It was the last blank space on the map of the United States. Nobody had dared to take the Colorado River between the colossal rock walls that the desert sun turned into a merciless, blazing furnace. Three hundred years earlier the conquistador Francisco Coronado had glimpsed the region and declared it impassable. And later American settlers preferred to keep their distance too – what would they have been looking for on the barren, parched soil of Arizona? Only Major John Wesley Powell, a Civil War hero, found a new purpose in life in a journey into the Great Unknown.
Perhaps he was already bored with the daily routine at Illinois Wesleyan University, where he had taken up a post after leaving the army. And perhaps he also longed to write his name into history for good. And so on 13 August 1869, together with eight other men, he sailed into the depths of the Grand Canyon.
On that brutally hot day they tied up their boats for the last time on the shore of the world they still knew. Everything beyond was an endless book of questions. They had no idea what the Colorado had in store for them. And it could have been anything – sheer waterfalls, wild rapids with monstrous boulders poking out of them, narrow channels full of raging water and, above it all, sheer walls that would give them no escape if things went wrong, up onto the perhaps even more hostile plateaus high above.
Powell tried to get financial backing for his expedition from the US government, but for Congress this gamble in an area of no commercial use was worthless. The land was barren and, what's more, untamed Native American tribes still rode their horses across the parched sand. In exchange for the promise of scientific samples and data, John Wesley Powell eventually got money from the Illinois Historical Society, the US Army donated ten months' worth of military rations and the Union Pacific railroad shipped four wooden boats for him from Chicago to Green River. He managed to recruit a crew of fellow Civil War veterans, hunters and trappers who knew how to survive in the wild. But none of them had any experience of running rapids. That caused problems just two weeks after setting off from Wyoming. At a spot Powell later aptly named Disaster Falls, the current swept the crew of one boat into a rapid full of rocks. The boat capsized and broke in half. Everyone survived, but a third of their precious supplies and one of the boats were lost before they had even got close to the gateway of the Grand Canyon.
After this, the Englishman Frank Goodman decided to leave the expedition. Powell, however, had no doubts about carrying on. Even though other things didn't go to plan either. Although they had modified the boats before the expedition so that water couldn't reach the cargo of food and ammunition on board, their rations got wetter and wetter. The bread went mouldy and the guns proved almost useless – in the parched landscape they barely saw another living creature to shoot and eat. To avoid further disasters in the rapids, Powell insisted that they line the boats on ropes along the sides of the canyon, which only dragged out their progress and robbed the men of what was left of their strength and resolve. That in turn led to quarrels and disputes. And not even the nights gave them the peace to recharge for the next day. A lack of beaches to camp on often drove them onto the rocks, where they huddled sitting up – just waiting for morning to come.
“The boats are entirely unmanageable,” John Wesley Powell wrote in his diary on 15 August 1869. The three-hundred-metre walls towering above their heads left the ten men completely at the mercy of the Colorado. It became a fight for survival. And yet the most treacherous section was still lying in wait for them.
Separation Canyon. That's what Powell named the terrifying dark granite walls against which the Colorado smashed with a mighty roar, the shattered water swirling through the air all around in droplets. They could hardly hear each other. They had to shout over the raging river. Three months after setting off from Wyoming, faced with the most frightening thing they had seen so far, the disputes among the members of the expedition boiled over into the open.
Oramel Howland tried to persuade Powell to end the expedition – he begged him not to drive the whole crew into the jaws of death because of his obsession. He had even found a weak spot in the walls that would let them out of the canyon into the desert. After a hundred-and-twenty-kilometre march they would reach the nearest Mormon settlement and might even survive. But Powell sensed the end of the canyon was getting close. And so close to the goal, he couldn't give up. “Even if only one of you stays with me,” he told the men, “I'll carry on!” In the end six of them stayed with Powell. For Howland, though, getting back into a boat was unthinkable – that's how much Separation Canyon terrified him – and together with his brother Seneca and William Dunn he left the expedition and began scrambling up the walls back to the world. At that moment there were sixty kilometres left to the end of the Grand Canyon out of four hundred and fifty in total, and only two days' paddling to calmer waters. But neither John Wesley Powell nor Oramel Howland knew that.
The six men squeezed into two boats – they left the third behind with some food and ammunition for the men who had gone their own way – and got through the first rapids with surprising ease. But Separation Canyon showed its treachery once more that day. As they were trying to line one of the boats past the rapids on a rope – as they had done to the point of exhaustion probably a thousand times during the expedition – a huge wave tore the boat away, taking with it the expedition's chronicler, George Bradley. The boat vanished and resurfaced in the foaming water, which tossed it around like a child's toy. The others stared in horror, but didn't catch sight of Bradley even once. When the boat disappeared under the surface for the last time, Bradley popped up in its place a moment later, waving his hat at the others and shouting so loudly that his voice echoed off the canyon walls several times – he had just survived his own death. And the expedition was left with one single boat.
But when, the next day, Sunday 29 August 1869, John Wesley Powell and his men floated past Grand Wash, they knew nothing bad lay ahead. After more than three months they had reached the end of their historic journey, while the world around them had long since given them up for dead. In wooden boats originally used by river ferrymen, they had coloured in another piece of the world map.
John Wesley Powell went down the Grand Canyon once more – in 1871. This time with the backing of the US government and with photographers who mapped the whole area. In the 1870s he became the man of the decade. He toured America giving lectures, founded the United States Geological Survey and tirelessly championed the protection of the Grand Canyon.
From the day Oramel Howland, his brother Seneca Howland and William Dunn left the expedition, nobody ever heard of them again. They were most likely murdered by Mormon settlers who mistook them for government agents hunting criminals from a sect of religious fundamentalists.
Today 20,000 people a year head down the Grand Canyon – with a professional guide on motorised rubber rafts that get through the whole canyon in one to two weeks. The rapids of Separation Canyon, however, were buried by Lake Mead in the 1930s, so very few people have experienced the Grand Canyon's most extreme water the way John Wesley Powell and his expedition did.
