Down the Great Unknown (46 page)

Up they climbed:
Powell added a long story here about finding himself trapped on the cliff, unable to advance or retreat, “suspended 400 feet above the river, into which I should fall if my footing fails.” He called for help, and his men (unnamed) managed a complicated rescue. No mention of the incident appears in Powell's river diary, or in Sumner's or Bradley's. (Powell's only reference to climbing in his Aug. 27 diary was “Spent afternoon in exploration.” See Powell,
UHQ
, Aug. 27, p. 131, and Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 27, p. 97.) Some modern white–water historians insist there is no spot on the canyon walls that fits Powell's description. See Anderson, “John Wesley Powell's
Explorations . . .
Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?” p. 378, or Marston, “Separation Marks,” p. 7.
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Powell woke Walter:
Hawkins told a different version, in which he played a decisive role. In this account, Powell came to Hawkins and said, “Well, Billy, we have concluded to abandon the river for the present.” Hawkins asked if Powell would sell his boat to him and Hall, so they could continue downstream. “Then the Major said, ‘Well, Billy, if I have one man that will stay with me I will continue my journey or be drowned in the attempt.' ” (See Hawkins,
CRC
, pp. 150–1.)
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“Three men refused to go”:
Bradley,
UHQ
, Aug. 28, p. 70. Hall saw the separation in much the same light. In a letter to his brother in September 1869, he wrote, “Just before we came out of the canyon three of the men left us on the head of rapids. They were afraid to run it so they left us in a bad place.” (See
UHQ
, v. 16–17, 1949, p. 507.)
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“The men that were left”:
Powell, in Bell,
New Tracks
. Reprinted in
UHQ
, p. 25. Powell wrote the account reprinted in Bell's book in 1870. By 1875, he had made a curious change in his description, writing, “We are behind a curve in the cañon, and cannot see up to where we left them, and so we wait until their coming seems hopeless, and push on.” (See Powell,
Exploration
, p. 101.) This description of “a curve in the canyon” that prevented the two groups from seeing one another is incorrect; the Colorado runs straight for two miles beyond Separation Canyon.
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“On I went”:
Bradley, UHQ, Aug. 28, p. 71. As remarked in the notes to Chapter Thirteen, this passage figures in the controversy about whether the boats had a sweep oar at the stern. Bradley's description of “putting an oar first on one side then on the other” would seem to speak
against
the existence of sweep oars, but Powell's 1875 account described “Bradley seiz[ing] the great scull oar.” (See Powell,
Exploration
, Aug. 28, p. 100.) In other instances where Bradley and Powell disagree on matters of fact, most historians have gone with Bradley.

Much of the confusion stems from Powell's flimflammery with dates. Powell mounted a second expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1871, this time with photographers and artists, and the boats on this second expedition definitely did have steering oars. The problem is that Powell lifted several incidents from the 1871 trip and inserted them into his 1869 narrative. Similarly, the text of his 1869 adventure was illustrated with drawings of his 1871 boats.

Making matters worse, much of the eyewitness testimony was recorded decades after the fact and is hard to evaluate. In 1907, for example, Robert B. Stanton tracked down Billy Hawkins and convinced him to write a short account of the 1869 expedition. At one point, declared Hawkins, “the high waves . . . were over fifteen feet in height, but Hall had the boat under such headway that I could manage it with my steering oar.” (See Hawkins,
CRC
, p. 152.) But then what do we make of a second account of the 1869 trip that Hawkins wrote in 1919, shortly before his death and fifty years after the events it describes? On the first day on the river, Hawkins wrote, “I was steering the boat with one oar behind.” (See Bass,
Adventures
, p. 20.) This seems unequivocal, but, as Brad Dimock noted, Powell's boats did
not
have steering oars on the first day of the trip. Michael Ghiglieri suggests that on the trip's first day, when the river was swift but there were no rapids to speak of, Hawkins may have left the rowing to Hall and taken an oar to the stern to use as a makeshift rudder. (Author interview, Mar. 19, 2001.) And, steering oars aside, Hawkins's account contained glaring mistakes of chronology and geography. (He put Island Park upstream of Disaster Falls, for instance, but the expedition reached Disaster Falls two weeks
before
Island Park.) In the end, we are left dangling.

Some skeptics have taken a different approach. Drifter Smith notes that the 1869 expedition became a race for survival and wonders if the men would have gambled their precious time on carving steering oars. Smith notes the problem of raw materials as well. The men had trouble finding wood that would do for an ordinary oar. A piece of wood suitable for a sweep oar would have been longer and presumably even harder to find.
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Here was confirmation, then:
Hamblin heard a slightly different version of the tale from one of the Indians after the official meeting broke up. In this account, the Shivwits had given the three men food and sent them on their way. Soon after, “an Indian from the east side of the Colorado” appeared, carrying news of a group of miners who had killed an Indian woman in a drunken brawl. Furious, the Shivwits had set out after the Howlands and Dunn and killed them in the mistaken belief that they were the “miners.” (See Powell,
Exploration
, pp. 130–1.)
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He never sought to punish:
The killings are sometimes attributed to one To–ab, based on a hearsay account written decades later by Anthony Ivins, a prominent Mormon and onetime mayor of St. George, Utah. To read Ivins's account is to realize that the case against To–ab is virtually nonexistent. (See Ivins, “A Mystery of the Grand Canyon Solved.” Ivins's essay can also be found in
Pioneer Stories
, edited by Preston Nibley.)
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If the inscription is a hoax:
Harvey Butchart, author of
Grand Canyon Treks
and the great authority on hiking the Grand Canyon, doubts that the inscriptions are authentic, on the grounds that “the three men would be trying to get to St. George without any touristy detours. The view from the top wouldn't help them find waterholes or the best route.” Private communication.
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both men kept:
Their critiques of Powell appear in Robert Stanton's
Colorado River Controversies
, a book with a curious history. Stanton was the engineer who had hoped to build a railroad through the canyon and who saw three of his companions drown in the Colorado's rapids. He became the second man to lead an expedition through the Grand Canyon. In 1891, he ran into a grizzled prospector who asked if he could spare any tobacco. The man turned out to be Jack Sumner. Stanton and Sumner began to chat, Stanton referred to Powell's famous
Exploration of the Colorado
, and Sumner grumbled that “there's lots in that book besides the truth.”
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The crew was new:
The new boats were slightly modified versions of the 1869 ones. The original boats had two bulkhead sections, one fore and one aft. The new boats had a third covered section in the middle, an improvement that made it less likely the boats would fill with water. (Powell lashed a chair to the middle deck so that he could scan downriver for trouble ahead.) The new boats also had a long sweep oar at the stern, a great advantage for maneuverability.
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Instead of feisty:
Since the first expedition, Powell had sharpened his sense of how to appeal to the public. This time the crew members included a professional photographer and a talented amateur artist. The best–known early photographs of the Grand Canyon date from the second expedition. (The first–ever photographs of the Grand Canyon were taken by Timothy O'Sullivan, with the Wheeler expedition in 1871.) See Pyne's
How the Canyon Became Grand
for a sophisticated history of attempts to depict the Grand Canyon in words and pictures.
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The second expedition endured:
As remarked in the footnote in the text, many of the men on the second expedition felt that Powell had robbed them of the credit they deserved. Even Frederick Dellenbaugh, who became the youngest member of Powell's crew, at seventeen, and was smitten with a case of hero worship that lasted throughout his long life, ventured a criticism of Powell on this point. “It has always seemed to me,” he wrote, “that the men of the second party, who made the same journey, who mapped and explored the river and much of the country roundabout, doing a large amount of difficult wok in the scientific line, should have been accorded some recognition.” (See Dellenbaugh, Romance, preface, p. vi. For a defense of Powell on this point, see Worster,
River Running West
, pp. 256–7.)
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Anyone writing about the Grand Canyon comes to rely on Earle Spamer's superlative
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It is available in a free, updated, searchable version on the Internet. See http://www.grandcanyon.org/biblio/bibliography.htm.

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———. “Shiloh: The Second Day's Battle and Aftermath.”
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———.
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Science 81
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———.
The Switzerland of America
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———.
John Doyle Lee: Zealot—Pioneer Builder—Scapegoat
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———.
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