The Colorado River in Under Heaven’s Banner is more than the setting for a dangerous expedition: it is a route through a contested landscape, a barrier that made a few crossings strategically important, and the center of a historical dispute over what happened to three of John Wesley Powell’s men. Its canyons expose the hardships and rivalries of exploration; its banks connect Mormon settlements to routes across the desert; and the river’s remoteness helps explain both the region’s isolation and the difficulty of establishing the truth about violence there.

A route through the last blank on the map

In 1869, the first descent of the Green River and Colorado River signaled that the West’s remaining expanses of unexplored wilderness were being entered and mapped. Powell’s expedition set out from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 24 in small wooden boats. The plan was to follow the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River, then continue through the uncharted chasms of the Grand Canyon. Powell, a Civil War veteran who had lost his right arm at Shiloh, led a journey marked by danger, hardship, and growing friction among its members.

The expedition’s river miles carried the men into country where distance and terrain made ordinary rescue or retreat difficult. By late August, after nearly a thousand perilous miles, the party was battered, hungry, and short of provisions. On August 27, near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, Seneca Howland, Oramel Howland, and William Dunn left the group despite Powell’s pleas that they stay. They intended to climb four thousand vertical feet to the canyon’s north rim and then cross more than a hundred miles of desert toward Mormon settlements in southern Utah. The river had brought the expedition to a point where separation meant a hazardous passage on foot through an unfamiliar landscape.

The Howlands and Dunn: a disputed fate

A year after emerging from the Grand Canyon, Powell returned to the region to explore the Colorado River and its tributaries. The Howland brothers’ family had asked him to learn what happened to Oramel and Seneca. With assistance from Brigham Young, Powell traveled with Jacob Hamblin, a prominent southern Utah guide and missionary. On September 5, Powell met Brigham Young, Hamblin, and about forty local Latter-day Saints in Parowan; among them were William Dame and John D. Lee, both identified in the account as leading perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre. The group accompanied Powell as far as Pipe Spring, where he and Hamblin continued south across the Arizona Strip.

On September 19, near Mount Dellenbaugh, Hamblin arranged a meeting with members of the Shivwit tribe. In Powell’s account, the chief confessed that the tribe had killed three white men. A second account, conveyed through Hamblin, said Dunn and the Howlands had arrived at the village exhausted and nearly starving, received food, and set out toward the settlements. After a report that miners had killed a woman, the Shivwits allegedly mistook the three men for the perpetrators, followed them, and attacked them. Powell accepted this explanation, forgave the Shivwits, and did not seek punishment or revenge.

That account became the prevailing explanation, supported by the detailed narratives of Powell and Hamblin and accepted by most historians, including Wallace Stegner. But Jack Sumner, who had been a friend of Dunn, and Colorado River guide Otis “Dock” Marston continued to doubt that the Shivwits were responsible. Sumner later recalled seeing a silver watch he had given Howland in the possession of a white man who boasted of how he had obtained it. This evidence did not settle who killed the men, but it contributed to Sumner’s skepticism about the claim that Indigenous people had led the murder.

The dispute acquired new force in 1980, when Wesley P. Larsen found an 1883 letter in an old trunk in Toquerville. Written by William Leany to John Steele, the letter suggested that Dunn and the Howlands had been killed by a local Latter-day Saint inside the Toquerville ward house. Most historians disparaged Larsen’s hypothesis, in part because the prevailing account rested on Powell’s and Hamblin’s descriptions of a confession. The book, however, questions how securely those accounts can be trusted: Hamblin’s reputation as an honest man among southern Utah Saints stood in tension with evidence that he had lied in service of the Kingdom of God and had also deceived others for personal gain. The river’s remoteness thus frames not only the men’s disappearance but also the difficulty of resolving the competing testimony about it.

Lee’s Ferry and the settlements along the river

Farther downstream, Lee’s Ferry occupied a strategic bend in the Colorado River below the lower rapids of Glen Canyon and upstream from the Grand Canyon. For many miles it was the only place where the river could be crossed. That made the ferry an important link between Utah and Mormon colonies in Arizona and Mexico, as well as a crossing used by occasional Gentile prospectors. John D. Lee operated a small wooden scow there, earning a meager living by carrying travelers across the river before his arrest and execution.

After Lee was jailed in 1874, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent Warren M. Johnson to the river’s north bank with his wives and children to help Lee’s wife, Emma, maintain the crossing. Their son LeRoy Sunderland Johnson was born at Lee’s Ferry on June 12, 1888, and later became a fundamentalist prophet known as Uncle Roy. After the Manifesto, the ferry’s remoteness appealed to polygamists. Short Creek, founded on the Arizona Strip in 1911, became another isolated refuge, and ties developed between its residents and the Johnson family at Lee’s Ferry. When improved access brought more outsiders through the ferry in 1928, some of the Johnson clan, including LeRoy, moved to Short Creek, which remained more remote. The Colorado River consequently appears not just as an obstacle to cross, but as a feature of the landscape that helped shape where communities could remain hidden and how they were connected.