Powell’s Colorado River Expedition — 1869, Through the Great Unknown

Summary

In the spring of 1869, a one-armed Civil War major named John Wesley Powell launched ten men in four wooden boats onto the Green River in Wyoming Territory, bound for the last great blank space on the map of the United States. Below the confluence of the Green and the Colorado lay a thousand miles of unrun river and, at the bottom, the deepest canyon on the continent — what Powell himself would call the "Great Unknown." No one knew whether the river was passable at all, or whether it dropped somewhere into unrunnable falls that would kill them.

Over roughly three months the expedition was ground down by the river. They lost a boat — the No Name — and a third of their provisions in a violent rapid on the Green, and the food that survived rotted and spoiled until the men were near starvation on rancid flour and dried apples. One man quit early and walked out. Then, deep in the Grand Canyon and only days from the end, with rations almost gone and one last fearsome rapid ahead, the party fractured. Three men — the brothers Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn — decided they would sooner climb out of the canyon on foot than run the next rapid. They left at a spot Powell named Separation Canyon.

The six who stayed ran the rapid, and within two days reached the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers were watching the water for their bodies. They had survived. The three who climbed out did not. They were killed on the high plateau north of the canyon, in country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute. By one widely repeated account they were killed by Shivwits Paiutes who mistook them for other men; that attribution has been disputed for over a century, with some historians arguing they may instead have been killed by Mormon settlers. Their true fate remains genuinely uncertain.

The river ran through the homelands of many nations — the Ute of the upper Green, the Hopi, the Diné (Navajo), the Hualapai, the Havasupai, and the Southern Paiute of the canyon country — peoples who had lived along and within these canyons long before Powell declared them "unknown." His expedition mapped the river and made him a national figure, but the phrase "Great Unknown" was always only true from the deck of a white explorer's boat.

Timeline

The Setup

John Wesley Powell was an unlikely man to lead an expedition down the most dangerous river in North America. A self-taught naturalist and geologist, he had lost most of his right arm to a Confederate minié ball at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862, and the nerve damage left the stump perpetually painful. But he was relentless, scientifically serious, and possessed of a conviction that the Colorado River could be run and surveyed. With modest backing from museums, railroads, and a small federal appropriation of rations, he assembled a crew of ten — including his brother Walter, a traumatized Civil War veteran; the mountain men and Civil War scouts Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and William Dunn; the Englishman and adventurer Frank Goodman; and frontiersmen like Jack Sumner, Billy Hawkins, Andy Hall, and George Bradley.

The boats were the wrong tool for the job, though no one yet knew what the right tool would be. Three were heavy oak Whitehall-style craft — the Kitty Clyde's Sister, the Maid of the Canyon, and the doomed No Name — built for hauling and durability rather than the agility a rapid demands. Powell's own lead boat was a lighter pilot craft, the Emma Dean, named for his wife. They were decked with watertight compartments fore and aft, an innovation that would save lives, but they were ponderous, hard to maneuver, and heavily loaded with ten months of provisions.

On May 24, 1869, the party shoved off from the town of Green River, Wyoming Territory, and dropped into the canyons of the Green. The early going gave fair warning of what was coming. In Lodore Canyon, on the upper Green, they hit the rapids in earnest, and the expedition would soon learn that the river was not a route so much as an adversary.

The Disaster

The first catastrophe came on June 9, 1869, at a rapid in Lodore Canyon. The No Name, crewed by the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman, missed the signal to pull ashore, was swept into the rapid, and smashed apart on the rocks. The three men survived, dragged from the water, but the boat was destroyed and with it went a third of the expedition's provisions, much of its spare clothing, and irreplaceable instruments. Powell named the place Disaster Falls. The loss set the clock on the whole journey: from that day, the expedition was racing its own dwindling food supply down a river of unknown length.

The food that remained steadily turned against them. Flour soured and had to be sieved through mosquito netting; bacon went rancid; the dried apples and coffee dwindled. The men grew gaunt and quarrelsome on short, spoiled rations. At the mouth of the Uinta River, in early July, Frank Goodman — who had nearly drowned at Disaster Falls — had had enough, and left the expedition to make his way to a settlement. He simply walked away from the river, the first man to quit, and survived by doing so. Nine men in three boats went on.

Below the confluence with the Grand (now the upper Colorado), the river entered Cataract Canyon and then bore down toward the deepest gorge of all. By the time they reached the Grand Canyon in August, the expedition was strung between two terrors: the rapids ahead, growing more violent as the canyon deepened, and starvation behind, as the rations approached nothing. They lined boats around the worst falls with ropes, portaged baggage over boulders, and ran what they could not avoid. Powell, with one arm, could not pull an oar or always cling to a rock; more than once he was left dangling on a cliff face until a comrade extended a pair of long underwear for him to grab. The walls rose a mile above them, black and sheer, and the men began to wonder aloud whether the river ended in a waterfall no boat could survive.

The Ordeal

By late August 1869 the expedition was near the end of both the canyon and its endurance. The men were starving — down to a little spoiled flour, dried apples, and coffee — and the river kept throwing up rapids that looked, from above, like death. On August 27 they came to a rapid so violent that the survivors remembered it as the worst they had seen, a churning drop walled in by cliffs that offered no way to portage. That night the camp argued. Oramel Howland told Powell he believed running the rapid was suicide, and that the only sane course was to climb out of the canyon and strike north overland for the Mormon settlements.

The next morning, August 28, 1869, the party split. Oramel Howland, his brother Seneca Howland, and William Dunn climbed out of the canyon at the place Powell would name Separation Canyon, choosing the long walk across the desert plateau over the rapid below. Powell offered them a share of the meager rations and his sympathy; the partings were said to be subdued, both sides certain the other was making a fatal mistake. The six who remained — the two Powell brothers, Sumner, Hawkins, Hall, and Bradley — climbed into the two remaining boats and ran the rapid. It proved far less deadly than it had looked from above. Within a day or two more, on August 30, 1869, they emerged from the Grand Canyon at the mouth of the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers — alerted to watch for wreckage and bodies — instead found them alive. The Great Unknown was run.

The three who had climbed out were never seen alive again. They made it up onto the high plateau north of the canyon, country that is the homeland of the Southern Paiute, and there they were killed. The most repeated account, which reached Powell secondhand the following year, held that Shivwits Paiutes killed the three men, having mistaken them for miners who had assaulted a Paiute woman elsewhere. But that account is disputed and has been ever since: some historians argue the evidence points instead to Mormon settlers who killed the strangers and let the blame fall on the Paiutes. There is no surviving testimony from the three men, no recovered remains conclusively identified, and no settled verdict. Their deaths are real; the hands that dealt them remain, honestly, unknown.

Rescue & After

For the six who came out at the Virgin River, the reward was fame. Powell's run of the Colorado made him a national celebrity and the foremost authority on the canyon country. He returned in 1871–72 for a second, better-equipped expedition that produced the detailed maps and science the first had only sketched, and he went on to lead the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology, becoming one of the most influential scientists in America and a prophet — largely unheeded — of how little water the arid West could actually support.

The three men who climbed out at Separation Canyon left a wound that never closed. Powell learned of their deaths the following year and recorded the Shivwits account in his published narrative, an account that fixed blame on the Southern Paiute in the public mind for more than a century. Modern scholarship treats it with deep skepticism: the timing, the geography, and a deathbed claim by a Mormon settler have all been marshaled to argue the men may have been murdered by settlers and the Paiutes scapegoated. The Southern Paiute community has long contested the traditional story. Honestly told, the case is open — three men died on the plateau, and we do not know for certain who killed them, or exactly why.

What is certain is the irony at the center of the story. Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, and William Dunn left the river because they were sure it would kill them, and chose the land because it seemed survivable. They had it exactly backward. Within two days the river delivered their companions to safety, while the dry country they trusted took their lives. Separation Canyon keeps the name Powell gave it, marking the place where one decision divided the men who lived from the men who did not.

Lessons

References

• Powell Geographic Expedition of 1869 Wikipedia
• John Wesley Powell Wikipedia
• Grand Canyon History & Culture National Park Service
• Southern Paiute people Wikipedia