Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner Read Free Book Online Page B

the late 1860s, there was but one place where the frontier was still nearly intact.
     
     
     
     
    By 1869, the population of New York City had surpassed one million. The city had built a great water-supply aqueduct to the Croton River and was imagining its future subway system. Chicago, founded thirty years earlier, was already a big sprawling industrial town. The millionaires of San Francisco were building their palatial mansions on Nob Hill. New England was deforested, farms and settlements were spilling onto the prairie. However, on maps of the United States published in that year a substantial area remained a complete blank, and was marked “unexplored.”
     
    The region overlay parts of what is now Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. It was about the size of France, and through the middle of it ran the Colorado River. That was about all that was known about it, except that the topography was awesome and the rainfall scarce. The region was known as the Plateau Province, and parties heading westward tended to avoid it at all costs.
     
    Some of the Franciscan friars, who were as tough as anyone in the Old West, had wandered through it on the Old Spanish Trail. Otherwise, the Mormon Outlet Trail skirted the region to the west, the California and Oregon trails swung northward, and the El Paso-Yuma Trail went south. From a distance, one could see multicolored and multistoried mesas and cliffs, saurian ridges, and occasionally a distant snowcapped peak. There were accounts of canyons that began without reason and were suddenly a thousand feet deep, eroded more by wind than by water. A distance that a bird could cover in an hour might require a week to negotiate. The days were hot and the nights were often frigid, owing to the region’s high interior vastness, and water was almost impossible to find. Lacking wings, there was only one good way to explore it: by boat.
     
    On the 24th of May, 1869, the Powell Geographic Expedition set out on the Green River from the town of Green River, Wyoming, in four wooden dories: the Maid of the Canyon, the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, the Emma Dean, and the No Name. For a scientific expedition, it was an odd group. Powell, the leader, was the closest thing to a scientist. He had brought along his brother Walter—moody, sarcastic, morose, one of the thousands of psychiatric casualties of the Civil War. The rest of the party was made up mostly of mountain men: O. G. Howland, his brother Seneca, Bill Dunn, Billy Hawkins, and Jack Sumner, all of whom had been collected by Powell en route to Green River. He had also invited a beet-faced Englishman named Frank Goodman, who had been patrolling the frontier towns looking for adventure, and Andy Hall, an eighteen-year-old roustabout whose casual skill as an oarsman had impressed Powell when he saw him playing with a boat on the Green River. There was also George Bradley, a tough guy whom Powell had met by accident at Fort Bridger and who had agreed to come along in exchange for a discharge from the army, which Powell managed to obtain for him.
     
    For sixty miles out of the town of Green River, the river was sandy-bottomed and amiable. There were riffles, but nothing that could legitimately be called a rapid. The boatmen played in the currents, acquiring a feel for moving water; the others admired the scenery. As they neared the Uinta Mountains, they went into a sandstone canyon colored in marvelous hues, which Powell, who had a knack for naming things, called Flaming Gorge. The river bore southward until it came up against the flanks of the range, then turned eastward and entered Red Canyon.
     
    In Red Canyon, the expedition got its first lesson in how a few feet of drop per mile can turn a quiet river into something startling. Several of the rapids frightened them into racing for shore and lining or portaging, an awful strain with several thousand pounds of boats, supplies, and gear. After a while, however, even the bigger rapids