The Age of Gold (23 page)

Given the desolate nature of the place, it was easy to imagine they were the first white men to descend this stretch of the river. They were wrong, but not by much, as they learned shortly. Someone sighted scratchings on the canyon wall; upon closer inspection these proved to be letters, which spelled ASHLEY, 1824. Manly and the others had no way of knowing who this Ashley was, but it seemed unlikely that subsequent expeditions would have passed Ashley’s signature without signing in themselves. (William Ashley, one of the great explorers of the Rocky Mountain region, had led a small party down this stretch of the Green River twenty-five years before Manly’s group.)

By now Manly and the others understood why the canyon had seen so few visitors; but less than a mile farther on the lesson was driven home more forcibly. A massive block barred the stream; to maneuver the boat around it, Manly ordered the men out and the craft unloaded. The boat was lowered as far as the rope would reach, then it was let go. Manly and a couple of the others waited downstream to catch it as it approached. But midway the current tipped it over and pinned it—one gunwale down, the other tilted skyward—against the great rock. So strong was the current that, despite several hours’ application of muscle and mind, the boat remained precisely where it initially stuck. “We could no more move it than we could move the rock itself.”

All were stunned by this turn of events. Without a boat, in the middle of this canyon in the midst of nowhere, what would they do? It might be years, perhaps decades, before anyone even found their bodies.

But Manly hadn’t been a woodsman for nothing. Some distance downstream from the imprisoned boat he spotted two pine trees clinging to the side of the canyon. Each was roughly two feet in diameter, and relatively straight in the main part of the trunk. Manly had made canoes before, and decided he could do it again. He and the others felled the trees, trimmed them to length, and set to hollowing them out. This last was the hard part; the men chiseled and chopped in shifts, by the thin light of the sky during the day, by the light of a fire at night. When they finally finished, after most of a week, they had two canoes, each fifteen feet long and two feet wide. For stability they lashed the two craft together.

The twin-hulled vessel floated, but low in the water, and after only half a mile on the stream Manly decided another canoe was needed. Luckily a third pine tree, taller than the first two, soon came into sight. Several more days and nights of chiseling ensued; these culminated in the launch of a second vessel, a single-hulled canoe nearly thirty feet long. As the only experienced canoeist in the party, Manly took charge of this craft, and in his flagship he led the small flotilla off hopefully.

The two canoes—swifter and more agile than the ferry scow—made good progress down the canyon, which became less obstructed the farther they went. Gradually the walls fell away from the river, the sky opened up again, and the current slowed. Once more game grew abundant; the party feasted on elk, deer, goose, and duck. The behavior of the waterfowl surprised Manly; upon being fired at, they refused to fly away but instead swam toward the hunter. He concluded that they had never encountered firearms, perhaps not even humans.

At one point the group saw signs that a herd of horses had been driven across the river. Manly and the others assumed—or hoped, really—that those driving the horses had been white men, perhaps traders or even emigrants for California. On no firmer basis than this, they let themselves think the worst was behind them.

But then the river entered another canyon, almost as wild and deep as the one they had managed to escape. Once more they encountered huge boulders in the water, which forced repeated portages. After several difficult miles they found an abandoned skiff, along with some cooking utensils and a notice stuck to an alder tree saying that the several undersigned, having concluded that the river was impassable, had decided to head overland for Salt Lake City. This intelligence naturally discouraged Manly’s party. But judging their canoes more manuverable than the skiff, and looking to Manly’s experience on the water, they decided to push on.

Things got worse. The river made a sharp turn, more than a right angle, and plunged over a low waterfall. Manly, having no time to reach shore, was forced to take his boat over. He made it safely, though drenched. So did the other canoe, to the surprise of all involved. The river then straightened out but shot steeply downhill. Manly skirted the main channel,
creeping downstream next to the shore. But the others, ignoring his hand signals and shouts, tried to run the main channel. Midway they hit a standing wave—larger and more powerful than anything Manly had ever seen—which capsized the canoe, ejecting the occupants.

Two of them—like a surprising number of emigrants—didn’t know how to swim. One of the two, who had fashioned a crude flotation device, splashed madly amid the powerful current but eventually found his footing and staggered to shore. The second man clung to the canoe for very life. As it dipped and rolled in the water, he alternately disappeared and resurfaced, his shock of black hair reminding Manly of a crow perched on the end of a log. Manly and one of the other men chased him downstream in the big canoe, with Manly standing in the stern for a better view. Finally they caught the runaway craft and hauled it to shore. The man still clinging to it was nearly dead of exhaustion, inhaled water, and hypothermia. They dragged him to land, expelled as much of the water from his lungs as they could, built a fire to warm him, and massaged his limbs to revive the circulation.

Gathering the others, Manly assessed the situation. By dumb luck the men’s bedding and extra clothes had remained within the capsized canoe; it was wet but otherwise unharmed. Yet several guns had been lost. Though Manly directed a search of the river bottom, these were not recovered. The party’s total armament—for hunting and protection against Indians—was reduced to two weapons: Manly’s rifle and another man’s shotgun. After the capsizing and the close brush with death, this sobered the group still further.

The next day, nearly dried out, they set off once more. The river grew smoother, giving each man time to dwell on his predicament and doubtless to wonder what had possessed him to leave home in the first place. Their glum reveries were broken by the sound of a gunshot from downstream. The shot was repeated, then again. Manly and the others had never heard of any white settlements in this part of the country, and from the looks of the terrain, the land wouldn’t have supported any. Nor did they think any emigrants traveled this far south of the main roads west. That left Indians as the likely source of the gunfire. “If it were a hostile band,” Manly reasoned,
“we could not do much with a rifle and shotgun toward defending ourselves or taking the aggressive.” On the other hand, they could hardly turn around and go back up the river. “We concluded we had not come into this wild country to be afraid of a few gunshots, and determined to put on a bold front and take our chances on getting scalped or roasted.”

Around another bend they came into sight of three Indian lodges a little way back from the river. An Indian appeared with a rifle in his hands; he motioned for Manly and the others to come to shore. They did so, cautiously. When the man made no threatening gestures, Manly moved to within speaking distance.

They exchanged words. The only one the Indian spoke that was at all intelligible to Manly sounded like “Mormonee.” Manly gathered that this band was friendly with the Mormons. As other Indians then appeared carrying various manufactured goods, including firearms, Manly concluded that they traded with the Mormons. He quietly suggested to his own men that a conversion-of-convenience to the Mormon faith might be prudent. No one’s conscience protested, and so all seven put their right hands to their breasts and declared “Mormonee” with cheerful countenance. Their hosts seemed pleased.

By now the leader of the Indians appeared. Manly struck up a conversation with the chief, who indicated he was known to the whites as Walker. The conversation took place principally in signs, but enough was conveyed to convince Manly of Walker’s good faith and general knowledge. Manly asked Walker how far it was to “Mormonee,” meaning Salt Lake City. Walker responded with a galloping motion of the hands, and by laying his head sideways and closing his eyes three times. From this Manly inferred that the Mormon city was three sleeps, or four days, on horseback.

Manly asked a harder question: How far was it down the river to the big water of the West? As best he could, Manly explained that he and his party had come down the river through the canyons and hoped the worst was behind them.

Walker evinced astonishment at this. He shook his head vigorously, looking alternately down the river (which still trended south) and out to the west, and shaking his head the more. He led Manly to a sandbar by the
river, and with a crooked stick began drawing a map. First he sketched a long, crooked line, about ten feet in length. He pointed from the line to the river and back, letting Manly know that the line represented the river. Pointing upstream, he drew several of the tributaries Manly and the others had encountered. Making a hoop of a twig and rolling it along the ground, he indicated the emigrant trail by which Manly and the others had reached the Green River; he also indicated other trails, which Manly had seen on maps. All these were just where they were supposed to be, convincing Manly that the chief knew whereof he spoke.

Walker began stacking stones on either side of the river, making miniature canyons. He raised his hands to the sky and said, “E-e-e-e!,” to indicate the great height of the canyon walls. He left an open space, then built another canyon, and with similar gestures and sounds, indicated the second deep canyon Manly and the others had been through. The more Walker spoke, the more he impressed Manly with his apparently comprehensive knowledge of the region’s geography.

Manly urged him to describe the river below their present location. Walker obliged.

Manly required no further convincing that the river trip was over. Only later would he learn that Walker was describing the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River (into which the Green emptied). But he was willing to take the chief’s word—and gestures—that he and his companions would never reach California that way.

Two of the men, named Field and McMahon, were skeptical. They doubted whether Walker knew all he claimed to, or whether he was telling the truth. McMahon had seen a map of the country to the southwest, and he said it didn’t look any worse than what they had already survived.

Manly told the two they were free to do as they pleased. But he pointed out that Walker had spent his whole life in this region and knew it as well as an easterner knew his father’s farm. Neither was there any doubt regarding the translation. The sign language Walker used was quite similar to that of the Indians of Michigan and Wisconsin, with which Manly was thoroughly familiar. Manly said he trusted Walker, and said he preferred his chances with the Mormons to those in the canyon of death and among the murderous Indians.

McMahon and Field wouldn’t be persuaded. But the others stuck with Manly. He had thirty dollars in his pocket; from this he offered to buy horses from Walker. The chief refused the money, which would do him no good this far from the white man’s civilization; instead he offered two ponies in exchange for some clothing. One of the men let Walker have a coat, which he was pleased to put on despite the heat. The others supplied odds and ends of apparel.

Manly’s group divided the remaining flour and dried meat with McMahon and Field. Then, wishing those two the best of luck, Manly and the others set out across the desert in the direction of Salt Lake City.

In abandoning the Green River, Manly and his companions implicitly admitted what nearly every overlander concluded early or late: that in traveling to California, there was no avoiding the Great Basin. A giant bowl bounded on the east and south by the drainage systems of the Green and Colorado rivers, on the north by the Snake and Columbia, and on the west by the Sierra Nevada, the Great Basin was something few of the emigrants had even imagined before heading for California: a vast region where rivers don’t run to the sea. Between the Strait of Georgia in what would become British Columbia and the Gulf of California in Mexico, the Columbia is the only river to pierce the mountain wall of the Sierra-Cascade chain— which was a principal reason the early western emigration was to Oregon. The rivers of the Great Basin, such as they are, die in the desert: in the Great Salt Lake or other briny bodies, or simply in the sand.

The lack of drainage to the sea is the result of the interaction of geology and climate. The Columbia was able to breach the Cascades because those mountains rose relatively slowly, and the rain and snow that fed that river gave it sufficient erosive power to defeat the tectonic forces that were building the mountains. The river’s victory is carved in the walls of the present-day Columbia Gorge. The Sierras, however, are higher than the Cascades, and rose faster; and their rain shadow is longer. The ancient
rivers to their east lost the battle between erosion and uplift; defeated, they turn back on themselves and expire in the desert sun.