Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick

Author:Edward Dolnick
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

OUTMATCHED

The euphoria at finally reaching the Grand quickly burned off under the pitiless desert sun. There was no shade in camp, but the exhausted men could not push on until they had rested a bit and patched their boats. No one knew what games the river would get up to next, but it seemed prudent to assume the worst. The men would be riding on the merged back of two mighty rivers, where before there had been only one, and the newcomer, the Grand, was the bigger of the two. Just downstream this merged monster hurled itself into a narrow, stone chasm. Trouble seemed inevitable.

But trouble turned up ahead of schedule, when the men took advantage of their break to look closely at the food stores. “Our rations, . . . we find, are badly injured,” Powell wrote. “The flour has been wet and dried so many times that it is all musty, and full of hard lumps.” Sumner had been the one to make the unhappy discovery. The only food left for the rest of the trip was “about 500 pounds of flour and a little bacon and dried apples,” he wrote, and the flour was “a miserable mess of green fermentation.”

Sumner and Oramel Howland sifted the flour through an improvised sieve made from mosquito netting. Almost half the total, two hundred pounds, was beyond salvaging and had to be thrown away. They put the rest on a sheet to dry in the sun. By Powell’s reckoning, that left food for two months. The arithmetic was discouraging. At the start, seven weeks before, they had packed supplies intended to last ten months. In less than two months, then, they had used or lost or ruined eight months’ worth of food. From here on, they would be down to near-starvation rations—Powell’s estimate that five hundred pounds of food would last two months meant that each man would get less than a pound per day. They had no idea how much farther they had to go.

The pressing question was not Where had it all gone? but How much longer would it last? If ten months’ supplies had provided food for two months, how long would two months’ supplies last? With the looming prospect of worse rapids just ahead, this was bad news at a bad time, and everyone seemed edgy. It had stormed the night before, and the lightning and thunder, Bradley wrote, “seemed as if commissioned to make doubly desolate this regeon set apart for desolation.”

Powell and Oramel Howland set to squabbling once again. The trouble between the two had begun weeks before, when each had blamed the other for the loss of the No Name at Disaster Falls. “From that date there was more or less rag-chewing on the part of Major Powell, nearly always directed at Howland,” wrote Sumner. Most often the disputes centered on Howland’s mapmaking. Only a few days before, at the mouth of the San Rafael, Powell had rebuked Howland for not keeping his charts up-to-date.

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