Down the Great Unknown (36 page)

But the Little Colorado is enticingly warm. Commercial trips all pull over at the river junction, like mini-cruise ships at a Caribbean harbor, and spill their passengers ashore. If the water level permits, the more adventurous—and less fastidious—attach their life jackets around their waists like giant diapers (to cushion collisions), lie on their backs bobsledder style, and shoot and slither their way down the muddy river through a mini-rapid or two. It is like bobbing in an enormous glass of chocolate milk while a titanic six-year-old stirs it with a giant spoon.

Powell planned to stop for a few days to measure the latitude and longitude of the mouth of the Little Colorado. The men were not pleased, but they knew this was part of the bargain. “We are sorry to be delayed as we have had no meat for several days and not one sixth of a ration for more than a month,” Bradley wrote, “yet we are willing to do all that we can to make the trip a success.”

On August 11, their second day in place, Sumner and Walter Powell set out to take measurements. The walls, they found, were three thousand feet high, more than half a mile. “The ascent is made, not by a slope such as is usually found in climbing a mountain,” Powell wrote, “but is much more abrupt—often vertical for many hundreds of feet—so that the impression is that we are at great depths; and we look up to see but a little patch of sky.”

Powell hiked upstream a few miles along the Little Colorado to explore. He went, as usual, without a weapon. “As we were on the edge of the Apache and Havasupai Indian country, his act was foolish, to say the least,” Sumner complained, but Powell saw nothing more dangerous than a couple of rattlesnakes. The most striking sight was the river's “tumbling down over many falls.”

Had Powell ventured eighty or a hundred miles upstream, and had the recent rains been heavy enough, he would have had a jaw-dropping surprise. There he would have encountered the muddy waterfall now known as the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado. In dry weather, there is almost nothing to see. But in full flow, the cataract is 185 feet in height, slightly higher than Niagara. An exploring party coming down the Little Colorado above the fall would have almost no warning that they were about to plunge to their deaths. The country just above the waterfall is fairly flat, and the river's descent is gradual. Not until about a quarter mile above the fall does the pace begin to pick up. By then it would likely be too late.

A geologist who had grown up near Niagara Falls once asked Powell why he assumed there were no such falls on the Colorado. “Have you never seen the river?” Powell shot back. “It is the muddiest river you ever saw . . . I was convinced that the canyon was old enough, and the muddy water swift enough and gritty enough to have worn down all the falls to mere rapids.”

This was more good-natured swaggering than a serious response. In the long run, Powell was quite right—waterfalls eventually create the conditions for their own demise, like termites who consume the home they live in. The problem, which Powell understood perfectly well, is that we live in the short run. His “argument” amounted to the claim that, because ice cream eventually melts in the heat, no one should expect to see an ice cream cone in July. Powell had made up his mind to tackle the Grand Canyon, risks be damned. The indisputable existence of the Grand Falls of the Little Colorado, in a region geologically identical to the one he was traversing, highlights how much of a gambler he was.

While Sumner and the Powell brothers ventured off exploring and taking measurements, Bradley stayed in camp and sulked. He had good reason. Like a soldier stuck in the trenches for months and no longer able to imagine any luxury that could compare with a dry pair of socks, Bradley was beset by mundane miseries. Camp was “filthy with dust and alive with insects,” and Bradley could not escape “for I have nothing to wear on my feet but an old pair of boots in which I cannot climb the mountains and which are my only reliance for making portages.” Modern boatmen wear rubber sandals (a Grand Canyon boatman invented Tevas), but Bradley and the others were condemned to leather boots that fell apart in the water and tore open on the rocks.

Bradley went barefoot in his boat and in camp when he could, and he had a pair of moccasins to wear when the sand was too hot or the rocks too sharp. But his spirits were as low as they had been all trip. “I have given away my clothing until I am reduced to the same condition of those who lost by the shipwreck of our boats. I cannot see a man of the party more destitute than I am. Thank God the trip is nearly ended.”

Without maps, this was little more than a hopeful guess, but Bradley tended to round off nearly all his gloomy thoughts with an optimistic note, the better to keep himself going. The others shared his melancholy and frustration. Only Powell, still reveling in the delights of geology, seemed cheerful, and the men found their leader's good humor more infuriating than inspiring. “If this is a specimen of Arrazona a very little of it will do for me,” Bradley wrote. “The men are uneasy and discontented and anxious to move on. If Major does not do something soon I fear the consequences, but he is contented and seems to think that biscuit made of sour and musty flour and a few dried apples is ample to sustain a laboring man. If he can only study geology he will be happy without food or shelter but the rest of us are not afflicted with it to an alarming extent.”

On August 12,
still
in camp, the men were growing frantic. Bradley had copied his notes, but he had finished with even that make-work project. The men had pinned down their position, so the mapmaking duties were discharged. “There remains nothing more to be done that is absolutely necessary for lat. and long. are sufficient and we ought to be away in the morning,” wrote Bradley. “Don't know whether we shall or not.”

It was Powell who had measured their latitude. The finding had a practical significance that none of the men could miss. The expedition had already made it as far south as they needed to go. They were now at the latitude of Callville, Nevada, the tiny Mormon settlement that signified a safe escape from the Grand Canyon. From now on, every mile west was a mile toward home, and every mile in any other direction was a life-threatening detour.

In the meantime, the weather did its bit to add to everyone's misery. “I am surprised to find it raining nearly every night in a country where they say rain seldom falls,” lamented Bradley. After long, wet days battling rapids on the river, tourists hit by monsoons today echo the same words as they cower in their tents in their soaked clothes and listen to the rumbling thunder and worry about where they left their life jacket and whether the whipping wind will find it and toss it into the river.

For no clear reason, Powell seemed to consider the junction of the Colorado and the Little Colorado to be the true beginning of the Grand Canyon. By modern reckoning, the expedition had entered the Grand Canyon some sixty miles before. Powell called that first stretch of canyon, from Lee's Ferry to the Little Colorado, Marble Canyon. Today the name “Marble Canyon” is still used, but it designates a part of the Grand Canyon rather than a separate entity.

On their last day camped at the junction of the two rivers, Powell scrawled a note in his river diary. “Take obs. Capt. climbed Mt.,” it read in its entirety. Years later, in Washington, D.C., Powell composed a journal entry to mark the same milestone. The words are the most famous ever written about the Grand Canyon.

We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown. Our boats, tied to a common stake, are chafing each other, as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month's rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried, and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun, and reshrunken to their normal bulk; the sugar has all melted, and gone on its way down the river; but we have a large sack of coffee. The lighting of the boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better, and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage.

We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance, as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs, that rise to the world above; they are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands, or lost among the boulders.

We have an unknown distance yet to run; an unknown river yet to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not; Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever; jests are bandied about freely this morning; but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SOCKDOLAGER

 

Powell's remarks were striking and not just for their eloquence.
His
men talked “as cheerfully as ever,” at the same time that Bradley described himself and the rest of the crew as “uneasy and discontented and anxious.” Was Powell oblivious to his men's mood? Or did he recognize their dismay but choose, on literary grounds, to portray the men as a hardy band of adventurers joking in the face of death?

Powell's description of himself as oppressed by “somber” and “ghastly” thoughts strikes a curious note as well, for Powell was no angst-ridden prince of Denmark. His remark a few sentences before, that the boats were now so light that they were easy to carry, rings truer. It evokes Henry V's startling argument to his troops at Agincourt that it was a
good
thing to be outnumbered four to one. “The fewer men, the greater share of honor,” Shakespeare's Henry declared, and now Powell, with astonishing but characteristic optimism, insisted that to be nearly out of food was in truth a happy turn of circumstance.

At eight in the morning on August 13, Powell and his fretful crew untied their battered boats and pushed out into the unknown. “With some eagerness, and some anxiety, and some misgiving,” Powell wrote, “we enter the cañon below, and are carried along by the swift water through walls which rise from its very edge.”

Immediately they found themselves fighting through a nest of rapids. “The rapids are almost innumerable,” Bradley wrote, “some of them very heavy ones full of treacherous rocks.” In the course of a long day, they ran too many rapids to count, lined three others, and advanced a total of fifteen miles.

They camped that night at the head of a rapid they could scarcely bear to look at. It was “the worst rapid we have found today and the longest we have seen on the Colorado,” wrote Bradley. “The rocks are seen nearly all over it for half a mile or more—indeed the river runs through a vast pile of rocks.” Hance Rapid, as it is known today, is the rockiest and steepest rapid in Grand Canyon. In a mere half mile, the river drops thirty feet.

It is named for John Hance, a prospector who found asbestos near here in the early 1880s. The asbestos was valuable (primarily for fireproof theater curtains, in an era when footlights were open flames), and Hance constructed two mule trails from the rim to the river to haul it out. Eventually the tourists who began coaxing Hance to lead them into the Grand Canyon proved more lucrative than the asbestos. Hance abandoned mining for tourism and became the first white resident of the South Rim.

Like the tourists Hance led down his trails, Sumner could only gape at the rapid in front of him. He reckoned that it was “about 1 mile long with a fall of 50 or 60 ft. that has about 100 rocks in the upper half of it. How anyone can ride that on a raft is more than I can see. Mr. White may have done so but I can't believe it.”

Powell and all his crew knew James White's story, but until now they had never had occasion to ponder it in detail. On September 8, 1867, a naked, incoherent, starving prospector was found clinging to a raft about one hundred miles below the Grand Canyon. “i was ten days With out pants or boos or hat,” James White wrote to his brother as soon as he recovered, and “i Was soon bornt so i Cold hadly Wolk.”

White and two companions had been searching for gold somewhere in the vicinity of the San Juan River, which joins the Colorado a short distance north of the Grand Canyon. They were attacked by a band of fifteen or twenty Indians, and one of the three prospectors was killed. White and the other man escaped. When they reached the Colorado, the pair found some driftwood, lashed together three cottonwood logs each about ten feet long and eight inches in diameter, and, still afraid for their lives, set out down the river. Four days later, White's partner washed overboard and drowned. White continued alone. For seven full days, he had nothing at all to eat except for two rawhide knife scabbards. To keep from drowning, he tied himself to the raft with a rope around his waist and plunged helplessly along as the raft tumbled downstream. By the reckoning of his rescuers—White himself contributed almost no specifics to his story, except that he had been afloat fourteen days—White had traveled 550 miles and
was the first man to have traversed the Grand Canyon. “i see the hardes time that eny man ever did in the World,” he wrote his brother, “but thank god that i got thrught saft.”

White's story was widely believed at first, but nearly all modern writers dismiss it. Five hundred miles was a tremendous distance to float in only two weeks. Rather than speed downstream, a raft drifting willy-nilly would likely break up on a rock or fly apart in a rapid or hang up in an eddy, and probably sooner rather than later. Just as puzzling, White said that he had encountered only one major rapid; and that the cliffs above him were only three or four hundred feet tall; and that the walls were not variously red and black and purple and tan but uniformly whitish-yellow. In what should have been the white-water nightmare of Cataract Canyon, if White's geography was correct, “the water was so smooth that George and I sat on the raft with our feet in the water.”