Exploring a Legend: John Wesley Powell and the Grand Canyon

I am quite impressed with the Grand Canyon. I know I’m not the only one. All that rugged grandeur! The colors, the changing weather, the varying landscape as you descend. The silence, as if all of nature is holding its breath. But when John Wesley Powell decided to explore the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, the place was not much more than a legend.

So was he, truth be told. John Wesley Powell joined the Union Army as a military engineer, but he served in many positions during the Civil War and ended up a brevet lieutenant colonel. A minié ball blew off most of his right arm, but he continued serving until the war ended. Geology was always his greatest love, so he took a position as a professor at Illinois Wesleyan University in that subject. He’d led his wife and students on several journeys of exploration when he decided to tackle the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. And he nearly lost his life in the process.

Dangerous rapids, difficult portages, poor weather and flash flood would all plague the trip. They lost most of their boats; they lost most of their supplies. Three men gave up at one point to leave the expedition and hike out of the canyon. They were never heard from again. Four months later, the rest of the expedition made it out.

But the canyon had a grip on his heart and mind. Determined to make it all the way through, with photographic evidence this time, he set out again in May of 1871 with a group of hand-picked men, including photographer John Hillers. It took them eight months, but they managed to traverse the canyon safely, coming out at Kanab Creek. With photographs to prove it.

Powell went on to publish his report of both trips for public consumption, which went a long way toward instilling in the Nation a love for the area, ensuring its preservation as a national park.

His first expedition was commemorated 100 years later with a U.S. postal stamp.

Rather grand, isn’t it?

Food, Glorious, Food—Nineteenth Century Grand Canyon Style

I have never been a big eater. My husband likes to tell the story of the first dinner I cooked for him. He mistook the entre, which I now know he could have eaten in a couple bites, for an appetizer and wondered when I was going to serve him the main course. What he didn’t know was that entre generally served my family of four, with leftovers the next day. But however little my family eats, even I was shocked at how little explorers in nineteenth century Arizona ate and what their diet consisted of.

I am confirming my research (lovely, lovely research!) for my October 2019 historical romance with my new publisher, Revell. A Scenic Beauty (title tentative) tells the story of a determined lady photographer on one of the early geologic surveys of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. My wonderful critique partner Kristy J. Manhattan found me a copy of John Wesley Powell’s diary of his first expedition of the canyon, which took place approximately 2 years before my story. (His second expedition is happening during my story.) Powell deserves his own blog post (coming soon), but for now, I’ll focus on the food.

Which wasn’t much.

Powell had ten men on his team, all well experienced with wilderness travel. Their goal was to successfully navigate down the Colorado, mapping it as they went. Armed with instrumentation to confirm elevation changes, estimate the heights of the cliffs, and determine the temperatures, they set off in four boats. Their rations included flour, saleratus (an early form of baking powder), bacon, salt pork, beans, dried apples, and coffee. They planned enough to last them for 10 months, in case they had to overwinter in the canyon.

The Colorado had other ideas.

Rapids quickly sank or at least swamped their boats. They lost a third of their rations within the first month. The rest was soon so water logged they had to stop they travels to lay it out on rocks in hopes it would dry enough to eat. When the flour merely turned as hard as the rocks themselves, they beat it and sifted it through their mosquito netting, losing hundreds of pounds in the process. Somewhere along the way they lost the saleratus, because they went from having biscuits to unleavened “bread.”

They tried hunting and were mildly successful, but when they shot something, they tended to eat nothing but meat and coffee for the night. Dinner other nights consisted of boiled spoiled bacon and unleavened bread. One night they visited a garden abandoned by a hunter and trader. Nothing was ripe except the green tops of potatoes. They ate those and spent the evening violently ill. When they happened across land being farmed by Native Americans, they pilfered melons and paddled away as fast as they could. That night they gorged on “melon sauce,” which I take is like applesauce, but with melons, supplementing it with coffee and unleavened bread. That they made it out of the canyon alive—on the food alone—is amazing to me.

And it makes me terribly glad for the leftovers I plan to consume tonight. 😊