Introduction

Utah State Historical Society State Capitol—Salt Lake City, Utah

Vol. XVI January, April, July, October, 1948 Nos. 1-4

Vol. XVII January, April, July, October, 1949 Nos. 1-4

INTRODUCTION

With this volume of its Quarterly, the Utah State Historical Society completes one of its most ambitious and most important projects, the publication of the original journals of the Powell expeditions of 1869-72.

The introduction to the last volume of the Quarterly, in which the journals of the Powell Colorado River Exploring Expedition of 1869 were published, devoted attention to explorations of the Green and Colorado rivers antedating those of Powell. The present introduction, dealing with the second Powell expedition of 1871-72, appropriately looks to the larger significance and fruits of this work of exploration and discovery, for the second expedition was what the first was not, a carefully constituted and admirably equipped scientific organization.

Although our lives are touched today at every point by our cultural inheritance from the great labors of Major J. W. Powell and his contemporaries. King, Wheeler, and Hayden, it is one of the curious paradoxes of our history that the early explorations of Utah and the West, having limited objectives and being largely of reconnaissance character, are better known than the great surveys of the seventies. Major Powell and his contemporaries did their work so well that we, the beneficiaries, have become not merely unappreciative but even incurious concerning it. It is thus a peculiarly valuable service that the Utah State Historical Society does in assembling and publishing the original records of one of the greatest of the early surveys, focusing attention upon it and making the records themselves available for study.

Undoubtedly the genesis of all these surveys was Clarence King's Fortieth Parallel Survey, which in 1867 embarked upon a hundred-mile-wide geological survey covering the entire length of the new Pacific Railroad. King's corps of geologists reached Utah in the summer of 1869, and in this and succeeding years, notably in 1871, achieved the first systematic mapping of northerner Utah. Although Clarence King's name is borne by Utah's loftiest peak, a summit in the Uinta Mountains rising 13,498 feet above sea level, his survey of 1867-74 has been almost forgotten, and few ever resort to the back shelves of the libraries to turn the pages of his massive report. The original field notes and Ietterbooks of his survey are, however, preserved in the government archives, and it is to be hoped that work done in these records by future historians of Utah and the West will do for the Fortieth Parallel Survey what the Utah State Historical Society has now done for the Powell Survey.

The King Survey was carried out under War Department auspices. By contrast, F. V. Hayden's Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, which also first took the field in 1867, was authorized by the Interior Department. The Hayden Survey concerned itself more particularly with Utah's neighboring states on the north and east, but no systematic study of the exploration and mapping of Utah will be complete until the documents relating to Hayden's Survey have been annotated in the light of modern knowledge, and published.

Even more imperative than a study of the King and Hayden surveys is a comprehensive reexamination of the labors of Lieutenant George M. Wheeler's Geographical Survey West of the One Hundredth Meridian. This was also a War Department enterprise, which had in the beginning the direct military purpose of providing information for operations in the Indian country of Arizona, Nevada, and southern Utah. The work so begun in 1869 was expanded in 1871 to embrace a larger field of labor, summarized by Wheeler himself as "to gather as much information as possible relating to the physical features of the country; the number, habits, and disposition of the Indians; the selection of sites for military operations or occupation; facilities for making rail or common roads; to make such examinations as were justifiable from their importance of the mineral resources of the region; and to note the climate, geological formation, areas valuable for agricultural and grazing purposes, and the relative proportions of woodland, water, and other qualities"—all this in addition to the gaining of correct topographical knowledge and the preparation of accurate maps of the regions investigated. Throughout the seventies, Wheeler's parties crisscrossed southern and western Utah, at times intersecting the paths of Powell's men. A long series of preliminary reports, eight volumes of final reports, and a valuable atlas were published by Wheeler, but it is past time that the original journals and field notes of his men be brought forth in the dress of modern scholarship, and such a labor suggests itself as the next large investigation to be carried on in the original documents relating to the discovery and formal mapping of Utah.

The three major surveys above named, together with Powell's great survey of the Colorado River canyons and the adjacent high plateaus, made possible the organization of the U. S. Geological Survey. In 1875 the Hayden and Powell surveys were reorganized under the Interior Department as the U. S. Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories, and in 1877 the resulting organization was renamed the Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. Finally, in 1879, the geological and geographical work of the government, apart from that of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, was consolidated by Congress as the U. S. Geological Survey. Clarence King served as director long enough to organize the new bureau, and then was succeeded by Major Powell, who meanwhile had set up the Bureau of American Ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution. The Major remained head of the Geological Survey until 1894 and of the Bureau of American Ethnology until his death in 1902. His influence on American life and institutions, it may be remarked in passing, was not confined to these two bureaus; the U. S. Bureau of Mines and the Bureau of Reclamation function today in pursuance of ideas on which Powell's vigorous mind had a powerful formative influence. Similarly, ideas of land use, utilization of natural resources, and in general the technological relationship of man to his environment, which have notably influenced government policy and the functioning of such Federal agencies as the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Interior, were markedly shaped by the thinking and public discussions initiated by Powell and his contemporaries.

The first Powell expedition of 1869, the springboard which catapulted the Major into all these great developments, was treated comprehensively in volume XV of this Quarterly, when the journals of George Y. Bradley, John C. Sumner, and the Major himself were printed with many collateral documents and biographical sketches. The present volume is concerned with the second expedition of 1871-72, which has been so strangely neglected in the record of the Powell explorations.

The Second Powell Colorado River Expedition of 1871-72 consisted of 11 men at the time it launched its three boats into the swift waters of the Green at Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 22, 1871. One member of the party, Frank Richardson, left the expedition in Browns Hole soon after starting, and he, like Andy Hattan, the cook, is not known to have kept a journal. All the other members of the expedition did keep journals, and it is the good fortune of this Society that it has been enabled to publish the majority of these, so that the second Powell expediion is now more completely documented than any other exploring enterprise of which we have record.

The journals of Almon Harris Thompson, published in volume VII of this Quarterly, of Francis Marion Bishop, published in volume XV. and of Stephen Vandiver Jones, John F. Steward, and Walter Clement Powell, all published in the present volume, account for five of the known diaries. The spasmodic journal of Major Powell himself, preserved in the Bureau of American Ethnology, is also here printed in part, in the form of footnotes to the other diaries. Frederick S. Dellenbaugh's original diary, deposited in the New York Public Library, remains unpublished but was the basis of his book, A Canyon Voyage (New York, 1908), so that its substance is well known and readily available. Jack Hillers also kept a journal, one somewhat belatedly begun but written up from the beginning; this, however, has not yet been located. The whereabouts of E. O. Beaman's journal has also to be established, but Beaman used this diary as the ;basis of a narrative published in Appleton's Journal during April and May, 1874, a record which has been drawn upon in annotating the diaries printed in the present Quarterly. Seen from so many diverse points of view, the second Powell expedition, both in its human components and in its scientific labors, can be known with a fullness of understanding that has never been possible until now.

Although the work of the second expedition was singularly neglected in the formal literature after publication of Powell's brief Report of Explorations in 1873 of the Colorado of the West and Its Tributaries (Washington, 1874), x a good deal of attention was given to it by the contemporary press, as most of the members of the expedition contributed letters to their local newspapers. These letters make up a bulky literature in their own right, and as they are largely repetitive of the journals, it has been found inexpedient to reprint them, except for F. M. Bishop's correspondence to the Bloomington (111.) Daily Pantagraph. published in the previous volume of this Quarterly, and four of Clem Powell's letters to the Chicago Tribune, reprinted in the present volume to fill a gap occasioned by the loss of one of his four diaries. One additional letter, Clem's last to the Tribune, so amplifies his journal account of the Hopi towns that it has been reprinted following his journal. S. V. Jones's correspondence to the Lacon (111.) Journal may be seen in transcript form in the Powell Collection of this Society. Frederick Dellenbaugh's correspondence to the Buffato Express may be seen in the New York Public Library, in the form of clippings pasted in his original diary. E. O. Beaman contributed a few letters to Anthony's Journal, a magazine devoted to photography which was essentially a house organ of the E. & H. T. Anthony Company of New York. John F. Steward makes some mention in his diary of writing letters to a local newspaper, but these have not been located. Inquiry has not disclosed the existence of any newspaper correspondence by Hillers, and it appears that the leaders of the second expedition, Major Powell and Almon Harris Thompson, wrote only letters to their families, which however occasionally appeared in print. Andy Hattan evidently found cooking a sufficiently creative labor, and left belles-lettres to his comrades.

Powell's fascinating report on his explorations, published in 1875, oddly neglected the great labors of the second expedition," and until this Society embarked in 1939 upon the project of publishing the original journals of the members of the Powell Survey, what was known of their work owed chiefly to Frederick S. Dellenbaugh. In 1877 he wrote a narrative of the canyon voyage of 1871-72 which, about 1886, he published in the Ellenville (N. Y.) Journal.' It was 1902, however, before the second expedition began to come into its own. In that year Dellenbaugh published his The Romance of the Colorado River, in which he gave proper attention to the great exploration of 1871-72 down the dangerous river, and six years later he followed the first book with A Canyon Voyage, a fuller and more personal account of the work that he and his comrades had done in 1871 and 1872.

Now, taking up where Dellenbaugh left off, the Utah State Historical Society has substantially completed the documentary record of the Powell Survey, at least for the years of its inception. None of the diaries printed, it may be remarked, extend beyond the field season of 1872 with the exception of Thompson's, which continues to 1875. All the original members of the Powell Survey except Hillers had left by that time, and the work done after 1872 must be sought out, for the present, chiefly in some of the published reports, especially J. W. Powell's Report on the Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Uinta Mountains . . . (Washington, 1876), G. K. Gilbert's Report on the Geology of the Henry Mountains (Washington, 1878), C. E. Dutton's Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah (Washington, 1880), and Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District (Washington, 1882). 4

In preparing all these diaries for publication the Utah State Historical Society has been fortunate in having the aid and advice of three notably qualified authorities. Dr. Herbert E. Gregory, William Culp Darrah, and Charles Kelly.

Dr. Gregory, who edits the journal of Stephen Vandiver Jones in the present volume of the Quarterly, will be remembered for the equally distinguished editorial work done on the journal of Almon Harris Thompson, published by the Society in 1939. Dr. Gregory was born in Middleville, Michigan, October 15, 1869, the son of George and Jane (Bross) Gregory. After receiving his A.B. from Yale in 1896, he served there as an assistant in biology, 1896-1898, and as instructor in physical geography from 1898-1901, meanwhile receiving his Ph. D. in 1899. Subsequently he became assistant professor of physiography, 1901- 1904, Silliman professor of geology, 1904-1936, and in 1936, professor emeritus. He served as a director of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu, T. H., 1919-1936, and has been director emeritus since that time. His numerous subsequent activities include Geologist with the LL S. Geological Survey, Regent of the University of Hawaii (1936-1945), Chairman of the Committee on Pacific Investigations of the National Research Council (1920-1946), and United States Member of the Pacific Science Council (1946—). Since 1941 Dr. Gregory has been on special assignment for military service. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Association of American Geographers, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Geological Society; and he is a member of the Explorers Club (New York), the Cosmo Club (Washington), and the Pacific Club (Honolulu). Among his many papers on geology and geography, which have been concerned with Utah, Arizona, Peru, Australia, Connecticut, and Hawaii, those which are of especial regional interest include The Navajo Country, A Geographic and Hydrographic /?econnaissance, Washington, 1916; Geology of the Navajo Country. Washington, 1917; The Kaiparowits Region, prepared in collaboration with R. C. Moore, Washington, 1931; and The San Juan Country, Washington, 1938. In 1908 he married Edna Earle Hope of Charleston, S. C, who herself will be remembered as the author of "Iosepa, Kanaka Ranch," published in the Utah Humanities Review, January, 1948. Dr. and Mrs. Gregory make their home in Honolulu.

The second of the journals published in the present volume of the Quarterly, that of John F. Steward, is edited by William Culp Darrah, of Medford, Massachusetts, to whom this Society is so signally indebted for the documents and biographical sketches of the first Powell expedition of 1869, published in the last volume of the Quarterly. A sketch of Mr. Darrah's career as a paleobotanist and industrial engineer was published at that time, but it may be noted that Mr. Darrah is now completing the biography of Major John Wesley Powell for which there has been such a long-felt want. Mr. Darrah's energetic research into all phases of Powell's career is well evidenced by the comprehensive biographical sketches he has supplied, first of Powell's associates of 1869, and now also of the men of 1871-72 whose journals have not been published and who therefore merit special biographical treatment These inquiries by Mr. Darrah into the life of Powell and his contemporaries are only one phase of his many-sided interests in a neglected field of Americana, the development of science and technology between 1840 and 1890 when American life as a scientific and industrial phenomenon began the intricate evolution which has changed the history of the world.

Charles Kelly, who edited the journal of F. M. Bishop in the preceding volume of this Quarterly, and who has edited that of W. C. Powell for the present volume, has been one of the most indefatigable investigators in Western history since he settled in Salt Lake City in 1919. Born February 3, 1889, in Cedar Springs, a Michigan lumber camp, he was the son of an itinerant preacher, and learned to set type at the age of seven. He became a professional printer, and in 1924 entered the Western Printing Company in Salt Lake City as a partner. An artist by inclination, he took up painting as a hobby and soon became interested in the colorful desert country. In the course of his sketching trips he became fascinated with the Donner Party and its travails in crossing the Salt Desert in 1846. The result of his investigations was a series of interesting contributions to this Quarterly in 1930 followed by Salt Desert Trails, which he printed and published himself the same year.

With an omnivorous interest in geology, anthropology, and archeology, Mr. Kelly has contributed to recent work in all these fields, but history has mainly preoccupied him, and he has become an authority in virtually every phase of Western history. His first book was followed in 1934 by Holy Murder, a biography of Porter Rockwell written in collaboration with Hoffman Birney. In 1936 appeared Old Greenwood, a biography of the old mountain man, Caleb Greenwood, and this was followed in 1937 by Miles Goodyear, another such biography written in collaboration with Maurice L. Howe. The next year he published the Journals of John D. Lee, as well as Outlaw Trail, a history of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch. Long interested in the Colorado River country, Mr. Kelly was a member of the party of Russell G. Frazier and Julius Stone which descended the Colorado in the summer of 1938 to place a marker at the Crossing of the Fathers. Mr. Kelly's article concerning that trip, published in the Saturday Evening Post for May 6, 1939, was instrumental in bringing to light the Walter Clement Powell journals.

In 1941 Mr. Kelly sold his printing business, and with his wife, Harriette Greener, whom he married in 1919. moved to Fruita, Utah, in the heart of the red rock land he loves so well. Besides acting as Custodian of Capitol Reef National Monument, he raises fruit, paints, writes articles on the desert, and at tne drop of a hat goes chasing off in quest of any new information bearing on the history of the mountain-desert country, particularly if it is a previously unknown inscription carved by some known or unknown traveler of the early West. The world authority on these inscriptions, Mr. Kelly has made them yield up striking information about the seemingly impenetrable past, as readers of his articles on Denis Julien and Antoine Robidoux, published in this Quarterly in 1933, will well recall.

In addition to the debt owed these three remarkably wellinformed editors, the Society is notably indebted to many other persons and institutions who have enabled the project of publishing the Powell journals to become a reality. As in so many other recent projects of this Society, the New York Public Library has been helpful in the highest degree in providing information and making available for publication the historic documents that have been deposited in its safekeeping. To Robert W. Hill, Keeper of Manuscripts, we are indebted for permission to publish the diary of S. V. Jones. The Chicago Historical Society and the New York Public Library, both custodians of transcripts made by John F. Steward from his original shorthand diary, joined in their consent to publication. Mrs. Mabel Bradley, only daughter of Walter Clement Powell, who has deposited the originals of her father's diaries in the museum at Grand Canyon National Park, similarly consented to their publication here.

Others to whom the Society extends its especial thanks include the Illinois State Historical Library, the California State Library, the Bancroft Library, the Salt Lake Free Public Library, the Genealogical Society of Utah, the L. D. S. Church Historian's Office, the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Historical Society, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the United States Geological Survey, and the Corps of Engineers of the War Department. Individuals who have been very helpful include Cabot T. Stein, Constantine A. Yeracaris, Robert W. Hill, Paul North Rice, Jay Monaghan, Mrs. Margaret A. Flint, Paul M. Angle, J. D. Kilmartin, W. W. Teeter, Richard Fennemore, Miss Margaret Whittemore, Mrs. Helen W. Mellor, Mrs. Juanita Brooks, Dr. Wallace Stegner, Mrs. Mamie Hall Laughlin, Mrs. M. S. Stetson, Mrs. M. W. Krause, and J. Cecil Alter. All three of the editors in this volume. Dr. Gregory, Mr. Darrah, and Mr. Kelly, made immense contributions to the volume as a whole, beyond their individual editorial contributions to the journals; the present volume not less than the original Powell explorations themselves is a monument to the cooperative work of many persons.

Like the preceding volume, the present Quarterly owes a great deal to the energy and imagination of the Society's Secretary-Manager, Miss Marguerite L. Sinclair. Of the Society's staff, Mrs. Elizabeth M. Lauchnor's labor with the details over a period of more than a year has been indispensable, and she has been ably assisted by Miss Lorraine Stout, Miss Patricia Tull, and Mrs. Ray T. Stites.

Photographs have been supplied by the U. S. Geological Survey, the Corps of Engineers of the War Department, the New York Public Library, Dr. Herbert E. Gregory, W. C. Darrah, Charles Kelly, Mrs. Mabel Bradley, and Richard Fennemore. The frontispiece is reproduced by courtesy of the artist, Miss Margaret Whittemore, her mother, Mrs. L. D. Whittemore, who first published it, and Mrs. Ray T. Stites, to whom our autographed copy was sent by Frederick Dellenbaugh.

Six sectional maps providing detailed topographical information were published in vol. XV of this Quarterly. Those maps are supplemented in this volume by a simplified map of the whole Green-Colorado river system, as far as the mouth of the Virgin River, which was prepared for the Society by Herbert M. Fehmel.

DALE L. MORGAN, Acting Editor.

1 This report was substantially reprinted in tills Quarterly, 1939, vol. VII pp. 134-138.

2 See the discussion by William Culp Darrah in the preceding volume of this Quarterly, p. 16.

3 Manuscript and clippings are preserved in die New York Public Library.

4 Dutton has been the subject of a doctoral study by Wallace Stegner: Clarence Edward Dutton, Geologist and Man of Letters, State University of Iowa, 1935. An abstract of this thesis was published by the University of Utah as Clarence Edward Dutton, An Appraisal (Salt Lake City, [1936]).