By Benjie Howard
Joseph R. Biden, in his inaugural speech, praised the American spirit and called for unity as a nation. Since the era of Reconstruction, unity has often been invoked as a way for people to come together and pretend racism doesn’t exist. Biden did something different on Jan 20, 2021. He spoke of unity while explicitly repudiating white supremacy and the
violence of racism. This framing of unity immediately drew the ire of politicians like Rand Paul and entertainers like Tucker Carlson who assumed and complained that Biden was talking about them. They made this choice to accuse themselves and air their white grievance during an historic moment when the most racially diverse White House cabinet in the history of the Nation — including the first woman, Asian, Black Vice President, and no less significant, the first Native American woman to head of the Department of the Interior — begin stepping into their confirmation processes and their roles. The fear that Carlson and Paul’s rhetoric and complaints betray and the hope that Biden’s speech represents are nothing new. We’ve been at the crossroads of democratic idealism and civil war before. We know this place and this contrasting fabric of vision and shortcoming.
Throughout this year of isolation, struggle and social tension, I’ve found comfort in seeking opportunities to learn from the past. I’ve found myself, for reasons I wasn’t sure of at first, coming back to a somewhat obscure moment in our American history.
As a commercial river guide in Grand Canyon for more than two decades, I’ve been fascinated by the story of Billy Dunn, O.G and Seneca Howland, three members of the 1869 Powell exploration of the Green and Colorado Rivers who chose to abandon the party shortly before it ended. After three months of grueling labor, portages, treacherous rapids, heat, lost boats and equipment, hunger and insufficient supplies, not to mention the heavy-handed leadership of John Wesley Powell — the three men decided to call it quits one evening in camp on the right bank above a large unportagable rapid. They departed the following morning, August 28, with a few biscuits in their pockets and a dry unknown desert labyrinth before them.
The irony is that the rest of the party, Powell and six other men fairly easily navigated the falls, which would later be called “Separation Rapid.” They exited the canyon through the Grand Wash Cliffs into calm meandering water, leaving the Colorado Plateau for the Great Basin on August 29, having successfully navigated the last unmapped piece of land in the lower 48.
More tragically, the Howland brothers and Billy Dunn were never seen again. They might have been executed by Shivwit Paiute, which is likely since a young Shivwit woman had recently been raped and murdered by white men. That story could also have been a misdirect from the Mormon who interpreted it from Shivwit leaders to Powell in 1871. The three could have been killed by Mormons, also likely as the Mormons had recently murdered 120 other white men women and children at Mountain Meadows and tried to blame Indians for the massacre.
My interest in this story has shifted over the years. As a young guide and educator, I was intrigued by the mystery of it. The Grand Canyon is full of mystery stories that scholars and historians debate. It’s The Grand Canyon, and everything about it, including its geologic record is mysterious and intriguing. It was exciting to work and live a life there, sleeping most nights on a boat within the mythical hallways of stone and light.
The story of Dunn and the Howland brothers has become more interesting to me now in a symbolic sense. It was the jumping off point for Jason Russell Poole and me in our artistic collaboration with Separation Point, a book of poetry and images from the arid Southwest. We were interested in that moment when those guys abandoned their captain, abandoned the project at hand, headed out on their own, made a definitive move toward an alternative trajectory.
The expedition and separation garner this symbolic meaning at the confluences of history and landscape, conquest and freedom, wilderness and Manifest Destiny in the American West. My interest has evolved toward how the events of August 28, 1869, align and diverge from events, mindsets, impulses, understanding and ignorance of the time and space around them; and how they inform the present.
I’m sure every man felt quite isolated and alone the night O.G. approached John Wesley and shared his plan to abandon the trip. Every one of them had to decide whether to stay the course or join the defectors. They hadn’t seen another human soul in months. They had been living their lives surrounded by massive, indifferent stone palisades, a loud and angry river always reminding them of the danger while they slept. Many of them, including Powell, wrote about the experience of feeling infinitely small in comparison to their environment, alone in an unknown wilderness. I’ve stood on that beach where the men parted ways. I’ve camped there many times. I’ve looked up at those massive gold and crimson walls, heard the river moving through the night, peered up the long and wide valley of what is now called Separation Canyon. I’ve felt the kind of loneliness those men must have felt trudging through the gravel in the wash toward an unknown fate.
The truth, however, is that we are never alone. Our actions and our decisions, even when made at the bottom of a chasm and in the middle of seemingly nowhere, have reverberations that ripple out and impact the lives of others, vibrate in the overall wave pattern of a particular time in history. The decision the Howland brothers and Billy made meant that they would walk up the wash toward their death. They were also walking into an intersection of rising tensions among cultures. The Mormons wanted their “Zion” for themselves, having been persecuted in Missouri and led by the visions of their bishops, willing to commit violence to keep other whites out. The Shivwits we’re trying to hold onto some piece of their ancestral home in the midst of an emerging onslaught of white settler immigration, newly invigorated by the connection of the first trans-continental railroad — the last spike having been driven into the ground that same year, 390 miles to the North at Promontory Summit. The railroad completion also made the Powell expedition possible as they needed a way to transport their boats from Chicago to the put-in at Green River.
The Powell Expeditions (there were two, one in 1869 and another in 1871) and the finishing of the Union Pacific Line accelerated the closing of the physical and psychological gap between East and West. Eliminating the struggle of overland travel made it possible for the final wave of land hungry, opportunity hungry white settlers to fulfill the covenant of Manifest Destiny and complete a final assault on the natural order and way of life for Native people still living free in the West.
The entire country and the political context surrounding the Powell expedition were also at a Separation Point — a moment in time when choices were made to stay the course of Manifest Destiny; piercing, mapping, claiming, fencing, extorting, committing violence and theft, or to diverge toward real democracy, freedom, dignity, and stewardship of the land. In most cases, the nation failed to take the higher road.
END OF PART 1