Down the Great Unknown (45 page)

What the factory:
A total of ninety Americans were killed and wounded at the Battle of Lexington and Concord. The bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War, for the Americans, was Camden. American casualties numbered one thousand.
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Southern troops made at least:
The fighting at the Hornets' Nest raises a number of tangled questions. First is the number of Confederate assaults. The count ranges anywhere from seven to fourteen, depending on the historian. Second, many writers describe the Hornets' Nest as the site of the fiercest fighting at Shiloh. Third, many accounts of the battle describe the Confederates making near–suicidal charges across Duncan Field. Stacy Allen, who has studied the issue in detail, disputes nearly all the conventional wisdom. He argues, convincingly, that there were seven confirmed assaults and possibly two more; that fighting elsewhere at Shiloh was more deadly than in the Hornets' Nest; and that most of the assaults on the Hornets' Nest were through dense thickets, not across open fields.
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As the barrage continued:
This account is from McDonough,
Shiloh
, pp.146–49 and Daniel,
Shiloh
, pp. 210–13. Allen survived and went on to become governor of Louisiana.
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In two spring days:
Union losses at Shiloh were 1,754 men killed, 8,408 wounded, and 2,885 captured, for a total of 13,047. Confederate losses were 1,723 killed, 8,012 wounded, and 959 missing, for a total of 10,694. The overall casualty rate was 24 percent. The figures are cited in Foote,
The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville
, p. 350. Most of the men listed as missing were captured by the enemy.
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With a death toll:
It is
not
the case, though the claim often appears in print, that more Americans died in the Civil War than in all the nation's other wars combined. From the American Revolution through the Gulf War but excluding the Civil War, 638,560 Americans died in combat. In the Civil War alone, 558,052 Americans lost their lives.
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“Hell's Half Mile”:
Powell,
Exploration
, June 15, p. 28. The name was not given until the second expedition down the Green and the Colorado, in 1871.
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In the narrowest stretches:
Kieffer measured the speed of Grand Canyon rapids and found a top figure of thirty–three feet per second, in Hermit Rapid. (See “Hydraulics and Geomorphology,” p. 338.) (Thirty–three feet per second is twenty–two miles per hour.) In Kieffer's “1983 Hydraulic Jump,” she reports that at one point the rapid reached a speed of fourteen meters per second (at a flow of fifty thousand cubic feet per second). See p. 399. (Fourteen meters per second is thirty–one miles per hour.)
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“optic flow”:
Curtis Rist, “Roll Over, Newton,”
Discover
, April 2001, p. 49. According to Rist, even the twenty–inch height difference between an SUV and an ordinary car changes a driver's perception of speed. An SUV driver going sixty miles an hour feels as if he is only driving at forty.
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When boatmen of their skill:
Michael Ghiglieri rejects this argument. “Modern boatmen are spoiled by having experience—and conditioned responses—only with top–notch and more appropriate boats,” he insists. “When you go from a modern, lightweight dory to one of Powell's boats, it's like going from a sports car to a Flintstone car, where you have to kick your feet. If you
only
knew Whitehall haulers, you'd figure out how to row them.” (Author interview, Mar. 19, 2001.)
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See the notes:
The most relevant entry in any contemporary account was Bradley's journal entry on Aug. 28. Bradley had gotten in trouble in a rapid but found a way to rescue himself. “By putting an oar first on one side then on the other I could swing her around and guide her very well,” he wrote, and the remark seems hard to reconcile with the boat having had a sweep oar. (See Bradley,
UHQ
, Aug. 28, p. 71.) But Powell described the same episode, although he did not write his account until 1875: “Bradley seizes the great scull oar, places it in the stern rowlock, and pulls with all his power.” (See Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 28, p. 101.)

Which man had it right? When we come to Aug. 28, we will see that Powell's account of the day's events is suspect in other regards, but there is no denying that we have to make a judgment call here. A fuller discussion of this issue can be found in the notes for Aug. 28, in Chapter Twenty–five.
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“Climbed the mountain”:
Bradley,
UHQ
, July 8, p. 46. “We have named the long peninsular rock on the other side Echo Rock,” Powell wrote. “Desiring to climb it, Bradley and I take the little boat and pull up stream as far as possible, for it cannot be climbed directly opposite.” (See
Exploration
, p. 33.) Then he continued with the story as told here. Echo Rock was far upstream, and Sumner, Bradley, and Howland each described it; none of them mentioned a word about a climbing mishap. Powell's reference to Echo Rock must have been a slip of memory or, perhaps, a literary flourish intended to provide a suitably grand backdrop for a monumentally dramatic scene.

It is possible to read Bradley's account as not quite confirming Powell's. Perhaps Powell merely needed assistance (“In one place Major . . . couldn't get up”), not rescue. But this reading seems strained. The story of the drawers seems to indicate that Powell was in a desperate plight, as do the words “he got up safe.”
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“except a glorious ducking”:
Bradley,
UHQ
, July 12, pp. 48–9. Like Powell's story of Bradley rescuing him with his drawers, Powell's account of Bradley's swamping is hard to evaluate. Bradley does describe a “big wave . . . knocking me over the side so that I held the boat by one hand,” but does not say that his foot was pinned beneath his seat. Does the discrepancy between Bradley's brief account of his “glorious ducking” and Powell's more elaborate version reflect Bradley's modesty or Powell's tendency to embellish a good yarn?
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the bigger of the two:
Sumner judged the Green to be 70 or 80 yards wide and the Grand 125. Sumner,
UHQ
, July 16, p. 114.
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“Climbed ‘Cave Cliff' ”:
Drifter Smith called my attention to Powell's repeated references to “Bradey” rather than “Bradley.” Martin Anderson, in turn, had pointed out the misspelling to Smith. The transcript of Powell's river diary in the
UHQ
silently corrects this error, but the handwritten original shows “Bradey” for “Bradley.” In his published accounts of the expedition, Powell did spell Bradley's name correctly. Bradley never complained in his diary that Powell
called
him “Bradey,” so presumably Powell knew his name.
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Powell, inclined by nature:
Powell built his journal account from his river diary, which was markedly richer than Bradley's diary but far more restrained than Powell's journal account would be. Powell's diary entry for July 20, 1869, read as follows: “Climbed ‘Cave Cliff' with Bradey. Summit of cliffs full of caves, hence name. Pinnacles in the red sandstone. The terraces, the monuments of the stages of erosion. Found a cool spring in gulch on our way up. One cave 75 paces long, dome, skylight at each end connected by fissure 6 or 8 inches wide, from 10 to 40 ft. wide, 51/2 ft. high.”
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Forty years would pass:
Nathaniel Galloway made the first successful run, in 1909. See Nash,
Big Drops
, p. 87.
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The two sides agreed:
Brower,
Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run
, pp. 26–7. Brower, one of the towering figures in the environmental movement, deserved much of the credit for keeping dams out of the Grand Canyon. But he castigated himself for having given in to the Glen Canyon compromise, which he saw as the great mistake of his life. “Glen Canyon died in 1963,” he wrote in the foreword to
The Place No One Knew
, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure.”
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But the Bureau of Reclamation:
Powell's legacy is so confused, in part, because of a tendency to forget that he was a man firmly of the nineteenth century. We tend today to lump together the words “preservationist” and “conservationist,” but, as the historian Patricia Limerick notes, the two terms had sharply different meanings in the 1800s. Powell was a conservationist, which meant, in his day, that he favored conserving scarce resources, water chief among them. He favored reclaiming the land, not preserving it unspoiled like a colossal museum exhibit. Powell talked happily of “conquered rivers” and looked to a future where rivers would be tamed by man “as wild beasts have been domesticated for his use.” The alternative to dams and reservoirs, Powell wrote repeatedly, was that rivers would “run to waste,” spilling their treasure uselessly into the sea. See Limerick,
Desert Passages
, pp. 169–72, and Aton,
Inventing John Wesley Powell
. For a typical expression of Powell's views, see his essay on the Johnstown flood, “The Lesson of Conemaugh.” For a book–length attempt to place Powell's views in their historical context, see Worster's
River Running West
.
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It looked like nothing more:
Writing independently, P. T. Reilly and Michael Ghiglieri, both of them Grand Canyon boatmen and white–water historians, described this scenario as their best guess. McDonald himself apparently pinned the blame on an underwater current. “Just as we turned, in what seemed to be smooth waves,” McDonald wrote, “a heavy wave came up out of a whirl on upper side of boat & instantly upset boat, throwing us both into river away from the boat.” Stanton endorsed McDonald's view but Reilly dismissed it contemptuously. “Since the three deaths which ensued from the use of this equipment [the boats] did not result from that which Stanton called defective, it is interesting to see him grope for explanations and advance such things as ‘up–shoots' and ‘boiling fountains.' ” (See Reilly, “How Deadly?” pp. 254–5; Ghiglieri,
Canyon
, p. 158; Stanton,
Down
, pp. 78–9.)
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The oldest rocks:
Price,
An Introduction to Grand Canyon Geology
, p. 23. The oldest rock in the Grand Canyon is Vishnu Schist. The oldest exposed rocks in the world, on the shores of Canada's Great Slave Lake and in Greenland, are four billion years old.
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“the Great Unconformity”:
At Blacktail Canyon, as Ann Zwinger notes in
Downcanyon
, a hiker can span the missing 1.2 billion years of the Great Unconformity with her hands. (See Zwinger, p. 103.)
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By the time Powell:
It is impossible to know exactly what rapids Powell faced in 1869. Some Grand Canyon rapids have changed since his day (Soap Creek was unrunnable, for instance; today's much–feared Crystal was not much more than a riffle; MNA did not exist). Floods, debris flows, rock falls, and the level of the river can all transform the rapids.
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Powell was the first:
Webb,
Grand Canyon
, p. 142. Perhaps Bradley deserves at least a share of the credit. In his journal on Aug. 18, he wrote, “Rapids very numerous and very large. A great many lateral cañons come in almost as large as the one in which the river runs and they sweep down immense quantities of huge rocks which at places literally dam up the river, making the worst kind of a rapid because you can see rocks rising all over them with no channel in which to run them.”
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“Still, on we speed”:
Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 14, pp. 82–3. Bradley wrote: “The little boat being too small for such a frightful sea filled soon after starting and swung around head up river almost unmanageable but on she went and by the good cool sense of those on board she was kept right side up through the whole of it (more than half a mile).” (See
UHQ
, Aug. 14, p. 63.)
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On August 16:
August 16 is an educated guess, not a hard fact. On Aug. 15 Bradley wrote, “Howland had the misfortune to lose his notes and map of the river from Little Colorado down to this point.” (See Bradley,
UHQ
, Aug. 15, p. 64.) Sumner described Powell rebuking Howland. He did not specify a date but wrote, “Then, after having had a spat with Howland in the forenoon, Major Powell at the noonday camp informed Dunn that he could leave the camp immediately or pay him fifty dollars a month for rations as long as he was with the outfit.” (See
CRC
, p. 201.)
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Remarkably, they lost nothing:
Bradley's account and Powell's disagreed on whether the oars were lost. Bradley wrote, “Fortunately nothing was lost but a pair of oars.” (See Bradley,
UHQ
, Aug. 19, p. 67.) Powell wrote, “The oars, which fortunately have floated along in company with us, are gathered up.” (See Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 19, p. 90.) I have chosen to follow Bradley, generally considered the most reliable diarist on the expedition.
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“What a conflict”:
Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 25, p. 95. It is worth noting that Powell's enthusiasm here was
not
an after–the–fact addition. His river diary betrays the same fascination with the lava as does his 1875 account, though the language is less polished.
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