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John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon is one of the few feats of American exploration that ranks with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Apollo landings on the moon. In terms of sheer life-and-death struggle in a dramatic landscape, the Powell expedition might be the most dramatic story of them all. As America’s frontier era has grown smaller in our national rearview mirror, many of our frontier heroes have shrunk, too, mainly because those heroes were agents of Manifest Destiny who viewed the land, wildlife, and Native Americans as obstacles to conquer and resources to exploit. Powell, however, has gained stature over time. Powell was first of all a scientist with a deep curiosity about nature, and this curiosity motivated his explorations. Because Powell viewed the landscape and waterscape as a scientist, he realized that the arid West couldn’t fit into America’s Manifest Destiny dreams, and thus he became a pioneering conservationist.

As one of the founders of the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in 1879, Powell studied Native American life with much more respect than most of his contemporaries. In recent decades millions of Americans have taken up river running and have appointed Powell one of the patron saints of river runners. For these reasons and more, interest in Powell has been growing, generating some valuable books about him and his expedition. A century ago Robert Stanton, who led the next expedition down the Colorado River after Powell’s, wrote a long book on Colorado River history —in fact, it was so long no publisher wanted it. Stanton’s first words in his book were, “Why another book on the Colorado River?”1 If Stanton already believed he had to justify his Colorado River history book, then it’s only fair that readers today, after a century of additional books, should ask if there can be any new discoveries about it, or at least discoveries of any significance. The answer is “Yes,” a surprisingly strong “Yes.” There are enough new discoveries to substantially rewrite the story of the Powell expedition.

This book had a simple beginning. Books about the Powell expedition didn’t say much about his crewmember William Hawkins except that he was from Missouri. I am also from Missouri, and so was curious to know more of Hawkins’s story. Was he from my own neighborhood? How did he come to join the Powell expedition? As I looked into Hawkins’s story, I was startled to discover a case of mistaken identity: the guy in the history books was the wrong guy. Back in the 1940s Powell’s first major biographer, William Culp Darrah, had looked for Hawkins but latched onto the Civil War record of someone else and put him into the history books, with the wrong birthdate, wrong birthplace, wrong family, wrong military record, even the wrong name. All subsequent historians had simply copied Darrah’s homework, not looking into original sources, and perpetuated his mistake. Looking further, I found that some of Darrah’s other statements about Hawkins had no source in the historical record, and in fact the record contradicted them. Darrah had portrayed Hawkins as a criminal, a fugitive, a liar, a shady character. Again, subsequent historians had simply repeated Darrah’s image. Yet when I looked into the sources, it appeared that Darrah had twisted some evidence and fabricated other claims. His motives were not hard to guess: In his later years Hawkins had written two strong denunciations of Powell’s leadership of the expedition. Darrah greatly admired Powell and wanted to defend his reputation, so he was eager to discredit Hawkins, to the point of dishonesty. I was to discover that this was only one of several times Darrah cooked the books to make Powell look better in his book.

The biographies of most of the other crewmembers were also skimpy, and I became curious about them, too. I soon found that they also had untold stories — important stories. I found documents about them, and also found their living families. Historians had never located, and hardly tried to find, the families of Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn, who left the expedition near the end and left us with two big controversies: why they left and why they disappeared without a trace. All along, for a century and a half, the Howland and Dunn families had passed from one generation to the next letters, photos, family memories, and documents about their ancestors. Such discoveries not only told the stories of the crewmembers, but also began to suggest new explanations for some of the events of the expedition. Powell’s crew included two of the most famous names in America in the 1860s: Howland and Sumner. The Howlands were a Mayflower family, whose early start in America helped them to become very successful and rich. The Sumners included one of America’s most powerful politicians. When I learned more about Howland family history and placed the Powell expedition within its context, I saw new reasons why the Howland brothers might have decided to leave the expedition. When I learned more about Sumner family history, I saw a new reason why Jack Sumner might have decided not to leave the expedition. The background stories of William Hawkins and Bill Dunn also offered new hints about their decisions about leaving or not leaving the expedition.

Historians have neglected the crewmembers, and some other important stories, because most were drawn to this subject out of admiration for John Wesley Powell. Like scientists who rely on paradigms to organize data into a coherent story, historians often start out accepting some basic stories, some assumptions about what happened or what events mean. Powell historians assumed that Powell was the whole story, that his crewmembers were peripheral characters: it hardly mattered who they were, where they were from, or what their motives were. Thus, historians’ research agendas were centered on Powell.

Even historians who were inclined to debunking, such as Otis — better known as Dock — Marston, nevertheless remained Powell-centric in their research agendas. Historians for whom Powell was a personal hero, especially Darrah  and Wallace Stegner, were eager to defend Powell from the written criticisms of crewmembers Hawkins and Sumner and the implied criticism of the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn, whose abandonment of the trip could be taken as as a sign of their dissatisfaction with Powell’s leadership. Thus Darrah and Stegner were downright eager to ignore Hawkins and Sumner. But at least Hawkins and Sumner got their names on the Powell Memorial on the canyon South Rim in Grand Canyon National Park. Other Powell admirers, especially Frederick Dellenbaugh, who was the chronicler of his second expedition, made sure that the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn were branded as deserters and that their names were left off the memorial.

Another factor in focusing research on Powell was that two of Powell’s biographers, Wallace Stegner and Donald Worster, were environmental historians— and very important ones — who were mainly interested in Powell the environmental prophet. Both Stegner and Worster did good jobs of placing Powell within the context of his times. Yet neither was nearly as interested in Powell the river explorer; for them the river expedition was just the prelude to the more important story. Biographical details about Powell’s crewmembers were largely irrelevant to their purposes. For information about the crew, Stegner, Worster, and other historians relied heavily on Darrah’s research. We do owe Darrah a large debt, for in the 1940s, when people who had personally known Powell and his crew were dying out, Darrah amassed a valuable collection of documents. Yet Darrah had his own agenda. In the course of this book, we will explore some interesting cases in historiography, of how history gets written. For instance, another historian perpetrated a hoax regarding the fate of the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn.

I also dug deeper into Powell’s story and came up with several important stories that had gone unnoticed. I visited archives and checked out leads no one had thought to explore, found documents that cast new light on various elements of the expedition, and made new connections between people and events. Some of these connections came from placing the Powell expedition in the context of the social, political, and cultural forces of his time. The Powell expedition did not take place in a vacuum, but was embedded in historical currents often as strong as the river currents that propelled their boats.

This book includes several parts. Part I takes a deep look into one of the longstanding controversies of Colorado River history: Was John Wesley Powell really the first person to go through the Grand Canyon? In 1867 a battered man named James White showed up on a crude raft downriver from the canyon. Ever since, people have debated whether he could or could not, did or did not make it through the canyon. White’s own testimony was vague enough that people can make a plausible case either way. Most of this debate has taken place in a vacuum, with insufficient facts for a foundation. In an archive no one else checked, I located a U.S. Army document that gives an authoritative account of one part of White’s story to which we can compare White’s version of events. I also look deeper into some of the other elements of his story. Powell’s fame has always been tangled up with the James White mystery, so it is appropriate that a book on Powell begins with White.

The heart of this book consists of the chapters on the crewmembers. In a symbolic reversal of the usual pattern of Powell books, I have placed these chapters in part II, before the chapters on Powell. Part III covers Powell, and part IV is on the origins of some of the names the expedition gave to one of their boats, and to a canyon. Part V is on the ending of the expedition, which was recorded by two outsiders, and on the fate of one of the boats. Finally, part VI offers a deeper exploration of another of the longstanding mysteries and controversies about the expedition: the fate of the Howland
brothers and Bill Dunn. I examine the two leading theories of what happened to them. Here, too, there are important new documents and facts to consider.

When we explore the life of William Hawkins after the expedition, it casts a startling new light on his claim, totally ignored by Powell historians, that he buried the bodies of his crewmembers. The Howland brothers had another brother who conducted a private investigation into the fate of his brothers, and his correspondence with Mormon leaders has remained in Howland family hands, unknown until now. In exploring the political events and contexts of southern Utah in 1869, we find and follow a scenario that has not been imagined before.