Seneca Howland

Seneca Howland was an expedition boatman whose departure from John Wesley Powell’s 1869 journey through the Grand Canyon became the beginning of a disappearance that was never conclusively explained. He left with his brother, Oramel Gass Howland, and William Dunn, choosing an arduous route across remote country toward southern Utah. The three men did not reappear; accounts of their deaths conflicted, and the last known physical trace associated with them was Dunn’s inscription on Mount Dellenbaugh.

Identity and the Expedition

Seneca Howland was one of nine men who had traveled nearly a thousand river miles with Powell by late August 1869. The expedition had 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 continue through the Grand Canyon. The journey was dangerous and difficult. By the time the party reached the lower canyon, the men were battered and hungry, with only five days of provisions, mostly dried apples and coffee. The expedition was also divided. Powell and his brother, Captain Walter Powell, represented military discipline and the officer class; Howland, Dunn, Jack Sumner, and Billie Hawkins were among the five trappers associated with frontier independence and resistance to discipline. The evidence places the Howland brothers and Dunn among the disgruntled members of this divided party, but does not specify Seneca’s individual reasons for leaving or describe his character apart from his decision to go.

Departure and the Overland Route

On August 27, immediately above what would prove to be the journey’s last dangerous rapids, Seneca and his companions announced that they were leaving. They planned to climb roughly four thousand vertical feet from the river to the canyon’s north rim and then cross more than a hundred miles of barren desert to Mormon settlements in southern Utah. Powell pleaded with them to stay, but they set out on their own course. The next day, after watching the remaining boats pass through Separation Rapids and disappear around a bend, the three men began the climb out of the canyon. They carried two rifles, a shotgun, a duplicate set of the expedition papers, and a silver watch that Jack Sumner had entrusted to them for delivery to his sister if he drowned. The details make their departure more than a simple break from the party: they carried practical means of defense and navigation, as well as documents and a personal obligation connecting them to the men they had left behind. They ascended the steep gulch later called Separation Canyon, reached the north rim, and crossed the Shivwits Plateau. About thirty miles from the river, they climbed the slopes of the extinct volcano now known as Mount Dellenbaugh to survey the country and plot their way forward. At its 6,990-foot summit, Dunn scratched his name into a boulder. That inscription, dated 1869 and pointing north toward the Utah line, was later found by DeLoy Bateman’s party. It is evidence that at least Dunn reached the summit; it does not establish how far the three men traveled afterward. Seneca and the others never returned to known contact.

Reports and Conflicting Accounts

A report published in the Deseret News on September 8 claimed that three members of Powell’s expedition had been killed by Indians. According to the account, Shivwits had first fed three hungry white men and directed them toward Washington in southern Utah. The men were then said to have shot a woman gathering seed, after which three Shivwits followed and killed them. The report did not name the dead, and Powell initially rejected its allegation that the missing men had attacked the woman. Powell later returned to the region after the Howland family asked him to investigate. With Jacob Hamblin guiding him, he met Shivwits near Mount Dellenbaugh. In Powell’s account, the chief acknowledged that the tribe had killed three white men. A separate explanation relayed at the meeting held that the travelers had arrived exhausted and nearly starved, had been fed and sent toward the settlements, and were later mistaken for miners who had killed a woman. The Shivwits, believing that account, pursued and killed them. Powell treated the deaths as the result of a terrible misapprehension and sought neither punishment nor revenge. That account did not silence doubt. Jack Sumner later described seeing the silver watch he had entrusted to Howland during a drunken altercation involving white men; one man reportedly boasted of how he had obtained it. Sumner considered this insufficient proof on its own, but said it strengthened his belief that Indians had not led the killing, if they had participated at all. A further challenge emerged in 1980, when Wesley P. Larsen found an 1883 letter in an old trunk in Toquerville. The letter suggested that the three men had been killed in Toquerville, inside an LDS ward house, by a local Saint. The competing claims leave the precise circumstances of Seneca’s death unresolved.

Disappearance and Historical Significance

Seneca’s story is preserved largely through what others reported: the expedition’s account of the split, the claims relayed through the newspaper and Powell’s later investigation, and the later doubts voiced by Sumner and others. His own words and the outcome of his intended journey are absent from the surviving account. The contrast is especially striking at Mount Dellenbaugh: Dunn’s carved name fixes one moment in the landscape, while the route the three men took afterward—and their final destination—remains unknown. The disappearance also complicates the expedition’s successful completion. Powell and the remaining men continued downriver and eventually reached Mormon settlements, but the three who left were not simply lost to the map: their departure became a dispute over what happened, whose testimony counted, and whether the accepted account concealed another responsibility. Seneca’s place in the narrative is therefore defined both by his consequential choice to leave and by the uncertainty that followed. The evidence establishes his participation in the departure and the search for an overland route; it does not establish with certainty who killed him or precisely where he died.