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William Chandless: British Overlander, Mormon Observer, Amazon Explorer
William Chandless: British Overlander, Mormon Observer, Amazon Explorer
BY EDWINA JO SNOW
THE BOOK IS EXCEEDINGLY LIVELY AND picturesque, combining pleasant reading with just observation, impartiality, and good sense." That is how Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer who visited the Mormons in September 1860, described the book of William Chandless, a fellow English traveler who had spent November and December of 1855 with the Mormons. Jules Remy, a French naturalist who observed the Mormons in October 1855, read Chandless's book, A Visit to Salt Lake; Being a Journey across the Plains and a Residence in the Mormon Settlements at Utah (1857), and stated that Chandless's "observations are marked with justice and good sense."
Present-day historians have similarly praised the Chandless travel narrative, citing it in a number of works dealing with the Mormon settlements or the overland experience in 1855. However, only Andrew Love Neff in the History of Utah attempted to describe and assess the man and his book in any detail. Without the benefit of any outside biographical information, relying on the travel account alone, Neff accurately concluded that Chandless was an "educated and prosperous Englishman" who wrote with "color and comprehension, sympathy and appreciation," telling a story "full of humor and pathos, of information and commiseration, a galaxy of humanistic pictures and personal portraits." This article goes beyond Neff to put both the Chandless account and the man himself in broader perspective.
The Chandless narrative is distinctive in subject matter and point of view. While categorized as an overland account like hundreds of other records of the trek from the Missouri River to California, it is specifically what Neff calls "the classic narrative of the entire twenty years of ox-team freighting from the Missouri River to Great Salt Lake City." It is one of a dozen or so book-length accounts written by travelers about the Mormons during their first decade of settlement in the Great Basin. It is one of an even smaller number of accounts by a "Winter Mormon," defined by contemporary Mormons as a Gentile who wintered among the Mormons but did not join the church, and furthermore, it is the only lengthy account written by a British traveler in that first decade. Chandless boarded with a polygamous family in Salt Lake City. Indeed, his book is best known as an outsider's inside view of polygamy. But the narrative is also exceptional in its description of the barter economy and British Mormon converts. In contrast to the negative image of the Mormons that prevailed in nineteenth-century novels, plays, periodicals, newspapers, and pictorial representations, Chandless, like some other early travelers, wrote sympathetically about the Mormons. Beyond this, he was articulate, perceptive, and witty.
As well as analyzing the Chandless travel narrative and comparing it to similar accounts, this article brings forward for the first time biographical information about Chandless who, after publishing A Visit to Salt Lake, explored and mapped the southern tributaries of the Amazon River. These later accomplishments substantiate the characterization of him as an accurate and openminded observer, one deserving more attention than he has so far received.
BACKGROLND
William Chandless's background is similar to that of other nineteenth-century British travelers in America—he was upper class, wealthy, and well-educated, with a bent for writing. Born November 7, 1829, William was the youngest of four children. His father, Thomas, was queen's counsel, the highest rank of barrister. William, like his two brothers and one sister, inherited money and property from his paternal grandfather. At school William showed an early facility in Greek, Latin, and writing. He continued his interest and achievement in classics at Trinity College, Cambridge, receiving a B.A. in 1852. He then began to study law, following the footsteps of his father, his uncle, and his brother. He received an M.A. from Cambridge in 1855. But he "hadno taste for the legal profession" and "possessing an ample fortune," departed the family path and made his own way as a traveler and an explorer.
After leaving Cambridge, Chandless, like a number of other Englishmen, made a trip to the United States. Between 1836 and 1860, approximately 230 British travelers published accounts of their American tours; however, the Missouri River was as far west as most journeyed. Accounts including the plains, the Rocky Mountains, and California appeared in significant numbers only after the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869. In the middle of July 1855 Chandless found himself on the banks of the Missouri River at St. Joseph waiting for an upriver boat, his "intentions being to travel by water to Council Bluffs ... and then turn eastward" to the Mississippi River. But an "accident or the whim of an hour" caused him to change his itinerary, continue west, and cross the continent.
The catalyst for this atypical trip was a wagon train bound for Salt Lake City and needing hands, however inexperienced. The idea of crossing the plains took Chandless's fancy. He applied for a job as a teamster and was hired on the spot. He posted "necessary letters" so that a letter of credit would await him in San Francisco; "threw off all smooth dress, and donned a woollen shirt and shooting jacket, still, as it seemed, fragrant of the last year's heather"; and made arrangements for his excess luggage. He was "ready to start when ordered," thinking there would be a "delightful novelty in working for less than a dollar a day, and mixing in a wholly untried and very miscellaneous society; one was sure to be amused, and likely to learn something too."
Chandless was sufficiently diverted and enlightened by his six-and-a-half-month journey from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean to write a travel account when he returned to England in the fall of 1856. In 1857 the account was published by Smith Elder, a distinguished publishing house that, in the 1840s, had published the five volumes of Charles Darwin's Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle. Contemporary London reviewers called Chandless the first Englishman to describe the Mormon settlements in any length or detail but condemned his rather favorable point of view towards the Mormons.
A JOURNEY ACROSS THE PLAINS
An 1857 London Athenaeum reviewer passed over Chandless's "clever and picturesque" narration of his plains' crossing to focus on the description of Mormon polygamy. Later readers, however, have better appreciated his distinctive record of a joint freighting and cattle venture. His account is, furthermore, a noteworthy overland narrative well exemplifying major characteristics of the overland experience set down by John Unruh in his excellent work, The Plains Across.
Unruh described various overland enterprises. Chandless depicted a livestock and freighting undertaking very likely connected with the Salt Lake City mercantile establishment, Livingston and Kinkead, since one of the owners mentioned by Chandless was "Mr. Kinkead" of "the Salt Lake firm." Chandless and forty other "cattle drivers" joined a venture consisting of thirty-eight freight wagons carrying 3,500-4,500 pounds each, three supply wagons, an office wagon, and over 400 head of cattle. There were five yoke of cattle to a wagon. The teamsters from the time they engaged had no more expenses. They were issued two blankets each and slept on the ground or in the wagons. They ate biscuits, bacon, and coffee supplemented only occasionally by fresh buffalo meat and rarely by fresh milk and vegetables. The duties were herding and watering the cattle, forming corrals, yoking up, driving, and cooking. A main duty of all was night watch. Chandless complained that "keeping guard half of every other night is hard work, and worst of all being hard at work from midnight to noon without any rest or a morsel of breakfast."
Unruh emphasized the overlanders' interaction with other groups in the West. Indeed, Chandless depicted continuous interaction with Mormon emigrant and goods trains, the overland mail, Indians, General Harney's army, army deserters, traders at trading posts, and settlers. The English teamster noted the comings and goings of his own train as men who were fired, left, died, or stayed behind because of sickness, were subsequently replaced by new hands. In describing the difficulties of the last hundred miles of the trail to Salt Lake, Chandless said, "the two other trains [Mormon emigrant trains] fared no better than ourselves, and companionship, even in misfortune, was pleasant; not to speak of a sort of tortoise race tacitly agreed on between us."
Unruh concluded that the extent of Indian attacks on overlanders has been greatly exaggerated and that Indian begging and thievery were the main nuisance. In addition, overlanders "were not above stealing from their colleagues." Chandless's train experienced a number of false alarms of Indian attack. As if quoting Unruh on Indian retaliation, Chandless stated, "much of their [the Indians'] hostility . . . has been caused by emigrants wantonly firing at natives, just for rifle practice, when they thought it safe; sometimes when it was not so." Although the train lost several mules to Indian theft near Laramie, Chandless recounted more thefts among the men themselves, including the theft of his blanket which he never got back and his gun which he did get back through the help of the probate court in Salt Lake City.
Rather than Indian attack, the main dangers on the trail for all overlanders were disease and accidents. Two men in Chandless's train died, probably of cholera, and others were ill, including Chandless. For about two weeks he lay on his "bed of coffee sacks," wearing the same clothes, drinking water "now and then." One morning he went by "many stages" 200 yards to the Mormon train to see their doctor. The doctor gave him "effervescing draughts" which took away his fever. Chandless attributed his recovery to this, to a bath ("many thought me stark mad to bathe, but cleanliness is a step not only towards comfort but towards health"), and to fresh buffalo meat "taken at first very moderately." After two more weeks, he recovered.
Unruh emphasized the "democratizing quality of overland travel" but did not pay any attention to the interaction of various nationalities on the trail. Chandless, however, perhaps because he was "the solitary Englishman of the whole camp" and because he could speak French and Italian, was aware of the ethnic overtones of trail life. Among the hired hands were Irishmen, Frenchmen, Italians, Germans, a Mexican, and a Scotsman, as well as Texans, Missourians, and other Americans. The men were allowed to group themselves into messes of ten — one mess consisted chiefly of "professional teamsters, and entirely of Americans"; another was in the main "American mechanics"; while Chandless's mess was the "relic of the rest," the "hotch-potch" of nationalities, although near the end of the trail the "Emerald Isle had ... a decided predominance." One of these Irishmen was "little Tom," the "character of the whole camp" and a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. Chandless recounted that he and Tom sometimes "capped Latin verses by the campfire, to the intense astonishment of the rest of 'ours,' who had not given Tom credit for so much learning, and he would hold his head a little higher after such exhibitions."
The "hotch-potch" of nationalities in Chandless's mess may have been friendly enough with each other, but, unlike their English trail mate, they were not friendly with their countrymen in the nearby Mormon trains. While visiting the Mormon trains Chandless
The sentiments voiced by the Italian and Irish teamsters were not uncommon. Gentile travelers expressed negative feelings about the Mormons well before reaching the Mormon settlements. Furthermore, even though the Mormon "half-way house" considerably eased the overland experience, as it did for Chandless, anti-Mormon stories prevailed in the western press. Unruh suggested such stories were a "tertiary force in bringing on the Mormon War." Some of the more bitter and extensively printed complaints about the Mormons were generated by overlanders who wintered with the Mormons, as Chandless did. Unruh wondered, "How justly and benevolently the Saints had in fact treated the overland emigrants—winter and summer—remains the unanswered question. Relatively few contemporaries attempted dispassionate assessments." Chandless's account may be numbered among these few.
A RESIDENCE IN THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS AT UTAH
The Chandless narrative can be appreciated as an overland trip eased by wintering at the Mormon half-way house. But the account is also noteworthy in relation to other early travelers' descriptions of the Mormon communities in the Great Basin.
Chandless is one of a small group of travelers who published firsthand accounts of the Mormons in their first decade of settlement. Except for Jules Remy, Chandless and the other early visitors did not go to Salt Lake City for the express purpose of observing or writing about the Mormons. They were gold seekers, itinerant preachers, members of government surveys or expeditions, and territorial officials. Besides Chandless, the only other British traveler in the 1850s to publish observations about the Mormons, excluding Mormon converts and apostates, was William Kelly, a good-natured Irish gold seeker who spent several days in Salt Lake City in early summer 1849. Chandless's journey to Salt Lake took three and a half months and was fraught with hardship. So it was for most of these initial travelers. A number, like Chandless, stayed at some length with the Mormons, spending time in the winter as well as the summer. And like him, some of these first visitors wrote positive assessments of certain aspects of the Mormon settlements, such as the imposing setting, the rapid development, and the industry, sobriety, health, and cleanliness of the Mormons.
Later travelers differed in several ways. As it became faster and easier to get to Salt Lake City—by mail stage in the sixties and then by rail after 1869—the number of travelers and travel books increased. In the sixties at least five British travelers, including Richard Burton, passed through Salt Lake City and wrote about the experience. The later travelers tended to stay a shorter time and usually made their visits in the summer. In the main, they were professional journalists with every intention of publishing their overland adventure, including a chapter on the Mormons. Some of these later travelers also wrote about the same positive aspects as the earlier travelers. But, with the exception of Richard Burton, the later accounts are more stereotyped than the early ones.
Historians value travel accounts such as Chandless's for the historic detail recorded therein, for the outside perspective shed on native views, and for the values and preoccupations of the times that are reflected by the traveler himself. A drawback of travel literature, however, is that occasionally rumor is repeated as fact. Chandless made such an error in writing that Brigham Young had Chief Walker secretly put to death. This rumor was later repeated by Burton who cited Chandless. Chandless himself said there may be errors of fact or opinion in his book but that he introduced no "incident" unless it occurred. Indeed, it is in the telling of personal incidents that his book has much charm and verisimilitude.
The Chandless narrative seems relatively free of two other characteristics attributed to travel accounts: a tension between what travelers expected and what they actually saw and a tendency to embellish their experiences. Just as British travelers in Colorado found the West to be less raw and bawdy than expected, the travelers to Salt Lake City found the Mormons less depraved and lascivious than expected. Chandless, more than most travelers, seemed to realize that what little he had read of the Mormons before his trip was "not taken from personal, or anything like personal, observation." Unlike Richard Burton, who included footnotes, an extensive bibliography, appendices, lengthy excerpts from both Mormon and non-Mormon sources, and numerous digressions comparing Salt Lake City to every exotic place Burton had previously visited, Chandless wrote "a narrative merely personal." He "read no books upon the subject" not wishing "either to borrow or controvert their facts or be impressed with their impressions." His object was to record "facts and incidents as they occurred" with little attempt to "theorize" or "generalize." His account is concise, well-written, amiable, and literary enough with a scattering of classical and biblical allusions. It is a pleasure to read as well as a source of information.
Like other firsthand accounts, Chandless's book has provided historians with details of the past—in this case, the winter of 1855-56, the "longest and severest" term of cold weather since the beginning of the settlement in 1847. The Englishman wrote that none of the 400 cattle in his train lived through the winter. In addition, he described the geography, natural resources, soil, buildings, roads, bridges, walls, irrigation method, crops, fuel, population make-up, and industries.29 In late November he made a brief walking tour of some northern settlements. Adding this jaunt to Chandless's journey to California via the Mormon corridor, readers today get glimpses of Weber, Ogden, Farmington, Cottonwood, Lehi, Battle Creek (now Pleasant Grove), Provo, Manti, Cedar Spring, Fillmore, Parowan, Cedar City, Las Vegas, and San Bernardino.
Chandless reported on the state of culture in Salt Lake City. He gave a mixed review to the Social Hall theatrical productions, noted that the "city boasted one decent band which was called in upon all occasions of Church and State," and observed that "all the pianos you might count on one hand; everyone knows their number and present locality as well as an old Thames puntman does those of the big trout." He included some stanzas, written with "smoothness and ease," from Eliza R. Snow, "the Sappho of the Valley," and wondered if a "lofty genius" will be born to Mormonism, "penetrated with the spirit of the ancient Hebrews," taking as a motto "in exitu Israel," and thus finding "a worthy subject in the flight and emigration across the plains." A "new faith ought to produce its own historians, poets, and novelists," but the Mormons, although they did not despise poetry, were "afraid of anything fanciful, except their own fancies; and nothing great can spring up under a spiritual despotism."
The "spiritual despotism," "unity of church and state," or "oligarchy working under and deadening the forms of democracy," Chandless felt to be the "very worst feature of Mormonism." Other early travelers noted the unity of church and state, but perhaps because they had met Brigham Young and were uniformly impressed with him, they found some redeeming features in his leadership. Chandless never met Brigham Young. He merely heard him speak, noting his affectation of "coarse and common language" and commenting that he was "in shrewdness and energy well fitted to be the head, though by no means the most intellectual or most eloquent in the 'Church."'
Having studied law, Chandless took a particular interest in the Mormon courts, both civil and ecclesiastical. He noted that the Mormons discouraged litigation and relied on the bishop of the ward as "a sort of county court judge" with a final appeal to Brigham. Regarding civil courts, he thought the Mormons showed "cool audacity and flagrant bad law" in giving the probate courts criminal jurisdiction. The English visitor himself appeared before a Mormon probate judge in order to obtain a search warrant against the Irishman from his train who had stolen his gun. The revolver recovered, Chandless did not press charges. The judge permitted the thief to go free "on condition that he left the city before sundown the next evening." The constable, for his trouble in executing the search warrant and who "saw the currish nature of Moran, worked out of his fears twenty or twenty five dollars."
Chandless is the only traveler who gave a description and analysis of the barter economy. He explained that the gold rush aided the Mormon economy in part by providing specie. However, trade with outsiders soon drained the specie from the Mormon settlements. The only source of specie at the time was money brought in by Mormon emigrants and the "salaries and etc. paid by the Federal Government of the United States." This lack of specie produced the direct interchange of commodities (including labor) and the circulation of promissory notes—the most valuable being orders for flour, sugar, coffee, hardware, butter, and orders on large stores with a variety of goods. The notes that were most likely to be discounted were orders for labor, chairs, hats, and shoes, and orders on small stores. The severest effect of the barter economy was on the poorest where "it comes rather to helping each other in a friendly way, and taking each from each what the other can best spare."
Chandless, like other British travelers in America at the time, was much interested in religion. Unlike other travelers to Salt Lake, he did not characterize Mormonism as anti-Christian. He obtained his information about Mormon doctrine not so much "from books (though from leisure hours among few but Mormon books, I am tolerably versed in their written theology) as from intercourse with the people and observation of its character." He pointed out the danger of "including in the general belief merely individual opinion." He attended service in the tabernacle "the very first Sunday," and thereafter he "rarely missed two out of three services: whether from curiosity, or principle, or habit, or association, or mere want of something else to do, I hardly know: perhaps a little of them all." He seems to have spent a good deal of time talking with his landlord about religion. The English boarder said, "for many weeks my host made strenuous efforts to convert me, encouraged principally by my being the only unprejudiced Gentile he had ever met: and by contrast impartiality seemed partiality." Chandless found that "intelligent Mormons" were "rather given to speculation" on theological topics but had "more readiness than exactness in argument."
Chandless was particularly interested in his countrymen, the British Mormon converts. The London Athenaeum review of his book said, "Public curiosity is more exercised on Mormonism than on most other topics in our day," in part because it "is an Anglo- Saxon movement—originating in the States and fed with forces from England." In fact, in 1851 Mormon membership in England reached a high of nearly 33,000. Emigration of Mormon converts from England peaked between 1853 and 1856 when more than 11,000 sailed.
Americans and British had differing views on the reasons for Mormon missionary success among the British. American travelers in Utah claimed that ignorant unchurched foreigners were easy prey for Mormon missionaries and that the English laboring classes in particular were more "amenable to authority" and were "less startled at innovations upon the common rules of morality, than the more astute, enterprising, and self-reliant Yankee." On the other hand, the London New Quarterly Review claimed that Mormon missionaries falsely promised "a terrestrial paradise: land easily acquired, overflowing with milk and honey, with a delicious climate, a fruitful soil, and cattle in abundance." The Chandless account was useful, the reviewer continued, lifting comments out of context, in giving the lie to this vision of ease and plenty and describing the Mormon settlements as they really were—plagued by drought, "locusts," severe cold, lack of wood, a "secret despotism" uniting "church and state," a barter economy, and of course, licentiousness and immorality of every kind.
As if responding to both the American and British stereotyped views, Chandless set down more thoughtful reasons for Mormon missionary success among the British, including the sincere belief, wrought through suffering, of the missionaries; the "certainty" of belief offered; the preaching of a "new dispensation"; and the church as "one family," as well as the subtlety and guile of the missionaries and their attention to the poor—"no religion that requires great sacrifices can attract many of those who have much to sacrifice." Polygamy, he believed, was not an inducement, "but rather kept back from the generality."
In Chandless's mind the advantage to the poor British converts in emigrating was educational rather than economic—in Utah their children would have a "decent education, ... no matter how poor they" were. He saw a similar advantage in the missionary system which "insures a considerable number of Mormons to have traveled and seen the world outside; no small benefit to those who are valley bred; otherwise their minds might become as narrow as the valleys they live in."
Unlike some other travelers, Chandless did not interview or socialize with Mormon or Gentile leaders. He was aware that his manner of traveling as a teamster for pay gave him an advantage in observing "if not quite the 'creme de la creme,' at any rate Mormon society in general." In particular, he described individual British converts, stressing the diversity of their situations and faith. He reported some discouragement among the newly arrived, mainly because they could not get work in their trade and "Salt Lake was not what they had expected." Some emigrants expressed a certain jealousy that Americans "hold all the chief offices in church and state." Yet what Chandless chiefly noted about the British converts was the "strong feelings of friendliness in Utah between people of the old country." He described evenings spent at the cottage of a Welsh convert:
As Chandless recorded his firsthand acquaintance with British converts, so too he recounted his familiarity with a polygamous family. Some gold rush sojourners boarded briefly with Mormon families during the summers of '49 and '50 and "seemed uniformly well-satisfied" with Mormon hospitality and "civility." For two months, Chandless boarded with the family of "S" (on one occasion called "Shorncliffe" but who was actually Vincent Shurtleff), a "worthy Saint and High Priest, the centre of a fair quartette of wives, just as a church spire is of the four pinnacles at the corners of the tower." Chandless described S., his four wives, their house, and children, in favorable, even affectionate detail."
His narrative stands out from other travel literature, in part, because of the depiction of a polygamous family. Also, his tolerant attitude toward polygamy differed from the prevailing attitude. The contemporary London reviews denounced the English observer's attitude toward polygamy, not his description of it. These reviews, which exemplify the typical nineteenth-century response to polygamy, quoted Chandless's chapters on polygamy almost in their entirety, but added that the details of polygamy "outrage every sentiment of purity, violate every feeling of virtue, and loosen every sacred tie by which the dear home life of England has for ever been regulated." Chandless, intentionally or not, failed to add such a disclaimer to his writings about polygamy. Other sympathetic travelers who, like Chandless, pointed out that polygamy was not as abominable as generally thought, nevertheless stressed that polygamy was a step backwards in progress. And lest anyone might doubt their personal values, these other travelers also included their testimony about the sanctity of monogamous marriage. Chandless, on the other hand, to one reviewer at least, left the impression that he was "rather favorably impressed with the convenience of half a dozen wives.
Most travelers believed that polygamy defiled the sanctity of the home and assumed that Mormon wives were to some degree miserable and degraded and that Mormon children were neglected and exposed to "the mysteries of the harem." Chandless held more positive views about the condition of the Mormon women and children. He wrote, "The wretchedness of wives in Utah has been greatly exaggerated . . . human nature is apt to suit itself to necessities." He explained that women could escape an unhappy marriage through divorce which they could obtain "for very trivial causes—disagreement with other wives, etc." while men could not obtain a divorce except for adultery. As to children, "polygamy, rightly or wrongly, is valued as a means of numerical increase," and Mormon children are highly valued and well cared for. The newspaper stories "about 'the terrible immorality, blasphemous language, and ungovernable temper of the rising generation in Utah,' I look upon as so much sheer nonsense."
Like some other travelers, Chandless included in his book the Mormon defense of polygamy. The defense Chandless heard rested, in part, on the assumption of the inferiority of women. He said Mormons
He added that although the "inequality of the sexes is a doctrine of their religious belief, as well as a rule of life," everyday life modified the theory in practice. "Solomon's heart, we know, was turned by his wives, and so are those of many less wise than he."
The Mormons also defended polygamy by citing the strict morality with which it was practiced. Chandless concluded, as did other observers, that the Mormons "are not a specially sensual people." Present-day historians have pointed out the "Puritanical" or "Victorian" aspect of polygamy. Richard Burton said Moslem "gloom" pervaded Salt Lake City. Chandless, who was twenty-six and unmarried, seemed particularly aware of this atmosphere:
JUST THE MAN FOR AN EXPLORER
Historians of the American West today know William Chandless as an observant but obscure British overlander. His name also occasionally appears in an entirely different context—in connection with the rivers and river tribes of Brazil. Dale Morgan said the overland journal, as well as being a record of the journey, the time, and the place, was a record of "a man's life—in some instances, all of that man's life we shall ever recover." The Chandless travel narrative, in addition to giving insights into a freighting and cattle enterprise and early Mormon communities in the Great Basin, also reveals characteristics of its author. These same characteristics are evident in the Englishman's river explorations in the Amazon basin. Relating the youthful travel account to Chandless's later pursuits increases understanding of the man himself.
The Chandless family legend is that William, who never married, turned to exploration because he fell in love with a lady he could not marry—she being Catholic and already married. Whether or not a lady played any role in his decision to become an explorer, an obituary lists qualities of character that suited the job:
Although Chandless's early overland trip was motivated by a whim to cross a continent, his later explorations were purposeful and thorough. His facility of observation became scientific accuracy. After publishing A Visit to Salt Lake in 1857, he traveled extensively in South America. In 1861 he became an explorer in earnest when he took up residence in Brazil in Manaus, "the central city of the Amazon valley," and began to systematically explore and map the southern tributaries of the Amazon. His goal was the discovery of the "missing" river link between the eastern Andes and the Amazon. A continuous, navigable, water route would provide the means of transporting the riches of the eastern Andes, minerals and rubber, via the Amazon and the Atlantic to Europe. From 1862 to 1870 he sent reports and maps of a number of rivers to the Royal Geographical Society in London. These reports include descriptions of animal and plant life, geological formations, and the various Indian tribes living by the rivers as well as detailed observations of the rivers.
In 1866 the Royal Geographical Society awarded Chandless its gold medal for his exploration and mapping of the Purus River. The Purus "had hitherto baffled all endeavors to trace its course" until Chandless ascended it 1,866 miles to its source, using astronomical and surveying instruments to map its entire length. Clement Markham, another South American explorer, said he "had seldom received a more admirable piece of geographical work than the minute and complete maps of Purus."
As his overland account shows Chandless to have been a practical traveler with a flair for overcoming difficulties, so his river explorations indicate an indefatigable characteristic. A Visit to Salt Lake describes dress, diet, personal habits, and carefully considered decisions that contributed to the success of his journey. Unfortunately, the explorer purposely omitted "personal details" from his river reports. It would be interesting to know how Chandless managed his expeditions since, according to a current scholar, he made his river explorations at "the worst possible time" for exploring—years of danger and discomfort. One difficulty was in procuring and keeping a crew of Indians for the canoes. Another was the constant danger of attack by hostile Indians. On the Purus trip his Italian servant and some crew members left the main party and were all killed. On a later trip Chandless and his crew were attacked but not injured. His crew, however, refused to continue and he wrote, "I shall always look back with shame on our return." Still later, a traveling companion and his crew were killed. The explorer nevertheless continued with his men until stopped by rapids. Chandless, who seemed never "very eager . . . for a return to the restraints of city life or civilized touring," died in London of "inflammation of the lungs" in 1896.
Chandless could see beyond racial or religious stereotypes, whether in writing about the Mormons or later about riverside Indian tribes. In A Visit to Salt Lake he offered criteria for judging American Indians: "To judge fairly any race whose habits differ from your own and especially of an uncivilized race, you must look beyond the mere repulsive exterior, or even actions, to motives, feelings, and principles." He applied this standard in writing about the Amazon Indians, such as the tribe at the very headwaters of the Purus whom he described at some length because, he said, "from their industry, simplicity, friendliness, good manners, and utter ignorance of the existence of a world other than their own little world, they interested me much."
Chandless was an independent traveler both in means and spirit. He undertook his explorations "entirely at his own expense"; he was not sponsored by the Royal Geographical Society as were Richard Burton and David Livingston in Africa. He chose to go where few or no Englishmen had gone before, whether across North America or down the Purus. Yet his independence brought him future obscurity rather than notability. Although all his river reports were published in the journal of the Royal Geographical Society, his name is not found in later books about the accomplishments of the society because he was not sponsored by it. He may have been the first Englishman to go certain places, but they were not the sort of places to bring him far-reaching repute. One can confidently infer that his account of the Mormons was not widely appreciated by his contemporaries. Although his extensive river explorations were recognized by his peers, he did not find a river link between the Andes and the Atlantic. Instead, the result of his expeditions was "rather to destroy the hopes" that a commercially navigable route existed. Even the Purus, deep and free of rapids, had no commercial importance, because, as Chandless showed, it was "exceedingly tortuous." It is, in fact, one of the most crooked rivers in the world. The Brazilians named a tributary of the Purus the Chandless River "in honor of its explorer," but this river today is much the same as he found it a hundred years ago—in the midst of impenetrable rain forests.
Since there is no metropolis on the Chandless River with inhabitants to look back with interest on the observations of an early visitor, the English traveler and explorer will probably continue to be primarily associated with A Visit to Salt Lake. Even so, Chandless may yet become somewhat better known and appreciated for the contribution he made to Utah history.
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