Down the Great Unknown (40 page)

On his climb, Powell had peered downstream in the hope of seeing the river emerge from the dreaded granite. He strained to see some encouraging sign of change in the cliffs but could make out “only a labyrinth of deep gorges.”

On August 19, it rained all day. “Still we are in our granite prison,” Powell noted bleakly. They began the day with a rapid they could run, for once, but it nearly did them in. “The waves were frightful and had any of the boats shipped a sea it would have been her last for there was no still water below,” Bradley wrote. “We run a wild race for about two miles, first pulling right—then left, now to avoid the waves and now to escape the bowlders, sometimes half full of water and as soon as a little could be thrown out it was replaced by double the quantity.”

They paused for lunch, such as it was, and ate on a cliff side as the rain poured down. Back in the boats again, the men came at once to a “furious” rapid. It had no rocks, though, and Powell decided to run it. The
Emma Dean
went first but immediately swallowed a wave and flipped, flinging Powell, Sumner, and Dunn into the river. Helpless, the three men managed at least to cling to the overturned boat as it raced downstream. Bradley and Walter Powell, in the
Maid of the Cañon,
saw what had happened and did their best to come to the rescue, but “the whirlpools below caught us and our furious speed threw us against the rocks with terrible force.” Reeling but still afloat, the
Maid
staggered toward the
Emma Dean
. “It seems a long time before they come to our relief,” Powell wrote. “At last they do come; our boat is turned right side up, bailed out, . . . and on we go, without even landing.”

Remarkably, they lost nothing
but a pair of oars. The clouds cleared, and soon after the men found some driftwood lodged in the rocks and built a huge fire. The flames leaped up and stars twinkled overhead, but it was hardly paradise. The expedition had advanced not quite six miles in another gruesome day. Even with the fire, all the bedrolls were sopping wet, as they had been for a week. Come morning, the sun rose in a cloudless sky but the men were too miserable to push on. Much as they needed to hurry, they needed to rest and dry their gear even more. Powell and the crew spent the morning in camp.

Life had become an endless round of work, and the first men to explore one of the world's greatest natural wonders found themselves stuck in a colossal rut. Each day was, in Sumner's words, “a ceaseless grind of running or letting down rapids with lines, varied in places by making portages of boats and contents. The contents were a small item, but the boats, water-logged and very heavy, taxed our strength to the limit.” John Henry, the ex-slave, supposedly died with a hammer in his hand, building the railroad. Powell's men were John Henry's contemporaries. If they did not drown or starve, it began to seem as if they, too, might work themselves to death.

Powell had lightened up a bit, though, at least according to Sumner. After the debacle in camp, “everything was as smooth as with two lovers after their first quarrel and make-up. Major Powell did not run the outfit in the same overbearing manner after that. At a portage or a bad let-down he took his geological hammer and kept out of the way.”

The pace picked up. On August 20, the men advanced eight miles after their morning break. Bradley dared to hope that they were nearly home. “We must be getting near to where the Mormons run the river,” he wrote, “for they have run it 65 miles above Callville and one would think we had run rapids enough already to be allowed a respite soon.”

The river had other plans. The next day ranked “first for dashing wildness of any day we have seen or
will
see if I guess rightly,” Bradley wrote. After six bad rapids in seven miles, they came to what Sumner called “a perfect hell—a rapid with a fall of 30 ft. in 300 yards.” (This was not their first “perfect hell.” Sumner glimpsed hell almost as often as Bradley spotted the worst rapid conceivable.) After a sharp bend to the left, the river swung sharply back to the right.The
Emma Dean
was flung broadside to the current, somehow not capsizing but uncontrollable, as helpless in the pounding waves as a bobbing cork. The river's twists cut off the view ahead, but there was no cutting off the sound of roaring rapids. Black granite walls rose to the sky on both sides of the channel, squeezing the river between its walls and amplifying its thunder. There was no place to pull to shore, no chance of portaging or landing, nothing to do but hang on and hope.

Powell stood on deck, clutching a strap tied across the boat, ducking the crashing waves. Sumner and Dunn struggled to row, their backs to the action. For ten miles the boat leaped and bounded and spun. “The excitement is so great that we forget the danger,” Powell wrote, “until we hear the sound of a great fall below; then we back on our oars, and are carried slowly toward its head, and succeed in landing just above, and find that we have to make another portage.”

That was melancholy news (although the thrilling run had at least broken the routine), but after the portage came a fabulous discovery. “Just here,” Powell rejoiced, “we run out of the granite!”

“Ten miles in less than half a day, and limestone walls below,” Powell exclaimed. “Good cheer returns. We forget the storms, and the gloom, and cloud covered cañons, and the black granite, and the raging river, and push our boats from shore in great glee.”

The good news came just in time. With the crushing work and the nasty feuding and the pounding rain and the lack of food, no one had much in reserve. “I feel more unwell tonight than I have felt on the trip,” Bradley wrote. “I have been wet so much lately that I am ripe for any disease and our scanty food has reduced me to poor condition, but I am still in good spirits.” If he ever made it back to civilization, Bradley vowed, he would eat to bursting.

Then, as suddenly as the vanishing of a dream, the good times fled. The rain resumed and kept up all day. No sooner had the exultant men set out again than they found the river carrying them in precisely the wrong direction. “We wheel about a point again to the right, and turn, so as to head back in the direction from which we come, and see the granite again, with its narrow gorge and black crags.”

The return to the granite was only half the bad news. The river that they fervently prayed would head west toward civilization and safety now turned almost due east. “What it means I don't know,” Bradley wrote, “but if it keeps on in this way we shall be back where we started from.”

Now that they were somewhere near their destination and near the end of their food supplies as well, the river's every twist and turn seemed a cruel mockery. The river giveth and the river taketh away. The mood in the boats veered wildly from hope to despair and back again a dozen times a day. Fast water raised the men's spirits. Rain and portaging and the sight of black rocks knocked them back down. Sumner acknowledged the river's treachery in a few terse words. “Ran the granite up and down again,” he wrote on August 21, meaning that the boats had escaped from their granite dungeon and then the river had sneeringly returned them to it.

On August 22, Sumner recorded the same spirit-sapping message again. (On the same day, Powell noted forlornly that “a part of our flour has been soaked in the river again.”) Then, on August 23, came a change. “Camped on the south side between perpendicular walls 2000 ft. high,” Sumner wrote, “all marble.” The last two words, though easy to miss, were in fact a cry of joy. Reporting the same news, Bradley sounded more relieved than joyful, like a patient who has recovered from a lingering illness. “This P.M. we got out of the granite rock and . . . the river has now got back to its propper direction again.”

August 24 began with a bad portage, but it turned into another encouraging day. The highlight was a fifteen-mile run through a narrow gorge (“all marble,” Sumner noted again, still thrilled). Despite pouring rain at night, Powell and the men lay snug and dry in an immense alcove cut into the stone. Sometime soon now, they reassured one another, they would come to the Grand Wash Cliffs, which mark the end of the Grand Canyon. “We cannot now be very far from it unless the river turns back again which it shows no sign of doing,” Bradley noted hopefully.

The Mormons, who knew this area better than any other white men (which is to say, hardly at all), had guessed that the distance from the mouth of the Little Colorado to the Grand Wash Cliffs was seventy or eighty miles. Powell and the crew, zealously recording their mileage quarter mile by quarter mile, reckoned that they had already run more than 120 miles since the Little Colorado. How many times could this accursed river bend?

“It is curious how anxious we are to make up our reckoning every time we stop,” Powell wrote, with remarkable restraint, “now that our diet is confined to plenty of coffee, very little spoiled flour, and very few dried apples. It has come to be a race for a dinner. Still, we make such fine progress, all hands are in good cheer, but not a moment of daylight is lost.”

The boats were hardly fit for racing. All three were leaking so badly that the men had to caulk and recaulk them at nearly every stop. On August 25, they lined one of the freight boats down a rapid, holding a rope tied to an iron ringbolt in the bow. They had lined innumerable rapids before, but now the boats were near collapse. As the men strained at the rope, the bolt tore out like a tooth yanked from the diseased gums of a starving man. The boat leaped forward, but by good fortune, four of the crew were in the river with it, trying to help maneuver it downstream. Before the boat could make its getaway, the men managed to put a line through a ringbolt in the stern.

The landscape changed again. Lava cones from extinct volcanoes sat perched on the canyon rim and a forty-foot-tall shaft of jet-black basalt now called Vulcan's Anvil rose from the river itself. A million years ago, countless tons of molten lava spilled over the canyon rims here. That prehistoric dam rose 2,330 feet high in the Grand Canyon (Glen Canyon Dam is 710 feet) and transformed the ferocious Colorado into a placid puddle that may have extended the full 179 miles back upstream to Lee's Ferry. It took the relentless river a mere quarter of a million years to wear the dam away and restore the status quo.

For Powell, half-starved and lost on an endless river though he was, the signs of a geological battle on a grand scale conjured up a spectacle glorious to contemplate. “
What a conflict
of water and fire there must have been here! Just imagine a river of molten rock, running down into a river of melted snow. What a seething and boiling of the waters; what clouds of steam rolled into the heavens!”

The men spent three hours portaging Lava Falls, today one of the two or three most dreaded rapids in the Grand Canyon, and then ran another twenty miles of rapids. “Thirty five miles today. Hurrah!” Powell wrote, and Bradley noted optimistically that “the country begins to look a little more open and the river still improves.” They were not home yet. Bradley concluded his journal entry for August 25 on a more somber note. “We commenced our last sack of flour tonight.”

Late in the morning on August 26, the men made a discovery they considered far more exciting than any extinct volcano. They found a carefully tended vegetable garden, with corn and melons and squash and no sign of the Indians who had planted it. The corn and melons were too young to eat, but the squash were large and tempting. Powell and the others raced off with a dozen squash, hurrying in case the Indians returned. “What a kettle of squash sauce we make!” Powell cheered. “True, we have no salt with which to season it, but it makes a fine addition to our unleavened bread and coffee. Never was fruit so sweet as these stolen squashes.”

Dinner precisely duplicated lunch. No one complained. “What a supper we make,” Powell wrote, “unleavened bread, green squash sauce, and strong coffee. We have been for a few days on half rations, but we have no stint of roast squash.”

The meals were the highlights of the day, but there was other good news. For the second day in a row, the weary party had advanced thirty-five miles. “A few days like this,” Powell wrote, “and we are out of prison.”

The river responded as maliciously as if Powell had whispered his hope aloud. The next day it swung in the wrong direction yet again, this time heading south. The dark granite, which the men had left behind, now loomed ominously in the distance once more. Toying with its victims like a Lothario trifling with his admirers' hearts, the river turned and twisted as if for sport. “Now and then the river turns to the west, and excites hopes that are soon destroyed by another turn to the south,” Powell wrote.

Then came a sudden, cold end to the teasing. “About nine o'clock we come to the dreaded rock. It is with no little misgiving that we see the river enter these black, hard walls.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

SEPARATION RAPID

 

At noon on August 27, 1869, the expedition came to a rapid that outdid their worst forebodings. The men pulled to shore and stared in horror. “The water dashes against the left bank and then is thrown furiously back against the right,” Bradley wrote. “The billows are huge and I fear our boats could not ride them [even] if we could keep them off the rocks. The spectacle is appalling to us.”

This latest bit of bad news might have been easier to take if it had been just one more dreary note in a long dirge. But the day before, the discovery of the Indian garden had sent everyone's spirits soaring. Hope had begun stirring, whispering hints of a life outside prison walls. And then this.

With the boats tied up on the right shore, Powell and the crew set out up the cliff in search of a path around the rapid. They climbed up and across the granite for a mile or two but saw no place where they could line or portage and no path through the rapid. “To run it,” Powell concluded bleakly, “would be sure destruction.”