The Colorado River Exploring Expedition

Everyone who goes down the Utah canyons in a boat travels in the wake and shadow of John Wesley Powell.

Powell’s party–10 men at the start, six at the end–was the first to travel the entire distance of the Green and Colorado rivers’ canyon sections. It took them 99 days–May 24 to August 30, 1869–to go about a thousand miles. Their successful passage through the 277 miles of the Grand Canyon was especially remarkable. Most of the canyon was unexplored and unmapped; nobody knew whether it contained waterfalls or other unrunnable features.

There have been many accounts of the expedition, the most recent and definitive one, by the science writer Edward Dolnick, called “Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon” (2001). Powell published an account and about half the crew members recorded their own.

There’s a John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah. Our mile-by-mile river guide labeled sites on the Powell expedition and was peppered with quotes from Powell’s account. The impounded section of the Colorado River that drowned Glen Canyon is called Lake Powell. A century after the 1869 expedition, Powell appeared on a postage stamp steering a boat (which he never did).

In insight if not in name, Powell lives on today in the century-old (and intensifying) struggle over development and water access in the arid West. “Powell became the first great spokesman in American history for the notion of limits,” Dolnick wrote. “The lesson of the West, this astonishingly optimistic man declared, was that not all things are possible.”

So, it’s worth saying a bit about who he and his fellow explorers were, and what they did.

Powell was born in upstate New York in 1834. His father was an emigrant from England and an impecunious itinerant preacher. The family lived in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois during John Wesley’s childhood. As a young man he did a lot of rowing on the great rivers of the Midwest.

Powell was 35 years old at the time of expedition; the crew ranged from 20 to 36. Only Powell was married. Seven of the 10 men were Union veterans of the Civil War, including Powell’s younger brother, Walter, whose experience in combat and seven months in a Confederate prison camp caused permanent psychological damage. Powell himself was shot in the right arm–he was right-handed–at the Battle of Shiloh in western Tennessee on April 6, 1862. Two days later the limb was amputated. He returned to his artillery battery, but had a second operation in 1864 and resigned his commission in 1865.

He was left with a chronically painful stump of his upper arm, and was ever after referred to as “Major Powell.”

The expedition was financed privately, although the federal government provided army rations (mostly flour, bacon, dried apples, and coffee). Three members were paid to draw maps, use scientific instruments, and hunt and cook; the rest were volunteers. Not everyone could swim well and none other than Powell had experience in boats. There was only one life jacket, which was for Powell.

The expedition was unrelenting hardship.

Less than two weeks into the trip one of the four boats was smashed to pieces in a rapid. A ton of cargo, including one-third of the food, several scientific instruments, and four guns were lost. More was lost as time went on, including oars, which the crew replaced by carving new ones from driftwood.

Eventually, they had barely enough to keep proceeding.

In the middle of August–the trip had started on May 24–Powell wrote: “It is especially cold in the rain to-night. The little canvas we have is rotten and useless. The rubber ponchos, with which we started from Green River City, have all been lost; more than half the party is without hats, and not one of us has an entire suit of clothes, and we have not a blanket apiece.” They’d also lost most of the maps and scientific instruments, and were on reduced rations, except for coffee.

By the end, the crew had run 414 rapids and portaged around 62. On many portages they “lined” the boats through unnavigable water from the shore, using ropes. In others, they carried the oak boats and thousands of pounds of supplies along the shore.

Miraculously, nobody died. On a similar expedition mounted in 1889 by a Denver businessman scouting a route for a railroad, three people drowned in the Grand Canyon. The businessman died first, and five days later two crew members. The survivors abandoned the trip and climbed out.

Although no one died on the river, only six members of the Powell expedition made it to the end of the Grand Canyon.

One man had left two months earlier at the last contact with civilization. On August 28, 1869, three men, with Powell’s consent, left the party and walked out of the canyon rather go through what looked to be the most dangerous rapid yet. They were certain they’d die.

Later that day, the six remaining members made it through what they named Separation Rapid. One man had to rescue Powell and two others after their boat capsized. They traveled on, and reached a Mormon hamlet two days later. They were back in the world.

The three men who’d left the expedition were never seen again. It’s believed they were killed by Indians, or perhaps by Mormon settlers suspicious of interlopers.

On September 1, 1869, the Powell brothers headed overland to St. George, Utah, and the four others took two boats varying distances farther down the river. The Colorado River Exploring Expedition ended with both a bang and a whimper.

The surviving members of the expedition never reunited. There is no photograph of them together. Little equipment remained when the trip was over, and most of the rocks, fossils and Indian artifacts Powell collected were lost in capsizes. None of the boats survived, and although their design is known–they were based on Whitehall rowboats–no photographs of them exist, either.

The expedition, however, lived on in the accounts and memories of its leader and crew. In addition to Powell, two men kept journals of the trip while it was underway, and two others wrote accounts early in the 20th Century when they were old men. It’s a good guess it changed all their lives.

Powell paid them a touching and rhapsodic tribute in the preface of his 1895 account.

Many years have passed since the exploration, and those who were boys with me in the enterprise are–ah, most of them are dead, and the living are gray with age. Their bronzed, hardy, brave faces come before me as they appeared in the vigor of life; their lithe but powerful forms seem to move around me; and the memory of the men and their heroic deeds, the men and their generous acts, overwhelms me with a joy that seems almost a grief, for it starts a fountain of tears. I was a maimed man; my right arm was gone; and these brave men, these good men, never forgot it. In every danger my safety was their first care, and in every waking hour some kind service was rendered me, and they transfigured my misfortune into a boon.

To you [and here he named them all] my noble and generous companions, dead and alive, I dedicate this book.

Powell died on September 23, 1902, at the age of 68, at the Haven Colony in Brooklin, Maine–a summer retreat for wealthy Washingtonians, of which he’d been one for years. The house still stands.

Edward Dolnick ends “Down the Great Unknown” with a quote from a speech the secretary of the interior gave many years later at a ceremony honoring Powell. It says it all, and is worth repeating.

“Major Powell, throughout his life, was the incarnation of the inquisitive and courageous spirit of the American. He wanted to know and he was willing to risk his life that he might know.”