Down the Great Unknown (43 page)

Still, with his attention now turned back East, Powell let the matter drop. At seven o'clock on September 16, Powell delivered a lecture on the expedition. At nine the same evening, he and Walter caught a night stagecoach to Corinne, Utah. (“Major Powell, of the Powell Expedition who has been lost, drowned and resurrected a dozen times [on paper], arrived here last night from the south,” the local paper reported, “in the best of health and spirits, a plain, unpretentious gentleman.”) From Corinne, they hopped a Union Pacific train to Chicago. By September 20, Powell was ensconced at Chicago's Tremont Hotel, giving interviews to eager reporters and planning the stops on his lecture tour.

•      •      •

The 1869 expedition had been a first, but Powell had fallen dismayingly short of his scientific goals. In 1870, he announced a plan to do the whole horrendous trip a second time. The new expedition, he explained, would produce the careful maps and topographic data that the first one had not. Trading on his newfound reputation, Powell won a $12,000 appropriation from Congress—a significant sum in those days—“for completing the survey of the Colorado of the West and its tributaries.” Success brought fame and fame brought money. Powell's days as an empty-pocketed freelancer had ended.

The key to this second expedition was a different approach to the problem of supplies. Rather than carry all the food from the outset, Powell intended to cache supplies ahead of time at various spots along the river. In the late summer of 1870, Powell was traveling in southern Utah in the expert company of Jacob Hamblin, the renowned Mormon scout, looking for manageable routes down to the Colorado. Hamblin, “the Leatherstocking of the Desert,” was an ardent Mormon who served Brigham Young, in the words of one historian, “with a loyalty that amounted almost to worship.”

Near Mount Trumbull, Powell and Hamblin met with a group of Shivwits. With Hamblin serving as interpreter, Powell explained what he was after. “I tell the Indians that I wish to spend some months in their country during the coming year, and that I would like them to treat me as a friend. I do not wish to trade; do not want their lands . . . I tell them of many Indian tribes, and where they live; of the European nations; of the Chinese, of Africans, and all the strange things about them that come to my mind. I tell them of the ocean, of great rivers and high mountains, of strange beasts and birds. At last I tell them I wish to learn about their cañons and mountains, and about themselves, to tell other men at home; and that I want to take pictures of everything, and show them to my friends.”

Hamblin translated the chief's response. “We will be friends, and when you come we will be glad. We will tell the Indians who live on the other side of the great river that we have seen
Ka-pu-rats
[”Arm Off”], and he is the Indians' friend. . . . We have not much to give; you must not think us mean. You are wise; we have heard you tell strange things. We are ignorant. Last year we killed three white men. Bad men said they were our enemies. They told great lies. We thought them true. We were mad; it made us big fools. We are very sorry. Do not think of them, it is done; let us be friends.”

Here was confirmation, then
, and from the Indians' own mouths, of the story the newspaper had reported the year before. Powell seemed curiously unperturbed. “That night I slept in peace, although these murderers of my men, and their friends, the
U-in-ka-rets
, were sleeping not five hundred yards away.”
He never sought to punish
anyone for the killings and almost never referred to the murdered men again.

It is a puzzling story, made all the more unsettling by Powell's reliance on Hamblin to interpret for him. The Shivwits knew perfectly well how swift and careless frontier justice could be. In 1866, at nearby Pipe Spring, for example, someone had killed two white ranchers. An armed posse arrived, accused a band of Paiutes of the murders, and left eight of them dead. Would Indians in 1870 freely confess to a white man that they had murdered three of his companions?

In camp below Separation Rapid on the night that the Howland brothers and Dunn hiked out, Sumner and the other men had tried to guess their friends' fate. The consensus, as Sumner put it, was that “the red bellies would surely get them.” Sumner (though he was no friend of the Indians) disagreed. He feared that the three men “would not escape the double-dyed white devils that infested that part of the country. Grapevine reports convinced me later that that was their fate.”

Sumner's suspicions had begun to take shape almost at once. On the second day at the Virgin River, while the men devoured melons and swapped stories with their Mormon greeting party, they tried to work out a plan to rescue the Howlands and Dunn. One of the listeners suddenly perked up when Powell mentioned the valuables the men had with them. “From one with a listless demeanor,” Sumner wrote, “he instantly changed to a wide-awake, intensely interested listener, and his eyes snapped and burned like a rattlesnake's, particularly when Major Powell told him of an especially valuable chronometer for which he had paid six hundred and fifty dollars.”

Soon after, Sumner heard the story of how his three friends had been killed by Indians intent on revenge. He dismissed it at once and never saw fit to reconsider. “I am positive I saw some years afterwards the silver watch that I had given Howland,” he wrote in his old age. “I was with some men in a carousal. One of them had a watch and boasted how he came by it. I tried to get hold of it so as to identify it by a certain screw that I had made and put in myself, but it was spirited away, and I was never afterwards able to get sight of it. Such evidence is not conclusive, but all of it was enough to convince me that the Indians were not at the head of the murder, if they had anything to do with it.”

There matters stood until 1980. Then Wesley Larsen, an amateur historian and a former dean of the college of science at Southern Utah University, found a letter that had lain undisturbed in a trunk with a jumble of other papers for ninety-seven years. The letter was written by one William Leany to John Steele and rediscovered in a trunk belonging to Steele's great-grandson.

Leany had been one of Brigham Young's bodyguards. Steele was a judge and a militia officer in the Blackhawk Indian War (and the father of the first white child born in Utah Territory). Both men were devout Mormons, but, in the most notorious incident in Mormon history, Leany had run afoul of his church. In 1857, as noted earlier, a group of Mormons (and, possibly, Indians) had perpetrated the Mountain Meadows Massacre, killing some 120 California-bound emigrants. Leany happened to see that ill-fated wagon train pass by as it wound its way across southern Utah headed in the direction of Mountain Meadows, and he recognized a man in the emigrant party. Years before, in Missouri, the man's father had saved Leany from an anti-Mormon mob that was threatening to kill him. Now the emigrants were in trouble themselves, for the Mormons had agreed to deny food or other assistance to the Gentile interlopers.

Seeing his rescuer's son, Leany defied the ban and gave the man a meal, a roof for the night, and some vegetables. Leany's fellow Mormons charged him with giving “aid and comfort to the enemy.” To teach him a lesson, someone clubbed him over the head, fracturing his skull and leaving him for dead.

Leany survived. By 1883, he and Steele were old men. Steele evidently suggested to his good friend Leany that the time had come for them both to repent of their sins. Leany wanted no part of it. The church had blood on its hands, but
he
had nothing to repent. Like an Old Testament preacher, Leany thundered that “thieving whoredom murder and Suicide & like abominations” reigned in the land. Then came the sentence that, a century later, electrified Wes Larsen: “You are far from ignorant of those deeds of blood from the day the picket fence was broken on my head
to the day those three were murdered in our ward & the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood.
” [italics added]

Larsen (like the other players in the story, a good Mormon) embarked on a frenzied round of detective work. The reference to “our ward,” a local Mormon district run by a bishop, was the first clue. Leany and Steele had lived in the same ward only once through the years, in 1869. And in that same fateful year, Larsen found, only one trio of men—Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and Bill Dunn—had been reported missing or killed in southern Utah.

Further, Larsen learned, only weeks before the Powell expedition reached Separation Rapid, Brigham Young had traveled throughout the region warning the faithful that the long-threatened invasion of Utah by Gentiles was imminent. When “war” came, Young warned his listeners, blood would rise “to their knees and even to their waist and to their horses' bridle bits.” The Mormon leader ordered sentries posted at all the passes leading into southern Utah.

Then, at the worst possible moment, three white strangers wandered into no-man's-land spouting a cock-and-bull story about their trip down a river that everyone knew was impassable. The three men were dragged off and executed as spies, Larsen speculates, and the news of the unsanctioned executions triumphantly telegraphed to Salt Lake City. At virtually the same moment, church leaders in Salt Lake received word from the fishermen at the mouth of the Virgin River that John Wesley Powell had survived his trip down the Colorado. He had arrived alive, but he was asking after three of his men who had left the river and set out on foot across the desert.

In Larsen's scenario, the next step was an exact replay of the Mormon response to the 120 killings at Mountain Meadows. First came cover-up (thus the reference in Leany's letter to “the murderer killed to stop the shedding of more blood”), then a vow of silence on the part of those who knew the truth, and finally a finger of blame pinning the crime on the nearest Indians.

Three theories, then, and none of them good. The first assumes that Indians would nonchalantly reveal that they had killed three white men (and the Shivwits had a reputation as peaceable). The next bases an accusation of triple murder on a stranger's shifty eyes and Sumner's certainty that he recognized a favorite watch. The last takes a cryptic sentence in a private letter and spins a tale of conspiracy, blood oaths, and cold-eyed executions.

The only certainty is that Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and Bill Dunn hiked up Separation Canyon on August 28, 1869, and were never seen alive again. They should have made it to the plateau, for the climb up from the river is rugged but doable and the heavy rains would have left water standing in puddles. Once at the rim, they would have headed north toward the Mormon settlements. It would have been only a short distance to a high point called Blue Knob that offers a view over the countryside. From there, the next conspicuous landmark to the north was Mount Dellenbaugh, as it is now called, about twenty miles distant. The summit is an easy hike and would have made a good spot to look for Indian trails or water.

Scratched into the rock near the mountain summit is an inscription, cut with a knife. “Dunn 1869,” it reads, and “Water,” above an arrow pointing north.
If the inscription is a hoax
, it is an old one. Ten years ago, a local historian tracked down a “hermit cowboy” who had lived near Mount Dellenbaugh since the early 1930s. He didn't know if the inscription was genuine or not, the old man said, but he knew that it had been there as long as he had.

The bodies of the Howland brothers and Dunn have never been found. The three men, along with their weapons, their papers, and the compasses and chronometers and other gear they carried, seem to have vanished into the air.

 

EPILOGUE

 

Frank Goodman, who left the expedition shortly after the wreck at Disaster Falls, settled in Utah and became the patriarch of a large family. (“He had the most sense of anybody in the whole expedition,” one modern boatman half-jokes. “He walked out when he had the chance.”) Goodman settled in Vernal, Utah, in the northeast corner of the state. Vernal happened to be the hometown of Nathaniel Galloway, the trapper who went on to invent the “face your danger” technique of river running. One white-water historian speculates that Galloway may have hit on the idea of taking rapids head-on, and the idea of building flat-bottomed, lightweight boats as well, by listening to Goodman's tales of misfortune in Powell's boats.

George Bradley spent the rest of his life near San Diego running a small fruit orchard. In 1885, in poor health, he returned to Massachusetts to be near his family. Bradley died a few weeks later, at fifty, in his sister's home. His death went unnoticed even in his hometown newspaper.

The irrepressible Andy Hall returned to his old trade, driving mule teams, in Arizona Territory. On an August afternoon in 1882, Hall and another man were driving a six-mule train for the Wells Fargo Express Company. They carried the U.S. mail and a miscellany of other goods, including a large box containing a $5,000 payroll in gold. Just outside Globe, Arizona, the mule train reached a small gully next to a giant boulder. A volley of rifle shots tore into the mules. One animal fell dead, and the others ran off in panic. Hall saw the gunmen chase down the mule carrying the gold, divide up the loot, and ride off. He set out to track the thieves while his partner rode to Globe to round up a posse.

The posse found a series of markers Hall had left. First were deep gouges he had scraped in the dirt with his boot heel, then (when the robbers moved into brush country) a trail of small, broken branches, and finally (when the route moved across bare rock) torn-up bits of handkerchief. In time, the posse found Hall himself, dead. He had been shot eight times.

The killers were caught two days later and hanged from a sycamore tree in Globe. The Chamber of Commerce now marks the site with a plaque that notes that “the culprits had a fair hearing” and goes on to add that “saloons were closed and it was an orderly lynching.”