John Wesley Powell

John Wesley Powell was a Civil War veteran, explorer, and leader whose first descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers made him an international celebrity. The expedition’s progress through the Grand Canyon was marked not only by physical danger but by conflict within the party. When three men disappeared near its end, Powell returned to Utah to investigate; his account of their fate became the foundation of a version later challenged by evidence and questions about how the story had been recorded.

Identity and Expedition

Powell had lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, but in 1869 he led an expedition into a vast, unmapped region. The party set out from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 24 in small wooden boats, intending to follow the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River and then continue through the Grand Canyon. The journey would carry the explorers through what the book describes as the last large blank space on the map of the contiguous United States.

The voyage was arduous, dangerous, and increasingly strained. By the time the party reached the lower Grand Canyon, its members were hungry and battered, with only five days of provisions, largely dried apples and coffee. A division had developed between Powell and his brother, Captain Walter Powell, associated with military discipline, and five independent-minded trappers: William Dunn, Oramel Gass Howland, Seneca Howland, Jack Sumner, and Billie Hawkins. The expedition’s hardships and this clash of temperaments form the immediate background to the break that ended Powell’s contact with three of his men.

The Separation in the Grand Canyon

On August 27, near the journey’s lower end, the boats were brought ashore above rapids that would prove to be the last dangerous ones on the route. Dunn and the Howland brothers said they would leave the expedition. They intended to climb roughly four thousand 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 departed.

The next day, after watching their companions pass through Separation Rapids, the three climbed out of the canyon carrying two rifles, a shotgun, a duplicate set of expedition papers, and a silver watch Sumner had entrusted to them for delivery to his sister if he drowned. They followed a steep gulch later called Separation Canyon to the north rim and crossed the Shivwits Plateau. About thirty miles from the river, they climbed Mount Dellenbaugh to find their bearings. Dunn scratched his name into a summit boulder, with the date 1869 and an arrow pointing north toward Utah. That inscription, found more than a century later, was the last known trace of the missing explorers. They never returned.

Powell’s party continued downriver. After passing Separation Rapids, the men waited, fired guns, and signaled for the deserters to rejoin them; the three remained on the rocks as the boats moved away. Two days later, the expedition reached the Virgin River, where Mormon settlers fed the exhausted explorers and escorted Powell across the Beaver Dam Mountains to St. George.

The Search and the Shivwit Account

On September 8, while Powell was traveling from St. George toward Great Salt Lake City, a report appeared in the Deseret News claiming that three members of his expedition had been killed by Indians. The account said that Shivwits had fed the hungry men, then pursued and killed them after hearing that they had murdered a woman. Powell rejected the allegation that Oramel Howland had harmed her, citing his personal knowledge of Howland’s character. The report therefore confronted Powell with a claim that implicated his missing companions, while offering an explanation he found implausible.

A year after the expedition, Powell returned to the region. The Howland brothers’ family had asked him to learn what happened, and he sought help from Brigham Young, who provided Jacob Hamblin as guide. On September 5, Powell met Brigham Young, Hamblin, and about forty local Saints at Parowan; William Dame and John D. Lee, both later identified in the account as leading perpetrators of the Mountain Meadows massacre, were among them. Powell and Hamblin eventually continued south from Pipe Spring with an escort of Kaibab Indians. Near Mount Dellenbaugh on September 19, Hamblin arranged a meeting with members of the Shivwit tribe.

Powell’s published version says the Shivwit chief confessed to killing three white men. A second account, conveyed without Powell present, described how Dunn and the Howlands had arrived exhausted and hungry, received food, and been sent toward the settlements. They were then mistaken for miners said to have killed a woman, and the Shivwits ambushed them. Powell forgave the tribe and sought neither punishment nor revenge. In this account, the killings arose from a fatal misunderstanding rather than from the original allegation that the explorers themselves had attacked a woman.

A Contested Record

Powell’s account became the principal support for the widely accepted conclusion that the Shivwits killed the three explorers. Jack Sumner and other skeptics disputed that version. Sumner later recalled seeing the watch he had given Howland in the possession of a white man who boasted about it; he considered this suggestive, though not conclusive. Much later, a letter discovered by Wesley P. Larsen in Toquerville suggested that Dunn and the Howlands may instead have been killed by a local Saint inside an LDS ward house. Most historians and scholars, including Wallace Stegner, rejected Larsen’s hypothesis and continued to rely on Powell’s and Hamblin’s descriptions of the confession.

The reliability of that evidence is itself disputed. Powell’s account depended on Hamblin’s translation, and Powell was not fluent in the Paiute language. Larsen argued that he could therefore assess the meeting only through what Hamblin told him. The narrative in Powell’s bestselling book, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, is also described as embellished and as omitting relevant events; it even combines episodes from separate visits in 1869, 1870, and 1871–73, presenting events from 1872 as if they occurred in 1870. These criticisms do not establish that Powell knowingly misstated the confession, but they complicate the certainty often attached to his account.

The lack of an apparent effort to recover the explorers’ bodies, guns, instruments, or papers also raises questions in the later investigation. A telegram reporting the killings said that two alleged perpetrators were near St. George with two of the guns, yet no local effort to arrest them or locate the bodies is described. The record thus leaves Powell in two roles: the celebrated leader who sought answers for the Howland family, and the transmitter of a story whose translation, chronology, and omissions later became subjects of scrutiny. The men’s disappearance remains unresolved in the evidence presented, with Dunn’s weathered signature on Mount Dellenbaugh enduring as a physical trace where the competing accounts cannot supply a definitive ending.