A History of Garfield County

Garfield county and exploration of the Colorado river

C H A P T E R 5 GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER W» hile Panguitch was being settled for the second time, impor­tant events were taking place in the eastern portion of the future county. John Wesley Powell led two scientific explorations of the Colorado River, the first in 1869 and the second in 1871-72. These expeditions had several purposes. Powell wanted to know if the Colorado River could be navigated, and, in the process of discover­ing that feasibility, he intended to gather as much scientific informa­tion as possible about the area's geology, anthropology, and plant and animal life along the river. At the conclusion of these two expeditions, Powell sent his brother-in-law, Almon H. Thompson, to explore and name the trib­utaries to the Colorado River. The reports that came from these mon­umental scientific explorations would serve as a guide to the region for generations to come. The John Wesley Powell Colorado River Expeditions (1869, 1871-72) Although Native Americans, early explorers, trappers, and settlers 93 94 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY The "Emma Dean" with John Wesley Powell's chair on top. (Utah State Historical Society) had crossed the Colorado and Green rivers, no one was known to have ventured into the section that runs from the confluence of the Green and Colorado rivers to Grand Wash below the Grand Canyon and lived to tell about it. Earlier explorers, trappers, and military expeditions in search of practical railway routes saw no reason to go beyond the confluence. After reaching the junction of the two rivers in 1859, Captain J.M. Macomb of the U.S. Army commented, "I can- GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 95 not conceive of a more worthless and impracticable region."1 The leader of an earlier southern scientific expedition in 1857-58, Joseph C. Ives, had stopped at the Colorado River to look over its vast canyons below. "Ours has been the first," he wrote, "and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater part of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undis­turbed." 2 John Wesley Powell and millions who have followed have surely proved him wrong! At Powell's birth in Palmyra, New York, on 24 March 1834, his parents named him John Wesley, hoping he would become a minis­ter. But the young man did not follow the wishes of his anti-Mormon father; instead, he became a teacher, soldier, professor, explorer, sci­entist, director of the United States Geological Survey, and a friend of the Mormons. A slim, wiry man, Powell stood five feet seven inches high with his boots on. He had a light complexion, grey eyes that smiled when he did, an unruly head of thick auburn hair, and a cropped beard. The right sleeve of his shirt hung empty, his arm a casualty of the Civil War, in which he had reached the rank of major in the Union Army. He was a thirty-five year-old professor of geology at Wesleyan University when he and ten men with four boats pushed off the bank of the Green River on 24 May 1869, ready to plunge into the "Great Unknown" reaches of the Colorado River and its main tributary. The townspeople of Green River, Wyoming, cheered them off. Major Powell, Bill Dunn and Jack Sumner led in the smallest craft, the six­teen- foot Emma Dean, named after Powell's wife and made of pine. For much of the voyage Powell would ride as look-out in a chair strapped to the top of this boat. Next came Walter Powell, the Major's brother, and George Bradley in the Kitty Clyde's Sister; they were fol­lowed by the Maid-of-the-Canyon, with Andy Hall and William "Billy" Rhodes Hawking at the ores. Two brothers, Orvel G. and Seneca Howland, together with Frank Goodman brought up the rear in the No Name. These three latter boats were each twenty-one feet in length. When the expedition reached the confluence of the Green and Grand rivers on 17 July, they had passed through numerous rapids 96 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY Francis Marion Bishop, cartographer for the Powell expedition. (Utah State Historical Society) and canyons, lost the No Name, a t h i r d of their bed rolls, m u c h of their food, and part of the scientific equipment. They camped at the confluence for four nights, exploring, taking scientific measurements, GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 97 Repairing one of the Powell Expedition boats at the mouth of the Muddy River. Individuals from left to right are W. Johnson, F.S. Dellenbaugh, and J.K. Hillers. (Utah State Historical Society) and taking stock of their supplies. "The flour has been wet and dried so many times that it is all musty and full of hard lumps. We make a sieve of mosquito netting and r u n our flour through it, losing more than 200 pounds by the process," wrote Powell. "Our losses . . . leave us little more than two month's supplies, and to make t h em last thus long we must be fortunate enough to lose n o more."3 98 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY On the morning of 21 July, they started again with a new air of excitement-they were on the Colorado River. Four miles later the river swept them into future Garfield County and down Cataract Canyon. Before they stopped to sleep that night on a narrow, rocky strip of beach, they had run numerous rapids, portaged three more, swamped-but rescued-the Emma Dean, lost three oars, and only made eight and a half miles. All the boats leaked from their pound­ings against the rocks of the turbulent canyon. The next afternoon they made camp at a larger beach. There they found a pile of drift­wood, which they used to make new ores. Powell and a companion climbed 1,500 feet up the canyon wall to some dwarf pines to get pitch to patch the leaks. On the evening of 23 July, Powell reflected on their journey and contemplated what lay ahead: There are great descents yet to be made, but if they are distributed in rapids and short falls, and they have been heretofore, we shall be able to overcome them; but may be we shall come to a fall in these canyons which we cannot pass, where the walls rise from the water's edge, so that we cannot land, and where the water is so swift that we cannot return. . . . How will it be in the future? On the 27th they stopped again to repair leaks and also suc­ceeded in killing two mountain sheep. That night they feasted: "And a feast it was! Two fine young sheep! We cared not for bread or beans or dried apples to-night; coffee and mutton are all we ask," wrote Powell. After eight days of battle with river and rock, the tempestuous river finally calmed and turned west. Before them lay a range of unmapped, unexplored mountains. Powell named them the Henry Mountains. A short distance farther, he signaled the men to turn up a stream entering from the west. One of the group who had gone ashore shouted, "Is it a trout stream?" Bill Dunn shouted back, "No, it's a dirty devil." Powell considered the Dirty Devil an appropriate name for the river. Another canyon lay around the next day's first bend. Powell called it Glen Canyon for the many tree-lined glens at the mouths of the numerous creeks that entered the river. About 200 feet above them on the left wall they could see the ruins of an old Indian struc- GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 99 ture. Climbing to it, they found flint chips, arrowheads-some per­fect, others broken-and pottery fragments scattered "in great pro­fusion." The structure had walls of carefully laid and mortared stone. On a nearby cliff face were "many etchings." Fifteen miles downriver they found more ruins. That evening, at a camp about three miles farther, Powell decided to climb to the top of a rock outcropping above the camp to see if he could get a better look at the country. Near the top he was surprised to find stairs cut in the red rocks. Farther up he came to "an old, rick­ety ladder" standing against a twelve-foot wall. Powell supposed this to be a look-out point for the ancient people who had once inhab­ited this canyon. The next day, 30 July, the Powell expedition passed out of future Garfield County. Today, the waters of Lake Powell have climbed the walls of Glen Canyon to bury the secret coves and elegant grottos that Powell described with such appreciation and reverence. A hundred days after departing from the town of Green River the Powell expedition exited the Grand Canyon on 29 August, minus three of its crew. The day before, William Dunn and the Howland brothers looked downriver at another treacherous chasm strewn with boulders-Separation Rapid, as it was later named. Sure the expedi­tion could go no farther on the water, they elected to climb out of the canyon. Powell would later be told that Shivwits Indians, mistaking them for miners who had abused an Indian woman, killed the trio after they climbed over the rim of the Grand Canyon. Powell's second expedition was a combination river and overland expedition. Although Powell took no formally trained scientists with him, his brother-in-law, Almon H. Thompson, would become a first-rate topographer, as would the expedition's artist, seventeen-year-old Frederick Dellenbaugh. Powell hired Jack Hillers as a teamster, but the German immigrant had more valuable talents and became the survey group's photographer. In preparation for this second voyage, Powell arranged to have supplies carried in at several strategic points along the river. He con­tracted with Indian agent and Mormon missionary Jacob Hamblin to carry supplies down the Dirty Devil River to its junction with the Colorado River. Hamblin did not go far enough north in search of 100 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY John Wesley Powell with a Southern Utah Native American. (Utah State Historical Society) the headwaters of the Dirty Devil, however. Instead, he traveled down another river, which Thompson would later name the Escalante, that was some forty miles southeast of the Dirty Devil. After following its narrow, rugged, twisting canyon for fifty miles, Hamblin could go no GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 101 farther. He retreated to report back to Powell that the river was not passable to the Colorado. He took the supplies by another route far­ther south to the Crossing of the Fathers, now submerged by Lake Powell. The second Powell expedition started at Green River, Wyoming, on 22 May 1871. During the course of the trip, Powell left and rejoined his men a number of times. In his absences he returned to Washington to seek additional funding, visited his wife, Emma (whom he had left in Salt Lake City), explored the area of future Zion National Park and other areas of southern Utah, and traveled to Indian communities with Jacob Hamblin. Major Powell was on the river with his men from 2 September to 10 October from Green River, Utah, to the Crossing of the Fathers, and thus traced the eastern boarder of Garfield County again. When he was away, he delegated the command to Almon H. Thompson. With his field headquarters in Kanab, Thompson would spend the next six years surveying and mapping the Arizona Strip and south­ern and east-central Utah-including most of Garfield County. Of the two Powell expeditions down the Colorado River, the first became the most significant and best-documented. The records of the two expeditions were combined into one report, but Powell neglected to even name the men who were part of the second trip. The crew of Powell's 1871-72 expedition consisted of Major Powell's cousin, Clem Powell, his brother-in-law, Almon H. Thompson, Frank Richardson, Frederick Dellenbaugh, S.V. Jones, J.F. Steward, EM. Bishop, Andrew Hatton, and photographer O.E. Beaman. Some of them, including Dellenbaugh, left valuable accounts of the second expedition. Almon H. Thompson's Scientific Explorations, 1871-1877 In 1871 when John Wesley Powell began his second expedition, the eastern two-thirds of Garfield County-from the Aquarius Plateau and the northern tributaries of the Escalante River to the Henry Mountains and the Colorado River-remained the last great unmapped wilderness of the American West. At the end of the sec­ond expedition, Powell instructed Almon H. Thompson to survey and map the tributaries of the Colorado River below its confluence with the Green River, and to give names to the many unnamed fea- 102 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY John E. Weyss, an artist with the George M. Wheeler Survey, made the first illustration of Bryce Canyon-a pencil drawing in 1878. (Utah State Historical Society) tures of this unusual landscape-a task which took nearly six more years. With Kanab as their base, Thompson, with eight other men to assist him, set to work. The exploring p a r t y made its way to the Paria River, following it to its headwaters below Bryce Canyon. They called the plateau that caps the Pink Cliffs to the n o r t h Table Top Plateau (known locally as Barney Top), and the stream which emerges from it was named Table Cliff Creek-later named Henrieville Creek after settlement of that town in 1878. Apparently the p a r t y did not venture into the Bryce Canyon area that would one day become a stunning national park. Edwin E. Howell and Grove Karl Gilbert of a rival survey expedition led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler stumbled onto the pink cliffs and spires in 1872 and provided the first recorded depiction of the intricately carved fairyland: # We came suddenly on the grandest of views. We stand on a cliff 1,000 feet high, the "Summit of the Rim." Just before starting down the slope we caught a glimpse of a perfect wilderness of red pinnacles, the stunningest thing out of a picture.4 GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 103 John E. Weyss, an artist with the same survey, made the first illus­t r a t i o n of Bryce Canyon-a pencil drawing. The following year Thompson and F. S. Dellenbaugh returned to the area and climbed into Bryce Canyon from the south near Rainbow Point. On 18 November 1876 T.C. Bailey-also of the Wheeler group- would walk out onto Sunset Point while surveying a guide meridian. He penned one of the most vivid early descriptions of the canyon: The surface breaks off almost perpendicularly to a depth of several hundred feet-seems, indeed, as though the bottom had dropped out and left rocks standing in all shapes and forms as lone sentinels over the grotesque and picturesque scene. There are thousands of red, white, purple, and vermillion colored rocks, of all sizes resem­bling sentinels on the walls of castles; monks and priests with their robes, attendants, cathedrals, and congregations. There are deep cav­erns and rooms resembling ruins of prisons, castles, churches, with their guarded walls, battlements, spires, and steeples, niches and recess, presenting the wildest and most wonderful scene that the eye of man ever beheld, in fact it is one of the wonders of the world.5 From Henrieville Creek the Thompson survey group continued up "The Blues" to Potato Valley, camping in one of the "green grassy meadows" Franklin Benjamin Woolley had lavishly written of in his military report seven years before. After climbing to the summit of a white sandstone ridge just east of present-day Escalante townsite, Thompson recognized the river Jacob Hamblin had earlier thought was the Dirty Devil while trying to get supplies to the second Powell river expedition. This river cut a course southwest of t h e Henry Mountains, while the D i r ty Devil joined the Colorado River some forty miles to the northeast. Thompson recalled, "Believing our party to be the discoverers, we decided to call the stream Escalante River in honor of Father Escalante, the old Spanish explorer, and the country it drains, Escalante Basin." The nearby s t r e am that feeds i n t o the Escalante River they named Pine Creek. The Escalante River and its basin drain a 8,840-square-mile area. From the ridgetop Thompson described the scene before him: We found we were on the western rim of a basin-like region 70 miles in length and 50 miles in breadth and extending from the 104 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY eastern slope of the Aquarius Plateau to the Colorado River. A large portion of this area is naked sandstone rock traversed in all directions by a perfect labyrinth of narrow gorges, sometimes seeming to cross each other but finally uniting in the principal [river channel] whose black line cut its way to the Colorado River a few miles above the mouth of the San Juan River.6 After locating the Henry Mountains on the horizon and verify­ing their position in relation to them, they selected a route to the Colorado River. It took them to the foot of the Aquarius Plateau (which they named after the water-bearer constellation for its multi­ple lakes and streams), then across the main ridge of the Waterpocket Fold. They affixed that name to the huge geological region because of the many natural hollows and water-filled tanks there that sup­plied them with water. As they approached the Henry Mountains, the men surprised a small band of Paiute Indians who hid in the brush in fright when they saw that the intruders were white. Finally an old man braved an approach. The explorers rewarded him with a few gifts they carried with them for just this sort of an occasion. Thompson and his men continued on around the south end of the Henry Mountains to the mouth of the Dirty Devil River. The boat they had cached there the year before remained water worthy. Four of the men took the craft down the Colorado River to its junction with the Paria River, where they beached it and eventually made their way back to Kanab. The rest of the party, led by Thompson, back­tracked to Potato Valley and resumed the work of surveying, map­ping, and sketching the features of the Aquarius Plateau, the Henry Mountains, and the numerous springs and creeks that drained them. When Powell discovered and named the Dirty Devil River on 27 July 1869 he had no idea where its headwaters were located, nor did he know that it had two main forks. Consequently, when Thompson and his men later explored the river from its upper tributaries in Wayne County to its mouth, they called it the Fremont River from the head of the south fork to where it empties through a narrow canyon into the Colorado River. The north fork he named Curtis Creek. Confusion over the names persisted for a number of years. Today the north fork is known as Muddy Creek, and the south fork as GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 105 the Fremont River. Where they join near Hanksville they become the Dirty Devil. When T h o m p s o n chose to n a m e a n o t h e r t r i b u t a r y Tantalus Creek he chose well. The creek begins as a s p r i n g high on the Aquarius Plateau near today's Bowen Reservoir and cuts through the Waterpocket Fold. The mythological Greek gods punished the sinful Tantalus by causing a lake's waters to recede whenever he t r i ed to drink from it. During the w a rm months of summer Tantalus Creek is absorbed into the sand or evaporates before it reaches the Fremont River.7 In 1872 T h o m p s o n took his survey t e am u p Pennellen Pass, which cuts between the two highest peaks of the Henry Mountains- Mount Pennell and Mount Ellen-but he did not survey that area on this trip. The Powell survey t e am received new d i s t i n c t i o n when E.E. Howell joined it in 1874 and Clarence E. D u t t o n and G.K. Gilbert signed on in 1875. It was Gilbert and Walter H. Graves who con­ducted a scientific study of the Henry Mountains in 1875-76. In the years between Thompson's first visit to the Henry Mountains and this survey a number of frontiersmen also had visited the area to no avail in search of minerals or land on which to farm or graze their stock. Gilbert's report declares the Henry Mountains virtually useless for any practical purpose: The physical conditions of elevation and aridity which have caused it to be so deeply carved . . . have rendered the region [nearly inac­cessible] and have made it a desert, almost without economic value. . . . There is timber upon their flanks and . . . coal near at hand, but both are too far removed from other economic interests to find the market which would give them value. It is only for the purposes of grazing that they can be said to have a money value, and so distant are they at present from any market that even that value is small. At the conclusion of his report, Gilbert declared, "No one but a geologist will ever profitably seek out the Henry Mountains."8 In 1879 John Wesley Powell issued his Report of the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the 106 HISTORY OF GARFIELD COUNTY Lands of Utah, which included the results of Almon H. Thompson's explorations from 1871 to 1877. In this report, Powell laid out a pro­gram for the orderly development of the West in general and Utah in particular. Since only a small portion of the region could be farmed (even by employing irrigation through cooperative investment and labor), Powell recommended that the land not be settled in the cus­tomary patterns of the more arable eastern and West Coast regions. He believed that the terrain should determine the shape of the tracts of farmed land, not an artificial grid. The high timberlands, according to the report, were more valu­able for their forests than for farm acreage and should be protected from fire. Since pasturage was sparse and would require large sections of land to sustain grazing, Powell recommended that farms and ranches be at least 2,560 acres and should include reliable water sources and small areas of irrigable land. He expressed his concern over expected settlement and its impact on water resources by sug­gesting that reservoir sites be selected and set aside for future irriga­tion needs. For example, Dutton, in his part of the report, estimated that a dam at the Panguitch Lake drainage point would expand the lake to an area of six or seven square miles, increasing its depth by some twenty-five feet.9 Powell estimated, however, that only 2.8 per­cent of the plateau region could be irrigated. And during the next hundred years, in fact, the construction of dams and canals only increased the irrigated acreage by about two-tenths of 1 percent. Looking at Garfield County today with its placement of commu­nities near waterways, its six small reservoirs, its logging and ranching industry, and its access roads to scenic wonders, one would have to conclude that the stewards of the land, both private and public (though they are often at odds with each other), have been reason­ably faithful to John Wesley Powell's vision of the settlement of this semiarid region.10 ENDNOTES 1. As quoted in Herbert E. Gregory, "Scientific Explorations in Southern Utah," American lournal of Science 248 (October 1945): 537. 2. Ibid., 528. 3. John Wesley Powell, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its GARFIELD COUNTY AND EXPLORATION OF THE COLORADO RIVER 107 Canyons (1895; reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 211. The infor­mation for Powell's journey through Garfield County comes from Powell's report cited above; William L. Rusho, Powell's Canyon Voyage (Palmer Lake, CO: Filter Press, 1969); John Wesley Powell, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, With a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879); Mary C. Rabbit, "John Wesley Powell: Pioneer Statesman of Federal Science," in The Colorado River Region and lohn Wesley Powell, U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 669 (Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1969); and William Culp Darrah, Powell of the Colorado (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). 4. Herbert E. Gregory, A Geologic and Geographic sketch ofZion and Bryce Canyon National Parks (Zion-Bryce Natural history Association, 1956), 25. 5. Bailey's 1876 field notes are in the Public Survey office. A copy of Kirkpatrick's undated excerpt is in the Bryce Canyon National Park library files, BRCA #350. 6. Almon H. Thompson, Diary, as quoted in Nethella Griffin Woolsey, The Escalante Story: 1875-1964, 24. 7. John W. Van Cott, Utah Place Names, 148; and Powell, Lands of the Arid Region, 157. 8. Grove Karl Gilbert, Geology of the Henry Mountains (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), 2. This report was published a year after Powell's main report. 9. Mary C. Rabbitt, "John Wesley Powell," 10. See also Powell, Lands of the Arid Region, 144-46. 10. Over a hundred years after the U.S. Geological Survey mapped Garfield County, Rick Crawford and some companions were hiking near Escalante and found a rusty cylindrical canister. Inside they found a note which read: "Department of Interior, U.S. Survey of Territories, Second Division Geological and Geographical, J.W. Powell in charge, A.H. Thompson surveyor of party. This first was visited on the 27th day of July, 1875." See Marilyn Jackson, "Hikers Discover Powell Exploration Notes Near Escalante," Garfield County News, 5 December 1985, 1.