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said there's a great suck in the Colorado River, some place where the river actually goes underground, and would therefore destroy anyone floating it. We worried that perhaps at some point the river would be so hemmed in by the sheer canyons there would be a cataract [waterfall] which would be too great to float over but there would be no place to put ashore and the current would be too swift to turn back so we would be cascaded to our death. We wondered whether there would be adequate places to camp. There was a belief by some of the local Indians that there was a demon, some sort of a bad medicine on the river, but I felt strongly that whatever difficulties we would face, we could face, particularly since five of us were Civil War veterans. I knew enough about rivers to know that it was unlikely that there would be a cataract that we could not survive. One of the joys of the expedition was naming the places that we encountered. Most of these places had no names. If they had them, we weren't told of them. We encountered very few native peoples in the course of our 99 days. We named places by sev€ral different criteria. Chiefly, we used descriptive names, Gray Canyon, Desolation Canyon, Beehive Point, Flaming Gorge. I'd say 95 percent of all the names we gave were unpoetic but descriptive. We also used a few honorifics, Vasey's, Paradise, the Crossing of the Fathers, the Escalante River, Ashley Falls. But these were very few. In fact, it was on the second expedi- tion that we tended to give honorific titles to pieces in the landscape, and I'm not in favor of that, generally speaking. The third thing we did was literary. For example, when we had our first great accident, one of the men remembered a poem he had heard in his youth, a poem by Robert Sothy, in which Sothy spoke of the Canyons of Lodore, so we named that place the Canyons of Lodore. One of our men, J.e. Sumner, grumbled in his journal, thought it was un-American. He said, "Why would we dive into musty old texts from the old world to name places on this conti- nent." But this was one of the few. We also, of course, had Bright Angel Falls, Dirty Devil Creek, and a handful of others. And from time to time, we simply translated known Indian names, Toon-pin, wu-near, Tu-weap, the standing up rock country. But chiefly our form of naming was descriptive. Let me give you one passage from my written account, which was published in 1875. This was how we named the Cliff of the Harp. I said, "At night we camped on the right bank on a little shelving rock between the river and the foot of the cliff, and with night comes gloom into these great depths. Mter supper, we sit by our campfire and tell stories of wildlife, for the men have seen such in the mountains or on the plains and on the battlefields of the south. It is late before we throw our blankets down to sleep. Lying down, I can look up through the canyon and see a little of the bright sky overhead, a crescent blue sky with two or three constellations peering down upon us. I do not sleep for some time as the excite- ment of the day has not yet worn off. Soon I see a bright star that appears to rest in the very brink of the canyon overhead to the east. Slowly, it floats free from its resting place like a jewel on the canyon and I almost wonder that it does not fall. In fact, it does seem to descend in a gentle slope as if the bright sky in which the stars are set were spread across the canyon, resting on either wall, and swayed down by its own weight. The stars appear to be in the canyon. I soon discover that this is the star Vega, part of the constellation of the Harp, so it occurs to me to designate this portion of the wall as the Cliff of the Harp." And in such ways, we named the places that we met and, of course, eventually called the Great Canyon, the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Well, you know what happened, we started with four boats, we ended with two. One miscarried early, the No-Name. Another we had to abandon at Separation Rapids. We started with 10 men, Frank Goodman, a florid Englishman who we found in the West, a man seeking adventure, discovered after our first wreck that this was more adventure than he chose to endure, so he walked out at the Uinta Agency. That left nine of us and the nine of us made it almost to the end. We were within a few miles and one day of coming out of the prism of the Grand Canyon when three members of the expedition chose to depart. Their names were Oramel and Seneca Howland and William Dunn. They had been a part of the group who lost the No-Name and there had been rising tension through the course of the expedition. In fact, all of the men, including G.Y. Bradley, were offended that I would stop our progress to take latitude and longitude observations and to geologize. But finally, when we got to a rapid that not even G.Y. Bradley could fathom, after dinner on the 28th August, 1869, Oramel Howland came to me and took me aside and said, "Captain, this is madness. If we attempt this falls, this rapids, we will all perish. There is no way that our boats can survive this and there's no way to portage either. The only rational thing for us to do now would be to climb out and move north on the north face of the canyon to some Mormon village or other and try again another time." This was deeplydismrbing, three men contem- plating departure. I tried to dissuade Oramel Howland but he was firm and his firmness - he was one of the most interesting and intelligent men of the REFLECTIONS OFAN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 o