Jack Sumner

Jack Sumner was one of the trappers on John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition through the Grand Canyon, and a close friend of William Dunn and the Howland brothers. When Dunn, Seneca Howland, and Oramel Howland left the expedition near its final dangerous rapids, Sumner stayed with Powell’s party. He later recalled their last sight of the three men and resisted the early claim that Indigenous people had killed them. His account links the expedition’s physical ordeal to a growing dispute over what happened after the group separated—and to the unresolved significance of a silver watch he had entrusted to Oramel.

Place on the Expedition

By late August, Powell’s party had traveled nearly a thousand perilous river miles. Its nine men were battered and hungry, with only five days of provisions, mostly dried apples and coffee. Tensions had also grown between Powell and his brother, associated with military discipline, and five trappers—Dunn, the Howland brothers, Sumner, and Billie Hawkins—described as fiercely independent and hostile to discipline. Sumner belonged to the group at the center of that divide, though the evidence does not specify his part in particular disputes.

On August 27, above what proved to be the last dangerous rapids of the journey, Dunn and the Howland brothers announced that they would leave. They intended to climb roughly four thousand vertical feet to the canyon’s north rim and cross more than a hundred miles of desert toward the Mormon settlements of southern Utah. Powell pleaded with them to stay, but they persisted. Sumner’s later recollection preserves the parting as a moment of separation rather than a disappearance without warning: the men who continued downriver made it through Separation Rapids, pulled ashore, and waited about two hours, firing guns and signaling toward the cliffs. The three friends remained on a reef, motioning the others to go on. Powell’s party eventually did.

The Missing Men and Sumner’s Suspicions

The men who stayed with Powell discussed the fate of the three deserters around their campfire the night after the separation. Sumner recalled that his companions feared the Indigenous people of the region would kill them. He did not share that expectation. He had trained Dunn for two years to avoid surprise, and thought an open attack on three armed men unlikely. His greater fear was that they might fall victim to white men in the region. The distinction mattered: Sumner was not simply dismissing danger on the trail, but questioning who was most likely to pose it.

A report soon supplied a different account. The Deseret News reported that the three men had been fed by Shivwit people after being found exhausted, and then killed after allegedly shooting a woman gathering seed. The newspaper’s story followed an anonymous telegram sent to Mormon Apostle Erastus Snow in St. George. Sumner, who had emerged safely from the canyon with Powell, remained skeptical of the claim that Indigenous people were responsible. The account’s language of certainty did not settle the matter for him; in his view, the possibility of white perpetrators had to be taken seriously.

The Watch and the Question of Responsibility

Sumner’s suspicion was informed by his knowledge of the Mountain Meadows Massacre and by what he understood as continuing Mormon claims that Indigenous people alone had been responsible for that killing, despite evidence to the contrary. The book presents this history as context for his distrust of the explanation offered for his friends’ disappearance. He and Powell disagreed on many matters, but on this question Sumner shared the major’s skepticism.

Before the separation, Sumner had given Oramel a silver watch to deliver to his sister in case Sumner drowned. Years later, Sumner said he saw the watch during a drunken brawl with white men. One of them had it and boasted of how he had obtained it. Sumner acknowledged that this was not conclusive proof. It nevertheless helped convince him that Indigenous people had not led the killing, if they had played any part in it. The watch had begun as a practical provision for the possibility that Sumner himself might die on the river; after the men vanished, its later appearance became a troubling trace connecting the missing expedition members to white men.

What Sumner’s Account Establishes

Sumner’s testimony supplies both a close account of the parting and a reason to question the first public explanation of the deaths. He records that the three men were still visible after the others survived Separation Rapids, and that they signaled for the party to continue. He also makes clear that his suspicions rested on more than one source: his knowledge of Dunn’s training, his understanding of the region’s history, later reports, and the watch he recognized years afterward.

Those details do not resolve the fate of Dunn and the Howland brothers. The watch was evidence that Sumner found persuasive, not definitive proof of who killed them or whether Shivwit people were involved. His account instead preserves the uncertainty at the center of the episode: three men left the river for a dangerous crossing, never reappeared, and became the subject of competing explanations. Sumner’s friendship with them, his final sight of them, and the watch entrusted to Oramel give that uncertainty a personal measure without making it disappear.