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Ordeals of Choice

Down The Green River Two Decades Before John Wesley Powell

By Alan Kesselheim

MORE OF THE MANLY STORY

William Lewis Manly tells the story of his Green River descent, as well as a great many other adventures, in his edited autobiography, Death Valley in '49 (Heyday Books). A rather dated biography of Chief Walkara is also available, titled, Walkara: Hawk of the Mountains, by Paul Bailey, published in 1954. Although Manly's exploits have been noted in the historical record, the story of his descent of the Green River has remained obscured and little-known, especially compared to the accounts surrounding J.W. Powell's explorations. Michael Kane, a graduate student at the University of Utah, recently based his dissertation on Manly's journey, shedding new light on the remarkable trip. As part of his research, Kane reconstructed Manly's journey by dugout canoe during the summer of 2006, including the 10-day, 200-mile overland trek from Green River to Salt LakeCity. But that's another story. - Alan Kesselheim

You know how it goes.

The wilderness trip has become something of an endurance test - long and difficult enough that the days are both grueling and monotonous. The group chemistry isn't what you hoped for. Life on the trail isn't nearly as heady as you imagined it would be. The prospect for improvement is nowhere on the horizon . . .

Then, an alternate route presents itself, a Plan B, a possibility to infuse the journey with a dose of excitement and adventure, perhaps even a shortcut. Plan B has its own set of unknowns, some daunting enough, but it offers the tantalizing certainty of change.

The year is 1849. Fall is coming on. The place, Lombard Crossing, near present-day Green River, Wyoming, and not far from South Pass.

A small wagon train has reached this ford, on the way to the gold fields of California. It is late enough in the traveling season that the party is reckoning with the fact that it will have to winter over somewhere, probably near Salt Lake City.

Twenty-nine year old William Lewis Manly is one of the hired wagon drivers. The spotlight plays on him.

Manly was born in northern Vermont, within a few miles of the Canadian border, in 1820. His family succumbed to the westward urge, traveling to the upper Midwest, where they came to rest in the Wisconsin Territory.

As a young man, Manly developed a chronic case of westward fever. He was well along with plans to strike out for Oregon when news of gold in California reached him. "I felt a change in my Oregon desires and had dreams of digging up the yellow dust," Manly later wrote. "Nothing would cure [me] then but a trip."

As soon as possible, he made his way to one of the staging grounds for western travelers near St. Joseph, Missouri, where he found work driving for a small, vulnerable string of five wagons heading up the Platte River.

Through the summer months the train straggled west, encountering the standard round of stream crossings, threats of Indian attack, torrential thunderstorms, equipment failures and leadership squabbles. They made their way past the outpost of Laramie, past Independence Rock and eventually to the gentle crest of the Continental Divide at South Pass. Soon afterward, they reached the first westward-flowing river of consequence, the Green.

"It was a remarkably clear and rapid stream," Manly recorded.

And in that current pulsing past, heading west, Plan B presented itself.

"We drivers had quite a little talk about a new scheme," Manly wrote. "We put a great many 'ifs' together and it amounted to this: if this stream were large enough; if we had a boat; if we knew the way; if there were no falls or bad places; if we had plenty of provisions; if we were bold enough . . . we might come out at some point or other on the Pacific Ocean."

In the Green River they had found their first "if". They soon happened upon the second one in the form of a small ferryboat abandoned and half-buried on a sand bar. Mormon travelers cobbled together several ferryboats for river crossings like the one on the Green, including the craft Manly discovered. With the gathering energy of a plan brimming with daring and promise, Manly and several of the other drivers exhumed the boat, along with a couple of weather-beaten oars. They pronounced the vessel sound for river travel.

In short order, Manly and his splinter group negotiated terms with the leader of the wagon train, and arranged to purchase some flour and bacon to augment game they would hunt en route. In a matter of half a day, they had struck their bargain, helped the wagon train across the ford and watched the diminished party disappear over the near horizon.

"We took a few long breaths and then set to work in earnest to carry out our plans," wrote Manly.

It wouldn't have taken them long, because the plans were so skeletal that they amounted to little more than a mirage. The seven male river-runners had a sketchy boat and a piece of current they took on faith would eventually lead to the Pacific. And some boldness to take care of the lengthy list of 'ifs' they had left unanswered.

They had no knowledge of river conditions whatsoever. Maps of the day marked much of the Rocky Mountain region and arid southwest as The Great American Desert. Manly's group would have been familiar with Fremont's maps, which had a few helpful particulars, but most of the cartographic record was based on guesswork and imagination.

They had scanty provisions, including six guns, two axes and several small hatchets. They tied some "cordage" to the bow and stern of the boat and collected a few poles to help steer. Their small pile of worldly goods sat forlornly on the riverbank.

Manly had clearly established himself as the group leader and was duly appointed Captain, a post he accepted with some reluctance. In no time at all the intrepid, if impulsive, crew was ready to shove off.

"The boat was about twelve feet long and six or seven feet wide, not a very well-proportioned craft, but able to carry a pretty good load," observed Manly. "It looked as if we were taking the most sensible way to get to the Pacific, and [we] almost wondered that everybody was so blind as not to see it as we did.

"We untied the ropes, gave the boat a push, and commenced to move down the river with ease and comfort, feeling much happier than we would had we been going toward Salt Lake with the prospect of wintering there." Plan B was pretty heady at the outset.

Twenty years later, near the end of May in 1869, J.W. Powell embarked from Expedition Island, some 40 miles downstream, ostensibly the first white party to explore the Green and Colorado Rivers. Powell's exploits have been extolled as one of the great chapters of daring exploration in the frontier American West, often compared with Lewis and Clark's journey to the Pacific.

While there is no doubt that Powell pulled off a remarkable journey, and much of his reputation is deserved, the fact that Manly's group preceded his launch by two decades, and that the earlier party struck off with little more than a cobbled-together, Huck Finn outfit, has been largely ignored in the historic record.

This lack of historic attention stems partly from the fact that Manly's quest was such a spontaneous and unexpected one, while Powell came fully outfitted and sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution.

In addition, Manly lacked Powell's devotion to documentation. Manly succumbed to adventurous whimsy, and the seduction of a possible shortcut, while Powell claimed that his expedition was not an adventure at all, but a scientific endeavor through and through. Powell took sightings, sketched landscapes, interpreted geology, made note of native cultures, and took pains to record the minutia of his progress. Manly was pretty occupied just making miles and provisioning the larder and made little attempt to place himself either chronologically or geographically.

At one point he guesses that they made about 30 miles a day, which is almost certainly a generous estimate. Later, he mentions the passage of five days. His geographic markers are spare.

By comparing his notes with Powell's, it is possible to get an idea of where they coincided in a few spots, but much is left vague. Some time into the journey, for example, Manly mentioned an inscription left by mountain man and fur trapper, William Ashley, in 1825. Powell also mentions the spot and placed it in Flaming Gorge. Powell gave a nearby rapid the name of Ashley Falls.

Powell launched at high water, and was swept along by a river of considerable volume and power, encountering the challenges of huge waves and holes, while Manly traveled downriver on ebbing current, still powerful, but full of boulder gardens and shallows

"The water was not very deep," Manly wrote, "and made such a dashing noise . . . that one had to talk pretty loud to be heard. As we were gliding along quite swiftly, I set my pole on the bottom and gave the boat a sudden push to avoid a boulder, when the pole stuck in the crevice between two rocks, and instead of loosing the pole by the sudden jerk I gave, I was the one who was very suddenly yanked from the boat by the spring of the pole and landed in the middle of the river."

Manly and his crew wrestled their ungainly, flat-bottomed barge through boulder-choked rapids. At one point they came to a stretch of river "where huge rocks as large as cabins had fallen down . . . completely filling up the riverbed." Here they unloaded the boat and held the stern line while the captain "took off my clothes and pushed the boat out into the torrent which ran around the rocks, letting them pay the line out slowly till it was just right. They I sang out to 'let go' and away it dashed. I grasped the bowline, and at the first chance jumped overboard and got to shore, where I held the boat and brought it in below the obstructions."

Powell describes similar antics in getting his more river-worthy boats past the same whitewater challenges. Lowering and lining over ledges, portaging gear around bad spots, running through massive standing waves. Almost nightly he reported spreading gear and food out to dry after a wet day in the rapids. More than once he feared for the loss of a boat.

The morning after Manly's daring skinny-dip boat save, in the depths of the red canyons now pooled behind Flaming Gorge Dam, the forlorn ferry boat met its match. Trying to maneuver with ropes and poles past another large rock with a "terrible swirl" behind it, the boat was pinned by the entire force of the current and upended.

"This seemed a very sudden ending to our voyage, and there were some very rapid thoughts as to whether we would not [be] safer among the Mormons than out in this wild country, afoot and alone," Manly wrote. "Our boat was surely lost beyond hope, and something must be done."

Suddenly a good bit of the air went out of Plan B.

The group conducted a solemn parley there by the wreck, weighing their chances striking overland. Manly noticed several ponderosa pine nearby, and suggested the possibility of hewing out a couple of dugout canoes. The men agreed and "we never let the axes rest, night or day, till we had [the boats] completed." They lashed the dugouts together, each about 15 feet long and 2 feet wide, but were crestfallen to find that the tandem rig was too small to carry the entire party with gear.

Half a mile downriver, however, they came upon several larger pines and set to work yet again, fashioning a much larger boat, between 25 and 30 feet long.

Days later, axe-weary but successful, Manly took charge of the larger craft, and loaded the most valuable gear aboard. "We agreed upon signals to give when danger was seen or game in sight and . . . set sail again . . . flying downstream."

As with most expeditions of that era, hunting and fishing for food was a constant preoccupation and the wilderness diet vacillated between starvation and gluttony. Manly proved to be the best shot of the bunch and periodically bagged elk, antelope, and desert sheep. Much of the time in camp was spent butchering and drying meat.

Through Brown's Park, the little dugout brigade enjoyed a more sedate pace, hunting elk along the way, shooting geese and ducks, even an otter. Then they entered "rougher country again, the canyons deeper and the water more tumultuous."

Powell wasn't nearly so sanguine with his description. He called the mouth of the Canyon of Lodore "a dark portal to a region of gloom - the gateway through which we are to enter on our voyage of exploration tomorrow. What shall we find?" he wondered on the evening of June 5, 1869.

Powell's trepidation was well-founded. Almost immediately, the rapids became frequent and difficult. Navigation required a series of desperate moves. Then, just four days after his brooding journal entry, Powell's party lost one of its three boats, along with valuable gear, at Disaster Falls.

"I turn down stream again and scramble along to look for the boat that has gone over," Powell wrote. "The first fall is not great, only 10 or 12 feet, and we often run such; but below, the river tumbles down again for 40 or 50 feet, in a channel filled with dangerous rocks that break the waves into whirlpools and beat them into foam. I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock, and rebounding from the shock, careen and fill its open compartment with water. Two of the men lose their oars; she swings around and is carried down at a rapid rate, broadside on for a few yards, when, striking amidships on another rock with great force, she is broken quite in two and the men are thrown into the river."

Twenty years earlier, Manly found in Lodore "generally more boulders than water, and the downgrade of the riverbed heavy." He ran the same stuff Powell describes in hollowed logs. Still, the dugout canoes made it through some challenging water. "We kept getting more and more venturesome and skillful, and managed to run some very dangerous rapids in safety."

Manly took the lead, scouted the best course, and demonstrated the necessary maneuvers by his example. "We went barefooted most of the time, for we were more than half of the time in the water, which roared and dashed so loud that we could hardly hear each other speak."

The system worked well enough, until they came to a section of sharply winding channel full of horrendous whitewater. Manly snuck along the inside of one bend with his canoe, missing the worst of it, but the other boats were pulled out into the main current "where great waves rolled them over and over, bottom side up and every way."

One capsized canoe came to rest in an eddy, and all the men but Alfred Walton floundered to shore. The second dugout tore on downstream with Walton clinging desperately to the gunwale. Walton couldn't swim and was very nearly drowned before Manly was able to catch up and tow the boat to shore. Twenty yards farther downstream and "he would have gone into another long rapid and been drowned."

It's hard to say exactly where the capsize occurred. Powell encountered a series of difficult rapids in the lower section of the Canyon of Lodore. His description of Triplet Falls and Hell's Half Mile closely match Manly's record of the accident.

Manly paused half a day to allow Walton to recover and then continued past the confluence with the Yampa River at Echo Park and on towards the remarkable grandeur of Split Mountain. The expedition's firearms had been reduced to two in the capsize. With one of the remaining guns, Manly managed to kill several desert bighorn, which he thought tasted "like very good mutton."

"We kept pushing down the river. The rapids were still dangerous in many places, but not so frequent nor so bad as the part we had gone over, and we could see that the river gradually grew smoother as we progressed."

Powell spent several days exploring the country around the Yampa River before proceeding through Island Park. He called the entrance to Split Mountain a "flaring, brilliant gateway," which, once through, led to a series of difficult rapids that his party ran or lined after careful scouting.

Of course, Manly had none of Powell's ambition as a geologist, cartographer and explorer. He was a young buck who wanted nothing more than to avoid starvation or drowning. Powell was busy with barometers and sketch pads, striking off on evening walks to explore and record, and he was furnished with, relatively speaking, cutting edge equipment.

Manly and his companions slogged on with their Neanderthal craft, past Split Mountain, out into the open scrubland of present-day northern Utah. They traveled through the sere canyons named Gray's and Desolation, heading more south than west, looking for some sign of their progress towards the Pacific.

"We were floating along very silently one day," Manly wrote, "for none of us felt very much in the mood for talking, when we heard a distant sound which we thought was very much like the firing of a gun . . . Some of the boys spoke of our scalps ornamenting a spear handle and indulged in such like cheerful talk, which comforted us wonderfully.

"Finally we concluded we did not come out into that wild country to be afraid of a few gunshots and determined to put on a bold front . . . Just then we came in sight of three Indian lodges."

The Indians spotted Manly at the same moment, and one of them came down to the riverbank, gun in hand, and motioned the boats to shore. Uneasily, Manly and his men walked into the camp of Chief Walkara, known to the Mormons he traded with as Chief Walker.

Walkara was one of the most powerful and enterprising Indians in the entire southwest. He had many dealings with the Mormons, had earned a reputation as an unparalleled horse thief, oversaw an extensive slave trade, and influenced a territory from Mexico to Salt Lake.

Manly intuitively claimed that his party was Mormon, and seemed to gain Walkara's acceptance as a result. Manly described Walkara as "very pleasant and his countenance showed a good deal of intelligence for a man of the mountains."

Manly and his men were hoping that they'd passed the worst water and that they might "sail on, quietly and safely, to the great Pacific Ocean and land of gold."

When Walkara understood Manly's position, he simply "shook his head."

Walkara rose and led Manly down to a nearby sandbar, where he began sketching a map. He drew a crooked line for the river, then proceeded to pile up stones along the sides in several places, simulating canyons.

"[Walkara] stood with one foot on each side of his river and put his hands on the stones and then raised them as high as he could, making a continued 'e-e-e-e-e-e-e' as long as his breath would last, pointed to the canoe and made signs with his hands how it would roll and pitch in the rapids and finally capsize and throw us all out. He then made signs of death to show us that it was a fatal place."

Scholars have surmised that this meeting between Manly and Walkara took place on September 12, 1849, near present-day Green River, Utah. The river below them soon entered Labyrinth and Stillwater canyons, then Cataract Canyon and finally, the Grand Canyon.

How well Walkara knew the river no one knows. That he knew it well enough to warn off this troop of clueless white guys paddling pine trees is sufficient. That Manly took Walkara at his word, and trusted his information, was to his credit.

Manly had descended some 450 miles of the Green River during a 39-day run, through rapids that sorely tested the later Powell expedition; rapids that, to this day, test whitewater boaters outfitted with the most modern equipment.

Manly and his group lived through their river jaunt by dint of their resourcefulness, athleticism, survival prowess, group solidarity, blind luck and a large dose of boldness. They were infused with an elevated level of the patriotism and ambition which seemed to fuel many heroic exploits during the frontier push West.

Standing with Chief Walkara on the quiet sandbar, however, with the peaceful Green River whispering past and the leaves of cottonwoods rustling in the fall breeze, Manly came face to face with the urgent need for a Plan C.

He and his men argued the case for going on, questioned Walkara's information, weighed the overland trek to Salt Lake City, where they might join another wagon train and get on to California.

In the end they asked Walkara for directions to Mormonee, or Salt Lake City. Another map in the sand. More gesturing and sign language. Then they set off on the overland trek, a journey of 200 miles. No looking back. Plan C was underway.

Writer Alan Kesselheim is the author of six critically acclaimed books, including Threading the Currents, Water and Sky, Going Inside, and Silhouette on a Wide Land.