The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (10 page)

O
n August 27, exactly 239 miles into the canyon and two days into their last sack of flour, they reached one of the worst rapids they had yet seen—a double set of falls created by a pair of tributary canyons that entered the Colorado on opposite sides of the river, squeezing the current into a fifty-yard-wide maelstrom that Sumner described
as a “perfect hell of foam.” After hours of scouting, Powell declared that he could see no way through and concluded that their only option was to lower the boats through the upstream waterfall with ropes, then risk a run through the second falls—an announcement that was greeted with silence.

That night, while the rest of the crew pondered this plan, Oramel Howland approached the Major and asked him to walk up the side canyon so that they could speak in private. He explained that after discussing matters with his brother Seneca and Bill Dunn, the three men had concluded that it was madness to go on. Instead, Howland proposed that the entire expedition abandon the river, climb out the side canyon to the north, and attempt to reach the Mormon settlements that lay somewhere along the Virgin River. If Powell refused, then the Howland brothers and Dunn intended to leave and take their chances alone.

After Oramel had bedded down for the night, Powell spent the next several hours pacing back and forth along the riverbank. Then he began waking the other members of the crew to solicit their views. While none were pleased by their situation, they all said that they preferred to stay with the boats and the river. When morning arrived, everyone gathered together and begged the three deserters to reconsider. Dunn and Oramel Howland refused, and although Seneca was prepared to relent, he decided that his duty lay in sticking with his brother.

The parting was solemn. In the absence of a full crew to man each of the boats, one would have to be left behind. The contents of the
Emma Dean
were transferred to the Whitehalls, and the little pilot craft was tied to shore, where it would be abandoned along with the barometers, a portion of the ammunition, and virtually the entire collection of rocks and fossils that Powell had painstakingly
amassed over the past nine hundred miles. Dunn and the Howlands were presented with two rifles and a shotgun, plus a pan of biscuits that Hawkins had prepared. Powell handed Oramel Howland a letter addressed to his wife, and Sumner gave him a watch to mail to his sister. Then, with pained farewells, the two groups said good-bye.

With Dunn and the Howland brothers watching from the cliff, Bradley wrote, the
Maid of the Canyon
and the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister
“dashed out into the boiling tide with all the courage we could muster.” The boats scraped against several rocks, plunged over the ledge, and were nearly swamped by the crashing waves. But in no more than a few seconds, they were safely through and bobbing in the tail waves. Delighted by their success, the six men pulled to shore and fired their guns into the air to encourage their friends to clamber along the cliffs and rejoin them. They waited for two hours, to no avail.
“The last thing we saw of them,” Sumner later wrote, “they were standing on the reef, motioning us to go on, which we finally did.”

The river still wasn’t finished with them. Six miles downstream they confronted an even worse rapid. Somehow they made it through, with Bradley performing his most heroic feat yet when the tether on the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister
broke free and he fought her through by himself.

The following day was a Sunday, and Bradley, who had previously objected to Powell’s refusal to observe the Sabbath, noted that it was good they didn’t stop. “This is the first Sunday that I have felt justified running,” he wrote. “It has
now become a race for life.”

A few miles downstream, however, the river bent to the northwest and by nightfall the granite had receded into the earth for the last time. By noon of the following day, just over twenty-four hours after Dunn and the Howlands had parted company, they passed through the gates of the Grand Wash Cliffs and found themselves staring across the shallow hills studded with Joshua trees and creosote bushes where the canyon gives way to the Mojave Desert.

O
n August 30, three white men and an Indian were drawing in a fishing net along the north bank of the river where the Virgin flows into the Colorado, a spot just twenty miles upstream from where the little ironclad steamship commanded by Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives had collided against a rock sixteen years earlier during his aborted attempt to explore the river from the opposite direction. The whites, who were Mormons, were under special orders from Brigham Young in Salt Lake City to monitor the current for any wreckage that might drift downstream from the Powell expedition, which had been reported lost several weeks earlier.

Sometime around midafternoon, the fishermen spotted a pair of battered and badly leaking boats drifting in their direction, crewed by a company of half a dozen men. In the first of those boats, one of the crew members was standing up and staring at them through a spyglass while a second man seemed to be pulling a piece of cloth from a storage compartment and attaching it to the bow.

As the boats drew near, the fishermen on the riverbank were astonished by what they saw. All six boatmen were unshaven, sunburned, and hollow-eyed. Most of them had no hat, several were in their bare feet, and none possessed more than a few scraps of clothing that hung from their exposed skin in ragged strips. They were also terribly thin—their bodies so emaciated that it was clear they were teetering on the threshold of starvation. But perhaps the most noteworthy detail—which offered a testament not only to the adversities they had endured but also to the purpose behind those trials—was the piece of fabric dangling from the bowpost of the lead boat.

It was the Stars and Stripes.

When the fishermen asked the boatmen if they needed something to eat, they said yes. All they had left was a day-and-a-half supply of flour and eighty pounds of coffee beans.

T
wo days later, Powell bade farewell to his men, four of whom had elected to continue rowing downriver toward the Sea of Cortés, and turned north with his brother for Salt Lake City. As they made their way up the edge of the Great Basin, they received word that Dunn and the Howland brothers were dead, apparently murdered by a party of Shivwits Indians after the three deserters had raped a squaw who had been gathering seeds—a tale that seemed preposterous, to say the least. Many years later, evidence would emerge to support a more plausible theory that the men had been taken into custody by Mormon fanatics and executed as federal agents. Neither tale would ever be proved.

Despite this tragedy, the reception back East was jubilant. As Powell went off on the lecture circuit, trumpeting his accomplishments from one city to the next, he became a national hero, acclaim that he was able to parlay into a $12,000 appropriation from Congress so he could set out and do the whole trip all over again—which he did in May of 1871, producing the maps and the topographic data that had not been possible on the first venture. Several years after that, he conflated the events that had taken place on both expeditions into his official report, entitled
Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries.
Despite some rather wild inaccuracies that would later sow confusion and provoke fierce arguments among historians, Powell’s account stands as an expressive work of classic adventure-travel literature.

To this day, Powell’s trips are celebrated by many as one of the greatest achievements in the history of American exploration, even as Powell is denounced by others for his distortions and exaggerations. But no one can dispute the essence of what was achieved. On May 24, 1869, ten men and four wooden boats plunged down an unknown river through the heart of the last blank spot on the map of the United States. Ninety-nine days later, and just shy of a thousand miles downriver, six men and two boats emerged. They had run through 414 rapids and portaged or lined another 63. In the process, they enabled America to take full possession of this last, hidden landscape feature, while simultaneously laying the foundation by which that same landscape would eventually turn the tables and take possession of Americans who would fall under its spell.

But all of that lay, as it were, far downstream. For the moment, it is enough to acknowledge that although Don García López de Cárdenas may have been the first European to lay eyes on the Grand Canyon from above, he had failed to take the measure of its depth and power. In part, that was because the mind of a sixteenth-century conquistador was incapable of calibrating its wonders, but mainly it was because Cárdenas had never touched the thing that had created the canyon and imbued it with its vitality. That task had been left to Powell, and his odyssey, not that of Cárdenas, would come to define the place.

The Major went on to do great things. His river explorations eventually springboarded him into a distinguished career in government that included heading up the US Geological Survey, which was charged with mapping and surveying the West, while simultaneously leading the Bureau of Ethnology, which he founded. When he died in 1902, at the age of sixty-eight in his summer home in Maine,
his obituary in the
Washington Post
ranked him with Columbus, Magellan, and Lewis and Clark.

Powell’s presence is woven into the fabric of the canyon and haunts the river in ways that are impossible to ignore even today. His exploits are recounted and debated around each campfire, and a copy of his journal rides on almost every trip. On the maps that are used by the boatmen and guides, more than a hundred buttes, rapids, and plateaus bear the names that he and his men assigned to these features. He cut the line. He set the narrative. Everything that would subsequently unfold on the river—including the
Emerald Mile
’s deranged quest in June of 1983—would flow from the themes that were inscribed by the one-armed major and his fleet of little wooden boats in the summer of 1869.

I have climbed the Great Wall of China and crawled through the Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt. But these are dead monuments. Dams have to be the greatest structures made by man. They are not only gigantic, they also pulse with life.

—H
ENRY
F
ALVEY
, US Bureau of Reclamation

Hoover Dam, the colossus that tamed the Colorado.

The more a man can achieve, the more he may be certain that the devil will inhabit a part of his creation.

—N
ORMAN
M
AILER

P
OWELL’S
first trip down the river had an important postscript, a half-forgotten coda representing the last leg of the odyssey whose details were largely ignored amid the publicity and accolades. Within a few days of the Powell brothers’ departure for the East, George Bradley and Billy Hawkins anchored the
Maid of the Canyon
and left the river to strike out overland for California. But Andy Hall, the sweet-tempered Scottish bull whacker, and Jack Sumner, the combative frontiersman with the long black hair, kept on going in the
Kitty Clyde’s Sister.
The Colorado wasn’t yet finished, and neither were they.