Oramel Gass Howland

Oramel Gass Howland was one of the three members of John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition who left the party near the lower end of the Grand Canyon and never returned. He and his brother Seneca Howland, together with William Dunn, set out toward the Mormon settlements of southern Utah; after their disappearance, a carved name on Mount Dellenbaugh became the last known trace of the missing explorers. Reports that they had been killed by members of the Shivwit tribe were later complicated by conflicting testimony and a letter suggesting a different account.## Identity and ExpeditionOramel Gass Howland is known here chiefly through the final stage of Powell’s expedition and the unanswered question of what happened after he left it. He was a member of the remarkable party that made the first descent of the Green and Colorado Rivers, a journey through a largely unmapped wilderness. By late August, the expedition had traveled nearly a thousand perilous river miles. Its members were battered and hungry, with only five days of provisions remaining, mostly dried apples and coffee.Howland was one of five trappers whose independence brought them into conflict with Powell and his brother, Captain Walter Powell. The expedition’s tensions were not merely a difference of temperament: the major and his brother represented military discipline and the officer class, while the trappers resisted such discipline. The strain formed part of the circumstances in which Howland and his companions chose to leave, though the available account does not identify any single quarrel as the cause of their decision.## Departure from the RiverOn August 27, near the lower end of the Grand Canyon, the boatmen landed above what proved to be the journey’s final dangerous rapids. Howland, Seneca, and Dunn announced that they would leave the expedition. Powell pleaded with them to remain, but the three said they intended to climb about four thousand vertical feet to the canyon’s north rim and then cross more than a hundred miles of barren desert to the settlements in southern Utah.The next day, the three watched the rest of the party negotiate Separation Rapids and disappear around a bend. They then began their ascent, carrying two rifles, a shotgun, a duplicate set of the expedition papers, and a silver watch. The watch belonged to Jack Sumner, who had asked them to deliver it to his sister if he drowned. These objects show the practical and personal burdens they carried away from the river: records that might preserve the expedition’s account, weapons for the crossing, and a keepsake entrusted to them by a companion.Howland and his companions climbed a steep gulch later named Separation Canyon, reached the north rim, and crossed the Shivwits Plateau. About thirty arduous miles from the river, they climbed the gentle slopes of an extinct volcano now called Mount Dellenbaugh to orient themselves and plan a route across the country ahead. At the mountain’s 6,990-foot summit, Dunn scratched his name onto a boulder. The trio presumably continued north toward the settlements, but that destination is an inference rather than a known final leg of their journey. None of the three reappeared.## The Last TraceThe inscription on Mount Dellenbaugh became the last trace of Howland and the others known to exist. More than a century later, DeLoy Bateman and his family found the faint but legible name W Dunn, accompanied by the date 1869 and an arrow pointing north toward the Utah line. The mark was cut into a flat-faced basalt boulder about the size of a washing machine. It establishes that Dunn reached the summit, and its direction is consistent with the group’s intended journey; it cannot establish what happened to Howland or either of his companions afterward.The discovery gives the disappearance a fixed point without resolving it. The mountain records a moment of orientation: three men had climbed out of the canyon and were trying to chart their way across a harsh landscape. But only Dunn’s name survived there, and the inscription provides no account of the route they took next or of their eventual fate.## Reports and Competing AccountsTwo days after the three men separated from the expedition, Powell’s remaining party reached the Virgin River and encountered Mormons fishing. The group fed the exhausted explorers and escorted Powell over the Beaver Dam Mountains to St. George. On September 8, while Powell traveled toward Great Salt Lake City, the Deseret News reported that the three missing men had been killed by members of the Shivwit tribe. According to the report, the men had been found hungry, fed, and directed toward Washington in southern Utah; they were then said to have been involved in the killing of a local woman and killed in retaliation. The report did not give the missing men’s names.Powell doubted the account. He knew Oramel personally and rejected the allegation that he would have participated in the killing of the woman. His response reflected both confidence in Howland’s character and skepticism about a report that had reached the newspaper through an anonymous telegram. That reaction did not settle what had happened; it marked an early divide between the reported explanation and those who questioned it.A year later, Powell returned to the region after the Howland family asked him to investigate the brothers’ disappearance. With Brigham Young’s assistance, Jacob Hamblin accompanied Powell as a guide. At a meeting near Mount Dellenbaugh, a Shivwit chief, speaking through Hamblin, acknowledged that his people had killed three white men. Another account described the explorers arriving at a village exhausted and being given food before a visitor from east of the Colorado River wrongly associated them with men who had killed a local woman. The Shivwits then pursued and killed the three in a mistaken belief. Powell forgave them and sought neither punishment nor revenge.This account did not end the dispute. Jack Sumner, who had known the missing men, remained skeptical of the claim that the Shivwits were primarily responsible. He later reported seeing the silver watch entrusted to Howland in the possession of a white man who boasted of how he had obtained it. Sumner regarded the watch as suggestive, though not conclusive, evidence against the official account.## An Unresolved DisappearanceIn 1980, Wesley P. Larsen found a letter dated February 17, 1883, that had remained in an old trunk in Toquerville for ninety-seven years. Written by William Leany to John Steele, the letter suggested that Howland and his companions had been killed in Toquerville, inside the local LDS ward house, by one of the local Saints. Its existence added another possible account of their deaths, but the evidence presented does not establish that this allegation was true.The competing explanations leave Howland’s ending unsettled. The report of a killing by members of the Shivwit tribe, Powell’s later account of a mistaken retaliation, Sumner’s doubts, and Leany’s letter all attach different meanings to the same disappearance. None restores a direct record from Howland himself. In the book’s narrative, his story is therefore carried by other people’s testimony and by the physical trace left by Dunn: a name, a date, and an arrow pointing toward the country the three men hoped to cross.