About a week after the loss of the No Name, another accident occurred that nearly finished the expedition. While portaging around another set of rapids, the Maid of the Canyon broke free of the ropes and went hurtling out of sight into the mist. The loss of this boat would mean that the two remaining would be overloaded, and the party could not survive the loss of this second boatload of provisions.

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Luck was with them, however. The men, gripped with despair as they raced down the shore, soon were shouting triumphantly at the sight of the boat whirling upright and unharmed in an eddy. They snagged her in and continued on, emerging finally in a park-like area where the Yampa River flows into the Green. There they camped on a grassy spot to take stock and to rest after their ordeal. Hawkins killed a buck, which provided the men with the first fresh meat they had eaten since the start of their journey.

On June 28, Powell and his party reached the mouth of the Uinta River, in Utah. From here, they were able at last to communicate with the outside world. Frank Powell and Andy Hall went to the Uinta Agency, thirty miles away, to dispatch letters from the men and to collect any mail that had arrived there for them. Goodman, the adventure-seeking Englishman, announced that he ‘has seen danger enough’ and was leaving the party.

When Powell and Hall returned, the rest of the expedition moved on, up barrier canyons, over unexpected rapids, and down rushing waterways, assigning names to each feature as they passed it. Each of the names they chose told a story–the Canyon of Desolation, Dirty Devil River, Sumner’s Amphitheater, Gray Canyon, Stillwater Canyon, Whirlpool Canyon, and Bright Angel Creek–and many remain on maps to this day.

Always, Major Powell stood on the prow of the Emma Dean, trying to peer around the corners of blind canyons. At every stop, he investigated the geological formations and collected shells to ship back to his mentors. On one occasion, the one-armed explorer climbed a cliff to peer downriver. Near the top, he suddenly found that he could proceed neither up nor down. ‘I find,’ he wrote, ‘I can get up no farther and cannot step back, for I dare not let go with my hand and cannot reach foothold below without.’

Having found a way to climb to a flat rock above Powell, Bradley could see the major’s toeholds weakening. With no time to run back to the boats for a rope and no stick or tree limb to pass down to Powell, Bradley took off his trousers and lowered them toward the man marooned on the cliff below. Powell could just barely reach the trouser leg as it brushed his hand: ‘I hug close to the rock, let go with my hand, seize the dangling legs, and with [Bradley's] assistance am enabled to gain the top.’

While all this was going on, the nation’s newspapers anxiously awaited news of the expedition. As the weeks passed without word of its progress, stories began to surface about the fate of the explorers. On July 2, the Omaha Republican reported that a disaster had befallen the Powell party. A trapper, the paper said, claimed that, while at Fort Bridger, he met Sumner, who told him that he had watched helplessly from the shore as all four boats went over a 12-foot-high waterfall and were destroyed in the rapids below.

The story swept eastward and soon appeared in the Chicago Tribune and other Illinois newspapers. A man named John A. Risdon claimed to be the only survivor of the Powell expedition. He recounted the disaster of May 8, when the expedition had been lost, and his own desperate struggle to find his way out to civilization.

This brought a letter to the Detroit Free Press from Emma Powell accusing Risdon of being a liar. No such person had been with her husband’s party, she stated. Moreover, she had received letters from her husband dated May 22, two days before the departure from Green River. Despite her refutation, the story flourished in midwestern and eastern newspapers. Risdon was feted and given free accommodations in return for his tearful rendition of the demise of his comrades.

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