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By Root 1441 0

there was to be mutiny, the leader would be Howland. He was a mountain man by nature and experience, but, after Powell, still the most literate and scientific-minded of the group. Nonetheless, Howland had been plagued by bad luck; it was he who had steered the No Name to its destruction in Lodore Canyon; he who had twice lost maps and notes in swampings. He had tested fate enough. In the morning, Howland told Powell, he and his brother Seneca, together with Bill Dunn, were going to abandon the boats and climb out of the canyon.

Powell did not sleep that night. He took reading after reading with his sextant until he was as positive as he dared be that they were within fifty miles of Grand Wash Cliffs. At the most, they ought to be four days from civilization, with the only remaining obstacle in view a wild twenty-second ride through a terrific rapid. Powell woke Howland in the middle of the night and poured out his conviction, but it was too late. His immediate reaction was two laconic sentences in his journal, but later he offered this version of what took place:

We have another short talk about the morrow, but for me there is no sleep. All night long, I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on? I go to the boats again, to look at our rations. I feel satisfied that we can get over the danger immediately before us; what there may be below I know not. From our outlook yesterday, on the cliffs, the canon seemed to make another great bend to the south, and this, from our experience heretofore, means more and higher granite walls. I am not sure that we can climb out of the canon here, and, when at the top of the wall, I know enough of the country to be certain that it is a desert of rock and sand, between this and the nearest Mormon town, which, on the most direct line, must be seventy-five miles away. True, the last rains have been favorable to us, should we go out, for the probabilities are that we shall find water still standing in holes, and, at one time, I almost conclude to leave the river. But for years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished, to say that there is a part of the canon which I cannot explore, having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on.

August 28. Breakfast was as “solemn as a funeral.” Afterward, Powell asked all of the men, for the last time, whether they planned to go ahead or climb out. The Howlands and Bill Dunn still intended to walk out; the rest would remain. The party gave the three some guns and offered them their equal share of the remaining rations. They accepted the guns. “Some tears are shed,” Powell wrote. “It is rather a solemn parting; each party thinks the other is taking the dangerous course.” Billy Hawkins stole away and laid some biscuits on a rock the mutineers would pass on their way up the cliffs. “They are as fine fellows as I ever had the good fortune to meet,” declared taciturn George Bradley, blinking away a tear.

As the others rowed cautiously toward the monster rapids in their two boats, the Howland brothers and Bill Dunn had already begun climbing up one of the canyon arroyos. Powell felt himself torn between watching them and the approaching rapids. They plunged down the first drop. The hydraulic wave at the bottom inundated them, but the water was so swift that they were out of it before the boat could fill. They were launched atop a pillow of water covering a rock, slid off, then rode out a landscape of haystacks. As the Maid of the Canyon circulated quietly in the whirlpool at rapids’ end, Kitty Clyde’s Sister wallowed up alongside. The roar of the rapids was almost submerged by the men’s ecstatic shouts. They grabbed rifles and fired volley after volley into the air to show their erstwhile companions that it could be done. Unable to see around the bend in the river or to walk back up, they waited in the eddy for nearly two hours, hoping the others would rejoin them, but they never did.

A few miles below Separation