Against the Current

What good is it being the granddaughter of a great adventurer of the West when no one believes you? That has been a dilemma for Eilean Adams ever since sixth grade when she was asked on a test: “Who was the first man to go down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon?” Adams answered: “James White,” her grandfather. She flunked the test.

Her teacher believed, as do most Americans, that the one-armed Civil War hero John Wesley Powell was the first white man to challenge the mighty canyon in 1869. At the time, the Grand Canyon was the last big chunk of unexplored territory in the West. There were rumors that the unknown river hid Niagara-type waterfalls and currents that would drag boats under. The first man to survive the journey would be a hero for all time--akin to the first man on the moon.

Indeed, Powell is currently enjoying a resurgence of celebrity based on his 133-year-old conquest. After surviving his canyon trip, Powell went on to a career in Washington, directing the U.S. Geological Survey and founding the Bureau of Ethnology, among other achievements. But it is his descent of the Colorado that gives him enduring appeal. There were four new books published on Powell in 2001, and at least four Powell documentaries produced in recent years.

But was Powell truly the conqueror of the canyon?

Not according to Adams, now a 78-year-old retired technical writer in Seattle. Spurred by her F in the sixth grade, she spent 40 years researching the family story. In her new book, “Hell or High Water: James White’s Disputed Passage Through the Grand Canyon, 1867” (Utah State University Press), she asserts that her grandfather actually ran the river two years before Powell.

Except, unlike Powell, he did it by accident.

Adams’ book has reawakened an old controversy down on the river, where many boatmen double as historians. “Eilean’s book is turning heads,” says Brad Dimock, a Colorado River boatman and historian. “James White had been thoroughly dismissed. The river-running world had just about laughed him off. But Eilean’s story leaves little doubt that White actually was the first down the Colorado.”

In 1867, the few residents of Callville, Nev., came out to watch as a near-naked man on a log raft floated down the Colorado River. (Callville is today submerged under the waters of Lake Mead.) The man, James White, was bruised, scabbed, blackened and babbling.

Once hauled ashore and revived, White said he’d been prospecting for gold in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. One member of his party was killed in an Indian attack, and White and a man named George Strole fled for their lives. Finding no overland escape route, they used lariats to tie together three 10-foot cottonwood logs and launched themselves on the river. Four days later, Strole was washed off the makeshift raft and vanished in a whirlpool.

The lone passenger strapped himself to the raft so he wouldn’t meet Strole’s fate, then he bounced helplessly down the chaotic river for what he said was 14 days. As the Callville bystanders pieced together the story, they realized their visitor could only have come by way of the unknown gorge, then called Big Canyon or Grand Canyon.

The newspapers picked up White’s story, and accounts that a man had survived the canyon journey soon reached the East Coast. At first, White’s tale was accepted as fact. But after Powell’s expedition two years later, new accounts began to question White’s veracity. Among other charges, doubters said the features White described on his passage--rapids, cliffs and distances--did not match the observations of later explorers.

At one point soon after his 1869 expedition, Powell told a reporter that White’s adventure was “a complete fiction.” Another White critic was Robert Brewster Stanton, the man who claimed to be second to lead an expedition through the Grand Canyon. By the time of White’s death in 1927, his claim to being first through the Grand Canyon was cause for smirks and jokes.

Then in 1959, a legendary river historian Otis “Dock” Marston contacted Eilean Adams’ mother and said he wanted to tell White’s story. Marston did not believe White had made his alleged Grand Canyon journey, but he wanted the details anyway. Adams says Marston’s visit to her mother marks the beginning of her 40-year journey to unravel her grandfather’s story. “It bothered my mother enormously that people said he didn’t do it,” she says. “She was furious.”

Although Adams had little sentimental attachment to her grandfather (he died when she was 4), she says she, too, was offended that he was called a liar. “I was proud of my grandfather, and I couldn’t understand why what he did didn’t mean anything to anyone,” she says. “Nobody wanted to know about it.”

She was busy working as a technical writer and raising a son at the time, so the investigation often stalled. Adams’ son, Greg, remembers that as a boy he and his mother discussed the details of White’s story from every angle, trying to decide if he really could have made the trip.

“My mom was really into proving it,” says Greg Adams, a San Diego carpenter. In 1988, Adams retired because of health problems from emphysema and turned her attention to telling her grandfather’s story. She and her late husband got to know the anatomy of the Colorado River, exploring by Cessna, steam train, motorboat and on foot.

Familiarity with the country helped Adams answer detractors who say her grandfather’s recollections of the length of the journey and the canyon’s geography were not accurate. She argues that White was in no position to be precise. He wasn’t an expedition leader with charts and sextants, he was a hysterical, half-drowned man clinging to a log. At one point, she says, the starving prospector was reduced to eating his rawhide knife scabbard.

In her book, Adams analyzes every element of the who-was-first debate, but her most convincing argument--as in most such disputes--comes down to character and motive. Powell, Stanton and anyone else who wanted to claim they were first, second or 100th down the canyon had plenty of reason to discredit the bumbling prospector, she says.

And some Powell experts agree. In his massive new biography “A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell” (Oxford University Press, 2001), Donald Worster says that Powell simply could not accept that another man was first by accident.

Edward Dolnick, author of “Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon” (HarperCollins, 2001), says he was not convinced by his research that White made the big voyage. But he concedes Powell was capable of bending facts. For instance, the explorer merged two Grand Canyon trips, in 1869 and 1871, and wrote about them as if they were a single trip “to make it a better story,” Dolnick says. “We know that Powell was willing to shade the record in a way that made him look more dramatic.”

James White, on the other hand, never displayed such tendencies or abilities. “There was no motive for him to lie about what happened to him,” Adams says. “He never showed any flair for making things up. He didn’t have the imagination to invent the river from whole cloth.”

White never capitalized on his brief fame. He married and settled in Trinidad, Colo., where he owned a drayage business. When one of his 10 children would beg to hear the story of his Grand Canyon traverse, he’d tell it briefly and without embellishment.

In fact, Eilean Adams has come to believe it was this same prosaic sensibility that enabled her grandfather to survive his terrifying voyage.

“I realize, more and more, he survived because he lacked a certain imagination,” she says. “He wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh, my God, what is going to happen next?’ I personally would have been dead of fright after the first rapids. But he was just extraordinarily practical about things. So he hung on.”

Down in the canyon, where hundreds of raft-riding tourists each summer retrace the death-defying journeys of early explorers, boatmen will undoubtedly continue to argue for years about who was first.

The man who’s been on the river the longest, Martin Litton, insists James White did not conquer the Grand Canyon. In his 50 years on the Colorado, he says he has learned that an object set loose in the river--with no motor, fins or oars to guide it--simply does not make its way downstream. It gets hung up in an eddy, washed out on shore or stuck in a logjam.

“James White had no propulsion,” says the 84-year-old Portola Valley, Calif., resident. “If he was hanging onto a makeshift pile of logs, he’d be there yet. All the evidence says no one was [through the canyon] before Powell.”

Yet boatman Drifter Smith of Flagstaff, Ariz., gives credence to White’s claim to being first. “A lot of people have accused White of lying, and even killing his companions,” Smith says. “I think he just got bad publicity from people who had their own agendas, including Powell. My guess would be [White’s journey] really did happen, but we’ll never know for certain.”

For Greg Adams, it doesn’t matter what boatmen, schoolteachers or anyone thinks about the family legend. “I’m not offended by what people say, and I have never needed to prove it,” he says. “I know my great-grandfather was the first man to go down the Colorado River. I know he did do it.”