“Once the canyon walls closed around them, Powell and his men would be as bound by their decision as sky divers falling through the air. All they could do would be to struggle on, knowing that each mile would carry them deeper into the earth, farther into the unknown, and farther from the possibility of rescue by the outside world.”
This has been a banner year for John Wesley Powell, the explorer/ scientist/ author/ conservationist who died 99 years ago. Three books have been published about him — all excellent — that will hopefully go some way towards rescuing him from historical obscurity.
John Vernon’s novel The Last Canyon is a compelling account of Powell’s hair-raising exploration of the Grand Canyon, which he traversed by riding the incredibly treacherous waters of the Colorado River. Donald Worster’s scholarly A River Running West, the first biography in nearly a half century to examine this towering and complex figure, places Powell within his proper place in the story of American western expansion; he was, after all, one of the greatest, most intrepid 19th Century explorers, as well as one of the few men of political stature who worked toward regulating relations with Native Americans.
Edward Dolnick’s Down The Great Unknown is the nonfiction counterpoint of The Last Canyon, focusing almost exclusively on the insanely ambitious journey Powell took down the Colorado River in his obsessive quest to explore and map an area of the American Southwest never before penetrated by whites. If Hollywood ever adapts this story for the screen, it may replace Deliverance as the most harrowing whitewater adventure captured on film — and it doesn’t even need any backwoods psychotics. The Colorado River will suffice quite nicely, thank you.
It’s hard to believe that four years after the end of the Civil War (in which Powell had valiantly fought, losing an arm to a minie-ball at Shiloh) there was still a vast section of this country in which men could enter without so much as a clue as to when they would encounter signs of civilization again (or whether they would live to see that day). The stupendously deep interior of the Grand Canyon was essentially a “black hole” (“scarcely better known than Atlantis”) — unexplored, uncharted, and seriously feared. (Through an unfortunate, and poignant, piece of bad timing, this recently published book states that “you could stack one of the World Trade Center towers on top of the other, and they would reach only halfway to the rim”)
Powell was not, of course, the first human to have noticed the existence of a land mass approximately 2000 square miles in size. Early Spanish explorers had scratched around the Canyon’s rim, and 12 years before Powell’s epic journey, the Army Corps of Engineers had made a few half-hearted descents, only to come away with the dispiriting prognosis that “the region can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. It seems intended by nature that this profitless locality shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.”
To a tough customer like Powell (“small and scrawny even by the standards of the age, a stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers”), this was a rebuke to his good sense of Manifest Destiny.
“Is any other nation so ignorant of itself?” he rhetorically asked, intending to rectify the situation by mapping whichever serpentine course the river took him though the bottom of the canyon, all the while collecting rocks and fossils and future glory for himself.
Since Powell knew the Colorado River eventually flowed out of the Canyon into desert and Mormon settlements, he was essentially rolling the dice that he could get himself and his nine “recruits,” comprised of hardcore “mountain men” and weathered Civil War veterans, none of whom had whitewater experience, from Point A to Point C alive. Point B was a bitch.
Ninety-nine days, 1000 miles, and some 500 rapids later, six men from the original party of 10 — tattered, skeletal, starving — staggered out of the few remaining boats (boats, mind you, designed for placid lake and harbor rowing) that had not been swallowed whole by the raging waters. They had been through “the Valley of the Shadow of Death” (according to one devout member of the crew), the detailed account of which comprises, not surprisingly, the most compelling sections of the book.
Describing each foaming rapid, vertiginous waterfall, and life-sucking whirlpool with the authoritative, if not fetishistic, voice of one who has himself shot the Colorado rapids numerous times, Dolnick devotes entire chapters to such pleasure stops as Hell’s Half Mile, Disaster Falls, Desolation Canyon, Dirty Devil River, and Separation Rapid. Since Powell was presumably the first to encounter, and survive, each “obstacle course,” he had the added bonus of coming up with the appropriate, well-earned names.
By quoting often from the journals Powell and a few of his crew kept during the actual journey (how did they manage to keep the pages dry?), Dolnick hurls the reader directly into the maelstrom of the raging waters. But it is Dolnick’s own descriptions of the voyagers at war with the river that are especially vivid, if not downright amusing. At various junctures he compares them to “fleas clinging to a psychotic dog,” a “kitten smothered by a sumo wrestler,” and a “ladybug caught in a hose’s blast.”
It all makes for a white-knuckle history lesson, one that should appeal greatly to readers fascinated with courageous exploits from the annals of American exploration, as well as those who gravitate toward the Perfect Storm category of nonfiction, those somewhat masochistic “you are there” accounts of life-and-death struggles against Nature in all its hellish manifestations.
As far as this reviewer is concerned, once I finally get around to visiting the Grand Canyon, it will strictly be from the vantage point of looking down, not up.
This article appears in Dec 15-21, 2001.
