Down the Great Unknown (42 page)

With just four more feet of rope, Bradley figured, he would have enough slack to maneuver out of harm's way. He didn't have four feet, though, and the river seemed intent on pulverizing the
Maid
. Was he better off waiting for rescue or launching himself into the rapid while he still had a boat?

Bradley took out his knife and leaned down toward the line. “One look at the foaming cataract below kept me from cutting it and then I was suffering all the tortures of the rack.” He held off and spent a moment scanning the rapid. Now two frantic scenes played out in parallel, out of sight of one another. On the cliff, the men finally had a second rope and had begun joining the two lines. In the
Maid
, Bradley still hesitated, knife in hand. Suddenly the river ripped the boat from the cliff once again, and the cutwater tore loose and flew thirty feet into the air, trailing the rope behind it.

The freed boat dashed into the rapid like a runaway horse. “
On I went
,” Bradley wrote, “and sooner than I can write it was in the breakers but just as I always am, afraid while danger is approaching but cool in the midst of it, I could steer the boat as well as if the water was smooth. By putting an oar first on one side then on the other I could swing her around and guide her very well.” Bradley raced downstream, now aligned with the current rather than broadside to it, while the men stared horror-struck from the cliff above.

“The boat is fairly turned,” Powell wrote, “and she goes down almost beyond our sight, though we are more than a hundred feet above the river. Then she comes up again, on a great wave, and down and up, then around behind some great rocks, and is lost in the mad, white foam below. We stand frozen with fear, for we see no boat. Bradley is gone, so it seems.”

Then a shape emerged from the waves. A boat, and Bradley standing on its deck, waving his hat back and forth to show that he was safe. “But he is in a whirlpool,” Powell wrote. “We have the stem-post [cutwater] of his boat attached to the line. How badly she may be disabled we know not.” Powell shouted to Sumner and Walter to see if they could grab a line and run along the cliffs to Bradley's rescue. At the same time, Powell, Hall, and Hawkins jumped into the other boat and sped into the rapid, in a frenzy to get to Bradley while there was still time.

They had lined and portaged countless rapids that seemed too dangerous to run. Now, without a plan, they had flung themselves into perhaps the worst rapid of all. “A wave rolls over us, and our boat is unmanageable,” Powell wrote. “Another great wave strikes us, the boat rolls over, and tumbles and tosses, I know not how. All I know is that Bradley is picking us up.”

Bradley had rescued his rescuers. When Sumner and Walter scrambled down the cliff a few minutes later, the party was intact again. It was an emotional reunion. “Major says nothing ever gave him more joy than to see me swing my hat,” Bradley wrote proudly, “for they all thought that the boat and I too were gone to the ‘Happy Hunting grounds' until then.”
*

Bradley had rated rapid after rapid as “the worst we ever run.” Now he was finally ready to retire the title. The last rapid of the day on August 28, he declared once and for all, “stands A No. 1 of the trip.”

In his river diary, Powell summarized all the mad adventures of the day in a bare handful of unpunctuated words. “28th,” he wrote. “Boys left us ran rapids Bradey boat broke camp on left bank camp 44.”

As usual, he misspelled Bradley's name.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

DELIVERANCE

 

The next day, August 29, was “the first Sunday that I have felt justified in running,” Bradley wrote, “but it has now become a race for life. We have only enough flour to last us five days and we do not know how long we may be winding around among these hills.” Everyone was exhausted now, staggering toward the finish line like first-time marathoners.

They were hopeful, though, for the country looked more open by the mile. By ten o'clock, they had made it out of the granite once more. They ran all the rapids now without even stopping to scout, “for we have no time to waste in looking.” The farther they went, the easier the rapids became.

In two more hours, it was over. “At twelve o'clock,” Powell wrote, “[we] emerge from the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.” Free at last. “We came out to a low rolling desert,” Sumner wrote, “and saw plainly that our work of danger was done—gave 3 cheers and pulled away steady strokes.” The Howland brothers and Bill Dunn had abandoned the river and set out on foot just over twenty-four hours before.

For almost the first time in three months, the river view was not cut off by stone walls. “It was a strange and delightful sensation,” Sumner wrote. “For my part, I felt as Dante probably felt as he crowded up from Hades.” Rowing easily now, the men carried on like schoolboys. Walter Powell, “Old Shady,” sang away at the top of his lungs, and Hall tried it, too. Hall's ventures into song never went well. This time Hawkins told him to stop before he drowned him. Lunch was another meal of “sinkers,” the heavy lumps of flour they had grown to know too well, but the prospect of better meals just ahead helped a bit.

They camped that night on the river's left bank in a thicket of mesquite. As always in moments of high emotion, Powell turned to military images to convey his feelings. “The relief from danger, and the joy of success, are great. When he who has been chained by wounds to a hospital cot, until his canvas tent seems like a dungeon cell, until the groans of those who lie about, tortured with probe and knife, are piled up, a weight of horror on his ears that he cannot throw off, cannot forget, and until the stench of festering wounds and anesthetic drugs has filled the air with its loathsome burthen, at last goes out into the open field, what a world he sees! How beautiful the sky; how bright the sunshine; what ‘floods of delirious music' pour from the throats of birds; how sweet the fragrance of earth, and tree, and blossom! The first hour of convalescent freedom seems rich recompense for all—pain, gloom, terror.”

Powell and all his men were beside themselves with happiness and relief. “Ever before us has been an unknown danger, heavier than immediate peril,” Powell wrote. Every waking hour in the Grand Canyon had been marked by danger and toil and the threatening growl of rumbling waters, all this endured in “gloomy depths” that transformed one's world into a stony tomb. “Now the danger is over; now the toil has ceased; now the gloom has disappeared; now the firmament is bounded only by the horizon; and what a vast expanse of constellations can be seen!”

Worn out though Powell and the other men were, they sat up late, too excited to sleep. “The river rolls by us in silent majesty; the quiet of the camp is sweet; our joy is almost ecstasy,” Powell wrote. “We sit till long after midnight, talking of the Grand Cañon, talking of home, but chiefly talking of the three men who left us. Are they wandering in those depths, unable to find a way out? Are they searching over the desert lands above for water? Or are they nearing the settlements?”

•      •      •

As soon as the sun rose on August 30, Powell and the crew were back on the river. Now it was “nothing but smooth water and rolling desert.” At ten o'clock, they caught sight of a band of Indians in the distance, their first glimpse of human beings in nearly two months (for the men who had not gone to the Indian agency, three months). By the time the boats approached, the Indians had fled. Two or three miles downstream, the boats rounded a corner and came upon more Indians. They seemed terrified, but Powell managed to convey, in the Indians' language, that they were friends. Powell asked a few questions about the nearest white people but got no response.

Taking to the boats again, the men continued downstream. By noon, they had covered twenty-six miles (they had run forty-two the previous day). They stopped quickly for lunch, and then set to work again, hoping with each pull of the oars that now, finally, they would reach the mouth of the Virgin River. After another seven miles, they saw figures in the distance. Sumner pulled out a spyglass and stared downstream. These were white men! He dove into the locker, pulled out the Stars and Stripes, and set it fluttering at the bow.

Three men and a boy stood fishing with a net in a large, muddy stream. The fishermen stared at the two battered, leaking boats and their crew of six half-starved, nearly naked, worn-out men. The boats drew near, and Powell and the men burst out with questions. Was this stream the Virgin? Were there Mormon settlements nearby?

The fishermen were Mormons helping to build a new town at the junction of the Colorado and the Virgin. They had been expecting Powell's crew—dead. Several weeks before, Brigham Young had sent orders from Salt Lake City to scan the river “for any fragments or relics of [Powell's] party that might drift down the stream.”

No one had imagined that Powell and his crew could turn up alive. They had trouble believing it themselves. “We could hardly credit that all our trials were over,” Bradley exclaimed. He took a few minutes to scribble a note “to assure Mother I was all right, but I was so intoxicated with joy at getting through so soon and so well that I don't know what I wrote to her.”

Joseph Asey, their newfound friend, led the six men to his cabin and began cooking—fish and squash and whatever else he could lay his hands on—while Powell and his men tried to keep from tearing into it raw. Then “we laid our dignified manners aside and assumed the manner of so many hogs,” Sumner wrote. “Ate as long as we could and went to sleep to wake hungry.”

August 31 was a well-earned day of rest. Asey had sent a messenger to St. Thomas, a Mormon town about twenty miles upstream on the Virgin River, to deliver the news of Powell's arrival. A bishop from St. Thomas arrived in the evening, bringing mail, flour, cheese, bread, butter, and two or three dozen melons in his wagon. “We talked and ate melons till the morning star could be seen,” Sumner wrote happily.

It was over. They had traveled for ninety-nine days and covered a thousand twisting, white-capped miles. Ten rowdy, hollering men had pushed out into the current at Green River Station, Wyoming. Six weary, frightened men had stumbled ashore below the Grand Canyon. One man had left nearly two months before, at the first opportunity. The fate of three more was unknown.

Sumner sat down and did his own summing up. “Rapids ran 414—Portages made 62—making 476 bad rapids . . . I never want to see it again anywhere. Near the Grand Cañon it will probably remain unvisited for many years again, as it has nothing to recommend it, but its general desolation as a study for the geologist.”

The expedition was the making of Powell. Soon a nation would hail him as “the conqueror of the Colorado.” Sumner, fully as proud and self-dramatizing a man as Powell but a far less sociable character, wanted only to put the whole experience behind him. “I find myself penniless and disgusted with the whole thing,” he wrote, “sitting under a mesquite bush in the sand.” He closed his journal with a flourish. “I shoulder my gun and bidding all adieu I go again to the wilderness.”

Scarcely any supplies remained. The final tally, for six men, was ten pounds of flour, fifteen pounds of dried apples, and eighty pounds of coffee.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE VANISHING

 

On September 1, the Colorado River Exploring Expedition disbanded, never to reunite. Powell and Walter left the river (the stretch that remained had been explored before) and rode off to St. George, Utah Territory, en route to Salt Lake City and, finally, a triumphant return back East.

Sumner and Bradley continued downstream in the
Maid of the Cañon
as far as Fort Yuma, near the Arizona-California border, for no reason much better than a desire to finish what they had started. Hawkins and Hall rowed the
Kitty Clyde's Sister
all the way to the ocean.

The visions of heaps of gold and stacks of beaver pelts had long since disappeared. Precisely what the crew did take away from the trip, beyond two badly worn boats, will probably never be known, but it wasn't much. Decades later, in 1902, Sumner would complain bitterly that “when Proff Powell left us at the mouth of the Virgin River he gave me 100 dollars in green backs worth then on the Coast 75.00 to Hall he gave the great sum of 20 dollars to Bradley a pleasant smile and a volume of thanks.” In his old age, Hawkins complained in the same vein.

While his four ex–crew men proceeded downstream, Powell made his way north with Walter. At St. George, Powell asked anxiously if anyone knew anything about the Howlands and Dunn, but there had been no word. Powell's driver and mule team turned toward Salt Lake City, a week distant. On September 8, while Powell was on the road, the Salt Lake paper reported grim news. “Three of the Powell Expedition Killed by Indians,” the
Deseret Evening News
announced, above a one-paragraph story:

We have received a dispatch through the Deseret Telegraph Line from St. George of the murder of three of the men belonging to the Powell exploration expedition. It appears according to the report of a friendly Indian that about five days ago the men were found by peaceable Indians of the Shebett [Shivwits] tribe very hungry. The Shebetts fed them, and put them on the trail leading to Washington in Southern Utah. On their journey they saw a squaw gathering seed, and shot her; whereupon they were followed by three Shebetts and killed. A friendly Indian has been sent out to secure their papers. The telegraph does not give us the names of the men.

The Powell brothers reached Salt Lake City and heard the bad news on September 15. Powell deemed it not at all certain that the murdered men were the Howlands and Dunn, especially because the woman they had reportedly shot (and, by some accounts, raped) was unarmed. “I have known O. G. Howland personally for many years,” Powell declared, “and I have no hesitation in pronouncing this part of the story as a libel. It was not in the man's faithful, genial nature to do such a thing.”