Down the Great Unknown (49 page)

Stacy Allen, Jeff Hall, and Andy Trudeau helped me navigate the literature of the Civil War. Michele Missner, a researcher who is herself a precious find, tracked down endless arcane articles. Kate Headline labored so diligently in pursuit of Grand Canyon photos that museum and library curators across the nation came to recognize her voice.

Thanks to Jane Meredith Adams, a dazzling writer, for wise and thoughtful editorial counsel, and to David Smith, for careful and diligent scrutiny of the entire manuscript. Both these writers neglected their own work in favor of mine.

Rafe Sagalyn, my agent and my friend, shepherded this project along from before Day One. Hugh Van Dusen proved as superlative an editor as his reputation had led me to expect, and higher praise is hard to imagine.

Ruth and Bill Holmberg read this manuscript in its earliest incarnations. For their editorial advice, and countless other gifts, I owe more than I know how to express. For Lynn, Sam, and Ben, for bottomless reserves of inspiration, insight, and encouragement, my fervent and inadequate gratitude.

About the Author

Edward Dolnick is the former chief science writer at the
Boston Globe.
He has written for the
Atlantic Monthly,
the
New York Times Magazine,
the
Washington Post,
and many other publications. He made his first Grand Canyon river trip twenty years ago. He is married and has two children.

Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

Credits

Jacket design by Kapo Ng

 

Copyright

DOWN THE GREAT UNKNOWN.
Copyright © 2001 by Edward Dolnick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

EPub © Edition SEPTEMBER 2001 ISBN: 9780061760341

Print edition first published in 2001 by HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

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*
By the standards of the day, Sumner and Powell (at 5 feet, 6 1/2 inches) were a bit under average size. The typical soldier in the Civil War stood between 5 feet, 7 inches and five feet, eight inches and weighed 142 pounds.

*
In this quotation and in all others that follow, the punctuation and spelling are as in the original.

*
Even the illustrations in the
Exploration
are less than straightforward. A drawing captioned “The Start from Green River Station,” for example, shows three boats rather than the actual four. The illustration on the cover of this book, taken from Powell's Figure 28, “Running a Rapid,” depicts boats with a decked-over compartment in the middle, which is incorrect, and shows a sweep oar at the stern (for reasons discussed in Chapter Thirteen, historians disagree about whether the boats had sweep oars). More important, the drawing shows a one-armed man at the sweep, though both Powell and his men agreed that Powell never touched an oar.

*
Few travelers have endured journeys as harrowing as Manly's. He ended up taking yet another shortcut; this one turned out to lead across Death Valley. (The name was given later, in testimony to the suffering of Manly's party.) In comparison with the trek across Death Valley, the trip down the Green was a pleasure jaunt. Manly eventually reached California, although he never did strike it rich. He told his story in his autobiography,
Death Valley in '49
.

*
Litton, now over eighty and still running the Colorado and other rivers, is the oldest person ever to have rowed the length of the Grand Canyon.

*
Official records listed Powell as absent without leave at Shiloh. It took him considerable trouble to correct the record, although his amputated arm served as hard-to-refute evidence that he had indeed been present on the battlefield.

*
At Spotsylvania, in 1864, Major General John Sedgwick of the Union Army's Sixth Corps rebuked a soldier for cowering under fire. Sedgwick's last words were, “Why, what are you dodging for? They could not hit an elephant at this distance.”

*
Powell liked to tell a slightly more flamboyant variant of the tale. “We're going to be captured in a few minutes,” Wallace told the wounded Powell, in this version. “Get onto my horse and go back to the landing at once.” Wallace himself was mortally wounded later the same afternoon.

*
Grua and two other boatmen hold the record for fastest trip through the Grand Canyon, set in 1983: 277 miles in just over 36 1/2 hours. (Commercial rowing trips cover the same distance in about fourteen days.) The winter of 1983 had been marked by tremendous snowstorms in the Rockies. When the snow melted, the rampaging Colorado nearly destroyed Glen Canyon Dam. The river was officially closed to boaters, but Grua and his companions ran day and night (sometimes using handheld floodlights), swapping off at the oars. Despite flipping and nearly drowning in Crystal Rapid, they escaped unharmed but for a $500 fine.

*
Powell was right to be alarmed. Potato greens, according to the writer and river runner Ellen Meloy, are relatives of deadly nightshade and, like it, contain the hallucinogen solanine.

*
Houston estimates the boulder's size as “seven stories,” which is almost certainly a considerable overestimate. “You could never get a group of boatmen to agree on the actual size,” one river runner told me, but the experts I surveyed offered estimates that ranged from fifteen or twenty feet to fifty-plus. The rest of Houston's account struck the experts as terrifyingly accurate. Little Niagara is “one hell of a scary place,” “a place you want to avoid at all costs,” “possibly the biggest white water in North America,” “horrifying.”

*
New evidence now makes it seem that the Paiutes may have been framed. Recently, while digging a foundation for a monument to the victims, a backhoe operator unearthed thousands of bone fragments from the murdered emigrants. According to a page-one story in the
Salt Lake Tribune
on February 21, 2001, forensic anthropologists studying the bones found extensive evidence of gunshot wounds but no sign of injuries inflicted by knives or hatchets, the weapons supposedly wielded by the Paiutes.

*
He would return later in the year, determined to finish his railroad survey. The second Stanton expedition (in sturdier boats and with life jackets) would become the first since Powell's to make it through the Grand Canyon, though nothing ever came of the railroad scheme.

*
Seashells had been observed on mountaintops at least as early as Leonardo da Vinci's day, but theologians had happily cited them as proof of the reality of Noah's flood.

*
The word was one of the last that Lincoln ever heard. John Wilkes Booth lurked outside the presidential box at Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865, while the audience enjoyed a frothy comedy called
Our American Cousin
. Booth stood silently, waiting for the line that would unleash a burst of laughter from the audience and help cover the sound of his gunshot: “Don't know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.”

*
River runners use the word “boatman” for both men and women. The first woman to row the Colorado through the Grand Canyon was the legendary Georgie White, in 1952, but it took until the 1970s for the commercial companies in the Grand Canyon to hire women in any numbers. Today everyone agrees that many of the best boatmen are female.

*
Tourists today know Bright Angel Creek as the site of Phantom Ranch, a small group of buildings that offer the only food and lodging on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

*
Later, on the lecture circuit, Powell would grow teary and the audience would burst into applause when Powell described Bradley waving his hat to signal “All's well!”

*
In their old age both men wrote about the 1869 expedition. I have drawn on those accounts but, for fear of jumping ahead of the story, avoided such expressions as, “Nearly four decades later, Sumner recalled . . .” in favor of “Sumner later recalled . . .” See the Epilogue notes for a discussion of these late-in-life recollections.

*
To the understandable dismay of his second crew, Powell never discussed this new expedition in print. Instead, he wrote as if there had been only one expedition (though he silently incorporated some material from journals kept by the second crew). In later years, the men of the second expedition often met with open disbelief when they insisted that they, too, had explored the Grand Canyon with Powell.