciated. We had troubles enough without them.”) Up Powell climbed, past the black granite and the rusty sandstone and the greenish shale to the base of the red-stained limestone. “I climb so high that the men and boats are lost in the black depths below, and the dashing river is a rippling brook; and still there is more cañon above than below. All about me are interesting geological records. The book is open, and I can read as I run. All about me are grand views, for the clouds are playing again in the gorges. But somehow I think of the nine days' rations, and the bad river, and the lesson of the rocks and the glory of the scene is but half seen.”

In the afternoon, the cavorting clouds gave way to storm clouds. “This P.M. we have had a terrible thunder-shower,” Bradley wrote. “We had to fasten our boats to the rocks and seek shelter from the wind behind bowlders. The rain poared down in torrents and the thunder-peals echoed through the cañon from crag to crag making wild music for the lightning to dance to. After a shower it is grand to see the cascades leap from the cliffs and turn to vapor before they reach the rocks below. There are thousands of them of all sizes, pure and white as molten silver.”

Such hymns to nature were more in Powell's line than Bradley's, but Powell's spirits were so low that he managed only to moan, “Still it rains.” Bradley's “pure and white” cascades of rain seemed only to heighten the contrast with the swollen, muddy river, now so full of dirt and grit that the men could no longer drink it. (They could have filled a bucket or a big pot with river water and let the mud settle to the bottom overnight, but ever since the fire, when they lost so much of their mess kit, they had not even had enough cups to go around. Now they drank rainwater puddled up in the rocks.)