Beyond The Hundredth Meridian Part 4

The Congress which had twice listened suspicious and unconvinced to his requests for help would shortly appropriate $10,000 to a.s.sist his continued geographical and topographical exploration of the Colorado River, and set him up in business in a western survey competing with those of Clarence King, F. V. Hayden, and Lieutenant Wheeler.

But there was one dissenter amid the chorus of applause. Almost as soon as the news of Powell's success started eastward along the wires, the Omaha Republican Omaha Republican printed a complaint against "a recent explorer, who has expended nothing individually and incurred none of the hards.h.i.+ps inseparably connected with the development of the west ... " and "whose vision was so remarkably acute, that at the distance of three hundred miles from Green River, he could see the canons of the Colorado in all their length and depth, and whose letters stated that he was the first to ascend Long's Peak, when it is a matter of public notoriety, that women and men had gone before him for the past ten years, the date of whose ascent was marked upon the place of his triumph." The much-publicized Colorado River exploration was a sell. "Through all the canons," the correspondent said, "I have ascended and descended several times within the past three years." printed a complaint against "a recent explorer, who has expended nothing individually and incurred none of the hards.h.i.+ps inseparably connected with the development of the west ... " and "whose vision was so remarkably acute, that at the distance of three hundred miles from Green River, he could see the canons of the Colorado in all their length and depth, and whose letters stated that he was the first to ascend Long's Peak, when it is a matter of public notoriety, that women and men had gone before him for the past ten years, the date of whose ascent was marked upon the place of his triumph." The much-publicized Colorado River exploration was a sell. "Through all the canons," the correspondent said, "I have ascended and descended several times within the past three years." 16 16 Like a feisty dog yapping on the fringes of a parade, Sam Adams was pursuing with senseless single-mindedness the shadow of his delusion. It was his idiot function to go on pursuing it. Major Powell, having catapulted himself into prominence by a piece of adventure, would devote the next ten years to justifying the adventure by the manifold work of revealing and opening his chosen part of the West. The exploration, spectacular though it was, was only a preliminary move, a means to an end. The end was new knowledge, and new knowledge would be the peculiar contribution of the United States Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, J. W. Powell in Charge, which Congress voted into existence on July 12, 1870. It did not have that comprehensive t.i.tle when it was. created; if it had any official name at all, it was the "Geographical and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West," and for part of its existence it was called the "Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, Second Division." The name does not matter: call it the Powell Survey. What matters is that its work was a continuity constantly enlarged but never interrupted for the next nine years.

What also matters is that Powell committed himself, enlisted himself at a strategic moment in history as a scientist in the service of the government. He was not yet a full-fledged federal employee, for until 1872 he continued to draw his salary from Illinois State Normal University, and until that year he maintained his official residence in Normal rather than in Was.h.i.+ngton. But in 1870 he put his foot in the door and got his eye fixed on what was beyond the door. His future was predictable from that point, because all his life his only direction had been forward.

Significantly, he committed himself to government science and the public service at almost the precise time when Henry Adams, after more than a year of trying to stomach the spectacle of Reconstruction politics, threw up his hands in disgust and abandoned a government that appalled him in favor of an academic life in which he had only a partial or tentative faith. Adams' disgust with Grant's Was.h.i.+ngton was well earned. But so was Powell's allegiance. For Powell's involvement in Was.h.i.+ngton was not with its political maneuvering, though he found himself forced to learn that game too. His involvement was with the unopened West and with the instru mentalities of science that, centrally directed in the public interest, might be used to open it. And that was a part of Was.h.i.+ngton's function that within a year would excite the enthusiasm even of Henry Adams.

II.

THE PLATEAU PROVINCE.

1. Center and Frontier

IT IS EASY for an enthusiast in Western history to exaggerate the importance of the opening West in the years following the Civil War, and to forget how complex and perplexing the nation's other problems were during Grant's two terms. It was not only in the West that we suffered from growing pains. The Internal Revenue scandals, the Indian Bureau scandals, the Land Office scandals, the Credit Mobilier scandal, the collapse of Jay Cooke's Northern Pacific, were convincing evidence of the importance of the West as the place of boodle, if nothing else. But it is essential to remember that Was.h.i.+ngton too, during the war and after, had acquired a new potency. Centralization bred by the crisis did not cease with the crisis. Not only was Was.h.i.+ngton preoccupied with the country's novel and uncomfortable position as a world power, but it was the source of policies, bureaus, and departments - and men - who controlled the West in its critical opening years.

Powell himself, from 1870 on, was a forceful part of that Was.h.i.+ngton which had formed during the war and which compacted itself in the dozen years afterward. He had a large hand in the creation of new central bureaus and in the formulation of new policies, none of which can be understood in purely Western terms. They must be fitted into a context in which the nation's capital and its concerns are central 1 1 - that capital which is vividly present in - that capital which is vividly present in The Education of Henry Adams The Education of Henry Adams and in Adams' mordant novel and in Adams' mordant novel Democracy Democracy, and in Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age, The Gilded Age, and in the writings and the careers of Hamilton Fish, Abram Hewitt, Carl Schurz. The interaction between Western interests and Was.h.i.+ngton power is sourly apparent in the and in the writings and the careers of Hamilton Fish, Abram Hewitt, Carl Schurz. The interaction between Western interests and Was.h.i.+ngton power is sourly apparent in the Reminiscences Reminiscences of Senator William Stewart of Nevada, the sagebrush statesman for whom Mark Twain was briefly and unhappily secretary, and who may have sat for Twain's portrait of the Congressman: "the smallest mind and the selfishest soul and the cowardliest heart that G.o.d makes." of Senator William Stewart of Nevada, the sagebrush statesman for whom Mark Twain was briefly and unhappily secretary, and who may have sat for Twain's portrait of the Congressman: "the smallest mind and the selfishest soul and the cowardliest heart that G.o.d makes." 2 2 There is an astonis.h.i.+ng amount of this new sense of centrality buried in the publications of the various government bureaus and the extraordinary collection of scientific men drawn capital-ward to staff them. It s.h.i.+nes in the revolutionary sociology of Lester Ward, for a time one of Powell's employees and all his life one of Powell's friends. It is in the enormous, encompa.s.sing, encyclopedic learning and the crusty energy of Elliott Coues, also for a time one of Powell's employees. The cavalier familiarity that Raphael Pumpelly - another Powell employee - showed for the whole wide world reflected a man who knew where home base was. There is an astonis.h.i.+ng amount of this new sense of centrality buried in the publications of the various government bureaus and the extraordinary collection of scientific men drawn capital-ward to staff them. It s.h.i.+nes in the revolutionary sociology of Lester Ward, for a time one of Powell's employees and all his life one of Powell's friends. It is in the enormous, encompa.s.sing, encyclopedic learning and the crusty energy of Elliott Coues, also for a time one of Powell's employees. The cavalier familiarity that Raphael Pumpelly - another Powell employee - showed for the whole wide world reflected a man who knew where home base was.

Out of Was.h.i.+ngton and its centralizing set of mind, as much as out of the West and the Western temper, came inst.i.tutions that have shaped the West and to a lesser degree the whole country: Geological Survey, National Park Service, Forest Service, Coast and Geodetic Survey, Weather Bureau, Bureau of Standards, Bureau of Mines, Reclamation Service, many of them proliferating out of the mitotic cell of the Smithsonian. Government science before the Civil War was largely, though not quite exclusively, Joseph Henry and Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian. Geology was a States' rights matter, topography and mapping were diversions to occupy the peacetime Army, time and weather were for the Navy to play with, and too much of private science was the occupation of amateurs of the kind that Powell himself started out to be. Postwar Was.h.i.+ngton permitted and encouraged the development of professionals and put them in charge of operations of incalculable potential. Less than twenty years after the war, Was.h.i.+ngton was one of the great scientific centers of the world. It was so for a mult.i.tude of causes, but partly because America had the virgin West for Science to open, and in Was.h.i.+ngton forged keys to open it with.

Henry Adams' heroine Madeline Lee, who went up to the capital "to see with her own eyes the action of primary forces, to touch with her own hand the ma.s.sive machinery of society; to measure with her own mind the capacity of the motive power," 3 3 was after the motive power of politics, but she could quite as effectively have studied in the same years and the same place the motive power of American science. was after the motive power of politics, but she could quite as effectively have studied in the same years and the same place the motive power of American science.

That science was not merely becoming centralized; it was growing up with a rush. It was only a generation since the paleontological Munchausen, Albert Koch, had edified the nation with his theories, or since sober Professor Silliman of Yale had attempted to tie geological history to the Noachian deluge. It was less than fifty years since the Reverend Frederick Rapp had interpreted fossil footprints in a slab of limestone as the footprints of the Christ. There were still plenty (including Clarence King and his first master, Professor Whitney, now of Yale) who clung to their belief in catastrophism as the explanation of mountains. George Catlin would propose a theory of the origin of the Gulf Stream in this very year 1870 that would raise some scientific hair, and Joaquin Miller a little later would poetically imagine the formation of the Grand Canyon by the collapse of the crust over an underground river hundreds of miles long. In the American Journal of Science American Journal of Science not too long before Was.h.i.+ngton began to collect and systematize scientific learning, a writer had explained the glacial drift in Velikovsky terms as having been caused by the rush of waters at a time when the earth's rotation stopped. not too long before Was.h.i.+ngton began to collect and systematize scientific learning, a writer had explained the glacial drift in Velikovsky terms as having been caused by the rush of waters at a time when the earth's rotation stopped.

In 1870 plenty of speculation and plenty of pure nonsense pa.s.sed for science. But in Was.h.i.+ngton, after the Civil War, there grew up a tough-minded group of men hard to fool, intent upon verification, and with unprecedented government support. At their backs they had the whole new West for a laboratory. Of that group and in that West John Wesley Powell was one of the first.

2. Geography

ONE OF MAJOR POWELL'S first services to geography was to explore a region previously little known. One of his next, after he obtained federal a.s.sistance for his expedition, was to divide the mountain West into three physiographic regions, which he called the Park Province, the Plateau Province, and the Great Basin Province.1 The first included the Colorado and northern New Mexico ranges and the great parks between them. The second included the great region of flat-bedded plateaus and mesas stretching from the western slope of Colorado to the east rim of the Great Basin in Utah, and from approximately the 40th parallel to the Painted Desert. The third began at the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and their southern extensions, and took in all the tormented ranges and great valleys and dead sea bottoms from there to the Sierras. The first included the Colorado and northern New Mexico ranges and the great parks between them. The second included the great region of flat-bedded plateaus and mesas stretching from the western slope of Colorado to the east rim of the Great Basin in Utah, and from approximately the 40th parallel to the Painted Desert. The third began at the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and their southern extensions, and took in all the tormented ranges and great valleys and dead sea bottoms from there to the Sierras.

It is the Plateau Province, comprising all of eastern and southern Utah, part of western Colorado, and part of northern New Mexico and Arizona, that concerns us, since it is what primarily concerned Powell. Its boundaries are precise on the north and west, less certain on east and south. Essentially the province follows an ancient sh.o.r.eline of Mesozoic times, when the Great Basin, the Wasatch, and part of what is now Arizona were islands or parts of the mainland, and what is now the Plateau Province was a great loop of sea. The region of plateaus with which the Powell Survey was chiefly concerned reaches from the Uinta Mountains southwestward to the Colorado River. It is mainly in Utah but includes the slice of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon, and it laps over on the east into Colorado and on the west into Nevada. It is scenically the most spectacular and humanly the least usable of all our regions.2 Here geological and human history have at least a poetic similarity. Here the earth has had a slow, regular pulse. It rose and fell for millions of years under Carboniferous, Permian, Tria.s.sic oceans, under Cretaceous seas, under the fresh-water lakes of the Eocene, before it was heaved up and exposed to rain and frost and running water and the sandblast winds. Mountains were carved out of its great tables and domes, river systems cut into it and formed canyons, elevations were weathered and carried away. What had acc.u.mulated pebble by pebble and grain by grain, cemented with lime and silica, folding into itself the sh.e.l.ls of sea life, scales of fishes, the compacted houses of corals, began to disintegrate again. Vast cyclic changes have left only traces. Though the geological record in the Plateau Province is probably as clear as it is anywhere on earth, the boundary between ignorance and knowledge, between speculation and certainty, is often no more than a line of ancient fracture almost obliterated, or an enigmatic unconformity between two layers of rock, or a slight but significant change from salt water to brackish water fossils.

Human history in that country is almost as tentative, and to our foreshortening eyes nearly as long. A vague sort of knowledge, with plenty of speculation to accompany it, reaches back to that all-but-Eozoic time when the Ho-ho-kam in the southwestern desert and the Anasazi among the plateaus built their mortared houses and granaries, and lived for certain years whose remoteness is measurable by the fading radioactivity of their dead campfires, and were driven out by certain causes including drouths known to us by the starved growth rings of ancient trees. Gradually, over several generations, we have sorted out a kind of stratigraphy of the plateau peoples: Basket-Maker I, Basket-Maker II, Post-Basket-Maker, Pre-Pueblo, Pueblo I, II, or III. We can distinguish among their artifacts and compare what we know of them with what we know of their cultural heirs, the Pueblos, including the Hopi and Zuni. We can mark the unconformities between strata of human history, and knowledge broadens down, not quite from precedent to precedent, but from inference to inference, toward historical time. By the same sort of taxonomy that cla.s.sifies and groups and separates fossils, we cla.s.sify and group and separate peoples and their leavings, and read history of a kind from them. Though we may be often and for long periods on solid ground, we are never quite out of sight of the half-effaced sh.o.r.elines of speculation. Knowledge extends in promontories and bays; or to put it vertically rather than horizontally, the strata from remote to recent never lie so unbroken that we cannot find some line of unconformity where the imagination must make a leap. There are so many horizons, geological and human, where the evidence is missing or incomplete.

Ever since the coming of white men, the region has gone through cyclic emergence and subsidence. It emerged hotly and briefly in the sixteenth century, when tales of golden cities, the antique and seductive Cibola, drew Coronado and Cardenas northward through the wastes only to show them, at the extreme stretch of their journey, the appalling barrier of the Grand Canyon. It went through an uneasy up and down period from 1540 to 1781, when the death of Padre Garces ended the great period of the entradas whose horizons were marked by Onate, Kino, Garces himself, and Escalante.3 What comes to us from that period of the entradas is a mixture of fact, fantasy, and folklore; the continent of knowledge is infirm and unstable. And from 1781 to the eighteen-twenties the region was submerged completely again. The Spanish maps used by Zebulon Pike in making his own chart of his 1806 explorations had a heavy mixture of speculation among their facts. What comes to us from that period of the entradas is a mixture of fact, fantasy, and folklore; the continent of knowledge is infirm and unstable. And from 1781 to the eighteen-twenties the region was submerged completely again. The Spanish maps used by Zebulon Pike in making his own chart of his 1806 explorations had a heavy mixture of speculation among their facts.

In some ways even less dependable is what comes to us from the era of the fur traders, that all-but-obliterated age when Jed Smith, General Ashley, Thomas Fitzpatrick, Jim Bridger, Kit Carson, and the other partisans, French, American, and British, spread like a thin abrupt lava over the West from the Marias to the Gila, and the Missouri to the Pacific. They spread very thin in the Plateau Province, where neither country nor climate was generally favorable for beaver except in the north, and only an impatient itch for travel justified the hards.h.i.+ps. Fragmentary fossils, little more, remain from their pa.s.sage - the ruins of Antoine Robidou's fort in the Uinta Valley, D. Julien's name on a canyon wall, James Ohio Pattie's embroidered Odyssey, the late-discovered narratives of Ashley and Jed Smith.4 But there is no unconformity between the horizon of the trappers and that of John Charles Fremont, who with trapper aid became the Pathfinder for the thousands destined to sweep westward from the forties on, though in fact he was more Path-publicizer than Path-finder. In geological terms, if the trappers were Pleistocene, Fremont marks the transition to the Recent. At about this level, modem knowledge begins; it was enormously strengthened by the Pacific Railway Surveys of 1853 and after. But though both Fremont and the Railway Surveys pierced the Plateau Province, their real results were found elsewhere. Offering neither opportunity for settlement, promise of mineral wealth, nor routes for travel, the Plateau Province lay like an unknown and forbidding island across two thirds of the state of Utah and down into Arizona, between what would one day be Highway 30 and what would be Highway 66, or roughly between the line of the Union Pacific and that of the Santa Fe. But there is no unconformity between the horizon of the trappers and that of John Charles Fremont, who with trapper aid became the Pathfinder for the thousands destined to sweep westward from the forties on, though in fact he was more Path-publicizer than Path-finder. In geological terms, if the trappers were Pleistocene, Fremont marks the transition to the Recent. At about this level, modem knowledge begins; it was enormously strengthened by the Pacific Railway Surveys of 1853 and after. But though both Fremont and the Railway Surveys pierced the Plateau Province, their real results were found elsewhere. Offering neither opportunity for settlement, promise of mineral wealth, nor routes for travel, the Plateau Province lay like an unknown and forbidding island across two thirds of the state of Utah and down into Arizona, between what would one day be Highway 30 and what would be Highway 66, or roughly between the line of the Union Pacific and that of the Santa Fe.

There was a thick crust of fable over this region, and as the country was lifted slowly into knowledge the layers of fable lifted with it, bending upward at the flanks like sedimentary strata along the axis of a great earth-flexure. It would take a long while for these to wear away; until they did, this could still be part of the Land of Gilpin. Lieutenant Gouverneur Warren, summarizing on his map of 1857 the aggregate of existing knowledge,5 had to splash the word "Unexplored" across almost eight degrees of longitude, and leave a good part of the middle plateau country hatched in with mountains that represented less information than an unwillingness to leave the paper white. had to splash the word "Unexplored" across almost eight degrees of longitude, and leave a good part of the middle plateau country hatched in with mountains that represented less information than an unwillingness to leave the paper white.

The state of knowledge, or rather of ignorance, properly demanded blankness without even hachures. Ignorance covered the geography of the region, its topography, landforms, drainage, and scenery, its geological and orographic history, its inhabitants both vanished and extant, its products, resources, and potential usefulness. The few fixed points, the small amounts of verified information, were only enough to whet the appet.i.te either of fabulist or scientist. To make this island a province of human knowledge, to reveal it clear and make it contribute to the sum of verified information, to extract from it what it could offer to the practice of legitimate inference, was a job that Powell individually began in the winter of 1868 and that the government-supported Powell Survey between 1870 and 1879 at least roughly completed. A chapter that had begun with the beginning of the century when Robert Livingston and James Monroe took a chance and bought vaguely-defined Louisiana from a harried French Empire,6 ended approximately in 1872 when a party of Powell's men discovered and named the last unknown river and explored the last unknown mountains in the United States. From that time on, the Plateau Province has been an increasingly firm part of dry land. By the time they were through, Powell and his colleagues had given it a map, boundaries, many of its names. They had painstakingly worked out its geological history, and incidentally illuminated one whole division of the science. They had recorded it in drawings, paintings, and photographs. They had extracted from it a number of rules that became a kind of decalogue of dryland agriculture and dryland. social inst.i.tutions. They had even given it a rudimentary aesthetics, used it as a starting point for a curious and provocative inquiry into the sublime and beautiful, and strengthened the affinity that Turner and Ruskin had established between geology and art. ended approximately in 1872 when a party of Powell's men discovered and named the last unknown river and explored the last unknown mountains in the United States. From that time on, the Plateau Province has been an increasingly firm part of dry land. By the time they were through, Powell and his colleagues had given it a map, boundaries, many of its names. They had painstakingly worked out its geological history, and incidentally illuminated one whole division of the science. They had recorded it in drawings, paintings, and photographs. They had extracted from it a number of rules that became a kind of decalogue of dryland agriculture and dryland. social inst.i.tutions. They had even given it a rudimentary aesthetics, used it as a starting point for a curious and provocative inquiry into the sublime and beautiful, and strengthened the affinity that Turner and Ruskin had established between geology and art.

3. The Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, J. W. Powell in Charge

AN AUTHORIZATION and a $10,000 appropriation granted casually for one year only by a Congress preoccupied with the Alabama Claims, Cuban insurrection, Fenian threats to invade Canada, tension between Southerners and Carpetbaggers, and Grant's expansionist adventure in Santo Domingo, did not automatically insure either the continuation or the scientific maturity of Powell's work. Not even a happy clerical error that removed his new survey from the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior, where the Sundry Civil Bill of July 12, 1870, had put him, and subordinated him to the learned and non-political Smithsonian Inst.i.tution,1 could remove from his project the lingering look of the amateur. Only Powell's own intellectual maturing could do that, and that had not yet come, despite gratifying notoriety and publicity, a successful lecture tour, the jealousy of his Normal colleagues, and a greatly increased acquaintances.h.i.+p in Was.h.i.+ngton, whence all power flowed. could remove from his project the lingering look of the amateur. Only Powell's own intellectual maturing could do that, and that had not yet come, despite gratifying notoriety and publicity, a successful lecture tour, the jealousy of his Normal colleagues, and a greatly increased acquaintances.h.i.+p in Was.h.i.+ngton, whence all power flowed.

Scientifically, Powell had not yet done anything. He had gathered data to correct an empty or inaccurate map, but he had produced neither map nor report of his own, and the scientific results of two expeditions to the Rockies and a hundred days on the river amounted to little more than an incomplete and crude reconnoissance marked by inadequately checked lat.i.tudes and longitudes, some tables of elevation and barometric fluctuation, some geological sections of the cliffs, and some boxes of miscellaneous collections, still mainly uncla.s.sified and unlabeled. He had published only letters to the newspapers, much more literary than scientific. The one short account of his river trip that he had so far written was intended for a book that would not even be published in the United States.2 For all that, the process of self-education never stopped in him. He learned in his sleep. He learned from every book, acquaintance, experience; facts stuck in his mind, and not like stray flies on fly-paper but like orderly iron filings around magnetic poles, or ions around anode and cathode in an electrolytic bath. Order was part of his very learning process, a function of his capacity to discriminate; and what he said later in tribute to Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian might even more truly have been said of himself: that in the world of modern science which was "almost buried under the debris of observation, the records of facts without meaning, the sands of fact that are ground from the rock of truth by the attrition of mind," he could "walk over the sands and see the diamonds." 3 3 But none of this was clear yet. There were numerous things John Wesley Powell had not caught on to. How to staff a scientific expedition, for example. But none of this was clear yet. There were numerous things John Wesley Powell had not caught on to. How to staff a scientific expedition, for example.

In both 1867 and 1868 he had signed up volunteers; if he wanted an expedition at all, he had no other choice. They were students, recent graduates, relatives, friends, members of the Natural History Society, bird watchers and botanizers willing to come along for the excitement. The river boatmen of 1869 were recruited about as haphazardly as Falstaff picked up his squad of ragam.u.f.fins, and they were equipped almost off the hedges. The one indispensable qualification of courage they all had, but though that would serve for purposes of exploration, it was not enough for purposes of scientific surveying. Yet now in 1870, authorized to continue the exploration of the Colorado River, and provided with backing and money and the chance to pack his expedition with brains and skill, Powell followed his old pattern of picking up local amateurs. Of all the people he would hire in the next four years, only three would be professionals. Two of those three, with help from developing amateurs, would remake the Survey.

To take charge of the topographical work Powell selected his brother-in-law Almon Thompson (a far better choice, actually, than most of the brother-in-law appointments of Grant's time) who had returned from acting as entomologist of the 1868 expedition to resume the superintendency of schools in Bloomington. From Bloomington also came Thompson's two a.s.sistants, Walter Graves, a cousin of the Howlands, and F. M. Bishop, a Union veteran and recent graduate of Normal. A third topographical a.s.sistant, S. V. Jones, was princ.i.p.al of the Washburn, Illinois, schools, and a friend of Thompson's. As artist, Powell selected one of Thompson's remote relatives, a self-taught boy of seventeen named Frederick Dellenbaugh; as a.s.sistant photographer he hired his own young cousin, Clement Powell. The cook and handy man, Andy Hattan, was an army acquaintance; the second handy man, later a.s.sistant photographer and finally photographer, was a German immigrant named Jack Hillers, picked up by accident in Salt Lake City. The photographer, E. O. Beaman of New York, was the only real professional in that early crowd, and he turned out to be something less than first cla.s.s. Powell pa.s.sed over available trained geologists in favor of J. F. Steward, an amateur with whom he had hunted fossils in the trenches before Vicksburg.4 These, with a few pickups in the field, const.i.tuted the Powell Survey between 1870 and 1874. Though several of them were men of real ability and all but one gave devoted service, they would not have enriched Who's Who. Nepotism and an acquaintance among the schoolteachers of Illinois explained them all. There was not a real scientist in the lot except the leader, and he was un-proved.

The amateurish condition is more apparent when one compares the Powell Survey with the other three surveys which since the end of the war had been established to produce information about the opening West. These were the United States Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, and the Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, known, from their leaders, as the King, Hayden, and Wheeler Surveys.5 The Geological Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, promoted and directed by Henry Adams' meteoric friend Clarence King, under the supervision of the War Department, had in its party during 1870 not only King, who was a product of the Sheffield Scientific School, but Arnold and James Hague and S. F. Emmons, all of them far better trained than Powell or any of his group. There was no photographer that year, but for the three preceding years King had had the services of T. H. O'Sullivan, one of Matthew Brady's most spectacular combat photographers during the Civil War, and one of the great recorders of the frontier. That survey ,was small, select, and well heeled. It concentrated on economic geology, especially deposits of minerals, along a hundred-mile-wide strip centering on the 40th parallel, roughly the line of the Union and Central Pacific. It had certain eccentricities, such as the sybaritic camp life affected by its leader, but it was a highly competent outfit.

The Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, established like the King Survey in 1867, but under the Department of the Interior, was led by Dr. Ferdinand Vandeveer Hayden, a man of extraordinary and excitable energy, considerable imagination, some learning, and an experience on the western frontiers that had been consecutive from 1853, when he had explored the Dakota Badlands with F. B. Meek, the noted paleontologist. Hayden's 1870 group included a good geologist, J. J. Stevenson; a botanist, Cyrus Thomas, later a famous archaeologist; a zoologist, C. P. Carrington; a mineralogist, A. L. Lord; and an artist, Henry Elliott. It also included, for the first of several years, W. H. Jackson, whose frontier photographs over a long period, including the first pictures of Yellowstone and Mesa Verde, would earn him a reputation as one of the finest of his kind. In addition to his actual field party, Hayden could count on the collaboration of such eminent men as E. D. Cope, Joseph Leidy, and F. B. Meek to interpret his fossils, Leo Lesqueraux to oversee the paleobotany, and John Strong Newberry of Columbia University to act as consultant on the ancient lake bottoms of the West. Hayden's appropriation was more than twice that of Powell, his training and experience were much longer, his acquaintance reached everywhere, his publications and the publications that he controlled were extensive. Though his work seemed more impressive than it actually was, there is no doubt that his survey was in many ways the most imposing of the four. To Hayden, as much as to any other man, we owe the creation of Yellowstone National Park, which in 1872 became the foundation for all the future development of the park system.

Finally there was Lieutenant George M. Wheeler's Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, supported by the War Department, as was King's survey. Wheeler was not interested in geology; he didn't even take a geologist along until 1871, his third field season, when G. K. Gilbert and A. R. Marvine joined him. His interest was almost wholly topographical, looking toward a master atlas of the western states and territories. Later evidence would demonstrate that Wheeler's methods of mapping were inadequate and his results not always sound, but his survey was the direct inheritor of the prestige of the Corps of Topographical Engineers which had given the country most of its accurate information about the West. It did dabble in some of the all-purpose natural science that both Hayden and Powell had interested themselves in, and its actual and projected publication of maps looked impressive. It was sometimes accompanied, like Hayden's and King's parties, by a clanking escort of cavalry.

Among that company the Powell Survey was a shabby, late-come, and only semi-official Cinderella, but there is no indication that its director knew it, or if he knew it, cared. He was of a kind that goes about its business and keeps its end in view. His immediate end, as defined in the Sundry Civil Bill which created him, was "a geographical and topographical survey of the Colorado River of the West." At this stage he seems not to have had any ambitions beyond that. The tentativeness of his governmental connection is indicated by the fact that he still drew his salary from Illinois State Normal University rather than from his government appropriation. But it is pretty certain that his plans did not include much future time in the cla.s.sroom. With his crowd of eager amateurs and teachers he would take out again into the West until the process of self-teaching would be complete. Some of his a.s.sistants would drop out, some would fail to develop, some would be replaced by key professionals. A few, notably Thompson, Hillers, and Powell himself, would acquire distinguished competence the hard way, in the field.

4. Major Powell's Amateur Hour

THE REAL BEGINNING of field work would have to wait a year, until the summer of 1871. First there was unfinished business, loose ends of the 1869 trip and plans for the next one. Powell might not know as much as he would know later, but he knew that even if all the records from 1869 had been preserved instead of being partly lost to the river or to the s.h.i.+vwits, the scientific results would have been thin. Before he could claim anything more than an exploit he had to run the river again and really survey it. And because much of the difficulty of the first expedition had been caused by the necessity of carrying tons of food, he would not run the river again until he had located points at which it could be reached by supply trains.

The Green was no problem. There boats, men, and supplies would all be fresh, and the river could be reached at Brown's Hole, in the Uinta Valley, and at Gunnison's Crossing (Greenriver, Utah). And anyway the Green was comparatively well known. But below Gunnison's Crossing he knew of only two places of access, one at the Crossing of the Fathers in lower Glen Canyon, and the other only a few miles below, at the mouth of the Paria (Lee's Ferry). Another point ought to be found, preferably somewhere near the mouth of the Dirty Devil, at the foot of Cataract Canyon.

Privately a.s.sured by Garfield and Salmon P. Chase, both regents of the Smithsonian, that he could probably depend upon funds for more than the immediate year,1 Major Powell dedicated 1870 to preparation. With Thompson in Bloomington he left the crudely meandered map and his own and Sumner's journals from the 1869 trip, and while Thompson studied those, Powell took two a.s.sistants, Walter Graves and Frank Bishop, and in mid-August made his fourth trip west. Major Powell dedicated 1870 to preparation. With Thompson in Bloomington he left the crudely meandered map and his own and Sumner's journals from the 1869 trip, and while Thompson studied those, Powell took two a.s.sistants, Walter Graves and Frank Bishop, and in mid-August made his fourth trip west.

Preparation involved not only supply routes but an understanding with the Indians. He could not count on and did not want the military escort that was standard equipment with most western scientific parties. With the White River Utes he had maintained friends.h.i.+p simply by being friendly and harmless; he would hope to continue that policy. But the murder of the Howlands and Dunn was a trouble, and he wanted to dig out the true facts. The story that had come out to St. George said that the three men had been shot for molesting a s.h.i.+vwits squaw. That story he did not believe, 2 2 but whatever the cause of their death, he had to be a.s.sured of safety both from the Paiute bands and from the Navajo with whom the Mormons of southern Utah were conducting an erratic guerrilla war. Because his own interests coincided with those of the Mormons, he went to headquarters for advice, and came out from a conference with Brigham Young armed with a letter for Jacob Hamblin, the Mormon Leatherstocking, the Apostle to the Lamanites, head of the Southern Mission and pathfinder and peace-maker for all the southern Utah settlements. Either for geography or for Indians, he could hardly have done better; when he finally started out from the fort at Pipe Spring in Jacob's company he was in the best hands in Utah or Arizona. but whatever the cause of their death, he had to be a.s.sured of safety both from the Paiute bands and from the Navajo with whom the Mormons of southern Utah were conducting an erratic guerrilla war. Because his own interests coincided with those of the Mormons, he went to headquarters for advice, and came out from a conference with Brigham Young armed with a letter for Jacob Hamblin, the Mormon Leatherstocking, the Apostle to the Lamanites, head of the Southern Mission and pathfinder and peace-maker for all the southern Utah settlements. Either for geography or for Indians, he could hardly have done better; when he finally started out from the fort at Pipe Spring in Jacob's company he was in the best hands in Utah or Arizona.3 Hamblin knew the plateau and canyon country better than any man alive, for in the fifties when Brigham Young had projected an empire south and west and north from the New Jerusalem he had charged Hamblin with locating crossings of the hitherto impa.s.sable canyons across the southern frontier. Jacob had found a crossing below the Grand Wash Cliffs, at the lower end of the Grand Canyon, and another at the mouth of the Paria. He had been the first Anglo-American to use the Crossing of the Fathers, or Ute Ford, at the mouth of Padre Creek. He had navigated the lower Virgin and the Colorado from Grand Wash to Callville, had made his way across the wilderness of canyons south of the river and had visited the Hualpais, the Havasupais, the Hopi, the Navajo, the Coconinos. With them, as with the Santa Claras, s.h.i.+vwits, Uinkarets, and Kaibabs north of the Colorado, his name was magic. It was magic also among his own people. A pious and orthodox Mormon with five wives, he had pioneered in Mountain Meadows, on the Santa Clara, and now at Kanab, below the Vermilion Cliffs, where an earlier village abandoned because of Navajo raids was about to be resettled. Though his ranch at Mountain Meadows was the nearest habitation to the scene of the Mountain Meadows Ma.s.sacre, Jacob's name had never been tainted with complicity in that horror.4 Pure, slow of speech and above anger, he was a rock of strength among the Mormon colonists and a bulwark against the Indians, whose languages he knew. A revelation had told him that if he never shed Indian blood no Indian would ever shed his; his life had been a demonstration of the dependability of G.o.d's midnight whisper. One of his wives was a Paiute. Pure, slow of speech and above anger, he was a rock of strength among the Mormon colonists and a bulwark against the Indians, whose languages he knew. A revelation had told him that if he never shed Indian blood no Indian would ever shed his; his life had been a demonstration of the dependability of G.o.d's midnight whisper. One of his wives was a Paiute.

Between them, Jacob and Powell were more effective than a punitive expedition, more salutary than a company of soldiers. Accompanied by a group of Kaibab Indians including the chief Chuarruumpeak, they rode out of Pipe Spring, west of Kanab, in September, 1870, and headed southwest toward the plateau the Indians called Uinkaret, Place of Pines, dominated by the great lava-capped b.u.t.te, twenty miles north of the Grand Canyon and sixty-odd from Kanab, that Powell would name Mount Trumbull in honor of his friend the senator from Illinois. There, just a week or two more than a year after his three men had died in the dark beside a waterpocket on the s.h.i.+vwits Plateau, they camped near a band of Uinkarets and sent a runner to the s.h.i.+vwits, farther west, to come to a council.

Before the s.h.i.+vwits came, Powell half satisfied his purpose of finding a pack route to the lower Grand Canyon. The Uinkarets showed him a dangerous and difficult trail, the last stretch impa.s.sable for horses, down which Indian packers might take supplies in a pinch.5 Settlement of the Howland-Dunn affair awaited the arrival of the s.h.i.+vwits. But by the evidence of all his words and actions, Powell was diverted from that almost from the moment he arrived. He found himself among Indians more primitive and untouched than any he had ever seen, as primitive probably as any left in the continental United States. Waiting for the s.h.i.+vwits was no trouble; it was one long ethnological picnic.

He must have cursed his failure to bring a photographer, for he went out of his way to get the Indians' promise to be photographed the next year,6 as he went out of his way to be interested in their life. "An eminently magnetic man," he worked his charm upon squaws and warriors and wise men as he had upon university regents or on editors encountered in Colorado parks. Knowing little Paiute, he made himself understood in Ute. Squaws showed him how they roasted seeds in wicker trays filled with hot coals, shaking the trays so dexterously that gradually roasted seeds collected at one side and coals at the other. Old women giggled, sitting with seed baskets between their knees and rolling out meal on mealing stones. Propped against trees, children wrapped in rabbit and wildcat skins stared from their wicker hoods. Even the young men were stimulated by the interest of Ka-pur-ats, One-Arm-Off, to extraordinary showing off. They set up a wide-winged net and put on a rabbit drive to demonstrate their way of catching game, and that evening while they feasted on the result Powell induced them to tell aloud the story of Stone-s.h.i.+rt, though it was not the proper ritual season. That was a diplomatic request: he had found that one of the surest signs of friends.h.i.+p was an Indian's willingness to talk about his religion. By the time the s.h.i.+vwits arrived, Ka-pur-ats was almost as solid with the Uinkarets as Jacob himself. He had enriched his Paiute vocabulary and filled packs with rabbit-skin robes, papoose hoods, nets, seed baskets, and all the paraphernalia of the tribe, to be deposited ultimately in the Smithsonian. as he went out of his way to be interested in their life. "An eminently magnetic man," he worked his charm upon squaws and warriors and wise men as he had upon university regents or on editors encountered in Colorado parks. Knowing little Paiute, he made himself understood in Ute. Squaws showed him how they roasted seeds in wicker trays filled with hot coals, shaking the trays so dexterously that gradually roasted seeds collected at one side and coals at the other. Old women giggled, sitting with seed baskets between their knees and rolling out meal on mealing stones. Propped against trees, children wrapped in rabbit and wildcat skins stared from their wicker hoods. Even the young men were stimulated by the interest of Ka-pur-ats, One-Arm-Off, to extraordinary showing off. They set up a wide-winged net and put on a rabbit drive to demonstrate their way of catching game, and that evening while they feasted on the result Powell induced them to tell aloud the story of Stone-s.h.i.+rt, though it was not the proper ritual season. That was a diplomatic request: he had found that one of the surest signs of friends.h.i.+p was an Indian's willingness to talk about his religion. By the time the s.h.i.+vwits arrived, Ka-pur-ats was almost as solid with the Uinkarets as Jacob himself. He had enriched his Paiute vocabulary and filled packs with rabbit-skin robes, papoose hoods, nets, seed baskets, and all the paraphernalia of the tribe, to be deposited ultimately in the Smithsonian.

In 1870 the day of the Indian as wild animal was by no means over. The hostiles of the plains were still unsubdued, the Custer Ma.s.sacre and the Meeker Ma.s.sacre and the Apache Wars and the brilliant and desperate campaign of Chief Joseph were still in the future, the subjugation of the Navajo at Canyon de Ch.e.l.ly still a recent memory. Wolves to be exterminated or curs to be kicked aside, verminous and beggarly and treacherous pests, Indians had had little enough of the consideration that Powell and Jacob gave them. Sam Carman's fastidious disgust with Antero's Utes was tenderfoot orthodoxy; the orthodoxy of the schooled frontiersman was of a bloodier kind.7 Though the s.h.i.+vwits and Uinkarets were probably too innocent to realize it, they were being given a revolutionary treatment. Jacob respected Indians and was respected by them because he granted them souls and gave even the Lamanite a chance at Heaven. Powell respected them, and earned their respect, because he accepted without question their right to be what they were, to hold to the beliefs and inst.i.tutions natural to them. To approach a strange culture and a strange people without prejudice, suspicion, condescension, or fear is common enough among students now; it was not too common in 1870, and it made his councils with the s.h.i.+vwits an unqualified success. Though the s.h.i.+vwits and Uinkarets were probably too innocent to realize it, they were being given a revolutionary treatment. Jacob respected Indians and was respected by them because he granted them souls and gave even the Lamanite a chance at Heaven. Powell respected them, and earned their respect, because he accepted without question their right to be what they were, to hold to the beliefs and inst.i.tutions natural to them. To approach a strange culture and a strange people without prejudice, suspicion, condescension, or fear is common enough among students now; it was not too common in 1870, and it made his councils with the s.h.i.+vwits an unqualified success.

The s.h.i.+vwits admitted freely enough that they had killed Powell's three men. But they had not understood who they were. The three had arrived worn out and hungry, and had been fed and shown the way to the Mormon towns. After them came a runner from another band saying these three must be the prospectors who had molested and then shot a squaw. The more the s.h.i.+vwits talked over the story the white men had told of coming down the big water, the plainer it appeared that the three were liars. Eventually warriors followed the strangers and shot them with arrows as they lay asleep. But they would not have harmed them if they had known they were Ka-pur-ats' men.

This was the point at which frontier orthodoxy would have demanded at least a token punishment, possibly even a hanging or two. Instead, Powell smoked with the s.h.i.+vwits - something, as he described it, slightly more difficult than hanging a few of them.

Hamblin speaks their language well, and has a great influence over all the Indians in the region round about. He is a silent, reserved man, and when he speaks, it is in a slow, quiet way, that inspires great awe. His talk is so low that they must listen attentively to hear, and they sit around him in deathlike silence. When he finishes a measured sentence, the chief repeats it, and they all give a solemn grunt. But, first, I fill my pipe, light it, and take a few whiffs, then pa.s.s it to Hamblin; he smokes, and gives it to the man next, and so it goes around. When it has pa.s.sed the chief, he takes out his own pipe, fills, and lights it, and pa.s.ses it around after mine. I can smoke my own pipe in turn, but, when the Indian pipe comes around, I am nonplussed. It has a large stem, which has, at some time, been broken, and now there is a buckskin rag wound around it, and tied with sinew, so that the end of the stem is a huge mouthful, and looks like the burying ground of old dead spittle, venerable for a century. To gain time, I refill it, then engage in very earnest conversation, and, all unawares, I pa.s.s it to my neighbor unlighted.8 By such means must duplicity bend the processes of diplomacy. But with that small exception Powell's acceptance of the Indians and their point of view was complete. He read them no scoldings for their murderous ways, made no. demands that the guilty be dragged forward for punishment, threatened no reprisals and asked no indemnity, required no a.s.surances from the s.h.i.+vwits beyond their word - and this despite the fact that the dead men had been his comrades and friends. He left his outfit scattered around without fear of their stealing, and nothing was stolen; he slept among the murderers without fear of harm, and none came to him. His experience with these Stone Age bands lost on an unvisited plateau not only whetted his appet.i.te for discovery in regions of human geography already being rapidly obliterated, but reinforced his belief - which was Jacob's - that one who meant no harm could travel freely among Indians, at least within the territory of a single tribe, unarmed and unprotected, except when foolish or brutal white men stirred a tribe to revenge, when even the innocent could suffer. Perhaps Powell's maiming was a protection of sorts, and he spoke always with a straight tongue, and his introduction by Jacob gave him great status. But his chief qualification for dealing with the tribes was his conviction that a naked Paiute s.h.i.+vering under a tree on the Place of Pines belonged as surely on the map of mankind as a patroon sitting down to dinner in his house above the Hudson, or a Boston Brahmin crossing the Common toward the Athenaeum. He arrived at this conviction without effort and without the sentimentality of many Indian advocates and without in any way regarding his att.i.tude as remarkable. It was simply a natural product of his thirst for knowing and the incorrigible orderliness of his mind, which was as ready to reduce the tribes of man to systems and categories as to arrange the stratigraphic series in a cliff.

To the ethnological goldmine on the plateaus Powell would return as he promised, with a photographer to record Uinkaret and s.h.i.+vwits before civilization destroyed them. But he had other temptations now. Seventy-five miles by trail southeast of Kanab, at the angle where the Echo Cliffs crossed the Colorado and the Paria added its dry-season trickle to the river, was one of the crossings that Hamblin had pioneered. Several days' ride to the south and east across the river from there was Cardenas' ancient province of Tusayan, home of those Indians whom the Mormons called the Moki or Moquis, and whom we call the Hopi, whose towns had been discovered by the Spaniards almost a century before Plymouth Rock but who had stubbornly maintained themselves intact, aloof, and little known. The legends that had formed a deposit over the whole Plateau Province encrusted them: they were the descendants of the "Aztecs" who had left houses and granaries and hewn footholds among the cliffs, and crumbling towns and irrigation systems along the desert rivers all through the Southwest. They were inheritors of the culture of the Nephites who according to the Book of Mormon had been driven northward by their dark brothers the Lamanites toward the Mormon Armageddon at the Hill c.u.morah. They were descendants of those "white Indians," Welsh or otherwise, who have cropped up in American folklore from the beginning and have left among the Indians themselves the enigmatic story of the blue-eyed G.o.d.

As early as 1858 Jacob Hamblin and Thales Haskell had visited the Moki towns, escorting a Welsh Mormon named Durias Davis whose mission was to search for echoes of Welsh words in Moki mouths. Davis found none he could be sure of, but the three Hopis that Jacob took to Salt Lake for a visit of state in 1862 had barely hit town before some Welsh converts tried to make them admit they spoke Gaelic, and within seven years another Welsh Mormon, Llewellyn Harris, would start the Welsh legend all over again about the Zuni. Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly, and only under cultivation, but fable has burrs and feet and claws and wings and an indestructible sheath like weed-seed, and can be carried almost anywhere and take root without benefit of soil or water.

Whoever legend said they were, the Hopi were civilized Indians, town Indians, a kind Powell had not seen, and they were even more of a temptation than the primitive Paiutes. Jacob was going again this year to visit the Mold towns. One can almost watch Powell weigh this opportunity against the need of finding a way in to the mouth of the Dirty Devil. Though the route in was what he had primarily come to find, he let it go, and went with Jacob.

Joseph Henry, when Powell had first come to him back in 1867, had asked that Powell take advantage of the chance to study Indians on his western travels. The request could not have been made to a more responsive student. All of the western surveys except that of King studied the Indians to some extent; only Powell studied them with pa.s.sion. So while Thompson back in Bloomington conned his maps and imagined that Powell was breaking a way in to the river, Powell was spending two delighted months among the Hopi, trading for artifacts, adding a Hopi vocabulary to his Ute and Paiute word lists and finding them related Sho shonean tongues. He watched the dances with which the Hopi marked every turn and change of the ceremonial year, recorded the intricate and devout ceremonial life, and listened to old men, living history books, tell the tribal myths.9 It is doubtful that Congress in granting him funds had in mind that a "geographical and topographical survey" included this particular variety of field work, or that it knew it was authorizing Powell to sit in almost as an official Was.h.i.+ngton representative on the talks Jacob held with the chief men of Shapalauvi, Mishonghovi, Oraibi, Walpi, Tewa, all the seven stone towns overlooking from their beaked mesas the sweep of the Painted Desert. It is doubtful that Congress in granting him funds had in mind that a "geographical and topographical survey" included this particular variety of field work, or that it knew it was authorizing Powell to sit in almost as an official Was.h.i.+ngton representative on the talks Jacob held with the chief men of Shapalauvi, Mishonghovi, Oraibi, Walpi, Tewa, all the seven stone towns overlooking from their beaked mesas the sweep of the Painted Desert.

It is quite as doubtful that Major Powell had any business in the peace conference that Jacob arranged with the Navajo over at Fort Defiance - not that he could have resisted taking part. At the beginning of November, 1870, he and Hamblin and their party crossed the Navajo and Apache country to the powwow. As part of the attempt to dissuade war parties of Navajo from crossing the Colorado, Powell spoke as if for Was.h.i.+ngton, explained the reservation system and the government annuities as changes that the Navajo must accept, reminded them of what they had already learned from the harsh schooling of Kit Carson: that resistance or continued raiding could only bring disaster to themselves. Those warnings were reinforced by the agent, Captain Bennett, and then Jacob spoke for peace. On November 5 he signed a non-aggression pact that outlawed raiding but welcomed the Navajo to the Mormon settlements on trading expeditions, and turned back toward the Moki towns and home, while Powell and his two men went on to the end of the stage line at Santa Fe.

One half-comic episode marked the end of his summer's work. At Oraibi he had made a friend of a Hopi, Tuleta, and had talked him into coming along back to Was.h.i.+ngton for a visit with the Great White Father. Hamblin had authority to take the Hopi chief Tuba and his wife back that fall to Salt Lake as good-will amba.s.sadors, but exactly what Powell expected to do with an uninvited Hopi in Normal or Was.h.i.+ngton is not clear; perhaps stuff him and put him in the Smithsonian along with all the other artifacts he had collected. But the dependable Navajo saved him possible embarra.s.sment. On the road between Fort Defiance and Santa Fe they stole Tuleta's horse. The party was in a hurry, and could wait only a day for Tuleta to find it. When he did not return, they went on. But Tuleta really wanted that visit to the Great Father. He borrowed another horse from somewhere and galloped after, arriving in Santa Fe a scant hour after Powell, Bishop, and Graves had climbed on the eastbound stage. n.o.body in Santa Fe would believe that the chiefs in Was.h.i.+ngton had requested Tuleta's presence, and he had no paper to show, so he had a long ride home across New Mexico and Arizona to his primitive apartment house on Third Mesa.10 The way Powell's plans were scattering, more than hopeful Hopis were likely to get left behind. The route to the mouth of the Dirty Devil had got left behind too; the best Powell could do was engage Hamblin to try to find a way to it next summer. He also arranged that Kanab would be the headquarters for the survey party during the winter of 1871.

Kanab, as it turned out, would continue to be the princ.i.p.al base of operations for the Powell Survey, and the route to the mouth of the Dirty Devil would be located, but not until after two years of searching among the tangled headwaters of the Paria, Escalante, and Dirty Devil in the high rock country from Table Cliff across the Waterpocket Fold to the unknown cliffs and canyons south of the San Rafael Swell. And it would not be found by Jacob; that would be almost his only failure as Leatherstocking. A party of Powell's amateurs would do it for him.

5. Exploration: Almon Thompson

THOUGH ONLY LIMITED REPORTS were made of it at the time, and though for many years, through Powell's own fault,1 its experiences and results were badly tangled with those of the 1869 expedition, few exploring journeys have actually been so thoroughly annotated as Powell's second trip down the Colorado. Powell, Thompson, Dellenbaugh, Bishop, Jones, Clem Powell, Steward, Beaman, and Hillers all kept diaries, and in addition Powell, Thompson, Jones, Bishop, and Steward made extensive field notes. First Beaman, then Clem Powell, then for a short time James Fennemore, and finally Hillers took hundreds of photographs with the toilsome collodion plate cameras. its experiences and results were badly tangled with those of the 1869 expedition, few exploring journeys have actually been so thoroughly annotated as Powell's second trip down the Colorado. Powell, Thompson, Dellenbaugh, Bishop, Jones, Clem Powell, Steward, Beaman, and Hillers all kept diaries, and in addition Powell, Thompson, Jones, Bishop, and Steward made extensive field notes. First Beaman, then Clem Powell, then for a short time James Fennemore, and finally Hillers took hundreds of photographs with the toilsome collodion plate cameras.2 Clem Powell wrote letters to the Chicago Tribune; Dellenbaugh made sketches both scientific and scenic. Through lectures and newspaper writing he made himself a chronicler of the party, and his A Clem Powell wrote letters to the Chicago Tribune; Dellenbaugh made sketches both scientific and scenic. Through lectures and newspaper writing he made himself a chronicler of the party, and his A Canyon Voyage Canyon Voyage, though not published until 1908, for a long time stood as the official story of the expedition.3 Instead of a dramatic tale and a series of imperfect recollections, the second expedition brought back data. Instead of a dramatic tale and a series of imperfect recollections, the second expedition brought back data.

It involved hards.h.i.+ps nearly as great as those of the pioneer journey. Exhausting labor and malnutrition brought Jones and Steward into Kanab on stretchers, in the fall of 1871, and the whole company was afflicted with beriberi, scurvy, and the ache of old war wounds. And it was a tremendous adventure to the young men who partic.i.p.ated in it. Yet somehow it doesn't make a story. It hasn't the thrill or the suspense, the fear, the fateful climax, the ending muted by tragedy; it doesn't come to us with either the terror or triumph of the first. The second pa.s.sage down the river was not an exploration, but a survey; what rendered it scientifically important rendered it dramatically second-hand. Exploration like seduction puts a premium upon the virgin.

Before he ever started down it the second time, the river had lost much of its grip on Powell's restless imagination. He was already looking beyond it to the unmapped hinterland, the great problems of physical geology, most of all the anthropological exhibits, the tribes both extinct and extant that awaited study. Pulled in a half dozen directions at once, he could not pretend even to himself that he was conducting a field party with a single concentrated purpose. He began delegating responsibility when he left to Jacob Hamblin the job of locating a route to the Dirty Devil; he continued in 1871 by unloading much of the conduct of the river party onto his brother-in-law, universally referred to as the Prof, while he himself shot off on other business.

From the start at Green River on May 22, 1871, Powell left the geographical work entirely in Thompson's hands, but he himself commanded the party as far as the mouth of the Yampa, which they reached on June 25. By that time restlessness, anxiety about whether or not Jacob had found a way in, and worry about his wife, waiting in Salt Lake and six months pregnant, led him to row on ahead and go out overland to Salt Lake by way of the Uinta Agency. Thompson had the unenviable job of commanding the expedition while it waited in the heat and mosquitoes at the dreary mou