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REFLECTIONS OFAN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY the flag with the 37 stars on it and made our way down the Green and Colorado rivers. I won't go into great detail about the expedition. Most of you know something about it already. I'll only say this, we took with us 10 months of provi- sions. Unfortunately, just two weeks into the expedi- tion, we lost the No-Name. It miscarried in the Canyon of Lodore and with it, we lost about a third of our provisions, including most of our scientific instruments. And so we were in some trouble almost from the beginning of our 99-day ordeal in the Colorado Canyons. The No-Name split and the three men in it were very severely bruised, none of them came close to drowning. We rescued them from the middle of the river. But once the boat had split, a portion of it lodged in some rocks. The following morning, I had not had any I sleep that night because, not only was a third of our gear in that boat, but for some irrational reason, we had placed that day all of our barometers in the No-Name. If those barometers were lost, the lone scientific pretension of our expedition would be lost and I actually contemplated walking out to Salt Lake City to get new barometers so that we could con- tinue. The following morning, several of the men, including J. C. Sumner, offered to go to the wreckage, a torturous journey across the rapids of the Canyon of Ledore to see what they could find. I was shocked because they hadn't shown any particular enthusiasm for science up until this point, but I authorized it and they very carefully made their way in the pilot boat across the river to the wreckage. The river is deafen- ing, always. One cannot be heard even by shouting at the top of one's lungs. But I did notice from about a quarter of a mile away that they began to gesture in joy and exultation and so I knew that they had found our barometers. They did find our barometers, most of them were still intact, but what had caused their joy was that they had also rescued a 10-gallon flask of whiskey which had been sequestered in that boat. I had refused any alcohol on the eXpedition, I was a bit of a prig in this way. But they had secreted some into the No-Name and it was intact. Now I had to face a crisis. I could either force that whiskey to be dumped into I felt strongly that whatever difficulties we face, particularly since SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 o would face, we could five of us were Civil War veterans. the river, which is what I wanted to do, or I could redefine it as medicinal whiskey. I chose the latter course,_ wanting to maintain esprit de corps. Two days later, we had a fire in camp and we lost most of our mess gear. The point I'm trying to make is that the first great descent of the Colorado River was an ordeal almost from the beginning. G.Y. Bradley, the favorite of my nine colleagues had been a member of the United States Army. He told me he would do anything, he would explore the River Styx if I could get him out of the Army, which I did. He kept a secret journal which wasn't discovered until years later, but in his journal- and he was not a man known for exaggeration - Bradley said, at least 24 times, ''These are the worst rapids we will ever encounter on the Colorado River,"and he was always wrong. There was always one infinitely worse. By the time we reached the Grand Canyon in late July of 1869 and began on our journey down the great unknown, as I put it, we had already essentially exhausted our expedition. Most of our crew was gone by now. We had ammunition but there had proved to be almost nothing to shoot. We had fishing equip- ment but we had only caught a handful of fish. When we caught a lO-pound Colorado salmon, one of the men wrote in his journal, "We may as well have boiled a piece of cardboard filled with stickpins, it was so unpalatable." So provisioning was a difficulty. We were down to some rancid bacon, a few pounds of dried apples, some flour which had been weathered so many times that we sifted it and re- sifted it and it was always sour, and coffee. We had perhaps a month's rations remaining, but they were very poor rations indeed by the time we began down the great unknown, down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Furthermore, most of the clothing was gone. The men were largely naked now. The morale was very low and, indeed, by rhe time we emerged from the Grand Canyon on the 30th of August, 1869, several of the men were showing signs of scurvy and severe malnutrition. It's almost impossible to cache equipment and food in the Colorado; there are very few places open out into raw vistas and there are very few trails to the river. I spent 1870 looking for such places of re- provision. But if I could do it over again, I would distribute the food and clothing somewhat differently in the boats and I certainly would try to bring more esprit de corps and more provisioning to the moment when we entered the Grand Canyon itself. One of the things that we found most interesring about the floating of this river is that no one had ever been there before. In fact, there had been terrible warnings against our attempt at all. Jim Beckwith had