The Powell Expedition

New Discoveries about John Wesley Powell's 1869 River Journey

Don Lago

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780874175998
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

" The Powell Expedition is a thought-provoking, nuanced work that reads at times like a detective story, and it should offer much fodder for historians."
— The Wall Street Journal John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon continues to be one of the most celebrated adventures in American history, ranking with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Apollo landings on the moon. For nearly twenty years Lago has researched the Powell expedition from new angles, traveled to thirteen states, and looked into archives and other sources no one else has searched. He has come up with many important new documents that change and expand our basic understanding of the expedition by looking into Powell's crewmembers, some of whom have been almost entirely ignored by Powell historians. Historians tended to assume that Powell was the whole story and that his crewmembers were irrelevant. More seriously, because several crew members made critical comments about Powell and his leadership, historians who admired Powell were eager to ignore and discredit them.Lago offers a feast of new and important material about the river trip, and it will significantly rewrite the story of Powell's famous expedition. This book is not only a major work on the Powell expedition, but on the history of American exploration of the West.

PART I

The James White Mystery

1

Introduction to the James White Mystery

AMONG THE MANY VAGUE, confusing, and disputed claims about the James White story, there’s one thing about which everyone agrees: on September 7, 1867, a crude raft floated down the Colorado River, dozens of miles downstream from the Grand Canyon, toward the small Mormon town of Callville. The raft held a man in terrible condition: starved, nearly naked, sunburned, bruised, semiconscious, confused. The people of Callville pulled him ashore and nursed him back toward health. They were eager to hear his story, and not just from simple curiosity. Callville had been founded, less than three years previously, to serve as a port that connected the Mormons in Utah with the outside world via the Colorado River and the Gulf of California. But the Colorado River had proven tricky for steamboats, often allowing only small barges to get through to Callville. The roads linking Callville with the rest of Utah were terrible, and the transcontinental railroad was fast approaching northern Utah, so Callville was already failing economically and being abandoned. But Callville would benefit if the Colorado River upstream proved to be more navigable. Five months before White arrived, Mormon explorer Jacob Hamblin and two other men had dragged a sixteen-foot skiff overland to the base of the Grand Wash Cliffs, where the Colorado River emerged from the Grand Canyon, and floated down the river sixty-five miles to Callville. Most of the rapids they encountered were manageable, but one had a six- or eight-foot fall and required them to portage; they judged this rapid to be the limit of navigation upstream from Callville, at least for commercial vessels. But this could be argued, since the river fluctuated greatly in volume and might fluctuate in navigability also. Like Coloradans and Californians, the Mormons, too, had been tempted by the idea that the Colorado River might be navigable much farther upstream. Maybe this stranger on his raft had come downriver a long way, even through the “Big Canyon.”

James White told his hosts that he had been on his raft for fourteen days. His ordeal had started far upstream, along the San Juan River, where he and two other men were prospecting. Their leader was a Captain Baker, originally from St. Louis, and the other man’s name was Strode—or at least that’s how it was first recorded; later it was Strole. Ute Indians attacked them and killed Baker, and White and Strole fled down a canyon to the Colorado River, where they built a raft out of cottonwood logs and headed downriver. After three days, a rapid washed Strole overboard and he drowned. White continued alone, with little to eat, roping himself to the raft to survive the rapids.

White’s story spread quickly downriver, first to the town of El Dorado Canyon, which had been a booming silver mining town but now was temporarily shut down, with only three residents for most of 1867. E. B. Grandin was the caretaker of a closed mill and heard about White when Captain L. C. Wilburn, taking his barge downriver from Callville, stopped there. Grandin wrote a letter about it to El Dorado postmaster Frank Alling, who presumably was not then in town; Alling occasionally visited San Francisco and served as a correspondent for San Francisco’s newspaper Alta California, and there Grandin’s letter got published on September 24. A few weeks later, on November 12, Grandin’s letter was reprinted in the Daily Register of Central City, Colorado, only twelve days after John Wesley Powell had left that city.

Central City was the center of mining activity in Colorado, its Gilpin County producing two thirds of the state’s mineral wealth. Thus local leaders were keenly interested in geology, and they had established a Miners and Mechanics Institute that seemed to pull in every prominent scientist passing through Colorado to give public lectures on things geological and geographical. John Wesley Powell was wrapping up his first summer of exploring the natural history of the Rockies, and he came to town on October 31. The Institute advertised Powell too generously as the “state geologist of Illinois” and charged people fifty cents to hear him lecture on how Colorado’s landscapes evolved. The next day, November 1, 1867, the Daily Register gave a long glowing account of Powell’s talk. “Our report,” the article concluded, “does no sort of justice to the beauty of the lecture or the pleasing style of its delivery.”

If the newspaper editor had already seen the Alta California with Grandin’s letter about James White, it would have made a natural topic of conversation with Powell, who was so obviously interested in western geography and rivers. If Powell didn’t hear about White right then, it might soon have been called to his attention by the men with whom he had roamed the mountains that summer, such as Oramel Howland, who had worked as a printer for the Central City newspaper, or Jack Sumner, who years later said that he and Powell had earlier in 1867 discussed going down the Colorado River. Or maybe Powell heard about it through William Byers, Sumner’s brother-in-law, the Denver newspaper publisher who was still hoping the Colorado River was navigable all the way to Colorado. However he heard, it’s likely Powell quickly became aware of the James White story. Whether he believed it or not, whether it encouraged his own plans or not, has never been clear. George Bradley, one of Powell’s 1869 crew, was under the impression that Powell had met White, which would have been logical since Powell was investigating sources—very skimpy sources—of information about the river. Yet Powell and his other crewmembers never said that Powell had met White, and White himself said they never met.

But Powell’s crew was aware of White’s story, and they seemed to be testing it against reality as they descended the river. Reality had gotten really tough by August 13, when they camped atop Hance Rapid, one of the rockiest and trickiest in the Grand Canyon. It appears that the crew held a discussion of White’s story that evening, for two of them commented on it in their river journals. George Bradley: “I am convinced that no man had ever run such rappids on a raft. . . . I pay little heed to the whole story.”¹ And Jack Sumner: “How anyone can ride that on a raft is more than I can see. Mr. White may have done so but I don’t believe it.”²

Twenty years later, Robert Stanton led the next expedition down the river (after Powell’s two,) and within twenty-five miles of leaving Lees Ferry and entering the Grand Canyon Stanton had suffered two accidents that drowned three men. Stanton, too, decided that White couldn’t possibly have done it, and he became one of the fiercest critics of White’s story. Over the next half century there were few river runners in the canyon, and fewer still got through without mishaps, so not many experts were willing to endorse White’s story. River running has grown into a mass activity, and today most river runners have judged White’s feat as highly improbable. Boat designs have improved a great deal, and experience and skill levels have risen with them, yet river runners still have to summon all their abilities to get through the toughest rapids, and even professional guides sometimes get into trouble. A clueless guy on a crude raft would have far too many obstacles and far too little power and control to get through intact. Even most advocates of White’s story admit he made it against heavy odds.

On the other hand, as river experience has accumulated, so have stories of the improbable. Beginners have made it through Lava Falls while the best guides have flipped. Rafts have gotten untied and drifted unmanned through many miles and many rapids, with loose items riding merrily on the deck all the way. People have deliberately swum the whole canyon, and lived. This accumulation of freak events has left a more relaxed attitude about White’s story: even most skeptics admit it is possible.

This debate has taken place more on theoretical grounds than on the specific facts of White’s story, and the debate drifted even farther from the facts when it moved onto ego grounds. Most of this debate has been conducted by river runners, some of whom became important river historians; river runners, even as they are awed and humbled by great rivers and canyons, also tend to be proud of themselves. Pride is not the best ink for writing history. Some river runners have felt diminished by the James White story: If White could make it through the canyon without any skill, then it must not take any skill to make it through the canyon. If White could make it while Robert Stanton’s expedition killed three people, then Stanton must have been criminally incompetent. Stanton’s effort to diminish White did not have the style of a disinterested historian. Yet those on the other side of the debate, too, have been guilty of pride—family pride in the case of White’s granddaughter, Eilean Adams, and Colorado pride in the case of Thomas Dawson, a Colorado historian who claimed priority for the Coloradan White. Some of the debate has consisted of accusing the other side of having ulterior motives—which was often true. Perhaps, unfortunately, I am going to contribute more to this tendency by examining further the motives of two of the debaters. Yet James White himself can’t be accused of pride or self-promotion, for he remained pretty quiet about the whole thing.

It also seems that some people take sides in the debate simply because they like the idea of James White or the idea of John Wesley Powell, the idea of a common-man frontier hero, a Davy Crockett, blundering his way down the river, or the idea of a heroic scientific explorer and skillful boatman.

With all these factors steering the James White debate, it would have been helpful if the evidence had exerted more gravity, but unfortunately the evidence has been vague and confusing. Even worse, when the facts have gotten in the way, both sides have been ready to argue that, obviously, James White was delirious so he can’t be held literally to what he was saying.

One of the movable “facts” about James White was his statement that he was on the river for fourteen days, and only by day, tying up his raft at night. He went from somewhere far above the Grand Canyon to sixty miles below it. Today’s rowing trips take about fourteen days to go less than half White’s distance. Eilean Adams tried to escape this problem by adding more days to the trip. Skeptics have declared that the fourteen-day timeline disproves the whole story, or they’ve proposed other entry points that fit. Robert Stanton reduced it to sixty miles, with a starting point below the Grand Wash Cliffs, but then he had the opposite problem of explaining how White could take two weeks to go only sixty miles, or just four miles per day. Yet this argument has taken place in a factual void, without anyone knowing how high the river was in September 1867. Now we have a previously unknown source: on July 10, 1867, a San Francisco newspaper quoted William Hardy, the founder of Hardyville, a river crossing below Callville, saying that the Colorado River was flowing as high as American settlers had ever seen it, with very full banks, covered with driftwood and still rising. Two other sources point to the same conclusion: tree ring data from Navajo Mountain, near Glen Canyon, suggest that 1867 was an unusually wet year, and 1867 was one of the few years when the Colorado flooded high enough to overflow into the Salton Sea.

Before it was dammed, the Colorado River used to peak in late spring or early summer, then drop significantly. By September it was a much milder river, although still subject to brief spikes from annual monsoon thunderstorms. Yet the abnormally high flows of the summer of 1867, which probably translated into higher September flows, make it much more plausible that White could have covered the distance he claimed. It could also lend more plausibility to White’s claim that at the mouth of the Little Colorado River he was caught in a powerful whirlpool. Today’s river runners don’t see any whirlpools there. Skeptics have ridiculed White over his imaginary whirlpool, while supporters have said that he must have gotten the location wrong. But when the river is flooding, all sorts of whirlpools and other hydraulic phenomena break out, often in unlikely places. And a high river would have covered many boulders and smoothed out many rapids. On the other hand, a high river full of powerful currents, eddies, and whirlpools would have made a raft without oars even more helpless, and far more likely to get trapped.

The Little Colorado whirlpool is only one of the vague, moveable “facts” that have muddied the James White debate. White said that the Little Colorado flowed into the main river from the right, when it really comes in from the left. On the other hand, he described a waterfall that is a good fit for Deer Creek Falls. But White’s accounts held outright contradictions. The Grandin letter offered a statement that sounds pretty accurate: “He describes the Big Cañon of the Colorado as terrific, a succession of rapids and falls. Some of the falls, he thinks, are fully ten feet perpendicular. His raft would plunge over such places, rolling over and over. . . . He says there are rocky cliffs overhanging the river that he believes to be a mile and a half high.”³ Yet in interviews with Charles Parry, Robert Stanton, and Ellsworth Kolb, White significantly reduced the height of the canyon walls and the presence and difficulty of the rapids, and said that most of the canyon consisted of a white sandstone. Some of White’s descriptions don’t fit the real canyon and river very well. Ellsworth Kolb commented, “I would like to know the truth about White. I talked with him a few years before he died, but he was so childish it was impossible to make head or tail of his story. He told me he. . .did not think it was so very bad except for a couple of falls.”⁴ And according to Stanton (although his statement has been disputed), White said, “In all the journey there was only one big rapid, the one with the twenty-foot fall. All the other rapids were small ones.”⁵

Speaking of ulterior motives, Grandin and the other residents of the dying towns of Callville and El Dorado Canyon should have been economically motivated to claim that White had an easy voyage, proving that the Colorado was navigable far upstream, and in fact Frank Alling, who placed Grandin’s letter in the San Francisco newspaper, had often written booster letters to the paper urging its readers to invest in El Dorado Canyon. But clearly Grandin has not fallen to this temptation, and his report shuts down hope for the river’s commercial value.

Since White’s adventure took place in the most solitary of places, with no witnesses, it has seemed we would never be able to get beyond the vagueness of his account and make reliable comparisons with reality. And yet, all along there was one eyewitness to White’s adventure, at least the beginning of it, and that eyewitness casts White’s credibility and story in a considerably different light.

NOTES

1. Bradley quoted in Ghiglieri, First Through Grand Canyon, 205.

2. Jack Sumner, quoted in ibid., 206.

3. E. B. Grandin, Alta California, Sept. 24, 1867.

4. Ellsworth Kolb to Lewis Freeman, December 27, 1922, in Robert Brewster Stanton, Colorado River Controversies (1932; repr. Boulder City, NV: Westwater Books, 1982), 243. Page references to 1982 ed.

5. Quoted in Stanton, Controversies, 51.

2

WANTED—James White

THE JAMES WHITE DEBATE has involved rivers of speculation in a canyon-like void of facts, since White’s adventure took place without any witnesses, except for its ending at Callville. Yet there was one part of White’s story that was indeed witnessed. White’s story began when he and some companions stole some horses from Indians near Fort Dodge, an army post in southwestern Kansas, and headed for the Rockies. Like most army posts, Fort Dodge kept extensive records of area events, but no historian has thought to check them. It turns out that White’s departure from Fort Dodge was especially well documented. It turns out that the real events were substantially different from White’s story, and far more serious. The events near Fort Dodge cast a long shadow on White’s credibility and on the rest of his story.

Fort Dodge was founded in 1865 to protect migrants, stagecoaches, and commercial and military freight wagons on the Santa Fe Trail, as well as local settlers. The fort was located on the Arkansas River, which the trail followed through Kansas as long as possible; twenty-five miles west of Fort Dodge the trail crossed the river at a ford called Cimarron Crossing, then headed across sixty miles of dry land to where it picked up the Cimarron River. The Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway would not arrive for another six years, when it would spawn Dodge City a few miles from Fort Dodge.

In 1867 the commander of Fort Dodge was Major Henry Douglas (in some sources, his name is spelled Douglass). Though the fort was meant to subdue the region’s Indians, Douglas was unusually sympathetic to Indians, at least for his time, and at least for an army post commander. Two years later—to flash forward for a moment—Douglas became superintendent of Indian Affairs for Nevada. In that role he cracked down on corruption and abuse at the Pyramid Lake Reservation, where the Indian agents had opened the Paiute’s reservation to American cattle grazing in exchange for $15,000 in payoffs, and allowed so many white fishermen to string nets across the Truckee River that the Indians were forced to fish from boats in the lake. Some whites were calling for the reservation to be abolished and opened to settlement. Seeking the Paiute point of view, Douglas wrote to the commander of the nearby army post, and the commander had his young Paiute interpreter, Sarah Winnemucca, write a response. Douglas was so impressed by her letter, both its despair and its pride, that he sent it to the commissioner of Indian Affairs. The letter began circulating in Washington and got published in Harper’s Weekly magazine, making a big impression nationally—few Americans had ever read a piece by an articulate Indian protesting against American mistreatment. A decade later Helen Hunt Jackson reprinted Winnemucca’...