The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (7 page)

T
hat region was called the Plateau Province, and almost nothing was known about its secrets, except that it received scant rainfall, possessed a surreal and almost otherworldly beauty, and was awesomely unreceptive to human beings. Stretching north toward Salt Lake City, south toward Phoenix, east toward Albuquerque, and west toward Las Vegas, its territory overlaid significant parts of what is now Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico—an expanse of 130,000 square miles that contained some of the most impassable terrain on the continent. The other thing that was known about the place was that somewhere through the middle of it ran the Colorado River—although, in the 329 years that had passed since Cárdenas had stumbled upon the great chasm that lay near its heart, almost no one had been back to explore that artery.

A handful of expeditions had succeeded in circumnavigating much of the canyon’s periphery, but had barely ventured inside it. In 1776, a pair of Spanish friars had traversed a portion of the Plateau and forded the Colorado just east of the Grand Canyon at a point known thereafter as the Crossing of the Fathers. That same year,
another Franciscan priest had poked along the South Rim of the canyon and worked his way into the hidden sanctuary of the Havasupai Indians in the western part of the canyon. This venture was followed by another two generations of silence until the 1820s and 1830s, when a handful of trappers ventured into the canyon country in search of beaver, but left little in the way of written records.

The only hard data available on any portion of this terrain came from the US Army’s one organized expedition, which had been confined to the lower reaches of the Colorado, a relatively flat stretch of water that extended north
from the river’s delta at the Sea of Cortés. In 1853, a lieutenant with the army’s Corps of Topographical Engineers named Joseph Christmas Ives was ordered to examine the navigable portion of the river by taking a steamboat as far upstream as he could travel.
After chugging nearly three hundred miles from Fort Yuma in an ironclad paddle wheeler with a crew of twenty-four men in the direction of present-day Las Vegas, his odyssey was brought to an abrupt halt when the little steamship slammed into a submerged rock in a crash so violent that the men near the bow were thrown overboard and the engineer was flung halfway into the firebox.

Ives then struck out overland, heading east through the Grand Wash Cliffs and making his way onto the plateau that forms the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. After conducting two brief surveys down a pair of tributary canyons, he declared his exploration complete and returned home to announce, in his published report, that the region was so bereft that “the deer, antelope, the birds, even the smaller reptiles, all of which frequent the adjacent territory, have deserted this uninhabitable district.” He then offered one of the most infamous pronouncements that has ever been made about the Grand Canyon:

Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. . . . Excepting when the melting snows send their annual torrents through the avenues to the Colorado, conveying with them sound and motion, these dismal abysses, and the arid table-lands that enclose them, are left as they have been for ages, in unbroken solitude and silence.

That was all anyone really knew about this giant expanse in the middle of the Southwest, which constituted
the last truly uncharted territory in the country. The most authoritative map of the United States featured a single, provocative word
emblazoned in the middle of its four-foot expanse: “unexplored.”

The implications of that word struck the patriotic boosters of Manifest Destiny as intolerable. “Is any other nation so ignorant of itself?” railed Samuel Bowles, editor of the
Springfield Republican
, whose views were shared by many. The mission of uncovering this “great mocking mystery of our geography,” Bowles declared, was a task “more interesting and important than any other which lies before our men of science. The wonder is that they have neglected it for so long.”

In fact, there was little wonder. Lieutenant Ives may have been wrong about the destiny of the canyon, but his assessment of its isolation and inaccessibility
was accurate. In a landscape that was incised by countless arroyos that branched off from the main stem of the canyon, any form of overland travel was virtually impossible. The distance a raven could cover in a few minutes might take a week or more for a man to traverse on foot or on horseback. In the absence of wings, the only conceivable way to explore the place was by boat, and until the spring of 1869, no one was mad enough to give this a try.

But now, here beneath an obscure railway trestle in a remote corner of the Wyoming Territory, as unlikely a figure as one could ever imagine—a one-armed Civil War veteran—was proposing to barnstorm his way into the center of this blank spot by rowing down the upper reaches of the Colorado to the point where published knowledge dried up, and from there to venture forth into what he rather poetically called “the Great Unknown.”

J
ohn Wesley Powell was the eldest son of an immigrant Methodist circuit preacher and grew up on a frontier farm in Walworth County, Wisconsin, sixty miles south of the place where the distinguished naturalist John Muir was raised in almost identical circumstances. Like Muir, Powell had a deep interest in botany, geography, and geology. As teenagers, both men indulged their fascination with science and nature by capping off fifteen-hour days of backbreaking farm labor with bouts of nighttime reading in order to teach themselves the rudiments of natural history. And, like Muir, Powell seized the first chance he got to break loose from his family and set out on a series of long, solitary, rambling excursions that deepened his love of the land. But the two men differed in one key respect. While Muir eventually found his spiritual calling amid the craggy peaks and wind-raked mountaintops of the High Sierra, Powell’s passions revolved around rivers and boats.

In the spring of 1856, at the age of twenty-two, he took a skiff down the navigable length of the Mississippi from the Falls of St. Anthony in Minneapolis all the way to New Orleans, an odyssey that the historian Donald Worster would later speculate may well have taken him past a steamship on which a young
river pilot named Samuel Clemens was learning the rudiments of reading water. The following spring, Powell took a train to Pittsburgh and floated the Ohio to St. Louis, tracing the classic natural-history route into the West that had been followed by Lewis and Clark, Thomas Nuttall, and a dozen other of the West’s first scientists. Then, in 1857, Powell rowed down the Illinois River to its mouth, and from there up the Des Moines. On the way, he put together a collection of mollusk fossils, a diverse class of ancient marine invertebrates, that would later win several prizes from the Illinois State Agricultural Society.

His rowing and mollusk-gathering days, along with the modest career in academia for which he seemed destined, ended abruptly in the spring of 1861, when he enlisted in the Union Army and went off to war. By April, he was a second lieutenant and serving on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff as a captain of artillery and an expert on fortifications. A year later, on the first afternoon of the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee, as he raised his right hand to signal his gunners to stand clear of the recoil of one of the half-ton cannons that he commanded, a Confederate minié ball
entered his wrist and plowed toward the elbow, shattering his entire forearm. The following morning, in a makeshift military hospital set up in the town hall of Savannah, Tennessee, the arm was
sawn off two inches below the elbow and tossed onto the pile of amputated limbs outside the building.

He returned to command the men of Battery F in nine more battles during the next three years, eventually rising to the rank of major before resigning in January of 1865. Within two years of mustering out, he was appointed professor of geology and natural history at the Illinois State University at Normal. Around the same time, he was also named curator of the Illinois State Natural History Society. Both positions served as a springboard for trips to Colorado during the summers of 1867 and 1868 to gather museum specimens—and there he came up with the scheme of resolving the mysteries of the canyon country by launching a fleet of small wooden boats down the most pugnacious and defiant river in the entire West.

T
he river that transected, knit together, and defined the last unexplored region in the United States had not one source but two. The first, the Green, was originally known to members of the Shoshone tribe, and later to the mountain men of the American fur-trade era, as the Seedskadee. Born amid the black and ice-studded tarns of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, just south of what is now Yellowstone National Park, the Green serenely gathered up the waters of a succession of small creeks cascading out of the Teton and Gros Ventre Ranges and meandered southward through a wide, shallow valley carpeted in sagebrush and lined with cottonwood trees, where, from roughly 1825 to 1840, several hundred trappers staged a rendezvous each summer to sell their peltries and replenish their
supplies of salt, gunpowder, lead, and whiskey.

At the southern end of this valley, the Green bent to the southeast and continued boring across the alkaline plains of western Wyoming until it reached the trestle bridge of the Union Pacific at Green River Station, where Powell and his bedraggled boatmen were launching their expedition. Fifty or more miles south, somewhere near the border separating the territories of Utah and
Wyoming, the river ran smack up against the Uintas,
the only major mountain range in the United States that runs from east to west, speared through a fault in the cliffs of
flaming-red quartzite and shale that marked the portal to a massive gorge, and disappeared.

Meanwhile the Green’s sister stream, known in Powell’s day by the now half-forgotten name of the Grand, was making a roundabout journey from its own point of origin in an idyllic Colorado meadow located in the heart of what would later become Rocky Mountain National Park. Tumbling out of a range called the Never Summers, the Grand cut a diagonal slant down the western slope of the Continental Divide, following a west-trending route that would eventually accommodate a long stretch of Interstate 70. Along the way, it collected the runoff from half a dozen or more tributaries, all of them cold, white-water streams cascading from the tops of the Rockies: the Fraser, the Blue, the Eagle, the Roaring Fork, the Fryingpan, and the Crystal.

At the center of a crescent-shaped valley that would later become the farming town of Grand Junction, the Grand picked up the Gunnison River, then crossed into Utah, wheeled left, and began drilling south through the same badlands into which the Green had disappeared—an impenetrable landscape of bald mesas, wrinkled cliffs, and isolated pockets of mountains whose snowy peaks looked like icebergs marooned in an ocean of impossibly blue air. Somewhere out in that maze of wind-raked stone, the two rivers, which by now had covered a combined distance of nearly twelve hundred miles, arrived at a secret place deep inside what is now Canyonlands National Park, a spot known as the Confluence, and merged to form the Colorado.

More than a thousand miles downstream from the Confluence, the Colorado emerged from the Grand Canyon and was joined by the Virgin, a tributary whose waters arrived just east of where Lieutenant Ives’s steamboat had come to a crashing halt. Almost everything that lay between those two distant points was a complete mystery. In fact, explorers had reached and forded this stretch of the Colorado at only a handful of places, and since the time of Cárdenas, no one had undertaken a systematic effort to navigate or chart the course of the river. On the Corps of Topographical Engineers 1855 map of the Southwest, the most definitive piece of cartography of the day, a dotted line of almost lyrical uncertainty traced across the empty space to represent the engineers’ best guess as to where the water ran. But
the actual details of most of that journey—whether the Colorado doubled back on itself, whether it cascaded over waterfalls the size of Niagara, or bored through underground tunnels—was anybody’s guess. Herein lay yet another unique attribute of the challenge that Powell had laid before himself.