Down the Great Unknown (44 page)

Jack Sumner and Billy Hawkins also lived well into the new century.
*
Sumner became a prospector who roamed across Utah and Colorado for another three decades without ever hitting pay dirt. (In 1902, he looked back at the great adventure of his young manhood and compressed the entire odyssey into a single sentence. “May 24th 1869,” he wrote, “the Expedition pulled out into the swift current of Green River and Hell commenced and kept up for 111 days.”) Hawkins, reluctant cook and possible fugitive from justice, took up farming and ranching near Eden, Arizona, and became a well-respected justice of the peace, a distinguished figure sporting a great, bushy mustache.

For a time,
both men kept
on good terms with Powell, but in the end the two men turned on their former leader. One great cause of the rift was a mistaken belief that Congress had appropriated $50,000 for the expedition and that Powell had kept back the men's share of the money.

Each man buttressed his case with further complaints. Hawkins focused on Powell's autocratic ways. “I can say one thing truthfully about the Major,” he wrote in 1907, “that no man living was ever thought more of by his men up to the time he wanted to drive Bill Dunn from the party.”

Proud, cantankerous Sumner came to feel that Powell had stolen not only the wages that were due him but the recognition he should have had as well. Bitter to the end, and past it, Sumner had the last word in an obituary that reads almost as if he had dictated it. The story focused on the 1869 expedition. “Without dwelling at length on the incidents of this thrilling and perilous journey—and there were many,” the
Rocky Mountain News
declared, “it may be truthfully asserted that it was due almost wholly to Sumner's cool nerve, calm judgment and quick and ready resourcefulness in all circumstances and in the face of every trying situation that the party completed the journey.” Sumner, not Powell, had truly been in command. “He was its real leader, and to him alone is due the fact that the entire party did not go down in the awful currents of the mighty cañon.”

“Powell's Scurvy Trick,” the
News
labeled one further outrage. “Powell left the six men who had accompanied him at Fort Yuma, on the lower river, and returned East to become famous as an explorer. To Sumner he gave sufficient money to return home, but left the other five penniless. Sumner promptly divided the money with his companions, and from that day on had no use for the man whose life he had twice saved, and who owed so much to him for the services he had rendered.”

Sumner died in 1907, Hawkins in 1919.

Walter Powell lived a long, melancholy life. Plagued by depression and fierce headaches, he was unable to work after the early 1870s. One sister or another cared for him for many years, and when they could no longer cope, Walter was admitted to an asylum in Washington, D.C. “At one time, perhaps for two years he claimed to be a prophet,” the Major recalled. “I never knew [Walter] to be dangerous to any one except once when I was afraid he would kill one of my men.” Walter Powell died in 1915.

The Colorado River, too, deserves a eulogy of sorts. The river Powell knew is no more, for it is now interrupted by a series of great dams. In long stretches the river still runs fierce and formidable, but it is a penned beast, like a zoo lion. The Colorado is “the world's most regulated river,” according to the National Research Council, but it has worn away mightier dams than those that encumber it today, and, centuries from now, it will flow free again.

Separation Rapid is gone, drowned in 1938 as the rising waters of Lake Mead pooled up behind Hoover Dam.

Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon a hero and a celebrity, a kind of nineteenth-century astronaut. In a national series of lectures, the hardy explorer, “direct from scenes of his great exploits and discoveries,” painted his audiences a series of word pictures of the West's greatest natural wonder.

Soon, though, Powell forsook the crowds and returned to the desert. On May 21, 1871, he set out from Green River Station a second time, intent on redoing the entire grueling trip, determined this time to bring back a scientific picture of canyon country.
The crew was new
and again included no skilled boatmen.
Instead of feisty
and hardheaded mountain men, Powell now opted for a group composed almost exclusively of his own friends and relatives. (Of the first expedition's crew, Powell invited only Sumner. He accepted, despite all his later condemnation of Powell, but heavy snows in the mountains kept him from joining the others.)

The second expedition
endured all the hazards of the first—near-drownings, runaway boats, a fire, feuds, rations barely adequate to stave off starvation. Finally, only halfway through the Grand Canyon, Powell decided it was time to stop. (On top of everything else, Hamblin, the Mormon scout, had sent word that it was not a safe time for whites to venture farther into Indian territory.) Powell told the crew that he had decided to cut the trip short, and, as one man wrote, “Everybody felt like praising God.”
*

Powell's Grand Canyon trips were the most exciting and glamorous events of his life, but perhaps not the most important. Fittingly, Powell's place in American history is as marked by paradox as was his character. Powell was not only the first to explore America's greatest landscape but also its poet laureate, the first to convey the almost infinite depths of time and space the Grand Canyon represents. And yet at the same time as he was discoursing on infinity, Powell became the first great spokesman in American history for the notion of limits.

The lesson of the West, this astonishingly optimistic man declared, was that
not
all things are possible. The empty West was fundamentally different from the crowded East and always would be. The differences all had to do with water—the West was dry—and Powell insisted that every intelligent discussion of the settling of the West had to begin with that stark fact. Even if every river in the region were diverted from its banks, there would not be enough water to turn the West green. The Jeffersonian vision of an endless checkerboard of small farms reaching from shore to shore, the vision that had launched Lewis and Clark, was an impossibility.

Powell propounded those views in a variety of conspicuous forums. Like John Glenn a century later, he took his fame and reputation and founded a political career on it. In Powell's case, he followed up his second Grand Canyon trip with further surveys of the West and with studies of Indian languages and customs. In surprisingly short order, this formidably able and ambitious man came to know the West as deeply as anyone in the United States. At the peak of his career, in the early 1880s, Powell was simultaneously director of the U.S. Geological Survey and director of the Bureau of Ethnology (dedicated to the study of Indian cultures), an organization he had founded.

Powell's prominence and his insistence that the West could not be turned into a shimmering green oasis kept him permanently at the center of political controversy. For the legions of boosters, politicians, and land speculators chanting “Go west, young man!” and loudly insisting that “Rain follows the plow,” Powell was a pariah. One of the loudest of those voices belonged to William Gilpin, the bombastic orator and spokesman for Manifest Destiny who had once worried aloud about whether “that grand explorer, Major Powell” would emerge alive from the Grand Canyon. Now Gilpin and Powell were archenemies. “In readiness to receive and ability to sustain in perpetuity a dense population,” Gilpin thundered, “[the West] was more favored than Europe.” Powell responded with statistics-laden reports and maps of rainfall patterns.

In the end, the boosters won, and the onetime titan of government science was driven out of town. The canyons of the Colorado had proved easier to negotiate than the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.

•      •      •

In 1889, after the Brown-Stanton expedition lost three men by drowning, the
New York Tribune
came to Powell for comment. How was it, the reporter asked, that Powell had not only succeeded in making it through the canyons but had succeeded on his first try?

“I was lucky,” Powell replied.

This was indisputably true, but Powell and his crew were also brave, resourceful, and resolute in the face of danger and hardship that far surpassed anything they had foreseen. Though Powell alone rose to fame after the expedition, he and all his men were true American heroes.

In 1895, Powell published a new edition of
Exploration of the Colorado
. Brusque and autocratic though he could sometimes be, he struck a gentler note as he looked back almost three decades to his “noble and generous companions” on the first expedition. “Many years have passed since the exploration, and those who were boys with me in the enterprise are—ah, most of them are dead, and the living are gray with age. Their bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon.”

Powell died in 1902, at sixty-eight, at his summer home in Brooklin, Maine. In death as in life, he inspired strong and conflicting responses. The
Washington Post
ranked Powell with Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark. The
New York Times
made do with a few curt paragraphs (“Noted Ethnologist Dies”) alongside news of a flower show that featured a “Large Display of Dahlias.”

At first, as so often with public figures, the tributes tended toward the vague and grandiose. Powell was “a moral giant” and the “brightest exemplar of human knowledge.” A few years would have to pass before this complicated man came into sharp focus.

In 1918, at a ceremony to honor Powell's memory, the secretary of the interior caught the essence of the man in a mere handful of words. “Major Powell, throughout his life, was the incarnation of the inquisitive and courageous spirit of the American. He wanted to know and he was willing to risk his life that he might know.”

Notes

This PerfectBound e-book edition of Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown contains hyperlinks to certain of the author's notes.

Simply click on the link and you will be able to read the note.

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He could not wash:
On the river, this task fell to Hawkins, the cook.
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The party believed:
The first woman whose name we know who reached the summit of Pikes Peak was Julia Archibald Holmes, in 1858.
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There he would stand:
This description is from Powell,
Exploration
, p. 91: “I stand on deck, supporting myself with a strap, fastened on either side to the gunwale.”
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Somehow the taciturn:
Bradley, in turn, did not know that Powell and Sumner kept journals. (See Bradley,
UHQ
, June 13, p. 37.)
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In fact, it was dictated:
Gilbert, “John Wesley Powell” (Part V: “The Investigator”), p. 289. In the interest of brevity, I use such expressions as “On Aug. 5, Powell wrote . . . ,” but the reader should bear in mind Powell's actual style of composition.
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Instead, the stick caught:
In similar fashion, beginning boaters today often jam an oar in shallow rocks. They are unlikely to get thrown overboard, but they may well break an oar.
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At about this point:
Manly reports that the inscription “Ashley, 1824” was “painted in large black letters.” (See
Death Valley
, p. 80.) According to Sumner, “Ashley, 1825” was “scratched on evidently by some trapper's knife.” (See Sumner,
UHQ
, June 2, p. 178.)
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“When I told Chief Walker”:
Manly,
Death Valley
, pp. 93–4. “[Wakara] undoubtedly saved our little band from a watery grave,” Manly went on, “for without his advice we had gone on and on, far into the great Colorado cañon, from which escape would have been impossible and securing food another impossibility, while destruction by hostile Indians was among the strong probabilities of the case. So in a threefold way I have for these more than forty years credited the lives of myself and comrades to the thoughtful interest and humane consideration of old Chief Walker.” (See
Death Valley
, p. 99.)
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Since water cannot squeeze:
More precisely, the rate of flow at a given point is the product of the river's cross section and its velocity. If the area of the cross section decreases, the velocity must increase proportionally.
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“War was a proving”:
Author interview, April 19, 2000. Powell rose quickly, and so did many other capable and ambitious men. In 1861, the permanent army numbered only sixteen thousand men; a year later, Northern and Southern forces together totaled nearly one million.
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At the war's outset:
Some did. William Tecumseh Sherman predicted that the war would bring hundreds of thousands of deaths and was ridiculed and called insane. Sam Houston made a similarly accurate and gruesome prediction of what war would mean. Houston had as little impact on his Southern audiences as Sherman did on his Northern ones.
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“the most confused”:
Marshall's comment is from his foreword to Wiley Sword's
Shiloh: Bloody April
, p. vii. A library has been written on the Civil War. The total is well over fifty thousand books, about one for every day since the war's end. At times, the meticulous reconstructions of the various battles impose a seeming order on what were in truth scenes of hellish disarray. This was especially true at Shiloh.
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