Major Powell, I Presume…

   John Wesley Powell has been an inspiration for generations of river runners, but a most remarkable story Powell’s influence seems to have been missed by historians.

   A few years ago I visited Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee, and the park historian gave me an hour-by-hour account of Powell’s fateful day at the Battle of Shiloh. The historian corrected several mistakes in the usual accounts. For instance, Powell biographies state he was wounded by a bullet, but it was actually cannonball shrapnel. Even the park’s battlefield marker showing the position of Powell’s artillery battery was misplaced.

   In the visitor center a display mentioned people who fought at Shiloh and then went on to become famous. They included a President of the United States, two writers, and a river runner. But the famous river runner was not John Wesley Powell. Actually, the display didn’t mention anything about this individual being a river runner. Today hardly anyone knows of his accomplishment as a river runner––what we remember of him is that long ago somewhere in Africa he uttered four words: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume...”

   Henry Morton Stanley was the first person to descent the Congo River, an ordeal that makes Powell’s journey look mellow. Starting in 1874, just a few years after Powell’s explorations, Stanley’s expedition took two and a half years, two years of which were required just to reach the put-in. With hundreds of native helpers Stanley trekked a thousand miles through jungles and deserts lugging a 40-foot boat cut into sections. Dozens of men died from disease and many more died in attacks by native warriors. Stanley retaliated by looting and burning villages. As his native helpers deserted, he had them recaptured and locked in slave chains. When Stanley finally started his nearly 2000-mile descent of the Congo he only had 100 men left, most of them in canoes stolen from natives. For the next 1,000 miles Stanley and his remaining men fought off ambushes and fleets of huge war canoes.

   The rapids, too, were deadly. Stanley soon came to a series of cataracts and rapids stretching for fifty miles, which today is still known as Stanley Falls. At each cataract or unrunnable rapid Stanley’s men had to drag their heavy, fifty-foot long canoes out of the water and cut a portage trail through the jungle slopes. To get around one two-mile long rapid Stanley cut a road over a 1,500 foot mountain, for which his men named him Bula Matari, “the rockbreaker.” Where possible, Stanley used thick vines to line his boats. In another gorge of rough cataracts 150 miles long, it took thirty-seven days to progress thirty-four miles—with the loss of three canoes. When they got within fifty miles of their destination, they abandoned their boats and walked out of the jungle to civilization—where Stanley learned his fiance had married someone else fifteen months before.

   Like Powell, Stanley started out knowing little about river running and cautiously learned how to run rapids. And, like Powell, Stanley’s men were near starvation when they stole food from the natives.

   I found it an unlikely coincidence that two of the world’s most difficult whitewater rivers would be run at virtually the same time by men who had fought in the same battle. It occurred to me that maybe it wasn’t a coincidence, so later I investigated how the lives of Powell and Stanley fit together.

   In July of 1869 newspapers across America reported the death of one John Wesley Powell who was attempting the first descent of the Colorado River. This was the first time most people had heard of the expedition. Powell’s wife declared these reports to be unreliable. Shortly later Powell emerged triumphant from Grand Canyon. A few weeks after that Henry Stanley, now a reporter for the New York Herald, met with his editor to discuss the fate of another river explorer also reported dead: English missionary David Livingstone had set-out to discover the source of the Nile and hadn’t been heard from for many months. Stanley determined to track him down. Two years later, while Powell was in the midst of his second expedition, Stanley walked into an African village and shook Livingstone’s hand. Two years after that, he ran the Congo.

   As I looked into records of the Battle of Shiloh, another connection between Powell and Stanley emerged.

   Shiloh has been called the Western Gettysburg, for there the western Confederate armies made their last great offensive against the north. Powell was an ardent abolitionist, enlisted in the Union Army, and became the commander of an artillery unit. On the morning of April 6, 1862, Powell’s unit was camped at the rear of Grant’s army along the Tennessee River. With the Confederate’s surprise attack, Powell rushed to a section of the front that would become known as the Hornet’s Nest for its bloody intensity of fighting. While Union forces elsewhere repeatedly fell back, only the Union stand at the Hornet’s Nest prevented a disaster that would have destroyed Grant’s army and lost the war. As artillery was critical to the Union stand at the Hornet’s Nest and Powell was one of the few artillery commanders there, he played a pivotal role in the battle. The Union fought off one Confederate charge after another. Powell’s unit moved westward several times as the focus of attacks shifted. At four in the afternoon Powell was in a meadow behind a peach orchard, protecting the crumbling Union flank, when he was wounded.

   Henry Stanley, who would later butcher his way across Africa and help establish the brutal Belgian rule of the Congo and who couldn’t understand why whites would fight for “half savage Niggers,” was a Confederate private at Shiloh.

   By matching the activities of Stanley’s Company E of the Sixth Arkansas Infantry to Powell’s movements, I determined that not only was Stanley at the Hornet’s Nest, but that he twice charged Powell’s exact position. Early in the day Stanley charged Powell’s position at Duncan Field, where he was knocked backwards by a blow in the stomach, only to find a bullet-sized dent in his belt buckle. At 2:30 in the afternoon Stanley, as part of a charge of the First Brigade of the Third Army Corps led by Colonel R. G. Shaver, focused on Powell’s position in the woods. In his autobiography Stanley recalls he was charging through the trees when “...suddenly the world seemed bursting into fragments... How the cannon bellowed and their shells plunged and bounded, and flew with screeching hisses over us! Their sharp rending explosions and hurtling fragments made us shrink and cower...” These cannon shells were almost certainly John Wesley Powell’s. In terror, Henry Morton Stanley turned and fled.

   In his several books Stanley makes no mention of Powell. In fact, he credits his editor with initiating the search for Livingstone. But a recent biography of Stanley disagrees, saying it was entirely Stanley’s idea, that his editor was indifferent to it, and that to insure future newspaper sponsorship for his Congo and other adventures, Stanley gave his editor credit. To me it seems no wild coincidence that Stanley conceived his search for Livingstone at the moment of Powell’s death and reemergence. Even the vaguest newspaper mention of Powell’s day at Shiloh would have made Stanley realize that one of those faces he saw at the Hornet’s Nest could have been Powell’s. The sight an infantryman dreaded most was that of the enemy artillery commander’s right arm being raised and lowered, which triggered a volley of cannonballs. Powell’s arm had been struck while giving the command to fire. To the proud Stanley, it must have made an impression that even with only one arm, the man who had sent him fleeing in terror and disgrace could still outmatch his greatest fantasies of glory. I believe that Powell’s triumph was a very personal and powerful motivator in Stanley’s transformation from a newspaperman into a wilderness river runner.

   There is one further, and haunting, echo of Shiloh’s guns in Powell’s story. The commander of Confederate forces at Shilohh was General Albert Sydney Johnston. Johnston’s death in the first hours of battle doomed the Confederates to chaos and defeat. Four years before, following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, Johnston led a Federal expedition against the Mormons, which the Mormons bitterly resented. With the start of the Civil War the Mormons were left alone for years. In isolated southern Utah the first Federal troops locals saw after the war may have been three men wandering into a remote town with the preposterous story that they had journeyed by boat through the Grand Canyon. It may have seemed more likely they were spies. Though history has blamed Indians, the suspicion has continued from 1869 to today that the three men who left Powell at Separation Rapid were actually killed by Mormons. If so, it was through incredible twists of fate that General Johnston and Henry M Stanley enacted their revenge against John Wesley Powell.

Don Lago