William Dunn

William Dunn was a mountain man on John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers. After leaving the expedition with Oramel Gass Howland and Seneca Howland near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, he disappeared. The name he carved on Mount Dellenbaugh is the last known trace of the three explorers, while competing accounts of their fate made his disappearance an enduring historical mystery.

Identity and Expedition

Dunn was not yet thirty when he joined Powell’s expedition. Powell, his employer and the expedition’s leader, described him as shaggy-haired and noted the distinctive appearance of his buckskin clothing. Dunn was an experienced mountain man: before joining the expedition, he had been wounded four times by Comanches. The book presents him as particularly alert to the danger of surprise attacks, a background that later shaped how some observers assessed the claim that Indigenous people had killed him and his companions.

The expedition began on May 24, 1869, at Green River Station, Wyoming. Powell and his men intended to follow the Green River to its meeting with the Colorado, then continue through the Grand Canyon. By late August, they had traveled nearly a thousand perilous river miles. The men were hungry, battered, and low on provisions, and serious tensions divided the party. Powell and his brother Walter represented military discipline; Dunn and several other trappers were associated with frontier independence and resistance to such authority. Against this strained backdrop, Dunn and the Howland brothers chose to leave.

Departure and Last Known Trace

On August 27, near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, the boatmen stopped above what proved to be the journey’s last dangerous rapids. Dunn and the Howlands told Powell they would climb roughly four thousand feet to the north rim and cross more than a hundred miles of desert toward the Mormon settlements of southern Utah. Powell pleaded with them to remain with the main group, but they continued with their plan.

The following day, after watching the rest of the party pass through Separation Rapids, the three men began climbing out of the canyon. They carried two rifles, a shotgun, a duplicate set of expedition papers, and a silver watch that Jack Sumner had entrusted to them for delivery to his sister if he drowned. They reached the north rim by way of a steep gulch later called Separation Canyon, crossed the Shivwits Plateau, and climbed Mount Dellenbaugh to orient themselves before continuing north. On its 6,990-foot summit, Dunn scratched his name into a boulder. The record does not establish what happened after the three men set out again; they never reappeared.

More than a century later, DeLoy Bateman led his family to the summit, hoping to find the inscription. Near sunset, they located “W Dunn” on a flat-faced basalt boulder, with the date 1869 and an arrow pointing north toward the Utah line. The inscription was faint but unmistakable. Bateman photographed it and examined the mark left by the missing explorer. The discovery matters not because it resolves Dunn’s fate, but because it connects the vanished party to a specific place and to the direction they were believed to have taken.

Competing Accounts of the Disappearance

A report printed in the Deseret News in September 1869 claimed that three men from Powell’s expedition had been killed by members of the Shivwit tribe. In that account, the men had been fed after being found hungry, then were said to have provoked pursuit after shooting a woman. Powell rejected the story that Dunn and the Howlands had committed the alleged act, citing his personal knowledge of Oramel Howland and his belief that the accusation did not fit Howland’s character. The report and Powell’s objection did not establish what had happened to Dunn.

Jack Sumner, who had been close to Dunn and the Howlands, also doubted that Indigenous attackers had killed them. He believed that armed, experienced men would have been difficult to surprise, and later reported seeing the silver watch he had entrusted to the trio in the possession of a white man who boasted of how he had obtained it. Sumner regarded this as suggestive, not conclusive. His suspicion pointed toward white men, whom he associated with the danger facing the deserters, but it did not identify a proven killer or settle the circumstances of their deaths.

For many years, most historians and scholars accepted the account that the Shivwits had killed the explorers. That explanation was challenged by a letter discovered in 1980 by Wesley P. Larsen in an old trunk in Toquerville. Written in 1883 by William Leany to John Steele, the letter referred to three men killed in a room in the local ward house and to a murderer killed to prevent further bloodshed. Larsen compared the letter with historical records and concluded that its references might concern Dunn and the Howland brothers, the only three men known to have been murdered in southern Utah in 1869. The letter raised a serious alternative, but it did not by itself prove that Dunn was killed in Toquerville or establish who killed him.

Historical Setting and Narrative Significance

The possibility of a local killing sits within a tense regional climate. Many early settlers of Toquerville had participated in the Mountain Meadows massacre, and some were still living there in 1869. Federal efforts to arrest those responsible had intensified under Ulysses S. Grant, while a bounty had been placed on the heads of Isaac Haight, John Higbee, and John D. Lee. Brigham Young had also warned of a possible federal invasion and ordered sentries along the territory’s southern border. These facts help explain why the prospect of three outsiders walking toward Mormon settlements could appear threatening; they do not establish the settlers’ actions toward Dunn.

The evidence against the accepted account includes questions about why no effective effort was made to recover the explorers’ guns, instruments, papers, or bodies, even after a telegram alleged that some of the supposed attackers and two guns were near St. George. The book also notes that Dunn and the Howlands were armed, while the Shivwits were described as having no firearms, and that Dunn was particularly cautious after his earlier encounters with Comanches. These considerations weaken confidence in a simple version of the story, but the account remains unresolved: the evidence does not conclusively identify those responsible.

Dunn’s role in the narrative is therefore defined by an absence that can be traced but not filled. His inscription survives where he paused to take his bearings; his companions’ papers and watch surface in accounts of what may have followed; and later testimony keeps the official explanation in question. The carved name is both a physical remnant of the expedition and a limit on what can be known. It confirms Dunn’s presence on Mount Dellenbaugh in 1869, while the desert route northward ends in uncertainty.