Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick Read Free Book Online

signalled to me and we tried to land, and did finally get to shore some four hundred yards below.” No one was much inclined to preach a sermon on a four-football-field miscalculation—the upstream boats joined their wayward colleagues and, in Hawkins’s grumpy summary, “the rest of the boys had the laugh on us”—but everyone knew the story had a moral. It was easily put: The river was fast and strong,
and they were all novices; they had better hope they were quick learners.
    Their problem, Hall and Hawkins decided, was that they were overloaded. Each of the boats was supposed to be carrying the same weight, but the Kitty Clyde’s Sister seemed to be riding several inches lower than the others. Even in calm water, the river was within four inches of spilling into the boat. The two men set to work removing supplies, figuring that “we better unload some of the bacon and take chances of replacing it with venison and mountain sheep later on. So we unloaded five hundred pounds of bacon in the river.” At the time, throwing food overboard seemed like a good idea.
    They camped that first night at the foot of an overhanging cliff, perhaps ten miles downstream from Green River Station. The two Powells and Bradley set out for “a couple of hours geologising.” While they searched for fossils, Oramel Howland and Dunn set out to hunt dinner. The two men returned at dark with one small rabbit. It made, Sumner noted dryly, “rather slim rations for ten hungry men.”
    Camp was cheery, though it was wet and raw. Unfazed, the men did their best to keep dry and to outboast one another. We “exchanged tough stories at a fearful rate,” Sumner recalled, but the crew was still suffering the effects of the nights of hard drinking at Green River Station. Everyone turned in early.
    The first day of the trip was complete. So far, so good.
    While the men snore in their bedrolls, let us take a moment to talk about their journals. Powell, Sumner, and Bradley all kept diaries. ( Somehow the taciturn Bradley managed to keep a detailed daily record of the trip without any of the others catching on.) Several of the others chimed in briefly, adding still more voices to the unruly chorus. We have two short accounts of the trip from Billy Hawkins, a few brief letters from Andy Hall, a long newspaper article by Walter Powell, two long newspaper stories by Oramel Howland.
    The men had two favorite modes of speech, wild exaggeration and ludicrous understatement. Ideally, both were delivered deadpan. Time and again, the accounts overflow with an offhand vitality that reminds us that we are listening to Mark Twain’s contemporaries. One remote spot was “desolate enough to suit a lovesick poet.” An eddy snagged a boat and “whirled it around quick enough to take the kinks out of a ram’s horn.” In one especially wild rapid, “we broke many oars and most of the Ten Commandments.”
    Some of the handwritten originals have been lost. But Powell’s notes (or, more precisely, notes that cover just over half the expedition) survived a long journey, from the depths of the Grand Canyon to a silent, dusty archive at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. There, at a wooden table under flickering fluorescent lights, a visitor can hold the pages that Powell held and study the notes he scrawled on long, thin pages marked with water spots and splashes of coffee that fell more than a century ago. The handwriting is large and looping, and the words sit awkwardly on the page.
    Bradley’s journal has come to rest only a mile or two from Powell’s, in the Library of Congress, a second message-in-a-bottle from a single shipwreck. Meticulously neat, it looks nothing like Powell’s. Bradley wrote on small pages in impeccable but infinitesimal script, as if he were one of those people who can inscribe the Twenty-third Psalm on a grain of rice. From its