The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (6 page)

Had Cárdenas and his men succeeded in completing this odyssey, they would have found themselves suspended so far down inside the pelagic nocturnes of deep time that their connection to everything that was familiar and comforting would have dropped away like a severed umbilical cord. This domain was older and deeper, by far, than anything they could even pretend to imagine—a dimension of time and space where God himself seemed to be a deluded and laughable idea and, in the same instant, closer and more ingrained than the teeth inside one’s own head.

E
lecting to forgo the descent, Cárdenas and his men continued their sojourn along the South Rim, slowly making their way west. During the better part of the following week, they were afforded ample time to absorb the scene before them in all of its glory. There was color everywhere, and as each day unfolded, the leaning light of late autumn would have put the countenance of the canyon through a range of complex and alluring changes.

The show began early each morning, as the company prepared to resume its journey. Just before dawn, the plateaus stretching beyond the rims took on a pale pink luster, while the upper band of cliffs appeared to be floating on a lake of darkness that slowly compressed as the light poured over the edges and squeezed night out of the abyss. Later in the afternoon, as the light turned flat, the chasm was engorged with a harsh glare that strained eyes and made temples throb. Then, at sunset, the upper strata were once again hammered into a molten gold that gradually cooled to lavender during the twilit minutes before the long shadows returned, the completion of a magnificent burning that spanned the entire visual spectrum, all the named and unnamed hues of candescence.

If they were moved by such wonders, their response was never recorded, and in any case, aesthetics were irrelevant to the object of their quest. For Cárdenas was chasing after a harder grade of wealth, and the canyon seemed to contain none of it. There were no precious metals or gems to plunder in the name of his king, no farmlands or estates to seize, no inhabitants to enslave and convert.
The impossibly distant river offered no great artery of transportation, and if the Hopi were to be believed, the only mineral worth excavating was salt. As for the gilded cities of Cíbola, they were nowhere to be seen.

And so, at the end of the week, Cárdenas did the only thing that made sense from his perspective. He pointed his squadron in the direction from which they had come and led them back toward the main body of the expedition—which went on to spend the next two years in a search that took them across the Texas Panhandle, through Oklahoma, and deep into the plains of central Kansas. It was the longest and most arduous march conducted by any group of conquistadores in the sixteenth century, and when they finally returned to Mexico in disgrace in the spring of 1542, they brought back, in the pages of their letters and reports, accounts of many singular encounters, including the first prairie dogs, the first jackrabbits,
the first meetings with the tribes of the Great Plains, and the first buffalo. But they had failed to find anything that they deemed to be of value.

“The villages of that province remained peaceful,” the expedition’s chronicler wrote of the country surrounding the great canyon, “since they were never visited again, nor any attempt made to find other peoples in that direction.” It was as if the defining element of the entire continent—the greatest testament on earth to the passage of time and to the power of water—had been rendered invisible.

More than three hundred years would pass before the most important of Coronado’s successors returned, less than an eyeblink when measured by the scale of Grand Canyon time. But even so, the arrival of those first Spaniards marked a fundamental turning point, a rotation of the great wheel. Because it was the children of Cárdenas, not the Native Americans, who would eventually come back to codify the canyon’s boundaries and catalog its wonders, to map out its grid lines with transits and a surveyor’s chain, and to lay down the foundations that would eventually enable them to harness the power of the river itself.

I.
This is not a revolutionary idea to us, but it would have been to Cárdenas and his men. Another 129 years would pass before Nicholas Steno, the son of a Copenhagen goldsmith, framed this notion in the Principle of Superposition, one of the defining concepts of the emerging science of geology.

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . . .
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.

—T. S. E
LIOT

J
UST
before two o’clock on a blustery Monday afternoon in May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train was clattering past a strip of ragged, tent-roofed shacks that clung like a piece of gristle to the pale gray badlands of southwestern Wyoming. Directly ahead, a trestle spanned a broad, shallow river whose olive-colored current was restless and kinetic, alive with the sluicing runoff of late spring. As the locomotive approached the lip of the bridge, the engineer throttled his speed back to five miles an hour, a shift that would have been manifest inside the
walnut-paneled Pullman Palace saloon carriage, several cars behind the tender, by a faint tinkling of the chandelier and a subtle jolt to the small organ resting atop the richly brocaded Brussels carpeting. If, at this moment, any of the first-class passengers on the left side of the saloon car had been curious enough to push aside the heavily looped curtains framing the windows, they might have found themselves staring down on a diminutive navy of rowboats preparing to cast off on one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American exploration.

Those boats were manned by a squadron of bleary-eyed, rumple-haired men who had spent much of the previous forty-eight hours
attempting to drain the entire liquor supply of Green River Station, a town whose population of several dozen roustabouts and blackleg gamblers had gathered along the shore to spit tobacco juice and call out farewells. The boatmen were not in the best of shape. Their faces were unshaven, their clothes were disheveled, and they subjected the spectators to
“much blowing off of gas and the fumes of bad whiskey.” But despite these handicaps, they had somehow managed to complete the final steps in loading up their impressive array of gear and provisions.

Inside the watertight compartments of the boats were enough bacon, flour, dried apples, sugar, and coffee beans to sustain a party of ten men for almost an entire year. An ample cache of ammunition accompanied a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns, plus the set of steel traps that they hoped would enable them to supplement their larder with fresh venison and beavertail soup. There was also a kit for surveying and mapmaking, including sextants, compasses, and four barometers—each featuring a thin tube of glass filled with a column of mercury and carefully packed in a protective layer of fresh straw. These would be used for determining their altitude as the river carried them on the better portion of its long journey from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortés.

By the time the train was rattling past on the trestle overhead, the stowing of this entire duffel—all seven thousand pounds of it—was finally complete, much to the satisfaction of a figure whose appearance gave little indication that he was destined for both greatness and notoriety. At thirty-five years old, Major John Wesley Powell stood barely five and a half feet tall, weighed less than 125 pounds, and scowled sternly at the world from behind the hedgerow of a beard that appeared to have been assembled from a box of steel wool—traits that made him look, in the words of one of his less deferential biographers, like
“a stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers.” His most notable feature, however, was that his right forearm, from the elbow down, was missing—a critical impediment, one might assume, for a man who was proposing to lead a flotilla of oar boats down one of the world’s most dangerous and least understood rivers.

In truth, the missing forearm was merely one item in a long list of liabilities and shortcomings, none of which seemed to have had any effect whatsoever on the Major’s confidence. Unperturbed by the perils he was courting by launching downstream in the company of a ragged band of inebriates aboard an unwieldy set of heavily laden boats, he issued the order to embark, and off they went.

As the boatmen put their backs into the oars and sent the bows of their boats shouldering into the current, it is impossible to know whether Powell or any member of his crew glanced up at the trestle and pondered how the l
abored chug of a steam engine passing over this highway of water represented the intersection of two epic subnarratives within the larger story of America, one of those semaphores in history that signaled the passing of one age and the arrival of another.

Just two weeks earlier, and less than two hundred miles to the west, at a place called Promontory Summit, a California-based politician and industrialist named Leland Stanford had picked up a maul and hammered home a golden spike that completed the final link in the nation’s transcontinental railroad. Within a few years, coal-burning locomotives would be hurtling passengers and freight between the east coast and San Francisco—a journey that once took as long as six months in a Conestoga—in as little as eighty-three hours, consigning the wagon trails to obsolescence while flinging open the door to cross-continental commerce and trade on a scale that had never before been seen.

The telegraph was already in operation, and the telephone was just around the corner, to be followed swiftly by the electronic stock ticker and the incandescent lightbulb. These and a thousand other changes were transforming the country from a pastoral agrarian republic into an industrialized powerhouse that would soon lead the world in mechanized production, agricultural output, capital formation, and real income. In just a dozen years, the frontier would be declared officially closed by the US Census Bureau and the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would compose a landmark essay on the significance of its passing. New York City was already planning its first subway lines. San Francisco, until just a few years earlier little more than a vast collection of tents
sheltering mud-spattered miners and squatters,
now boasted ostentatious Victorian mansions, one of the busiest ports in the world, and a population that was climbing toward 150,000. And like those burgeoning cities, the nation itself was feverish with expansion. In five months, Congress would take formal possession of Alaska, which had been purchased two years earlier from Russia, and augment the nation’s territory by more than 20 percent. Before the turn of the century, Hawaii would be annexed, Puerto Rico invaded, and the Midway Islands declared a US possession.

And yet, despite the unstoppable growth, the ballooning wealth, the breathtaking speed with which the United States was expanding and ripening, parts of the country were ferociously resisting the pull of the modern age. All along the northern and southern Plains, the fiercest and most defiant Indian tribes were battling against the advancing waves of Anglo-European settlement using Stone Age technology, and in some cases they were actually winning. In seven years, the Lakota and the Northern Cheyenne would inflict a brutal defeat on George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry along the Little Bighorn River in eastern
Montana. A thousand miles to the south, the Comanche—a tribe that had risen to prominence for their unrivaled mastery of horses
descended in part from the herd that was brought north during the Coronado expedition—had not only succeeded in stopping cold the advancement of white civilization on the prairies of central Texas, but had in some places actually managed to drive it
back
, forcing the line of settlement
to retreat more than a hundred miles to the east. It was almost as if America was a kind of double nation composed of two parts: one surging forward relentlessly, even heedlessly, toward the rapidly looming approach of the twentieth century; the other digging in its heels and doing its utmost to remain anchored to the past. And nothing symbolized that resistance more eloquently than that an entire quadrant of the country’s backyard, a region bigger than all of Germany and roughly the size of France, remained as remote and obscure to its own citizens and government as the South Pole or the dark side of the moon.