Frank Mason Brown drowned in a whirlpool in
the bottom of the Grand Canyon because he was sure he could build a great railroad
through its depths and become rich and famous. He believed he could define
reality. Although he died 127 years ago, his kind of hubris remains alive and
well in America.
Brown was one of the first humans on earth to
float a boat into the Grand Canyon. He never emerged from its maw because he thought
he knew better than the experts. He was smart. He had always gotten his way.
But he didn’t respect the reality of the Colorado River. As a result, bits and
pieces of Frank Mason Brown ended up feeding the fish from the Grand Canyon all the way to the Gulf
of California – the very place where his fantasy railroad was to have ended, a
thousand miles downstream.
Had the Grand Canyon not killed Brown, there is a good chance he would have wrecked the Grand Canyon - desecrating its sublime spectacle of pristine cliffs, rapids, waterfalls, and raw wilderness that adventurers experience today. America came way too close to having a railroad blasted through the heart of the Grand Canyon.
FRANK
MASON BROWN’S CRAZY PLAN
In 1889, it had been 17 years since Powell’s last
expedition. No one else had revisited the 300 miles of brawling river
inside the Grand Canyon, or much of the hundreds of miles of wilderness canyons and
forbidding rapids upstream in the upper Colorado River and its tributaries. At least, no
one who had lived to tell about it.
This wonderful river after nearly four centuries of discovery and exploration still flings defiance at the puny efforts of man to cope with it, while its furious waters dash on through the long, lonely gorges, as untrammeled to-day as they were in the forgotten ages. Those who approach it respectfully and reverently are treated not unkindly, but woe and disaster await all others.
These words were penned in 1902 by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh. He was with John Wesley Powell in 1871-72 on Powell’s second-ever descent through the Grand Canyon. Dellenbaugh knew whereof he wrote.Where most people saw frightful riverine obstacles,
however, businessman Frank Mason Brown saw opportunity. He would turn the Colorado
River into a money machine for himself and his rich East Coast backers.
Brown appears to have been born to privilege
in Maine; he was a Mayflower descendant. He started college but didn’t finish. His
father’s work for the Lincoln Administration likely helped him secure a job in
Alaska, soon after the Civil War, with the U.S. Treasury Dept. In the 1870s, he
ran a California mining company. That’s where he got himself elected as a state
senator for a term, before moving to Colorado to run another mining company and
speculate in real estate. He married the daughter of a Denver judge, and they
had two sons. Brown seems to have been able to get anything in life he set his
mind to. He had become wealthy and was looking for opportunity for new
investments.
This was the era of Manifest Destiny – the belief
in America’s God-given right to expand from the Atlantic to the Pacific and own
everything in between. The first transcontinental railroad had already been running
for two decades. Dwindling populations of Native Americans had been mostly
stripped of their land, settlers and immigrants were flooding west, and
railroads were punching into the last unclaimed wildernesses. Riches were free
for the taking. Unfettered, rapacious development would make America great.
The idea for a railroad through the Grand
Canyon started with a prospector named S.S. Harper, who had spent decades
looking to strike it rich in northern Arizona. Harper watched new railroads
being surveyed and pushed west and thought they were doing it all wrong. Why go
over mountains, he reasoned, when you could simply follow the Colorado
River that cut through the mountains? For years Harper talked up his pet
railroad scheme to anyone who would listen.
After Powell’s expeditions, other men came up
with similar ideas about a water-grade railroad from the Rocky Mountains to
California, but it was Harper who sold Brown on the plan. The two first met in
Denver in January 1889; Brown loved Harper’s dream.
On paper, it seemed to make sense: build a
river-level railway to ship coal cheaply from the mountains of Colorado to the
mouth of the Colorado River and then on to San Diego to coal-hungry markets. Tracks
would start in Grand Junction, near Colorado’s coal fields, and run river-side
for 1,200 miles to the Gulf of California. Although Brown, 43 years old, had no
experience in building a railroad, he was a hustler and a true believer in his
own genius, able to overcome any obstacle, to ignore any inconvenient fact. A
picture of Brown reveals a handsome, boyish face bedecked with ridiculous,
black muttonchops, a facial fashion of the day. He was described as happy and
cheerful, candid and full of self-assurance.
Brown and his partners set up the Denver, Colorado
River & Pacific Railway Company. Now as company president, Brown took his
fanciful plan east to raise money from starry-eyed investors, even meeting with
the U.S. Secretary of State (from back home in Maine). All gave enthusiastic
support for a railroad through the Grand Canyon.
He returned to Colorado with potential financial
commitments for millions of dollars to build the railway, contingent upon a
favorable on-site engineering report. Therefore, his first step would need to be
a survey of the proposed route down the river, a daunting endeavor that Brown
would organize and lead himself. To say that Brown was in over his head would
be a terrible understatement, as well as an awful metaphor, given his watery fate.
Nevertheless, it was true.
Brown knew little of the violence of the Colorado
River’s rapids or the Grand Canyon’s mile-high cliffs. He knew little about
equipping such an unusual expedition. Although he talked with Powell and
members of his crew at length, Brown believed they exaggerated the dangers. After
all, Brown must have been thinking, if the river was so bad, how had the
one-armed Powell managed to boat through it twice without (as far as the river could
be blamed) losing a single crew member? How dangerous could it be?
He was a man of action. Barely two months
after first hearing of S.S. Harper’s crazy idea, by March, Brown was ready to
go. He and two engineers he’d hired traveled from Denver to Grand Junction, 250
miles west. Minutes after arriving, Brown audaciously hammered into the dirt
the first surveying stake for what he believed would become the greatest of America’s
railroads.
Brown bought a leaky, 15-foot dory from the
local ferryman, repaired it, bought some rations, and hired a crew. His men
called him “President Brown.” They all took a test run together for a half-mile
down the upper Colorado River (then known as the Grand River). At that point, President
Brown waved goodbye, sent his survey crew on their way downstream, and headed
back east to complete arrangements for his full-scale expedition, which would
start a few weeks later from Green River on its namesake tributary of the
Colorado River. The tiny settlement to the west was on a train stop that Brown
could reach with the five boats he was having specially built in Waukegan, Illinois,
and shipped west.
First, however, Brown’s crew with their one
little dory were to survey the upper Colorado River route for 160 miles
downstream through steep, largely unexplored canyons and rapids from Grand
Junction to the mouth of the Green River. Just the boating would have been
challenging enough, but for these men, the boating was merely a means to an
end. They were running a survey line on the river’s bank to determine
the engineering feasibility of building a railroad alongside the river and past
its 500 or so often-deadly rapids. They walked the shore, scrambling over
boulders and around cliffs, wading in the river, while dragging a measuring line,
driving stakes every 200 feet, and using a transit and level to map precise
elevation and direction changes. They planned to do this for 1,200 miles,
identifying places where tunnels would have to be blasted from the steep canyon
walls, cliff benches leveled and widened, slopes flattened, river channels
moved, and bridges built.
Brown’s survey crew reached the mouth of the
Green River, relatively unscathed, in early May. To get upstream for their
rendezvous with Brown, however, they then had to pull their boat with ropes
against the current for 120 miles, under the broiling desert sun. After ten
days, they arrived exhausted and famished. The expedition’s sufferings had
barely just begun.
These were serious men on a serious mission
backed by serious investors. And, despite the skepticism of many, including
Powell, Brown and his men had no doubts about the practicality of their
mission. Brown’s chief engineer, Robert Brewster Stanton, who started with the
party in Green River, never wavered, still claiming more than a decade later,
despite the expedition’s tragic outcome: “That the proposed [rail]road is
feasible and practicable, and at a reasonable amount of cost, is beyond
question.”
[A note to the reader: In the
following narrative, I’ve relied entirely on the references cited at the end,
particularly Stanton’s hand-written journals. Most quotes are directly from those
frank and revealing pages. A few quotes – marked (M) – are from his memoirs
(Stanton 1965), written some 20 years later. Except as noted, photos are public
domain images from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.]
BROWN’S
HUBRIS MEETS COLORADO RIVER REALITY
On May 25, 1889, Brown’s full expedition
pushed off into the Green River, flush with the spring’s mountain snowmelt, and
headed downstream to the Colorado River and their fateful encounter with the
Grand Canyon. They were a crew of 16 men, including Stanton, Brown’s
newly hired chief engineer, and six ridiculous boats, including the “Brown
Betty,” the leaking old dory that somehow had made it all the way from Grand
Junction and would serve as the cook’s boat.
The five boats that Brown had ordered from
back east had suffered during their jostling rail trip from Illinois to Green
River. He’d designed them to be light for ease and speed during portages, but
that made them fragile. His priority was getting the survey finished quickly,
for reasons he would not confide to Stanton until weeks later during one of the
expedition’s many crises. President Brown’s worldview as a can-do businessman blinded
him to the fatal consequences of his ignorance, bad planning, and impetuous decision-making. Here
they were, about to embark on an epic journey into a poorly-known wilderness,
and their puny boats, no bigger than small canoes, had already proved so frail
that two had split nearly end-to-end on the train ride and had to be fixed
before they could leave.
At his first sight of their boats, Stanton’s
heart sank. He confessed to his journal:
I was awfully disappointed when I saw them. They are light brittle cedar
hunting & pleasure boats, totally unfit for the work they will have to do
down the Colo. River. I shall say nothing now, for my position &
association with Mr. Brown will not permit of it & I will go with these
boats. This I think it really unsafe.
Under Brown’s direction, Stanton bought
provisions and went about hiring a crew from the local talent. Since he had
carefully read Powell’s reporting of his earlier expeditions, Stanton knew that
he needed experienced boatmen to handle the boats for when the rest of the men
were ashore and surveying along the riverbank. Brown, though, believed he knew
better. He had brought with him from Denver two “guests” to accompany the
expedition. He told Stanton not to worry, that he and his guests would serve as
boatmen. Stanton was “thunderstruck”:
‘Guests’! on such an expedition! And they, two charming and genial young
lawyers and clubmen of Denver, to handle the boats down the River that Major
Powell’s sturdy frontiersmen had found such a task!
Both, presumably, were investors. One was the
company’s attorney. The other was the company’s secretary, whose incompetence in
that role helped save the Grand Canyon from Brown’s railroad, as a disgusted
Stanton would discover months after the expedition’s end.
Neither guest brought discernible skills to an
immensely perilous expedition. Brown’s poor judgment in bringing along these greenhorns
convinced Stanton that his new boss, while a great promoter, was “utterly
incapable of appreciating the nature of the undertaking he was going into, or
the dangers to be encountered, and, especially so, to scoff at the idea of any
danger to himself.”
Brown’s sense of invincibility took on mortal
stakes over the issue of life preservers, which he refused to buy. Members of
Powell’s expeditions had warned Brown of the necessity of wearing life
preservers on the unpredictable river. Stanton, who had a bum arm and couldn’t
swim, argued with Brown until “the air turned blue,” but it was no use. The
expedition would carry no life preservers.
Once their delicate little boats were launched
into the shallows of the Green River and loaded up, they floated so low that their
sides were only an inch above the water. The problem was the heavy, water-tight
zinc boxes for storing gear that Brown had ordered. So they removed the five
boxes and lashed them together as a raft, to be towed behind. This make-shift
contraption carried a third of their supplies and all the extra oars and rope,
“a most unwise arrangement from every point of view,” as Dellenbaugh later sniffed.
Finally, after a breakfast of trout with
strawberries and cream at the little Green River hotel, they were ready to go. Everyone
in town came out to cheer as Brown’s ill-fated expedition drifted away in the
crystalline current.
Almost immediately, the boats had to pull over
to calk fresh leaks in the heavily-laden Brown Betty, using a concoction of
flour and lard. Five miles later in the first shallow rapid, one of the new
boats scraped over rocks and opened three holes in its bottom, which were
repaired.
Yet after their problem-plagued start, for the
next four days the party floated without serious incident down to the Green River’s
junction with the Colorado River. Their placid boat ride was the calm before
their living nightmare ahead. They entered the Colorado River and resumed their
on-shore engineering survey.
Disaster didn’t delay. Just two miles
downstream, the crewmen in the boat towing their makeshift cargo raft beached at
the head of a particularly dangerous rapid, as Stanton had told them to do if
they got into fast water. But Brown, who had set up camp on the opposite side
of the river, yelled over to the men and ordered them to row across. Who knows
why? Maybe he wanted some food from the storage boxes.
Despite their fears, the men tried to obey. He
was, after all, the boss. Rowing across the powerful current with all their
might, they started losing the struggle and being swept toward the rapid’s chaos.
To save themselves, both jumped overboard into the shallow water and cut loose
the cargo raft. They saved their boat, but the five precious supply boxes
vanished downstream along with a third of their gear (some was later recovered).
Stanton gives no hint that Brown took any
blame or apologized.
The next day, June 1, the men headed into the
frenzied waters of the 44-mile-long Cataract Canyon, with its dozens of
near-continuous rapids, some with drops of 20 feet, and spent much of the day
portaging cargo around rapids, wading in icy water up to their necks, and
lowering the boats by ropes from shore (called “lining”) through the worst of
the raging waters – “the hardist (sic) day’s work I’ve known for years,”
Stanton recorded. As one of the boats was being lowered, with Stanton’s
assistant aboard to ward off boulders, it was caught by a giant wave, sucked
into a whirlpool, and spun about like a top for several minutes before being
safely spat out of the deadly vortex.
 |
| Cataract Canyon & one of the expedition’s frail boats |
Two days later, while the men were ashore surveying,
one of the tied-up boats swung into a rock and sank. They saved the boat but
lost its cargo, including all the clothes and bedding of two men. Stanton noted
dryly, “The damage to our stores from the swamping of one boat is quite
serious.”
The next day it was Brown’s turn to suffer,
along with his two pampered guests. The three started off alone while the crew
was still packing up camp. Downstream, their boat capsized in a rapid and they
were tossed out. Clinging to the sides of their boat, they were carried a mile
downstream before they were able to scramble onto some rocks, where they were
stuck overnight.
Meanwhile, upstream, as the other boats were
being lined past a rapid, one boat, with a man aboard, broke loose but managed
to survive its harrowing ride through the cascades. Next, the cook boat, the
Brown Betty, broke loose and was demolished. At this point, the expedition had
lost nearly all its cooking supplies and much of its food. In camp that night,
with the boss and his guests stuck downriver on the rocks overnight, the crew groused
freely. Stanton noted:
Talked to Several of the men & find a good deal of dissatisfaction
among them as to the way Mr. Brown is managing the expedition & the way
Hughes & Reynolds [the guests] try to boss the handling of the boats.
Morale was dismal. Food had run perilously low
and what little was left (flour, bacon, sugar, dried fruit, coffee) constantly
got soaked and had to be dried in the sun, with much of it ruined. All this
time the men were seldom actually riding in their boats, but were lining them past
rapids as they negotiated on foot the rocky beaches and sheer cliff faces. And,
of course – the reason for their agonies – the crew’s engineers, mile after
mile, were still carefully surveying and mapping the route for Brown’s mythical
railroad.
The next chance for supplies was still many
days downstream at Dandy Crossing, a camp where gold miners were working the
river’s gravels. (That spot today is flooded beneath the upper waters of Lake
Powell, two miles downstream from the bridge on Utah Hwy 95.) In camp on June
5, Stanton had a heart-to-heart with his boss about their desperate straits and
his worries that the crew was going to abandon the expedition. He recommended
that Brown, his two guests, and one crewman (who Stanton called “utterly worthless
except to eat our grub”) should take one boat and push ahead to Dandy Crossing
and obtain supplies. Stanton and the survey crew would catch up as soon as
possible. But Brown objected, worrying that it could slow down the expedition.
They argued into the night with no agreement.
Two days later as the survey struggled along,
the boat now serving as cook boat was upset, and the remainder of their cooking
supplies was lost to the river.
Sunday, June 9, was Brown’s 44th birthday,
andthey took a rest day to recuperate and dry out supplies as best they could. Several
climbed the cliffs to find more pine resin to repair their leaky boats.
For the next days they moved through their
surveying like the walking dead; sore beyond belief; gear, clothes, and bedding
constantly soaked; boats swamped; leaks continually being patched; and more
food and equipment lost in the worst rapids they had yet encountered.
At week’s end, Stanton confronted his boss
about their critical situation. Brown “was very much surprised and seemed
dazed,” noted Stanton. But Brown finally agreed to split up the party, with
Stanton and five men moving ahead on foot to continue surveying, while the rest
stayed behind to repair boats and catch up later. As Stanton’s group moved
forward, he wrote:
Our rations being very short we lunched today on three lumps
sugar and plenty of river water. For supper I took 1/6 of my
[bread] loaf with a cup of hot water & Condensed milk.”
Meanwhile upstream, the tribulations of
Cataract Canyon continued for Brown and the rest of the crew. One boat, the
“Mary,” had to be dismantled for material to repair the other boats, prompting
Brown to cry in front of his men, since the boat had been named after his wife.
What must his frontiersmen-crew have thought of their boss weeping over
a broken-up boat?
By Sunday evening, the two parties were
reunited, but they were still 37 river miles from their hoped-for relief at
Dandy Crossing and nearly out of food. The hungry crew was threatening
mutiny. Brown’s expedition faced its worst challenge yet – starvation.
Stanton, now “thoroughly disgusted with the
way things were going,” made an executive decision without asking his boss. He
ordered every morsel of food to be cooked, then divided everything into sixteen
equal piles, one for each man, on a log: “1½ loaf bread about 12” in diam &
1” thick, with no baking powder or salt. One can condensed milk, a little
coffee, a handful of beans. [The men] seem Thunderstruck.” Each took his meager
allotment.
Stanton recounted in later years a “most
curious” complaint that one of his men made long afterwards concerning this
egalitarian food distribution: “[H]e thought I treated him harshly and
unfairly… He thought, and so stated, that, because he had the greater appetite
and capacity for food, he should have had more than the rest!” (M)
One way or the other, Stanton was determined
to continue the survey with as many as would stay to work with him. He insisted
that Brown and a few men quickly press downstream to Dandy Crossing to get food
and bring it back while they carried on the railroad survey.
In the middle of trying to salvage their
expedition, that evening, Brown confided to Stanton for the first time the real
reason why he was in such a rush to complete the survey:
After Supper, Brown Called me aside & said he intended to have a
confidential talk with me & he believed this was the proper time. He then
explained why he was in such a hurry to get the survey through…, saying that he
was under an engagement to be in New York by Aug. 15th to meet a
syndicate of N.Y. men, who represented $50,000,000, who had agreed to take hold
of the building of this [rail]road if the Engineer’s report was favorable. That
they had agreed to wait in NY till Aug. 25th before going on their
Summer trips in their Yachts & hence it was of utmost importance on
reaching Dandy Crossing to drop the instrumental Survey and push on… so that I
could make an ‘eye Survey’ of the remainder of the route.
It’s unclear how much, if any, of the New York
syndicate’s $50 million (equivalent to $1.3 billion today!) that Brown was
counting on. Or, for that matter, how much he may have exaggerated his plan’s
popularity with his moneyed men. In any event, it wasn’t lack of money
that kept America from wrecking the Grand Canyon with a railroad grade blasted
through its heart.
Early the next morning, Stanton faced a revolt
from his hungry crew, who wanted to flee downstream together to find food. They
pleaded with Stanton to abandon the survey, but he would have none of it. Just
four men, including “our two colored boys, [Henry C.] Richards & [George
W.] Gibson,” who had been servants to Stanton’s family for many years, agreed
to stay with him to continue the survey through Cataract Canyon. Shortly after
7 a.m., “Brown & all the Scared men,” as Stanton sneered, eleven in all,
departed, “running from hunger to grub.”
Stanton and his small crew returned to their
survey work, while the retreating group worked through the rapids downstream.
Did Stanton take secret satisfaction as he watched one of their three boats
swamp, losing several of the men’s last sacks of food? Stanton’s contempt drips
from his journal page:
This [accident] seemed to frighten them more & they threw away almost
everything they had, blankets, clothing etc. etc. and started down the river
like scared dogs with their tails between their legs!!
Their fright was understandable. Earlier that
day, the near-starving men had come across part of a wagon floating in the
river, a body still attached and reduced to a skeleton.
As they worked, the survey party survived on
next-to-no rations. Their breakfast and dinner consisted of three ounces of
bread, with a little coffee and milk. No one complained.
Late on the third day, rescue arrived with a
boat loaded with food returning from Dandy Crossing. Stanton, though, was still
stewing about their abandonment, and grumbled: “[Crewman] Howard is in great
glee over plenty of ‘Grub’ but I feel sore over what passed last Monday &
so remark that I don’t care so much for Grub as I do for other things, which
offends Howard.” After Stanton’s passive-aggressive insult, Howard sulked all the
next day.
The night before they reached Dandy Crossing, while
camped at some “magnificent sulphur [hot] springs,” Brown came upstream and rejoined
Stanton. He was worried. The men were demoralized, he told Stanton, and, with
nothing to do, were complaining amongst themselves. Stanton said he would
straighten everything out if Brown would give him the authority. Brown agreed.
The expedition completed its survey to the
Dandy Crossing placer mining camp one week after the group had split up. With
everyone reunited and well fed, Stanton talked with each of his men. The upshot was that two
left the survey. Stanton replaced them with a local miner who was an
experienced boatman.
Brown reminded Stanton that he had to be in New
York in less than two months to meet his investors. So they agreed that a small
crew of five would remain behind to continue their engineering survey along the
relatively calm waters of Glen Canyon, that stretch of river from Dandy
Crossing to Lee’s Ferry, 170 miles downstream. Brown, Stanton, and the remaining
men would take three boats directly to Lee’s Ferry, then continue through the
Grand Canyon and on to Needles, California, to complete an “eye survey,” basically
a reconnaissance engineering report.
The plan was foolhardy, Stanton knew, given
their disaster-plagued trip thus far – “unwise in the extreme,” as he described
it later. And they hadn't even reached the Grand Canyon's violent waters. But, he explained, “I considered it my duty to remain with my
superior officer.”
With their boats repaired and strengthened, both
crews pushed off through Glen Canyon, one group slowly continuing the survey,
and the other moving ahead to Lee’s Ferry.
We can never see the sights that greeted these
men as they floated and rowed through Glen Canyon. That once-glorious landscape
lies buried under the waters of Lake Powell, since completion of the Glen
Canyon Dam in 1963. Stanton recalled his impressions:
In our journey through Glen Canyon, we stopped to examine and enjoy many
of the beautiful glens, and the great chambers and amphitheatres (sic) that
have been carved out of the massive sandstone, by the action of the River, in
which there are often springs and streams of clear water, with moss covered
walls, and banks streaked with black by the weather. The red is not in itself
brilliant, but the effect of the morning and evening sun shining upon the
cliffs, through the peculiar atmosphere of that dry country, produces a most
startling effect, till the whole side of the Canyon seems ablaze with scarlet
flame. It is difficult to understand how this effect is produced. In the late
evening, as one is looking up the River at some massive wall that seems, in the
shadow, to be black rather than red, suddenly the sunlight flashes out in
living fire, so bright, so startling, as to be unreal, for it is the color of
the sun’s rays, not the wall; but the wall is needed to bring the color to your
eye, and it stands out as if painted in veritable scarlet. (M)
During their idyllic float through Glen
Canyon, Stanton and Brown’s friendship deepened. They discovered they were
members of the same fraternity, and sang familiar college songs in the river’s echoing
alcoves. Stanton later confessed that he loved Brown, calling him “a most
delightful companion, kind and genial.” The new bonds would make their pending
tragedy all the more poignant for Stanton.
The men emerged from Glen Canyon and reached
Lee’s Ferry on July 2nd. Unbeknownst to them, just eight days away, death
waited.
RENDEZVOUS
WITH DEATH
In the early days of non-Indian settlement of the
Southwest, predominantly by Mormons in this region, Lee’s Ferry was the sole
crossing of the Colorado River for hundreds of miles in either direction.
When Stanton and Brown’s crew arrived in 1889,
nearby was the ranch of Warren M. Johnson “and his Mormon families.” The
Johnsons welcomed their unexpected guests with feasts from their produce and
livestock. After six weeks closeted in the river’s canyons, the men marveled at
the Johnsons’ well-kept fields of alfalfa and corn, trees ripe with fruit, and
lush gardens. Their favorite treat: all the buttermilk they could drink.
 |
| Warren M. Johnson families – Lee’s Ferry |
A rough wagon-road connected Lee’s Ferry with
Kanab, Utah, 80 miles to the west. The morning after the group arrived, Brown
borrowed a horse and rode to Kanab to buy fresh provisions. While he was gone,
Stanton met an old miner who gave him a list of local Indian names, which
Stanton intended to use to name local railroad stations along the tracks he was
certain would soon be coming right through Lee’s Ferry.
Five days later, Brown returned with a wagon
load of supplies. On July 9, the expedition’s reduced crew of eight was ready. Off
they rowed in three flimsy boats, still without a life preserver among them.
Today, Lee’s Ferry is the starting point for
recreational rafting trips through the Grand Canyon. In just eight miles,
rafters hit the first of the Canyon’s thrilling, world-class whitewater –
Badger Creek Rapid.
Three miles later, Soap Creek Rapid treats
rafters to a soaking-wet, roller-coaster-like ride. Exciting as it is, changes
to the Colorado River in the past century have actually made this rapid less
dangerous than for those first explorers. Certainly, few of the screaming,
beaming, modern-day river runners know the morbid history of Soap Creek Rapid. Even
before Brown met his deadly fate near there, the rapid had earned a bad
reputation.
During Powell’s second expedition down the
Colorado River in 1871, his party had halted for the winter at Lee’s Ferry,
caching their supplies, intending to return in the spring. A month before they
got back to resume their river journey, a group of ten prospectors discovered
the cached supplies and decided to steal what they wanted, then build
themselves a raft and check out the Grand Canyon. These idiots made it as far
as Soap Creek Rapid, which demolished their raft and marooned them in Soap
Creek Canyon. With the river upstream running against vertical cliffs, they had
no way to get back to Lee’s Ferry. Using driftwood for ladders, they eventually
climbed out of the canyon and made it back.
When Powell’s party came by that same spot a
month later, Dellenbaugh gloated:
We made a portage at the place and enjoyed a good laugh when we looked at
the vertical rocks and pictured the prospectors dismally crawling out of the roaring
water with nothing left but the clothes on their backs. Our opinion was, they
were served just right: first, because they had stolen our property, and,
second, because they had so little sense.
Seventeen years later, with little more common
sense than those fool prospectors, Frank Mason Brown resumed his expedition’s
journey from Lee’s Ferry down the route of his imaginary railway. The men were
rested, their bellies full, and spirits were high.
 |
Stanton's Journal - July 9, 1889
Plans to blast through Soap Creek Rapid |
Their first night, they camped just
below Soap Creek Rapid, which they had safely portaged. Surely, Brown must have
known the story of the rapid’s treatment of the ten thieving prospectors.
Perhaps that, and the ceaseless thunder of the rapids, is what spooked him and
kept him up late. Or was it a premonition? Brown seemed lonely and troubled, talking to Stanton about home
and his family, travelling in Europe and so very far away. Stanton
made up Brown’s bed for him, “as he seemed unable to do it, and divided my
blankets with him, for he was cold and unhappy.” That night, Brown's final dreams were of bad rapids.
They arose the next, fateful morning at 4:00
a.m., ate breakfast, and at 6:23 pushed away in their boats into the short
stretch of heavy waves and whitewater below Soap Creek Rapid.
It happened in a heartbeat and was over in 90
seconds. Brown’s boat in the lead capsized. He was tossed from the boat, sucked
into a whirlpool, and vanished. The notebook from his shirt pocket shot out of
the vortex – the only trace of Brown they could find, despite a desperate
search. Stanton mourned his friend:
In the depths of this lovely canon and beside the roaring water, which
leaped & lashed & foamed without easing, we sat for hours utterly
paralyzed. We watched eddy & …searched the banks for a mile & a half on
either side in hopes of at least finding his body & giving it an honored
burial place on the top some high cliff, but all in vain. It is a common
expression of those who know it, ‘This river seldom gives up its dead.’
The one indispensable item the charming,
know-it-all President Brown had neglected to include in his expedition was life
preservers. One would have saved his life. But Brown had poo-pooed Powell’s
warnings of the Grand Canyon’s dangers. Maybe he thought life preservers would
be in the way and slow their work. Maybe he just didn’t want to spend the
money.
Ironically, after Brown’s death, Stanton tried
to blame Powell for Brown’s own shortsightedness in not bringing life preservers.
As if Brown was a victim of others’ bad advice, rather than a casualty of his
own hubris. At the moment the Colorado River's muddy water flooded his lungs, was he surprised? Did he die blaming
someone else?
The crewman steering Brown’s boat also had
been thrown into the rapid, but he was swept past the whirlpool and survived.
Their boat was recovered undamaged and its contents intact, a mile downstream.
For the next three days, the sobered crew
soldiered on, shooting or portaging rapids, and lining through the worst.
Stanton threw himself back into his “observational survey” of the future
railroad line, writing descriptions of his recommended alignment in more detail
than ever. He noticed, however, that since Brown’s death, one of his crewmen,
Peter Hansbrough, was growing increasingly morose and worrisome, and sleeping
little.
Saturday, July 13, started hot and muggy.
Everyone was tired and sore from days of hard work in the oppressive desert
heat. On Sunday, they rested. The day was rainy and gloomy, foreshadowing the
next tragedy about to strike the foolhardy expedition of the now-dead Brown.
Stanton recalled in his book, under the heading “Some Facts, With No
Explanation,” how crewmen Hansbrough and Richards spent their last full day on
Earth:
The occurrences of this day are
not related here as evidence for the Society of Psychic Research; but as facts
that happened on a railway survey. – I leave to others their explanation…
[A]fter our Sunday breakfast, [Hansbrough]came to me and sat near me, or walked
with me around camp, the whole day, talking of his past life, of death, of
Heaven and his trust in a future state. I tried to cheer him up. Although no
thoughts of coming danger came into my mind I entered into the spirit of his
talk and read to him several chapters from the Bible, which seemed to comfort
him.
The two Negro boys [Richards & Gibson] had their camp some distance away,
so I hardly saw them all day; but learned later from Gibson, that Richards
spent the whole time, and the greater part of Sunday night, talking to him in
the same way as Hansbrough had to me, of the River, of death, and the future
life to come. (M)
Monday morning they were back on the river,
facing another series of dangerous rapids. They portaged the first, then
decided to run what is known today as 25 Mile Rapid. Immediately below the
rapid, the current swept left into cliffs that overhung the river by several
feet. From the beach above, the men assessed the best route through. The first
boat made it safely. As Hansbrough and Richards got into the second boat,
Richards remarked, “That’s a bad place to smash a boat, but of course there’s
no danger to us.”
Stanton pushed them off to their doom, a
moment he would remember the rest of his life, warning them to stay in the
current away from the cliffs. “Yes, we will,” Hansbrough replied.
But the river had other designs, and pulled
their boat left, smashing them under the overhanging cliff. As Stanton watched
helplessly from upstream, both men struggled to push away from their trap, but
suddenly the boat flipped over.
[Richards] sank in what was swift but perfectly smooth water. Hansbrough
we never saw from the time we saw the boat upset. [We] ran over the cliff but
by the time we got there all was quiet and both men gone forever. What an
experience. I am too much affected to write further.
The tragedy of Brown’s flawed ego had claimed
two more lives. As with his own death, life preservers would have prevented the
drownings.
At this point, Chief Engineer Stanton, who was
now in charge of the remnants of their expedition, knew they were beaten. For
two more days, the men worked their way downstream, looking for a side canyon where
they could scramble up cliffs to the plateau and escape the murderous river.
On the morning of the second day, they found
their exit in what today is named South Canyon. They pulled onto the beach and
explored the area, including a unique spot of greenery where springs gush from high
on the cliffs, which Powell had named “Vasey’s Paradise.”
From it we gathered ferns and flowers and took them to our camp where we
expected to spend our last night in the Canyon. The little flowers, in their
innocence and beauty, seemed to speak to us of better things, still the sad
thoughts of the past few days crowded in upon us.
It’s no wonder they were sad. As they returned
to camp with their handfuls of wildflowers, Stanton spotted what looked like a
large bundle floating down the river. Then he recognized Brown’s coat. They
chased the body downstream, hoping they could give their President Brown a
proper burial at Vasey’s Paradise, but the corpse vanished around the big bend
where the river swings in a hard-left turn.
Stanton named the promontory across the river
at that bend, Point Retreat. It’s a spot that captures the contradictory nature
of this man and his times. Stanton was genuinely awed by the point’s
magnificence, as well as the natural beauty of Vasey’s Paradise.
On the other hand, he was a man on a mission.
Even while he marveled at his sublime surroundings and mourned his friends’
drownings, he continued to work. Point Retreat, he concluded, would require
blasting a mile-long railway tunnel through it. The “easy exit” on the lower end
would have put the railway tracks on the cliffs right above Redwall Cavern, one
of the most iconic spots in the Grand Canyon, where today rafters stop to
lunch, play Frisbee on the broad, pristine beach, or simply marvel at the
immense cavern. It would be a perfect spot, Stanton observed, to build a railroad
bridge to cross the river.
And so, the first phase of Frank Mason Brown’s
ill-fated expedition ended ignominiously in South Canyon. The men cached their
boats and equipment in caves above the high-water line before heading up the
canyon. Despite everything that had gone wrong, Stanton had not given up on
Brown’s hallucinatory dream of a railroad through the Grand Canyon. He left,
vowing to return and complete his survey.
After a miserable climb up the half-mile-high
cliffs, and an equally miserable hike across the plateau, the crew reached the
Mormon settlements. In Kanab, the local bishop loaned Stanton $600 to get them
home. (All the expedition’s cash had flushed downriver in Brown’s pockets.) Telegraphs
went out from Stanton, informing the world of their tragedy, even while
continuing to promote the Grand Canyon railroad scheme.
Left to their own devices, some men are
capable of believing strange and crazy things. From the Kanab newspaper at the
time:
[Stanton] reports that the railroad line down the Colorado river canyon
is not only practicable as far as he has examined it, but can be much more
easily and cheaply built that he expected before the survey.
After all, the 1,780-mile-long
transcontinental railroad – laid entirely by hand – had crossed the treeless
Great Plains, the Rockies, and the Sierras – including a 1,650-foot tunnel
through solid granite at Donner Summit. Why should anyone doubt the engineering
feasibility of conquering the Grand Canyon?
By July 29, Stanton was back in Denver, his
head and notebook filled with plans return to the Grand Canyon and complete his
survey. This time, with President Brown out of the picture, he vowed to do it
right.
THE
GENIUS OF ROBERT BREWSTER STANTON
Though Brown was incompetent as an expedition
leader, the man he hired as his chief engineer was a genius at it. Had Robert
Brewster Stanton been in charge from the beginning, there’s a good chance that
today there would be a railroad track running right through the bottom of the Grand
Canyon.
 |
| Robert Brewster Stanton |
However, while Stanton proved to be a skilled
expedition organizer and leader, he was no good at fund raising, barely able to
raise enough, $13,500, to order new boats and supplies. That was but half
needed for his renewed expedition, so he paid the rest himself.
After his harrowing experiences with Brown’s
frail little boats, Stanton knew exactly what kind of sturdy crafts he would
need to survive the Colorado River’s frightful rapids, and oversaw every detail
of design and construction of three new boats at the Waukegan boat yard. Each
oaken, 22-foot boat could carry 3,200 pounds of food and gear, plus four
crewmen. Rear-facing men handled the eight-foot rowing oars; another stood in
the stern with a twelve-foot steering oar off the back. Stanton ordered for
everyone the “best cork life preservers,” also made to his precise design.
He mostly hired experienced, new men for the
second phase of the railroad survey expedition, retaining only his assistant
engineer, photographer F.A. Nims, and one other. He had a knack for finding men
who could quickly learn the skills of wilderness boating. Reginald Travers, for
example – a young stockbroker in New York City and “an amateur oarsman on
Flushing Bay” – would earn Stanton’s praise as the expedition’s best steersman
who “showed perhaps the greatest pluck and daring of any one of the men, in the
face of every danger or misfortune he encountered…”
Another, Langdon Gibson, was working as a
broker’s clerk on Wall Street, intending to become a banker. His father had met
Nims while travelling the West and climbing Pike’s Peak, and recommended that
his son apply to work on the expedition. Gibson served Stanton’s survey admirably, and went on to work as ornithologist on Robert Peary’s 1891-92
expedition to Greenland.
Only four months after Stanton had arrived in
Denver after the aborted first phase of Brown's survey, he left for his return to the
Colorado River. This time, he would by-pass the worst cataracts of the upper
river, where they already had surveyed. But reaching the river downstream of perilous
Cataract Canyon meant hauling everything in horse-drawn wagons from a railroad
stop in Utah, across 120 miles of desert mesa. For the last half there were no
roads or trails, as the wagons, teamsters, and expedition crew crossed gulches
and barely fit through slot canyons, in constant rain and snow. They reached the river on Dec. 6, 1889.
The new boats had survived their
cross-continental trip by train and wagon and “did not leak a drop,” Stanton
bragged. After four days of packing, the crew of twelve pushed off, first retracing
some 200 miles of their previous route across the mostly placid waters of Glen
Canyon.
By Christmas the expedition had made it to
Lee’s Ferry. The men celebrated with a great, outdoor holiday feast, dressed in
jackets and ties, and fed from their own provisions and fresh foods from
Stanton’s new friends, the Johnsons. After desserts, the men relaxed with Havana
cigars and Turkish cigarettes.
 |
Christmas dinner, 1889 -- Lee's Ferry
(Stanton at far left)
(Photo: National Park Service) |
On Dec. 28, the expedition headed out on a
beautiful, sunny morning. They planned to continue their detailed shoreline
survey only at difficult points, while their photographer, Nims, would take a “continuous
photographic panorama” of the entire, recommended railroad alignment. Those
photos would be the crucial proof Stanton would need to convince skeptics that
the railroad was practicable. And off they rowed.
Our good friend Johnson and all his families, thirty-two members in all,
came out to see us start, and gave us a cheer as we ran the long rapid. It was
the first real rapid our new boats and new men had run. I was proud of them
both. (M)
They portaged past Soap Creek Rapid and stopped
at the same place they’d camped the night before President Brown’s drowning six
months earlier. “Rather a sad place to camp in again,” Stanton noted. He hoped
that the future railroad past the spot would be a monument to the memory of its
first president.
Instead, perhaps in karmic justice to Brown’s
foolish, preventable death, that relatively inauspicious spot in the Grand
Canyon where he drowned is now named “Brown’s Riffle.” (Riffle: a ripple upon the surface of the water.) Some monument.
 |
| Stanton's new boats enter the Grand Canyon |
The renewed expedition, despite Stanton’s perfectionist
attention to detail to make the journey safe and successful, only made it 15
miles downstream from Lee’s Ferry before tragedy struck again.
New Year’s Day, 1890, dawned bright, clear,
and cold. At their first stop to allow photographer Nims to document their
descent, he clambered up a cliff in order to get a more artistic vantage point
that would include the men and boats in the scene. Nims slipped and fell 22
feet, landing on his head and shoulders on the hard sand and rocks below. His
right leg was broken above his ankle, and he was semi-conscious, vomiting, and
bleeding from his nose and ear.
Stanton’s tactical brilliance and fortitude
now came into play. Nims couldn’t continue, yet they were stuck downstream
below vertical cliffs. Moreover, the success of the expedition depended on the
“continuous photographic panorama” that Nims was making. No one else knew how
to operate the complicated camera and Nims was in no condition to offer
lessons.
I must confess, what worried me most was the fact that no one remained in
the party who had ever so much as focused a camera. It was a matter of most
vital importance. The Canyons of the Colorado had been pronounced
impracticable, and even impossible, as a railway route… We could not take these
doubters and the prophets of Wall Street to the Canyons, hence we must bring
the Canyons to the prophets. How was it to be done? By Photography! (M)
 |
| Photographer Nims before his near-fatal fall |
The next day, with Nims immobile, they floated
downstream to the first side canyon (Rider Canyon), where they spent the night.
In the morning, Stanton and two men started up the canyon, looking for a route
to get Nims out, and reached the icy top around noon. After lunch, the two men
headed back down and Stanton hiked off toward Lee’s Ferry, 35 miles away, to
get help. He arrived by moonlight at the Johnsons’ ranch at midnight, a giant
blister on one heel.
Up at 5:30 the next morning,
and with Johnson and his young son on a horse-team and wagon, he headed back to
rescue Nims. It was slow going, fighting a cold head wind across the trackless
mesa, and they didn’t make it to the top of the side canyon before dark. That
night it snowed.
Meanwhile, back at the river, eight crewmen
had managed to haul the often-unconscious Nims – strapped to a make-shift
stretcher made of canvas, oars, and driftwood – miles up the narrow canyon and
steep cliffs to the top of the mesa, 1,700 feet above the river. The last 15
feet up a vertical wall, they used ropes to pull Nims over the sheer rock face.
They were counting on meeting Stanton that same day, so had brought no blankets
or provisions and had to spend the night shivering and feeding a fire of
fast-burning sagebrush and tumbleweeds.
When Johnson’s wagon team finally reached the
edge of the rim the next day, they loaded Nims onto a mattress in the wagon.
Back in Lee’s Ferry, he was nursed by the Johnsons, then treated in Flagstaff,
before getting home to Denver.
Stanton and his men returned quickly to the river
and resumed their engineering survey. They passed Point Retreat, where they had
ended their first expedition less than six months earlier, recovered their
cached supplies, and pressed on to new waters. In camp about ten miles below
Point Retreat, they discovered the bleached skeleton of Peter Hansbrough, one
of the two boatmen who had drowned in 25 Mile Rapid, on the rocky shore where
high waters had dumped his remains. They easily identified him by the shoes
still on his feet, and buried him high on a cliff in a grove of sweet-smelling mesquite, overlooking
a magnificent point opposite, which Stanton named Point Hansbrough, as it’s
still known today.
Of the three men who drowned on the earlier
expedition, only Hansbrough got a Grand Canyon landform named after him. Brown
at least got a riffle, but poor Henry Richards got nothing. Richards, of
course, was Stanton’s “colored servant.”
 |
| Hard men at noontime rest in the Grand Canyon |
All through the winter, the surveying expedition
continued on, each day a new adventure filled with peril and discomfort, most
days spent cold in soaking wet clothes and nights wrapped in soggy blankets.
Stanton had mastered Nims’ camera, and successfully
took several thousand photos, working many days in pouring rain. A mile above
on the Canyon rim, snow piled ten feet deep. Mornings inside the Canyon often
were so cold that a fire was needed to thaw the camera and survey transit. As
they splashed through waves and rapids, they found themselves encased in a thin
sheet of ice.
Stanton’s men had become experts at shooting
the river’s ferocious rapids, portaging their tons of supplies, and lining
their boats when absolutely necessary. Despite their skill and caution, one of
their boats was smashed to splinters. Yet nothing seemed to phase Stanton.
On March 17, the expedition emerged from the
Grand Canyon into the open, sunny landscape below Grand Wash. Though they still
had 500 miles to go before reaching the Gulf of California, the
life-threatening rapids were behind them.
One would think, after traveling through five hundred miles of these
canyons, one would be satiated with beauty and grandeur, but in this fact lies
the charm – of the five hundred miles no two miles are alike. The picture is
ever-changing from grandeur to beauty, from beauty to sublimity, from the dark
and frowning greatness of its granite walls to the dazzling colors of its upper
cliffs, and from the roaring, tumbling waters of its cataracts to the peaceful
stillness of its great lakes. I stood in the last few miles of the Grand
Canyon, spellbound in wonder and admiration, as firmly as I was fixed in the
first few miles, in surprise and astonishment. (M)
Five weeks later, the crew reached tidewater
in Mexico. Stanton had brought his survey and crew safely down more than a
thousand miles of the Colorado River, marred only by his photographer’s
unfortunate fall and the loss of one of their three boats.
Stanton’s simple conclusion:
The [railroad] line as proposed is neither impossible or impracticable,
and as compared with some other transcontinental railroads, could be built for
a reasonable cost. (M)
So how come Brown and Stanton’s Grand Canyon
railroad never got built?
EPILOGUE
Brown and Stanton’s vision of building a
railroad through the Grand Canyon was never realized. That’s not, however,
because it was a stupid idea or a sacrilege, though it was both. In fact, had Brown
not drowned below Soap Creek Rapid, his knack for promotion and fund-raising,
combined with Stanton’s genius for engineering and project management, might
have forever changed the history and face of the Grand Canyon. Brown’s death
was a critical loss to the railroad project. Without him, Stanton the engineer
didn’t have the political skills needed to pull off such an audacious project.
Railroads were the tech industry of the time,
the place where immense fortunes were to be made. It also was a cruder time – bribery of politicians, fraud, and conflicts of interest were blatant, and
often tolerated. The nation-changing transcontinental railroad had been rife with
corruption; one historian (Jensen 1975) opined: “Seas are not discovered by the
scrupulous, nor continents conquered by mild churchgoers; there was risk at
every step in building the [transcontinental railroad], and most of those who
undertook the job did it with the hope of gain.”
Just months after Stanton completed, in April, 1890, what
he had every reason to believe was a successful survey expedition, he ran
into a bureaucratic snafu. Stanton had sent to the U.S. Dept. of the Interior his detailed
survey maps of the proposed railroad route, requesting acquisition by his
railroad company of right-of-ways along the 1,200 miles of the Colorado River.
On Sept. 6, however, he learned from the agency’s denial letter that his
company’s secretary, E.A. Reynolds, had never filed the necessary paperwork for
the railroad to be recognized by the government. This was the same Reynolds
that Brown had brought as one of his two “guests” on the first phase of that
ill-fated venture, to Stanton’s considerable disgust.
He sent a blistering, “I-told-you-so” letter
to his railroad company’s president, H.B. Chamberlin:
I repeatedly asked the Sec. if all the necessary papers had been executed
to establish the legal standing of the Co. & he assured me that they had.
Still on my return to Denver last April, after having proved the entire
feasibility of the route, I was not satisfied – although I did not dream of
anything of this nature. I feared from the habits of the Sec.
that the Co.’s papers were not in the best of shape. And at a meeting at your
house early in April, you… will remember, that among other things, I urged the
necessity of having a new Sec., giving my reasons, and
asking that this change be made at once.
No attention was paid to this recommendation… This whole matter is a shameful
piece of business from beginning to end.
Despite his pique, Stanton promised to
resubmit the right-of-way maps as soon as the necessary paperwork was filed by
a new company secretary. If those papers were ever filed, nothing came of it.
Government red tape wasn’t the only reason,
however, that the railroad scheme died. According to Dellenbaugh, soon after
the time of Stanton’s survey, the California market for Colorado’s coal already
was gone: “At present coal in abundance is to be had in the Puget Sound region,
and this reason for constructing a Grand Canyon railway is done away with.”
Despite engineer Stanton’s insistence that the
railway was feasible and affordable, the project was big and complicated. It
had lost its talented promoter, and its profitability was highly uncertain.
Definitely not a factor in the plan’s
demise was the environmental impact of the proposal. Ironically, Brown and
Stanton recognized the Grand Canyon as a unique, magnificent creation of
God. Stanton agreed that by virtue of its whole, the Canyon was “the
sublimest thing on earth.”
Nevertheless, they truly believed that a
railroad would make the Grand Canyon even grander. That it also could make them
rich would only be fair reward for their visionary genius. Never, so far as I
can tell, did either ask the fundamental question of whether a railroad should
be built through the Grand Canyon.
That would have been a heretical question for
men of their time. Conservation was barely a concept. The Sierra Club was just
being founded by John Muir in 1892. Not until 1903 did the Grand Canyon find a
worthy champion, when President Theodore Roosevelt visited and the told the
world:
The Grand Canyon fills me with awe. It is beyond
comparison — beyond description; absolutely unparalleled through-out the wide
world... Let this great wonder of nature remain as it now is. Do nothing to mar
its grandeur, sublimity and loveliness. You cannot improve on it. But what you
can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and all who
come after you, as the one great sight which every American should see.
America’s emerging conservation movement would
grow and manage to block serious proposals to build dams in the Grand Canyon. However,
other destructions of wild places that Brown and Stanton surveyed did follow –
most notably, the Glen Canyon dam in 1963, drowning hundreds of miles of
canyonlands and waters.
Brown’s railroad would have been a foolhardy
and permanent desecration of the Grand Canyon, nearly everyone today would
agree. But at the time, his dream no doubt was popular. It would have meant
jobs for coal miners and construction workers, profits for investors, and
potential tourist dollars to boot. Defilement of a sacred landscape didn’t
matter back then.
And maybe not so much even now. Today, on
Navaho land abutting the Grand Canyon, Indians are fighting Indians over plans
to desecrate a place that is sacred to the nearby Hopi - their birthplace, the confluence
where the Little Colorado River joins the main Colorado River. Plans include
tourist facilities and a tram to carry 10,000 tourists a day from the rim to
the river.
*
* *
Exposed on the Grand Canyon’s cliffs and
ridges are 1.7 billion years of geologic history. Its story will continue eons
after man’s railroads, dams, and tourist trams have washed to the sea. None of
which lessens our stewardship responsibility today. This place – the Grand
Canyon – is sacred. It is universally acknowledged as the “last word in
grandeur and sublimity” (Van Dyke 1920). It is sacrosanct.
Attitudes 127 years ago – exemplified by the
story of the failed Grand Canyon railroad – seem today reprehensible, even if
understandable. All the same, attitudes of today's leaders towards our natural heritage probably
will appear equally naïve, selfish, and indefensible, 127 years in the future.
The threat of a railroad through the Grand Canyon
is now dead as Frank Mason Brown. But his kind of short-sighted ignorance and
greed lives on. Men of such hubris concoct schemes and promise riches without
regard to environmental consequences or costs to future generations. Some
become president of more than a railroad. Like Brown, all will face their
inevitable fate in unsparing whirlpools.
REFERENCES
Daniels, Rudolph. 2000. “Trains Across
the Continent: North American Railroad History.” Indiana University Press.
Dellennbaugh, Frederick S. 1902. “The
Romance of the Colorado River.” Dover Publications.
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. Manuscripts
and Archives Division, The New York Public LibrJensen, Oliver. 1975. "The American Heritage History of Railroads in America." Wings Books.
New York Public Library Digital Collections: Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New
York Public Library. (1851 - 1960). Thursday April 24th 90. [Drawing of shape of shore.]
Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-56f3-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library. (1851 - 1960). Thursday
April 24th 90. [Drawing of shape of shore.] Retrieved from
http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-56f3-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99Robert
Brewster Stanton papers, 1851-1960:
Series V. Field Notes, Diaries, and Transit
Books. Field
notes of a survey for the proposed Denver, Colorado Cañon and Pacific Railroad
from Green River, Utah, down the Green and Colorado rivers to the Gulf of
California; incl. expense accounts, etc. 1889 May 10-1890 Apr. 30.
Series
VI. Photographs. Grand Canyon and the Colorado. Denver, Colorado Cañon and
Pacific Railroad Survey, 1889-1890.
Stanton, Robert Brewster. 1965. “Down
the Colorado.” Dwight L. Smith, ed., Univ. of Okla. Press. [Noted above with (M) where quoted.]
Van Dyke, John C. 1920. “The Grand
Canyon of the Colorado.” Kessinger Legacy Reprints.
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