Down the Great Unknown (8 page)

Jim Beckwourth, who wrote about Ashley in a swashbuckling autobiography, lived a life with all the plot twists of a boy's adventure book. The son of a slave mother and a plantation-owner father, Beckwourth was born in Virginia and raised in Missouri but became a celebrated hunter and explorer in the West. Along the way, he was adopted by the Crow Nation, took a Crow wife, and became a war chief. A man of extremes, he stood out even among his fellow mountain men, one historian notes, as “a tough hombre, a daredevil, a thug, and a liar.”

Ashley placed his newspaper ad in 1822. By 1824, the mountain men had brought him the welcome news that the tributaries of the upper Green teemed with beaver. Determined to see for himself, Ashley headed West in 1825. He divided his men into four scouting parties and assigned three to explore particular valleys and streams. The fourth group, Ashley and seven mountain men, prepared to set out down the Green itself. Beckwourth was, at least sometimes, part of Ashley's party.

First Ashley's crew had to make their boats. These fragile craft, called bullboats, were formed by draping buffalo skins across a framework made of willow branches. The first boat was sixteen feet long and seven wide, made from half a dozen buffalo hides. It bore a none-too-encouraging resemblance to an upside-down umbrella. Soon the men found it necessary to build a second, smaller boat as well. Awkward at the best of times, these bullboats grew even more unwieldy as they became waterlogged.

Beckwourth claimed that the boats proved unreliable from the moment they were built. “One of our boats being finished and launched,” he wrote, “[Ashley] sprang into it to test its capacity.” Immediately the mooring line snapped, and Ashley was pulled from the river's edge by what Beckwourth called the “Green River Suck.” The ominous name referred to a “fall [that] continued for six or eight miles” while descending “upward of two hundred and fifty feet.” Ashley made it to the far shore but capsized, and Beckwourth swam to his rescue. But both men found themselves caught in the Suck and “began slowly to recede from the shore toward inevitable death.” At the last possible moment, Beckwourth managed to catch a line flung from shore, and the other mountain men dragged their two half-drowned companions to safety.

From that dismal beginning, the trip quickly grew even worse. The men had not brought enough food, and they could not get more because they had lost their guns in various capsizings. After six days without food, they had decided to draw lots to see who should be sacrificed to serve as dinner for his companions. Ashley prevailed on the men to hold out one more day. The next day, the canyon opened up and they found a party of trappers waiting with food.

So Beckwourth told it, at any rate. It is worth emphasizing that, just as good cooks pride themselves on being able to conjure up a feast from a wedge of cheese, a tomato, and a few other bits and pieces, so the mountain men prided themselves on crafting an elaborate tale from a handful of half-truths. “To be a liar was as much a part of mountain honor,” one historian notes, “as hard drinking or straight shooting. Embroider your adventures, convert to use any handy odyssey, and spin it all out in the firelight. The only sin is the sin of being dull.”

By this standard, Beckwourth was a man of unimpeachable honor. Remarkably, his account was taken as gospel for decades. Only in 1918, when Ashley's journal was posthumously published, did the true story of the 1825 trip emerge. The danger had been real enough, even without exaggeration, and both men and boats had taken a beating. The portages were frequent and difficult, and sometimes the men had deemed it better to take a chance on capsizing in a rapid than to volunteer for the certain misery of portaging. “Exosted with the fatiegue of portages and the tediousness of our progress . . . we crossed many dangerous places This day without examining them previously,” Ashley wrote. The men
had
run low on food (although never to the point of considering cannibalism), and once Ashley
had
been rescued from a rapid “just as from all appearance [the boat] was about making her exit and me with her for I cannot swim.”

All in all, though, the trip was less colorful in reality than in Beckwourth's dramatization. But even the unadorned facts might have made Powell hesitate, if he had known them. Consider what Ashley and his mountain men had done. They had seen the Green, struggled through some of its fearsome canyons and rapids, and gladly left the river to rendezvous with their colleagues. It is true that Ashley's goals were not Powell's—Ashley's concern was business, not exploration. But even allowing for their different motives, it is worth noting how much more ambitious Powell's plans were than Ashley's. Ashley covered only a fraction of Powell's route; he saw the Green only before its junction with the Colorado, before that second mighty river added its power to what was already a life-threatening torrent; and he never came near the Grand Canyon.

Ashley's men were bold, and proud of their boldness. But enough was enough. They were hungry, and the river was growing steadily more threatening. Farther downstream, Ashley was told, the Green was not only “destitute of game” but also “verry dangerous.” Powell would eventually hear the same warnings. It was a mark of his daring—some would say of his recklessness—that, within two years of seeing the West for the first time, he crossed a line that the mountain men had crept up to and then shied away from.

The first to find Ashley's inscription, as far as we know, was an ill-fated young man named William Manly. He had himself proudly written his own name near the river, a few miles upstream of Ashley Falls, but Powell and his men had missed it. “Capt. W. L. Manly, U.S.A,” it read, in large letters painted on a rock. Manly's “paint” was a combination of gunpowder and grease, his brush a bit of cloth tied around a stick. He had signed his name twenty years before Powell set off down the Green, and he, too, had found himself overmatched at Ashley Falls.

Manly was a restless young man, a hardworking but not notably successful hunter and trapper who, in 1849, caught a bad case of gold fever. California was strewn with gold, everyone said, just waiting for someone to come and get it. No story was too outlandish to believe. For $2.50 a bottle, one newspaper advertisement declared, you could buy a special salve that would guarantee your fortune. All you had to do was climb a hillside in gold country, rub the salve all over yourself, and roll downhill. By the time you reached the bottom and scraped off the gold dust, you would have riches that would last the rest of your days.

Manly, then living in Wisconsin, found a wagon train headed for the gold fields and hired on to drive an ox team. They had started too late in the year, he soon learned; the Sierra Nevada would be deep in snow and impassable. The only choice was to wait out the winter in Salt Lake City. By this time, the party had reached the Green River. Manly and a small group of impatient companions came up with their own plan. “We put a great many ‘ifs' together and they amounted to about this: If this stream were large enough; if we had a boat; if we knew the way; if there were no falls or bad places; if we had plenty of provisions; if we were bold enough to set out on such a trip, we might come out at some point or other on the Pacific Ocean.”

Then came a sign from heaven—someone found a small ferry boat abandoned on a sandbar. It was beat-up and filled with sand, but the men soon dug it free and declared it usable. Better still, they found a pair of oars buried in the sand beneath the boat. Manly and six companions bade farewell to the wagon train, gulped hard when they realized that “all our worldly goods were piled up on the bank, and we were alone,” and prepared to head downriver. The boat had awkward proportions—it was about twelve feet long and six wide—but it held all the men, six guns, and their gear. “It was not a heavy load for the craft,” Manly noted, “and it looked as if we were taking the most sensible way to get to the Pacific, and we almost wondered that everybody was so blind as not to see it as we did.”

The first inklings of doubt crept in soon enough. One man was at the oars, the others at the sides of the boat armed with long sticks they intended to use to keep away from rocks in the channel. The river was fast and shallow. At one point, Manly, who had been chosen captain, pushed his pole against the bottom to dodge a boulder.
Instead, the stick caught
between two rocks and flung Manly out of the boat and into the river, pole vaulter style. He managed to swim to shore to the sound of his companions' cheers.

They soon reached a stretch of river choked by “huge rocks as large as cabins.” Here Manly and his companions tried a version of lining that makes Powell's approach seem stodgy. “While the boys held the stern line,” Manly explained, “I took off my clothes and pushed the boat out into the torrent which ran around the rocks.” Then Manly scrambled into the boat, and the men slowly paid out the stern line. Manly cried out, “Let go!” when he thought the time was right, and the boat leapt ahead—with Manly still in it—and over the fall. “I grasped the bow line, and at the first chance jumped overboard and got to shore, when I held the boat and brought it in below the obstructions.”

At about this point
, Manly chanced to look up and see the rock where Ashley had painted his name. He didn't have much time for sightseeing. Three hundred yards downstream an enormous rock nearly blocked the channel. “The current was so strong that when the boat struck the rock we could not stop it,” Manly wrote, “and the gunwale next to us rose, and the other went down, so that in a second the boat stood edgewise against the big rock, and the strong current pinned it there so tight that we could no more move it than we could move the rock itself.”

Checkmate! Or so it seemed, for the boat was irretrievably lost and the men were “afoot and alone.” Manly, though, saw two pine trees that he believed could be shaped into canoes. The men set to work with their axes and soon had hacked out two dugout canoes, rough but perhaps workable, each about fifteen feet long and two feet wide. They lashed the two together for stability but found that the makeshift craft was too small. They struggled back to shore, chopped down more trees, and set to work building a third, larger canoe. The new boat, about twenty-five or thirty feet long, was soon finished and loaded. Manly and a companion set out in the lead, in the big boat.

They rattled their way along, sometimes dodging rocks, sometimes crashing into them, riding over some waves and being flipped by others. In one stretch where the channel ran straight and unobstructed, “the stream was so swift that it caused great, rolling waves in the center, of a kind I have never seen anywhere else,” Manly wrote. “The boys were not skillful enough to navigate this stream, and the suction drew them to the center where the great waves rolled them over and over, bottom side up and every way.”

Some of the men struggled to shore, but one, Alfred Walton, could not swim and clung to his canoe with a death grip. “Sometimes we could see the man and sometimes not, and he and the canoe took turns in disappearing. Walton had very black hair, and as he clung fast to his canoe his black head looked like a crow on the end of a log. Sometimes he would be under so long that we thought he must be lost, when up he would come again still clinging manfully.”

Walton lived, and somehow the men made it downstream several more miles. Exactly how many is a matter of historical dispute; Manly and Walton and the rest of their crew seem to have covered roughly the easiest one-fifth of the distance Powell intended to travel. Somewhere in the Uinta Basin they had the good fortune to encounter a Ute Indian, Wakara, whose name Manly rendered as “Walker.” Wakara asked, in sign language, where Manly thought he was going. Manly did his best to explain that he and his party were taking a shortcut to the Pacific Ocean and the land of gold. “
When I told Chief Walker
this he seemed very much astonished,” Manly reported, deadpan.

Wakara then led Manly to a sandbar by the river, took up a stick, and began to draw a map in the sand. Here was the Green, here were its upstream tributaries, here (a trail of pebbles and much waving of the stick, as if Wakara were driving oxen) was the white man's overland route. It was all, Manly saw, “exactly correct.” When Manly nodded his understanding, Wakara began to map the section of river that Manly would encounter next. At last, after depicting a series of mountains, valleys, and canyons, Wakara began gathering stones and piling them up one on top of the other, to represent the deepest canyon yet. “Then he stood with one foot on each side of his river and put his hands on the stones and then raised them as high as he could, making a continued e-e-e-e-e-e as long as his breath would last, pointed to the canoe and made signs with his hands how it would roll and pitch in the rapids and finally capsize and throw us all out. He then made signs of death to show us that it was a fatal
place. I understood perfectly plain from this that below the valley where we now were was a terrible cañon, much higher than any we had passed, and the rapids were not navigable with safety.”

Manly and four of his companions decided that it was time to take the overland route.
*
(Two of the men chose to stick with the river, although they, too, soon decided that they had had enough.)

•      •      •

Powell did not know these harrowing stories, and he might have proceeded anyway had he known them. But even John Frémont, “the Pathfinder,” perhaps the most renowned Western explorer of them all, had rejected an expedition like Powell's as too reckless. That this man had looked at the Colorado and blinked should have been worrisome indeed, for Frémont risked his own life (and the lives of his companions) with blithe indifference.

Frémont was a larger-than-life character, part hero and part comic-opera buffoon. He was the Republican presidential candidate in 1856 and, for a time during the Civil War, commander of all Union forces in the West. (He surrounded himself with a guard of thirty men, all of them five feet, eleven or taller so that the effect would be suitably impressive.) Frémont was “the damndest scoundrel that ever lived,” Abraham Lincoln once observed, “but in the infinite mercy of Providence . . . also the damndest fool.”