Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick Page A

continued on in singsong fashion for another hundred-plus lines, was called “The Cataract of Lodore,” and Hall proposed the name Lodore for the canyon they were passing through. Sumner was not pleased—“the idea of diving into musty trash to find names for new
discoveries on a new continent is un-American, to say the least,” he grumbled—but Powell liked the name, and Lodore it is to this day.
    On the following day, no one was reciting poetry. It brought, Sumner wrote, “as hard a day’s work as I ever wish to see,” and it was as dangerous as it was difficult. The morning alone saw a dozen bad rapids to line and portage, each one seemingly worse than the ones before. The scenery, for those in the mood for sightseeing, was spectacular. The men stopped for lunch at the foot of a perpendicular, rose-colored wall some fifteen hundred feet high. At one o’clock, they started up again.
    In half a mile, they came to a maelstrom that earned Bradley’s customary description as “the wildest rapid yet seen.” This time Sumner echoed him. They had reached “a terrible rapid,” he wrote, a place “where we could see nothing but spray and foam.” The lead boat, the Emma Dean , pulled safely to shore above the rapid.
    So did the Maid of the Cañon . Powell began climbing the rocks along the shore to size up their predicament. Then he heard a shout—the Howland brothers and Frank Goodman, in the No Name , were speeding down the river in midstream, out of control and headed for the rapid. In the meantime, where was the Sister ? Unable to help the No Name , Powell ran back upstream to try to warn the Sister to land. Racing along the rocks, shouting, waving, he saw nothing. Then, rounding a bend and pulling hard to shore and safety, there she was. Powell turned around yet again, chasing desperately back downstream in search of the No Name .
    Where was she? The first part of the rapid was a drop of ten or twelve feet, which was bad but perhaps manageable, and then came a steep, boulder-strewn stretch of forty or fifty feet, beaten into foam and churned by whirlpools. Powell scrambled over the rocks and finally caught sight of the No Name , straining to pull toward shore. Suddenly she hit a rock, tipped alarmingly, and filled with water. The men lost their oars. Helpless, the three men sat while the boat raced sideways several yards, crashed into another rock, and broke in two. The three crew members—none of them in life jackets—struggled frantically toward the broken boat and grabbed on to a chunk of its bow in the surging waters. Down they drifted a few hundred yards into another rapid, this one, too, filled with huge boulders. Twice the men lost their grip on the fractured bow and sank into the water; twice they managed to struggle back again.
    At one point, the river carried them near a sandbar, almost a mini-island, in midstream. Oramel Howland made a leap, found himself momentarily protected from the current by a rock, and dragged himself ashore. Frank Goodman tried the same move but vanished into the river. One hundred feet downstream, Seneca Howland leaped and pulled himself onto the same sandbar.
    Goodman reappeared a few seconds later, clinging to a barrel-sized rock in the middle of the torrent, gagging on river water, and calling for help. Oramel Howland found a branch that had washed up onto the sandbar. Wading into the river as near Goodman as he dared, he extended the branch toward him. Goodman let go of his rock, dove for the branch, and Howland pulled him to safety. “And now the three men are on an island,” Powell wrote, “with a swift, dangerous river on either side, and a fall below.”
    Worse yet, the river was rising. “Our position on the bar soon began to look serious,” noted Oramel Howland, a hard man to rattle. It fell to Sumner to rescue Howland and his fellow castaways. The men unloaded the Emma Dean , so