Down the Great Unknown (41 page)

Everyone straggled back to camp, choked down lunch, and set out again, this time after crossing to the river's other shore.
Up they climbed
, to the top of the granite, only to find that the crags and pinnacles made it nearly impossible to see down to river level. They wasted another hour climbing high above the river on the left, in a futile search for a useful vantage point. Giving up, they recrossed the river to search the right bank a second time, as if in the hope that
this time
the iron bars of their cell would somehow give way. A close look only confirmed how much trouble they were in. To transport the heavy boats around the rapid would mean climbing eight hundred feet to the summit of the granite, and then back down, while somehow belaying or carrying the boats. By Powell's calculation, it would take ten days. Only five days' food remained.

“We appeared to be up against it sure,” Sumner wrote. “There were two side canyons coming into the Colorado nearly opposite each other, the river not being over fifty yards wide and running like a race horse. The first part of the rapid is caused by the big rocks carried out of the side canyon coming in from the south. The second part of the rapid is formed by rocks from the northside canyon and a granite reef that reaches one-third of the way across the river, making a Z-shaped rapid. We spent the day trying to solve the problem.”

Oramel Howland and Dunn confided to Sumner that they had found a solution of their own. They intended to leave the river and try to make it overland to one of the nearby Mormon settlements. The rest of the party should hike out, too. The alternative was an almost certain drowning. “I did what I could to knock such notions out of their heads,” Sumner wrote, “but as I was not sure of my own side of the argument, I fear I did not make the case very strong.”

Just two weeks into the trip, Howland had survived the wreck at Disaster Falls and emerged undaunted. Two weeks later, he had proclaimed that nothing was as abhorrent to him as “a calm, smooth stream” and nothing as appealing as the sight of “white foam” in a mad river. Now, after eight more weeks of rapids and half rations and rain and quarreling, this brave man had endured enough. “[Howland] had fully made up his mind to quit,” Sumner wrote, “since the rapids had become a holy terror to him.”

Bradley had his nerves under better control, but even his sober assessment of the situation was deeply discouraging. “We have only subsistence for about five days and have been trying half a day to get around this one rapid while there are three others in sight below,” he wrote. “What they are we cannot tell only that they are huge ones. If we could get on the cliff about a hundred yards below the head of this one we could let our boats down to that point and then have foot-hold all the rest of the way, but we have tried all the P.M. without success.”

Late in the afternoon, Powell climbed down from the cliff and announced his decision. The next morning they would lower the boats past the first waterfall, then run the rapid that extended to the head of the second fall, and then squirt down a chute Powell had spotted along the right side of that fall. Finally, they would pull for their lives across the river, to get to the left of the channel-blocking boulder before the angry river flung them into it headlong.

It was more a prayer than a plan. Even the first step, lining the upstream waterfall, was one they had already dismissed as impossible. After Powell broke the news, he and the crew took the boats across the river and camped, forlornly, by a creek at a side canyon on the river's left side.

They drank their black coffee and gulped down chunks of unleavened bread and tried to ignore the rapid's din. Scared and despondent, the men muttered to one another and tried to think things through. “There is discontent in camp tonight and I fear some of the party will take to the mountains but hope not,” Bradley wrote. “This is decidedly the darkest day of the trip.”

Just after dinner, Oramel Howland approached Powell and asked if they could talk in private. The two men walked a short distance along the creek and talked out of earshot of the others. To take on the rapid, Howland said, was suicide. They should all abandon the river and take their chances on hiking out to safety. But regardless of what the others decided, Howland announced, he, his brother, and Dunn had made up their minds to leave.

Powell might have tried ordering Howland to stay with the expedition, but instead he tried to persuade him not to leave. The canyon walls soared thousands of feet above their heads. They might be trapped, like children in the bottom of a well. They had hardly any food. If they
did
manage to climb out, could they make it across the desert to the nearest Mormon town? The best choice was to trust their lives to the river.

In the end, neither man could sway the other. Howland grabbed his bedroll and headed off to find a place to sleep. It was a starry night, and Powell took out the sextant to measure their position. The straight-line distance to the mouth of the Virgin River, he estimated, was perhaps forty-five miles. No more than twenty miles upstream on the Virgin River were Mormon settlements, and safety. Even if the forty-five miles turned out to be ninety, because of the river's meandering, they
had
to be nearly home. And the Colorado was known to be fairly tame for a long stretch above the mouth of the Virgin.

Powell woke Howland and made his case one more time, this time drawing on his new calculations. No sale. “We have another short talk about the morrow, and he lies down again; but for me there is no sleep,” Powell wrote. “All night long, I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on?”

Powell weighed and reweighed the possibilities through the night. He checked the rations again. The expedition had come down to this one judgment call, he knew, and decisive as he ordinarily was, Powell wavered. On the one hand, they had survived more rapids than they could count. On the other hand, they had never run a rapid that looked as bad as this one. On the one hand, this rapid could be a fluke, a one-time horror. On the other, it might be a preview of what the river had in store from here on. On the one hand, they might be able to climb out of the canyon. On the other, they would then have to survive a long trek across the desert. On the one hand, it had rained so much lately that, if they hiked out, they might find enough water to keep them alive. On the other, they might not.

“At one time, I almost conclude to leave the river,” Powell wrote. “But for years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished, to say that there is a part of the cañon which I cannot explore, having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on.”

Powell woke Walter
and told him about Howland's decision to leave. Walter said he would stay with his brother. Powell talked with Hawkins and Hall. The two men, boat mates in the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
, were the expedition's youngest, boldest members. They had come a long way, in every sense, since the first day of the trip when they had not known how to pull to shore even in easy water. They proclaimed their determination to stay with the river.

Powell turned toward Bradley. Time after time, Bradley had favored running rapids that Powell had insisted on portaging. That choice had pitted a minute's danger against hours of crushing labor. Now the choice was between a minute or two of hell and days wandering in the desert. Bradley chose the river. “I shall be one to try to run it rather than take to the mountains,” he had written the previous night just before falling asleep. “ ‘ 'Tis darkest just before the day' and I trust our day is about to dawn.” With slightly more hesitation—he was worried that this looming rapid was only the first of a deadly series—Sumner made the same decision.

•      •      •

In the morning, no one had the heart to resume the debate. “At last daylight comes,” Powell wrote, “and we have breakfast, without a word being said about the future. The meal is as solemn as a funeral. After breakfast, I ask the three men if they still think it best to leave us.”

Oramel Howland did, and so did Dunn. Seneca Howland tried to convince the pair to stick with the others. Failing in his plea, Seneca threw in his lot with his older brother and Dunn. That made three who planned to trust to the desert's mercy, and six who “came to the determination,” in Bradley's words, “to run the rapid or perish in the attempt.”

The entire party crossed the river again. With only six men continuing downriver, two boats would do. The men unloaded the
Emma Dean
and left it behind, tied to the shore. (“Abandoned the small boat as useless property,” Sumner wrote, with characteristic unsentimentality, of the boat he had piloted for nine hundred miles.) Left on shore, too, as if in mute acknowledgment that the trip was a scientific expedition no longer, were the broken barometers and the collections of fossils and minerals, as well as some beaver traps.

“With great labor,” and with the help of the Howlands and Dunn—who were parting from the expedition but lingered to help with this last chore—the men managed to carry the two freight boats over a twenty-five-foot boulder. Once there, they snubbed a rope around a convenient pillar in the granite and lowered the boats into a little cove just barely big enough to hold them both.

Then it was time for farewells. The three climbers took two rifles and a shotgun, in the hope they would find game when they reached the plateau. Well aware of the plight of the men they left behind, they refused Powell's offer of a share of the rations but did take some lumps of dough that Hawkins had fixed. Powell gave Oramel Howland a letter to Emma, and Sumner gave him a watch to deliver to his sister as a keepsake in case he drowned. The trip records had been kept in duplicate, and Howland took one set. (In the haste and confusion, Powell inadvertently gave Howland two copies of some records and and no copies of others.)

Howland pleaded with the others, one last time, to reconsider. It was folly to challenge this rapid. Downstream, the river seemed to veer south once again, deeper into the granite. A few more miles would exhaust what few rations remained and then it would be too late to climb out. “Some tears are shed,” Powell wrote. “It is rather a solemn parting; each party thinks the other is taking the dangerous course.”

“
Three men refused to go
farther . . . and we had to let them take to the mountains,” Bradley wrote somberly. “They left us with good feelings though we deeply regret their loss for they are as fine fellows as I ever had the good fortune to meet.”

The
Kitty Clyde's Sister
, with Powell aboard, pushed out into the current. The
Maid
followed close behind. The Howland brothers and Dunn stood on a cliff, watching anxiously. “Dashed out into the boiling tide with all the courage we could muster,” Bradley wrote. The
Sister
raced along the foot of the wall, scraped against a boulder, then plummeted over a fall, careened into the waves at its foot, and filled with water. A huge boulder loomed downstream, blocking the channel's right side. Caught in the torrent headed for the rock face, Hall and Hawkins pulled for their lives, desperate to get across the current and to the left of the boulder. The waves grew “too large to do anything but hold on to the boats.” Somehow—it happened so fast they could not figure it out—they were safely by, bobbing in the choppy water at the rapid's downstream end.

The
Maid
made it, too. Both boats had nearly swamped, but they were right side up and everyone was safe and not even an oar had been lost. It had taken perhaps a minute.

“
The men that were left
sat on the cliffs and watched us go safely over,” Powell wrote, “so we went into camp and waited two hours, hoping that they would join us with the boat left tied to the rocks above.” Even without the
Emma Dean
, the Howlands and Dunn could have joined Powell and the others simply by climbing along the cliff past the rapid. That would have meant all nine men had to squeeze into two boats. Earlier in the trip, when there were countless miles still ahead and the boats were weighed down by tons of supplies, that would have been impossible. Now the boats were nearly empty, the trip was nearly done, and a human cargo that totaled perhaps five hundred pounds would have been no problem.

Sumner and the rest of the crew fired their guns into the air to signal that all was well and waved imploringly for their friends to come. To no avail. “The last thing we saw of them,” Sumner wrote, “they were standing on the reef, motioning us to go on, which we finally did.”

There stood Oramel Howland, his Lear-like beard now filthy and matted, and silent, loyal Seneca Howland by his brother's side, and Bill Dunn, a mountain man about to put his skills to the ultimate test. Rapid or no rapid, the three were determined to go their own way. They set out up what is now called Separation Canyon in somber procession.

Exhausted and emotionally drained, the six men turned to the river once again. It showed no mercy. “Ran 10 more rapids in 6 miles,” Sumner wrote, “when we came to another hell.” Hemmed in by high, narrow walls, Lava Cliff Rapid, as it is now called, was impossible to run. The men found they could climb the cliff along one side, though, and made a plan to line the boats through. Bradley stayed in his boat so he could fend off the rocks with an oar. The men climbed their way downstream while holding the
Maid
on the end of a 130-foot rope lashed to the cutwater, the long, curved piece of wood at the farthest forward point of the bow. (If a knife were held in cutting position, as if about to slice down into a loaf of bread, the forwardmost part of the blade would correspond to the cutwater.)

All went well for a few minutes, but the current grew fiercer and the layout of the cliffs forced the men to climb ever higher. Finally it became clear that without more rope to swing him free, Bradley and his boat were stuck. One man raced back along the shore for more rope. The others did their best to fight the current that was trying to grab Bradley for itself. Though only a rope's length apart, Bradley and the men on the cliffs could not hear each other over the rapid's roar. The cliff was so steep that the men could not
see
Bradley either, their view cut off by a point of rock. The
Maid
was trapped in the worst possible spot, where the current was at its strongest. Time and again, the river dragged the boat out from shore to the rope's fullest extension, like an archer pulling a bow to its ultimate tautness, and then shot it full force against the rocks.