Read The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon for Free Online Page B
Authors: Kevin Fedarko
the children of Cárdenas, not the Native Americans, who would eventually come back to codify the canyon’s boundaries and catalog its wonders, to map out its grid lines with transits and a surveyor’s chain, and to lay down the foundations that would eventually enable them to harness the power of the river itself.
----
I. This is not a revolutionary idea to us, but it would have been to Cárdenas and his men. Another 129 years would pass before Nicholas Steno, the son of a Copenhagen goldsmith, framed this notion in the Principle of Superposition, one of the defining concepts of the emerging science of geology.
2
The Grand Old Man
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . . .
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.
—T. S. E LIOT
J UST before two o’clock on a blustery Monday afternoon in May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train was clattering past a strip of ragged, tent-roofed shacks that clung like a piece of gristle to the pale gray badlands of southwestern Wyoming. Directly ahead, a trestle spanned a broad, shallow river whose olive-colored current was restless and kinetic, alive with the sluicing runoff of late spring. As the locomotive approached the lip of the bridge, the engineer throttled his speed back to five miles an hour, a shift that would have been manifest inside thewalnut-paneled Pullman Palace saloon carriage, several cars behind the tender, by a faint tinkling of the chandelier and a subtle jolt to the small organ resting atop the richly brocaded Brussels carpeting. If, at this moment, any of the first-class passengers on the left side of the saloon car had been curious enough to push aside the heavily looped curtains framing the windows, they might have found themselves staring down on a diminutive navy of rowboats preparing to cast off on one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American exploration.
Those boats were manned by a squadron of bleary-eyed, rumple-haired men who had spent much of the previous forty-eight hoursattempting to drain the entire liquor supply of Green River Station, a town whose population of several dozen roustabouts and blackleg gamblers had gathered along the shore to spit tobacco juice and call out farewells. The boatmen were not in the best of shape. Their faces were unshaven, their clothes were disheveled, and they subjected the spectators to“much blowing off of gas and the fumes of bad whiskey.” But despite these handicaps, they had somehow managed to complete the final steps in loading up their impressive array of gear and provisions.
Inside the watertight compartments of the boats were enough bacon, flour, dried apples, sugar, and coffee beans to sustain a party of ten men for almost an entire year. An ample cache of ammunition accompanied a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns, plus the set of steel traps that they hoped would enable them to supplement their larder with fresh venison and beavertail soup. There was also a kit for surveying and mapmaking, including sextants, compasses, and four barometers—each featuring a thin tube of glass filled with a column of mercury and carefully packed in a protective layer of fresh straw. These would be used for determining their altitude as the river carried them on the better portion of its long journey from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortés.
By the time the train was rattling past on the trestle overhead, the stowing of this entire duffel—all seven thousand pounds of it—was finally complete, much to the satisfaction of a figure whose appearance gave little indication that he was destined for both greatness and notoriety. At thirty-five years old, Major John Wesley Powell stood barely five and a half feet tall, weighed less than 125 pounds, and scowled sternly at the world from behind the hedgerow of a beard that appeared to have been assembled from a box of steel
----
I. This is not a revolutionary idea to us, but it would have been to Cárdenas and his men. Another 129 years would pass before Nicholas Steno, the son of a Copenhagen goldsmith, framed this notion in the Principle of Superposition, one of the defining concepts of the emerging science of geology.
2
The Grand Old Man
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable . . .
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget.
—T. S. E LIOT
J UST before two o’clock on a blustery Monday afternoon in May of 1869, a westbound Union Pacific train was clattering past a strip of ragged, tent-roofed shacks that clung like a piece of gristle to the pale gray badlands of southwestern Wyoming. Directly ahead, a trestle spanned a broad, shallow river whose olive-colored current was restless and kinetic, alive with the sluicing runoff of late spring. As the locomotive approached the lip of the bridge, the engineer throttled his speed back to five miles an hour, a shift that would have been manifest inside thewalnut-paneled Pullman Palace saloon carriage, several cars behind the tender, by a faint tinkling of the chandelier and a subtle jolt to the small organ resting atop the richly brocaded Brussels carpeting. If, at this moment, any of the first-class passengers on the left side of the saloon car had been curious enough to push aside the heavily looped curtains framing the windows, they might have found themselves staring down on a diminutive navy of rowboats preparing to cast off on one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of American exploration.
Those boats were manned by a squadron of bleary-eyed, rumple-haired men who had spent much of the previous forty-eight hoursattempting to drain the entire liquor supply of Green River Station, a town whose population of several dozen roustabouts and blackleg gamblers had gathered along the shore to spit tobacco juice and call out farewells. The boatmen were not in the best of shape. Their faces were unshaven, their clothes were disheveled, and they subjected the spectators to“much blowing off of gas and the fumes of bad whiskey.” But despite these handicaps, they had somehow managed to complete the final steps in loading up their impressive array of gear and provisions.
Inside the watertight compartments of the boats were enough bacon, flour, dried apples, sugar, and coffee beans to sustain a party of ten men for almost an entire year. An ample cache of ammunition accompanied a small arsenal of rifles and shotguns, plus the set of steel traps that they hoped would enable them to supplement their larder with fresh venison and beavertail soup. There was also a kit for surveying and mapmaking, including sextants, compasses, and four barometers—each featuring a thin tube of glass filled with a column of mercury and carefully packed in a protective layer of fresh straw. These would be used for determining their altitude as the river carried them on the better portion of its long journey from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortés.
By the time the train was rattling past on the trestle overhead, the stowing of this entire duffel—all seven thousand pounds of it—was finally complete, much to the satisfaction of a figure whose appearance gave little indication that he was destined for both greatness and notoriety. At thirty-five years old, Major John Wesley Powell stood barely five and a half feet tall, weighed less than 125 pounds, and scowled sternly at the world from behind the hedgerow of a beard that appeared to have been assembled from a box of steel
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