The Deadly Lure of Separation Canyon

THREE WHO DARED When luck ran out for a trio of Colorado River explorers Text by Lyman Hafen

Unlike most first encounters with the Grand Canyon, my own was from the bottom looking up, at age 14, floating into its prisonlike chasm on the currents of the Colorado River. One particular image of that trip has stayed with me: a night spent on the beach at Separation Canyon. It was August of 1969. I lay on the sand gazing up the black lacquered walls of the Canyon as steaks sizzled on the camp stove and our trip leader related the mesmerizing story of what had occurred at this spot 100 years earlier. "This is where it happened," he concluded, inviting all of us to look at the plaque bolted to the canyon wall. I joined my friends clambering over the rocks to read the words etched in bronze: Here on August 28, 1869, Seneca Howland, O. G. Howland, and William H. Dunn separated from the original Powell party, climbed to the North Rim and were killed by the Indians. Maj. John Wesley Powell, a Union Army officer who had lost his right arm in the Civil War, was a geologist and ethnologist. After the war, he became the first explorer to plumb the wilderness at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. He and a 10-man party braved the rapids of the Colorado River in a journey that delivered excitement - and peril at every bend. Although the party's four wooden boats were built to withstand the river's treacherous white water, one of them was smashed against a boulder and broke apart. No one could guess what danger the next minutes would bring.

As darkness shrouded our camp that night, I stared into the canyon, ruminating about that long-ago journey. It wasn't too difficult, I thought, to understand why the three men had given up to return to civilization. Back then, in those pre-dam days, one of the Colorado's fiercest rapids crashed through this very stretch. After weeks of meager rations, exhausting days lowering boats with lines through thundering falls, and running rapids that wanted to swallow them alive, the Howlands and Dunn may have felt they had experienced more than enough terror. For all they knew, at any moment they might plunge over a waterfall, or be sucked into a whirlpool. They had already encountered vicious whirlpools, stubborn eddies, giant boulders, and threatening floodwater gushing out from side canyons. Some chroniclers of the Dunn-Howland separation refer to the men as cowards and deserters. Others attribute the split to a personality clash between the men and Powell. But why they left the expedition was not what intrigued me. I was far more interested in knowing what those three encountered when they took off that summer morning a century ago and how they died. It would be years before I would try to find out. May, 1987: along with several others bent on retracing the path of Dunn and the Howlands, I drove south out of St. George, Utah, 80 miles to the Slim Waring ranch at Wildcat on the Arizona Strip. Here we picked up Buster and Terry Esplin. Buster and my uncle, Ferrel Hafen, would be the drivers and trip monitors. Terry, Buster's son and a rancher on the Strip, would join the hike, along with Brent Kamerath, a banker; David Nuffer, an attorney; and Milo McCowan, a real estate broker. We had arranged for a boat to pick us up on the river at the end of our hike. After a one-day layover at the ranch, we set out in a four-wheel-drive Suburban heading south toward the edge of the Earth at Kelly Point. But we had some stops to make along the way. A few miles south of Wildcat, we parked the vehicle and hiked into an Eden of green below two basalt ridges. Buster informed us that this was Log Spring, where, local folklore suggests, Dunn and the Howlands were ambushed as the men camped. We walked down the grass-lined draw and up through black rocks, our imaginations running at high speed.

One of Major Powell's priorities following that expedition was to learn if the three men had succeeded in getting to civilization. In his journal, Powell tells how he headed back through the Mormon settlements of southern Nevada and Utah, inquiring of everyone he met about the men, and eventually learning that they had made it out of the Canyon only to be felled by Shivwits' arrows.

The next year, on September 19, 1870, Powell and Mormon missionary Jacob Hamblin visited the Uinkaret Paiute camp near Mount Trumbull on the Arizona Strip to learn what they could about the killings.

According to the Paiute account, Indians from the south side of the Colorado River had crossed to the north to warn the Shivwits about some miners who had plundered their camps and murdered a squaw. As fate would have it, this attack on the Indians happened at the same time Dunn and the Howlands left Powell's expedition, and the Shivwits mistook the hapless trio for the miners. When the opportunity presented itself, they ambushed them.Other stories claim the motive for the killings was robbery as the men were carrying two rifles, a shotgun, and a watch. The watch later turned up in St. George, legend has it, and Toab, a renegade Shivwit, was credited with the killings. Toab was later imprisoned for murdering his father-in-law. After serving his sentence, he returned to the Shivwit Reservation in southern Utah where he died.

For whatever reason the three men were killed, some believe the deed occurred either at Log Spring or farther south at Pen Pockets, known also as Ambush Water Pocket. (Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, a member of Powell's second river expedition in 1872, placed the site of the killings at Pen Pockets.) No bodies were ever found.

After investigating Log Spring, and failing to find any hint of the ambush, we headed back through the junipers to the vehicle. Just before reaching it, Ferrel picked up a near-perfect arrowhead. Could this weapon have pierced the flesh of one of the Howlands or Dunn?

Our next stop on the rough track we were navigating was 7,000-foot-high Mount Dellenbaugh to search for a message said to have been scratched into a rock by William Dunn.

For two hours, we scoured the rugged face of the mountain before we finally found it on a black boulder nearly a yard wide. It read: Dunn 1869 water. An arrow on the rock pointed toward Lake Flat, a clearing among the pines to the north.

Had Dunn gotten this far? Some believe so. Dr. C. Gregory Crampton, author and retired professor of history at the University of Utah, allows that the inscription could have been made by Dunn. If it is authentic, then, we figured, the site of the killings had to be Log Spring rather than Pen Pockets because the three would already have passed that site before reaching Mount Dellenbaugh and would have been on a natural course leading to Log Spring.

From our mountain vantage point, we could see down along the peninsula stretching to Kelly Point, the southernmost cape of the Shivwits Plateau and, though we could not see as far as the point, we could study the route the Howlands and Dunn, once out of the Grand Canyon, would have used to work their way north. That was the route we would follow, backtracking the three men to the Colorado River where they had started their ill-fated trek. Later that day, four-wheel-drive engaged, we were on the trail, negotiating some of the most treacherous country on the continent.

It was 6:00 P.M. when we arrived at Kelly Point, thoroughly exhausted from being battered on the rough ride. To regain our strength, we spent an hour in softly falling rain peering into the formidable Grand Canyon. From here we could clearly see Separation Canyon to the west to which we would hike the next day. As we set up camp just north of Roger Tank, the light rain turned into a downpour. After all the preparation for this trip, it was hard to deal with the possibility of a washout. But Buster quashed that fear when he jokingly suggested we plan more such outings if that is what it takes to get precipitation in the dry Strip Country.

By dawn the rain had stopped, though the sky was still murky. We ate breakfast, packed our meticulously rationed vittles and water, bade goodbye to Ferrel and Buster who returned to the ranch, and headed southwest via shanks' mare, along the track we believed Dunn and the Howlands had hiked a century and more before us.

With about 40 pounds of food and gear on our backs, we remaining five began the descent from 6,000 feet, hooking up with a deer trail that led us to the bottom of the first shelf. Ahead was the draw leading directly up to Kelly Tank.

At 4,400 feet, we stumbled upon an awesome pour off, the sight of which jerked the spirits out of us. From an According to account written by Michael Belshaw who, with three others, retraced the Separation Trail in May, 1978, we knew this would be our first big obstacle. But it looked worse than it was.

After a half-hour's search, we found the narrow chimney Belshaw had written about, the logical spot where Powell's men would have climbed out of their walled prison. We lowered our packs over the cliff, then, one by one, we inched through the slot down to a shelf, then scurried around the ledge to another cliff where we lined the packs again and eased our way down to a talus slope we could descend to the bottom of the canyon.

Now we're home free, we thought. But, a half-mile farther on, we discovered another pour off that looked impossible to climb down. Our hearts sank. We began a cautious backtrack. Then we found it. A shelf leading around to another talus slope to the canyon bottom. We were now four hours into the expedition.

Our spirits high again, we headed toward the east arm of Separation Canyon just as it began raining. In minutes we were dropping into the Redwall formation where the canyon grew narrower by the yard.

Before we knew it, we found ourselves sandwiched between sheer walls, a dangerous place to be under the circumstances. A flash flood would kill us all.

Fortunately, the floods never came, and we proceeded safely into the east arm of Separation.

Seven hours had passed, and we had covered only six miles. That meant we could expect two more hours of walking before striking the junction where the east arm meets the main canyon.

Camp that evening was on a broad rock shelf where dozens of water pockets provided us with plenty of fresh rainwater.

That night as we sat around our camp stove, still four miles from the Colorado River, our final destination, we speculated about those men who had gone before. We could visualize Dunn and the Howlands making their way through this rugged country, trying to avoid the heat while keeping an eye out for water and food. We wondered if they could have made it out without a supply of water and what they might have eaten along the way. The only wildlife we encountered, other than lizards, was a rattlesnake. Surely, they would not have made it without a good dose of luck, we concluded, and drifted off to sleep, exhausted.

Next morning we were on the trail again, coming upon the first live water about three miles above the river. We had dropped 4,500 feet in 14 hours of hiking.

Our arrival at the shore of the Colorado was anticlimactic. I'm not sure what we expected, given our state of mind, but it wasn't what we got. Dozens of brightly dressed river runners greeted us with cold soda pop and questions. Where had we come from, what had we seen, and where were we going? We found it difficult to explain what we'd experienced, that there had been no trail where we'd walked in some of the roughest country this side of the Himalayas, and who were the Howlands and Dunn, anyway?

Finally, they all shoved off, heading downriver, and we claimed the beach for ourselves. In the morning, we knew, one of Mark Sleight's riverboats would be along to pick us up and float us to Pearce Ferry.

As I lay in the sand that spring evening, I listened to the unmindful river rushing by and gazed up the same varnished walls I had seen as a teen, the same walls that Powell and his men pondered the night of August 27, 1869. His journal entry on that date surely echoed what the others in his tiny group of explorers felt themselves: "All night... I pace up and down a little path, on a few yards of sand beach, along by the river. Is it wise to go on? I go to the boats again, to look at our rations . . . I am not sure that we can climb out of the canyon here, and, when at the top of the wall, I know enough of the country to be certain that it is a desert of rock and sand between this and the nearest town, which, on the most direct line, must be seventyfive miles away.... I almost conclude to leave the river. But for years I have been contemplating this trip. To leave the exploration unfinished having already almost accomplished it, is more than I am willing to acknowledge, and I determine to go on."

That night, Dunn and the Howlands determined not to go on, having lost faith in the expedition and likely fearing for their lives. They were never seen by white men again. Ironically, had they stayed with the others, the following day they, too, would have reached safety at Grand Wash, the expedition's final destination.

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