Down the Great Unknown (19 page)

The
Maid
still had to cross the river, to join the
Emma Dean
along the right-hand cliff. She made it. The
Sister
, in the meantime, was on the correct side of the river but still hidden in her alcove, out of sight and out of hearing, the farthest away from the rapid of the three boats. Powell, now on foot at the rapid, spotted yet another crevice. This one stretched in the direction of the
Sister
. Powell crawled along the crevice and, when he had come as close to the
Sister
as he could, yelled with all his might. Eventually someone made out his voice above the water's noise. Powell shouted orders to the
Sister
's crew to move downstream to join the other two boats. Afraid to commit to the river, the
Sister
crept along the cliff face, the men grabbing desperately at every crevice and knob they spied. Finally, the three boats were together a few yards above the rapid. “Now, by passing a line up on the shelf, the boats can be let down to the broken rocks below,” Powell wrote. “This we
do, and, making a short portage, our troubles here are over.”

The “troubles” had taken up three or four hours, but no one made much of them. In their journals that evening, Bradley and Sumner each devoted more space to the afternoon's fishing. By this time, a bad time in the boats hardly counted as news; a good meal was a front-page story. Oramel Howland was the hero of the day. He had set aside his mapmaking duties “and soon had a score of large trout,” Sumner noted happily, “the first we have been able to catch so far.” When Sumner recorded the great event in his journal, he paid tribute to his friend by referring to him not simply by name but as “Mr. Howland.”

The good fortune continued into the next day, June 22. It began in fine fashion with a breakfast of fried trout followed by what Sumner, in the
Emma Dean
, called “a splendid run of six miles through a continuous rapid.” For the freight boats, the run was not quite as splendid as all that. “One of the boats in trying to make a landing could not be held when she touched,” Oramel Howland recalled, and had instead spun down the river through the next rapid, out of control and dragging 120 feet of line from the bow. Even so, everyone muddled through.

Soon after, lured by the sight of sheep and deer tracks on a sandy beach at the foot of a rapid, the men pulled to shore. The hunters set out optimistically, but, here at least, life was as frustrating as always. “They
hunted
with their usual success,” Bradley grumbled. (In camp later that day, Bradley would set out in search of easier prey. He returned proudly bearing four quarts of currants.)

By one o'clock, the men had finished lunch and returned to the river. If the hunting had left anyone out of sorts, the bad moods vanished quickly. Powell was positively exuberant. “Into the middle of the stream we row, and down the rapid river we glide, only making strokes enough with the oars to guide the boat. What a headlong ride it is! Shooting past rocks and islands! I am soon filled with exhilaration only experienced before in riding a fleet horse over the outstretched prairie. One, two, three, four miles we go, rearing and plunging with the waves.”

Powell was, admittedly, a man who could be thrown into ecstasies by a fossil or a fern. The previous day, describing a section of river that had threatened to drown him, he had written delightedly that “the waters waltz their way through the cañon, making their own rippling, rushing, roaring music.” On this glorious day, however, everyone shared his enthusiasm. Sumner, ordinarily a man of few (and sardonic) words, sounded fully as romantic as his leader. The expedition was, he wrote excitedly but not quite accurately, “dancing over . . . waves that had never before been disturbed by any keel.”

They ran, Sumner wrote, in “splendid style.” Occasionally their style proved not quite a match for the river's power, but the men continued undaunted. Toward the end of one long rapid, for example, Sumner described “a place about a hundred yards long that had a dozen waves in it fully ten feet high.” There was no place to land, and so Sumner and Powell and Dunn rode through, bucking and leaping and trying their best to hit the waves straight on, the boat filling nearly full of water but the men finally emerging safe and gleeful, though “looking like drowned rats.”

As the boats sped along, the canyon walls grew gradually lower until, at about four o'clock, the men suddenly emerged into what Sumner described as “a splendid park.” This was the third time that the dependably caustic Sumner had used the word “splendid” in a single journal entry, and even Bradley was only slightly more subdued. “We came out into an exceedingly beautiful valley full of islands covered with grass and cottonwood,” he wrote. “After passing so many days in the dark cañons where there is little but bare rocks we feel very much pleased.”

Since passing through the Gates of Lodore, Powell and his men had been traveling through territory that, though it remains nearly empty to this day, is now familiar to many tourists. This early part of the route cut across the vast area that stretches across northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah and is now known as Dinosaur National Monument. Slightly farther south, Powell would follow the Green through what is today Canyonlands National Park. With their cliffs and buttes and endless erosion-carved vistas, these are the sort of landscapes that inspire modern Americans to say they love the desert. And, indeed, it is easy to love, especially from inside an air-conditioned car or from a lounge chair on a patio with a margarita in hand, salt glistening on the rim, and an endless water supply available a few steps away at the turning of a faucet.

But Powell and his crew, whose notions of landscape had taken form in the rolling fields of Wisconsin and Illinois, the dappled forests of Vermont and Massachusetts, or the snowy peaks of the Rockies, found little to admire. Surfeited with rock, they reveled in the simple pleasures of flopping down on soft grass and stretching out to rest in the shade of a tree. What desert connoisseurs like Edward Abbey would later see as starkly beautiful struck these men as barren and lifeless. Land, it went without saying, should be useful—it should be fertile, or rich in timber or minerals, or, at the very least, suitable for grazing. To heap superlatives on these raw stones would be to prefer a skeleton to a lush nude.

Nature herself, Powell implied, seemed to have little use for the desert. The clifftop plateaus high above the river were home to majestic elk and noble eagles, but the desert below was a kind of nightmare zoo where “rattlesnakes crawl, lizards glide over the rocks, tarantulas stagger about, and red ants build their play house mountains.” Occasionally a scrawny rabbit might flit by, chased by a mangy wolf, “but the desert has no bird of sweet song, and no beast of noble mien.”

“The whole country is utterly worthless to anybody for any purpose whatever,” Sumner concluded flatly, “unless it should be the artist in search of wildly grand scenery, or the geologist, as there is a great open book for him all the way.”

Powell, a bit of an artist and more than a bit of a geologist, found himself as intrigued as Sumner's words implied. He tried, with only sporadic success, to convey his fascination to his crew. On June 23, their first day out of the most recent canyon, most of the men stayed in camp to patch up the boats, which were leaking again. Powell and Bradley hiked off to examine a puzzling fold in the rocks and hunt for fossils.

The others preferred faster-moving quarry. “Wonderful to relate,” Bradley noted sarcastically, the hunters finally succeeded. Hawkins brought down a deer, a fine, fat buck that had been standing two thousand feet above the river. “He stopped to take a look at me,” Hawkins recalled, “and I shot just as he stopped and broke his neck.” With Goodman carrying one of the forequarters, the proud hunter managed to bring both the deer's hindquarters to camp. They left the other forequarter hanging in a tree, thinking they might fetch it later. To celebrate his hunter's triumph, Powell named the spot where he had bagged his deer Mount Hawkins. The others, in hopes of game and glory of their own, all clamored for a crack at the wildlife. “The men are on tiptoe, and each swears by everything he can name that some
little innocent
deer must die by his hand tomorrow,” Bradley teased. “We shall see.”

The excitement over Hawkins's kill showed how heartily sick everyone was of beans and bacon and rice, the drab fare that Powell archly called “our
cuisine
.” But as welcome as it was, fresh meat from a single deer was only a diversion. Divided among ten hungry men, it would vanish in a day or two. “Have spread the rations to dry and find one sack of rice spoiled,” Bradley had observed only the day before, but then he had waved the problem of short supplies aside. “We are glad to get rid of it, for our boat is too much loaded to ride the waves nicely but is all the time growing lighter as we eat the provisions.”

The day after Hawkins' successful outing was spent near camp. As usual, Powell set out exploring. Bradley, convinced that the hunters had succeeded only by a fluke, headed up the cliff to bring in the deer's forequarter. He found it, untouched, at a spot that the barometer showed was 2,800 feet above the river rather than the 2,000 feet they had guessed at. “I am so used to climbing . . . now that I hardly notice it,” Bradley observed, “yet it came very hard at first.”

After climbing the cliffs, Bradley had taken the opportunity to see what the river had to offer. The view was encouraging if you looked far downstream but worrying if you focused closer in. “The river about four miles below here cuts this . . . mountain chain in two and comes out on the other side,” Bradley noted. That was not how rivers were supposed to behave—rivers did not slice mountains apart—but once the Green reemerged on the far side, it seemed to settle down and behave. “We can see for 50 or 60 miles that it is all valley and island covered with cottonwood groves and the cañon cannot be very long,” Bradley wrote hopefully.

Oramel Howland compared the colors of the cliffs to “a muddy looking rainbow.” Powell, who saw the world through rosier lenses, was more effusive. “The park is below us,” he wrote from a cliff-top perch, “with its island groves reflected by the deep, quiet waters. Rich meadows stretch out on either hand, to the verge of a sleeping plain, that comes down from the distant mountains. These plains are of almost naked rock, in strange contrast to the meadows; blue and lilac colored rocks, buff and pink, vermilion and brown, and all these colors clear and bright.”

From his vantage point high above the river, Powell could see the canyon they had just floundered through. They had named it Whirlpool Cañon. For Powell it was something out of a Gothic novel, “a gloomy chasm, where mad waves roar.” But their new camp, which they had named Island Park, was a haven that dispelled any melancholy thoughts. From high above, with the sun beating down and the river seeming “but a rippling brook,” it was easy to hope that the worst danger lay behind them.

They set out eagerly the next day, knowing that it was not far to their first true milestone, the junction of the Uinta River and the Green, where they planned to stop for several days. They would be in the Uinta Valley, territory they all knew well. It was, moreover, as much of a crossroads as any place in this lonely corner of the world could be, for the valley marked one of the few places where the Green could be crossed. Nearly a century before, in September 1776, Spanish missionaries, guided by Indians, had made the first documented crossing of the Green near this river junction. They had been searching (futilely, it would turn out) for a new route from Santa Fe to California. In the nineteenth century, wagon trains heading West had crossed the Green at the same spot.

Powell and his men would be sticking with the Green, not fording it. For them, the beckoning prize was the Uinta Indian Agency, a small headquarters for a newly established reservation. The area “reserved” for the Indians stretched across two million bleak and barren acres for which the federal government could imagine no use. The immense tract of land, Brigham Young had assured his followers, was “one vast contiguity of waste.”

The agency consisted of a couple of wooden huts and a handful of employees. But for Powell and his crew, who had not seen another human being since their departure from Green River Station a month before, it offered the promise of a link with the outside world. They could replenish their supplies, but that was the least of it. Like campers or soldiers or prisoners, the men longed for a chance to read letters from home and send heartfelt replies.

Before they could take that welcome break, Powell and his men would have to negotiate the curious geological beast that Powell would later name Split Mountain Cañon. Here the Green ran headlong into a mountain ridge, “splitting [it] for a distance of six miles nearly to its foot,” in Powell's words.

Since early in the trip, the Green's course had perplexed them all. The river seemed to flow without any design whatever, violating laws of nature and common sense willy-nilly. Oramel Howland decided that the Green acted not out of ignorance but out of malevolence. “The river seems to go for the highest points within the range of vision,” he wrote, “disemboweling first one and striking for the next and serving it the same, and so on, indefinitely.” The Green tore into a mountain at one point, made one sharp turn after another, “whirling, splashing and foaming as if in fury to think so tiny an obstacle should tower 3,000 feet above it to check its progress.”

For Howland, bright and curious though he was, this was a puzzle more than a preoccupation. Powell's interest, in contrast, was anything but casual. The prospect of investigating just such geological riddles was one of the lures that had spurred him to risk his life in canyon country in the first place. For the time being, though, he would have to put such pleasures to one side.