Down the Great Unknown (7 page)

This was Horseshoe Canyon, the name chosen to indicate the U-shaped course of the river. Then came another valley and soon another canyon, this one fed by a beautiful creek. They named both creek and canyon Kingfisher, for a bird they saw on the branch of a dead willow. It stood on its perch above the river, Sumner wrote, “watching the finny tribe with the determination of purpose that we often see exhibited by politicians while watching for the spoils of office.”

The river curved again, bending around a dome-shaped rock where hundreds of swallows had built their nests. The rock, a thousand feet of gray-white sandstone, looked like an enormous beehive, with swallows playing the role of bees. The men named it Beehive Point, and camped on the opposite bank. The hunters set out before dinner, returning with the usual lack of success. “Goodman saw one elk, but missed it,” Sumner noted with dismay, and no one else came even that close.

Powell was in an expansive mood nonetheless. The first serious rapid lay behind them, the river had become “broad, deep, and quiet,” and the view from camp was inspiring. On the far shore, behind the beehive, rose a kind of natural amphitheater perhaps fifteen hundred feet high, formed of sandstone cliffs and terraces of pine and cedar. “The amphitheater seems banded red and green,” Powell wrote, “and the evening sun is playing with roseate flashes on the rocks, with shimmering green on the cedars' spray, and iridescent gleams on the dancing waves. The landscape revels in the sunshine.”

The next day brought everyone back down to earth. It began well enough. Powell, Bradley, and Dunn had set out “to examine some rocks,” in Sumner's none too enthusiastic words, and Oramel Howland and Goodman had climbed high above the river to survey the landscape for Howland's map. By ten o'clock, the men were on the river and into two miles of barely interrupted rapids. Then came half an hour of flat water and after that, in Sumner's words, “a bad rapid through which no boat can run; full of sunken rocks, and having a fall of about ten feet in two hundred yards.” They lined it in two hard hours, one boat at a time, most of the men stumbling along the shore clutching ropes tied to bow and stern while two of the group grabbed oars and stationed themselves on the rocks along the riverbank to fend off the boats as needed.

At five o'clock, Sumner continued, “we came to the worst place we had seen yet; a narrow gorge full of sunken rocks, for 300 yards, through which the water runs with a speed that threatened to smash everything to pieces that would get into it.” The men pulled to shore to make a plan and quickly saw that they had landed on the wrong side of the river. Now the problem was to get across the rushing river without being swept into the rapid. “Dunn and the trapper”—Sumner referred to himself in the third person—“finally decided to take the small boat across or smash her to pieces.” They made it across, emptied the boat, and crossed back to help their companions. In the meantime, the three heavy boats had each unloaded about half their cargo so that they would not be quite as clumsy as usual. Five crossings later, the
Emma Dean
had ferried the excess cargo to the far side. Now, one at a time, the big boats set out. They made it, barely, the men pulling desperately
while the current rushed them toward the rapid. Tomorrow they would line their way past it. Now they were too exhausted to do more than collapse. “Had supper,” Sumner wrote, “turned in, and in two minutes all were in dreamland.”

Not quite all. “As the twilight deepens,” Powell wrote, “the rocks grow dark and somber; the threatening roar of the water is loud and constant, and I lie awake with thoughts of the morrow and the cañons to come.”

Away from its rivers, the desert at night can be eerily silent. “Was there ever such a stillness as that which rests upon the desert at night!” the writer John Van Dyke asked a century ago. “Was there ever such a hush as that which steals from star to star across the firmament!” We can be sure that Van Dyke was not camped by a rapid when he wrote those lines. Many people find the sound of running water soothing. They may have in mind a babbling brook or a gurgling fountain; they are not thinking of rapids, which do not murmur. They rumble. They roar. They crash. The sound evokes a thunderstorm just overhead, a jet skimming the ground, a runaway train. The noise echoes all the louder when it is amplified by stone cliffs that soar upwards of a thousand feet. And, in nerve-racking contrast with the other ground-shaking sounds it calls to mind, this river thunder never stops.

The message is worse than the sound itself—the roar of a rapid is a proclamation of danger as clear as a giant's bellowed curse in a fairy tale.

Small wonder that Powell and his men all rose early the next morning. The first order of business was to make it past the rapid they had sneaked in front of the day before.

It took three tense hours of lining, but then, as if to reward the men for their hard labors, the day took a sudden turn for the better. In the boats at last, they found the river fast and free of obstacles. The contrast between the misery of lining rapids and the delight of “shooting” them leaps off the journal pages. Even the dyspeptic Bradley seemed excited, writing happily that the boats raced along “like lightning for a very long distance.” Powell, characteristically, was the most high-spirited of all. “To-day we have an exciting ride,” he wrote. “The river rolls down the cañon at a wonderful rate, and, with no rocks in the way, we make almost railroad speed. Here and there the water rushes into a narrow gorge; the rocks on the side roll it into the center in great waves, and the boats go leaping and bounding over these like things of life.” The swooping, soaring motion of the boats over the waves reminded Powell of “herds of startled deer bounding
through forests beset with fallen timber.” For the time being, the rapids were thrilling rather than threatening.

Even on as fine a run as this, it was not all play. Occasionally a wave had the bad manners to jump uninvited into one of the boats. This “necessitates much bailing, and obliges us to stop occasionally for that purpose,” Powell complained. (Powell had made the wise decision to cover bulkheads in the bow and stern of each boat, but he had left the center section of each boat open. Had he known the size of the waves he would face, he might have chosen to cover this center section, too, except for open cockpits for the men at the oars.)

The expedition's introduction to the fine art of bailing was comparatively gentle. A boat that has swallowed a wave is instantly heavier and clumsier by more than a thousand pounds. For a boatman, already struggling to find a route that will take him safely through a rapid, it is as if some prankster god has dropped a piano into the boat at the worst possible time. The only good news is that a boat carrying an extra half ton of ballast is hard to flip. But passengers and pilot may end up swimming anyway, because the newly heavy boat may plow directly into the next giant wave rather than float over it, and the impact of that collision can overpower the most white-knuckled grip.

About two decades ago designers devised “self-bailing” rafts with an inflated floor that rides considerably higher than the river surface. Water that spills into the boat drains out through strategically placed holes along the floor. Self-bailing boats have obvious advantages but disadvantages as well—they are harder to repair, slower in flat water, and, because they drain their watery ballast so quickly, comparatively easy to flip.

So the old design is still widely used, and it is still common for white-water trips to be punctuated by shouted orders to bail. On commercial trips on the Colorado today, passengers quickly learn what is at stake. At the foot of every rapid, the boatman yells, “Bail!,” and three-hundred-dollar-an-hour lawyers and thirty-year-old millionaires grab their bailing buckets and start slinging water overboard.

Despite the pauses for bailing, Powell and his men were making good time. In a single hour, they reckoned, they had covered twelve miles and run perhaps a dozen rapids. (The mileage figures were rough guesses, obtained by stringing together estimates of the “half a mile to that black rock” sort. The guesses tended to be high, especially early on.) Then came trouble. “As the roaring of the rapids dies away above us,” wrote Sumner, “a new cause of alarm breaks in upon us from below . . . when, turning an abrupt corner, we came in sight of the first fall, about three hundred yards below us.” Powell, in the lead boat, signaled the other boats to land. The
Emma Dean
approached the rapid within about twenty feet and pulled to shore to reconnoiter. No one liked what he saw. “[We] found a fall of about ten feet in twenty-five,” Sumner reported. “There is a nearly square rock in the middle of the stream about twenty-five by thirty feet, the top fifteen
above the water. There are many smaller ones all the way across, placed in such a manner that the fall is broken into steps, two on the east side, three on the west.”

They were in a chasm they had named Red Canyon, in honor of the red sandstone walls that soared anywhere from a thousand to two thousand feet above the river. Powell had been warned about these rapids; they were the ones he had been told about the previous spring by the Indian who had painted a word picture of roaring waves and bucking canoes and rocks that were “heap, heap high.” The rapid in front of them confirmed that description. As miserable as it would be to carry the supplies and line the boats here, where there was no decent land route, no one even suggested they try to run the rapid.

The lining strategy was born of desperation, as if house movers who needed to transport a safe ended up tying ropes to it and pushing it down the stairs. (Today, lining is still dreaded, although techniques have improved.) First, the boats were unloaded. Then, one boat at a time, a long rope was attached to the boat's stern. Five or six men on the shore grabbed that stern line. A second line was attached to the bow and tied off downstream, well below the fall. Next came the critical move—the half dozen men clutching the stern line with all their strength did their best to ease the boat over the fall, while others in the crew stood on the sharp rocks along the river's edge, armed with oars, poised to ward off the boat if it careened into the rocks. When the river overpowered the men on the stern line and tore the rope from their hands, the boat shot over the fall. Now it was up to the men stationed downstream to reel in the runaway craft by taking up the slack in the bowline, as if our housemovers
had to snag the safe tumbling down the stairs before it crashed through the front door.

All four boats, and at least three tons of cargo, had to be manhandled past the rapid. The men began with the
Emma Dean
, the lightest boat, and lowered her to safety in fifteen minutes. Then they unloaded the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
, but it had grown late and they put off any further work until the following morning. Everyone woke early the next day and soon had all the boats safely below the fall. “Then came the real hard work,” wrote Sumner, “carrying the freight a hundred yards or more over a mass of loose rocks, tumbled together like the ruins of some old fortress. Not a very good road to pack seven thousand pounds of freight.”

It was brutal work. The cargo came to nearly eight hundred pounds per able-bodied man, to be carried on their backs a distance of a couple of city blocks (and with those blocks torn up by a construction project). The trail, Bradley wrote, led over and around an array of “huge bowlders recently fallen from the mountains.” With all their surroundings so outsized—house-sized boulders, thousand-foot cliffs—the men staggering under their enormous loads seemed like ants making off with crumbs from a picnic.

At one point, someone noticed an inscription cut into a rock. “Ashley,” it said, and then, less clearly, a date. Some of the men thought it said 1825, some 1835 or 1855. They named the rapid Ashley Falls in honor of their mysterious predecessor.

No one knew who Ashley was, though Powell thought that he had heard the name. He had been told a story about a group of men who had started down the Green. Their boat had swamped, and some of the men drowned. Powell believed (mistakenly) that Ashley was one of that group. The whole episode was unsettling, the faded name and date evocative of an inscription on a gravestone. “The word ‘Ashley' is a warning to us,” Powell wrote, “and we resolve on great caution.”

William H. Ashley was an entrepreneur and a major figure in the fur trade, though he himself seldom ventured west of St. Louis. In February 1822, he had placed a newspaper advertisement seeking “one hundred men, to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years.” A host of men who would become explorers of almost legendary stature—Jim Bridger, Jim Beckwourth, and Jedediah Smith among them—took Ashley's offer and marched into history.

These mountain men were not only surpassingly brave but surpassingly accomplished as well, vastly more at home in the unsettled regions of the West than any other white men of the day. “They went about the blank spaces of the map like men going to the barn,” in the words of the historian Bernard De Voto.

Illiterate though many of them were, they knew how to read the landscape. “It is hardly too much to say that a mountain man's life was skill,” De Voto wrote. “He not only worked in the wilderness, he also lived there and he did so from sun to sun by the exercise of total skill. . . . The mountains, the aridity, the distances, and the climates imposed severities far greater than those laid on forest-runners, rivermen, or any other of our symbolic pioneers. . . . Why do you follow the ridges into or out of unfamiliar country? What do you do for a companion who has collapsed from want of water while crossing a desert? How do you get meat when you find yourself without gunpowder in a country barren of game? What tribe of Indians made this trail, how many were in the band, what errand were they on?” Such questions were all in a day's work for the mountain men. And Ashley's men were among the best.