Down the Great Unknown
Edward Dolnick’s 2002 book "Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon” is a vital complement (some might say "“antidote”) to Powell’s own widely-read account of his journey. I say this in the sense that there are various instances of major discrepancies in both facts and tone between his published account (5 years after-the-fact) and his river log, and between the latter two and the chronicles kept by three other members of that famous expedition that cast new (to me, anyway) light on both the events and on the character of Powell and his fellow explorers.
The key points (seriatim) that I took away from the book are:
1) As Powell himself later admitted, good luck played at least as important a role in the expedition’s success as anything. In fairness, Powell’s cautious decisions when faced with the choice of either running or lining or portaging rapids probably played a life-saving role in its success, although it was frustrating for his crew at the time.
2) While, superficially, the expedition seemed well planned and supplied, in reality neither the men nor the equipment were up to the task before them. The boats were completely unsuitable for running rapids, designed instead for speeding across harbors. He had no experienced river boatmen with him. In combination, these two facts were nearly disastrous: Powell & Co ran rapids facing upstream, which placed severe limits on their ability to maneuver, and react to rapidly changing river conditions. About all they could do was pick a line, then row like hell and hope for the best. Re-supply was impossible after the Uinta River, Utah and food stores were lost or ruined by wetting and drying to the point where they were on starvation rations by the time they reached the Mormon settlements at junction of the Colorado with the Virgin River.
3) The one-armed Powell’s character combined unbridled romanticism with scientific curiosity and imperious military discipline. Many (most?) of his men found this irksome, at best, unbearable at worst. This boiled forth as a near-mutiny only once on the journey, but contributed to the overland departure of three crew members at Separation Rapid, only 24 hours before the boats reached safety. At least one crew member reported being cheated by Powell out of promised wages after the expedition. If this is true, it was pretty despicable.
4) Circumstantial evidence presented by Dolnick points to a literal and figurative smoking gun in the hands of Mormon settlers as being those responsible for the deaths of Dunn and the Howland brothers, who left the expedition at Separation Rapid. As at the Mountain Meadows massacre, the evidence suggests that they were murdered by the settlers as a part of an ongoing campaign to keep “gentiles” and agents of the US gov’t out of their promised land of “Zion”.
5) In general the atmosphere of the expedition was one of oppressive fear, generated by enforced confinement between unscalable canyon walls, the amplified roar of unknown downstream rapids, the desperate hard work necessary to portage and line them under conditions of near-starvation, especially in the Grand Canyon itself. This was alleviated by very rare calm stretches, like the Stillwater and Labyrinth Canyons of the Green, where the men complained of the heat and monotony!
I’d rate this as an excellent, balanced account of the expedition. Dolnick presents abundant background material on river-running, geology, Powell and his companions history and Civil War experiences (including that which cost Powell his arm).
