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[00:00:00] 

LaNae: I didn't know much about the mapping of the Colorado River before I started reading a book about Powell and his gang of intrepid explorers out there shooting the Grand Canyon to find the source of the river, and to find the best roots through canyon land.

CJ: Those rapids were sick.

LaNae: I'm sure they were way more difficult than they are today because that water is dammed 

CJ: So, yeah.

LaNae: It's one of the biggest mysteries of the Wild West, and I didn't know anything about it. I would wager that there's a lot of people out there who don't know this story, and that's why we're gonna tell it today.

(Cue intro music) 

(Podcast Intro ) 

(Cold Open) 

LaNae: On August 28th, 1869, the expedition reaches a stretch of water that George Y.

Bradley later calls the darkest day of the trip. The river drops through a violent churning run where waves rebound from wall to wall.

That day three men decide they will not continue.

They're William H. Dunn, or Oramel G. Howland and Seneca Howland. They climb out of the canyon and head overland towards [00:01:00] settlements.

Two days later, the men who remain, float out of the mouth of the Virgin River.

The expedition is over for them.

Six men walk out of that canyon and three would never be heard from again.

(Commercial Break) 

LaNae: Welcome back to the Time and Tales Podcast, guys. I'm LaNae. 

CJ: Hey, I'm CJ

LaNae: Today we're talking about one of the oldest and strangest mysteries of the Wild West.

CJ: I guess it was the Wild West because it had been, or it wasn't discovered yet, or had not been tamed. Still wild.

LaNae: Not by the Europeans anyway.

CJ: That's true. More trees than a lot of them had ever seen in their lifetime.

LaNae: Until they came and cut 'em all down. But anyway.

CJ: That was the reason they came, part of it.

LaNae: We're gonna get off topic, but I read that Europe before 1492 was overpopulated.

The rivers were choked with pollution. The waterways had been overfished to critical levels and farm yields were just not producing what they were producing before. They were [00:02:00] experiencing, various warming periods that would cause blight and starvation and et cetera. So when they came to the new world, it's teeming with fish.

There's lumber everywhere. The soil is black as a woman's hair, you know, it's a place primed for farming and primed for the acquisition of resources.

CJ: That's true.

LaNae: And now look at it. They came over here and like locusts just kinda gobbled everything up. So I think that the Wild West, as it were, was mostly wild just because they hadn't seen it and it wasn't really conquerable in the way that, let's say Virginia was.

Okay. Before we get started, just a couple of updates. As I keep mentioning, we do have a brand spanking new website at timeandtalespodcast.com, so please go check that out. We also have a new Instagram account @timeandtalespod where you can catch videos and pictures and other goodies.

So if you wanted like a visual aid [00:03:00] for the source notes, that would be a good spot to go check that stuff out. We also have a brand new email timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. Feel free to get in touch with us about requesting topics, to say hi, or chat with us about an episode.

And if you like what we do and wanna support the show, we have a Patreon. That's at patreon.com/timenadtalepodcast. At the Lore Librarian Tier You'll get every episode ad free up to two days earlier than everyone else, and at the Dark Historian Tier, you'll get all of that, and access to outtakes, show transcripts, and a shout out every week.

We're just starting out and really looking to make this our full-time gig. So we really appreciate your help. Okay. That covers business for me. Do you have any business you wanna talk about? CJ?

CJ: I think you should spend more time arguing with people on the internet.

LaNae: We are just gonna go ahead and jump into this story now.

In 1869, the American West has maps with blank stretches of great interest to Congress, to railroads, to mining money, [00:04:00] and to the one resource nobody can avoid in arid country: water.

The Powell Geographic expedition of 1869 was the first scientific exploration of the Green and Colorado Rivers.

The purpose of the trip was to chart the last blank spaces on the US map, including the first recorded passage through the Grand Canyon. The three month journey faced immense hardships, including lost supplies and dangerous rapids.

The expedition would successfully produce the first detailed maps and descriptions of the region's, geology, geography, and Native American cultures.

CJ: Wouldn't you love the adventure to go somewhere that no other person has written about?

LaNae: I mean, of course.

CJ: Yeah. That's pretty awesome. Who doesn't want that type of adventure?

LaNae: People shoot the Grand Canyon now for fun.

CJ: Well, it's a lot more tame than it was back then.

LaNae: It's true. If you look at pictures of the Grand Canyon at about 1869 when this happens, the river was a lot higher.

CJ: It was, yeah. Well, aren't they like [00:05:00] sipping? Everybody's got some little bit of the Colorado way all the way up to, Utah, or Wyoming?

LaNae: If I'm not mistaken, my father, who is a wildlife biologist from California, explained to me that the Colorado River is one of the major sources of water for the cities of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, if I am not mistaken.

CJ: Alright. Yeah.

LaNae: Which is kind of horrible. And my father will say all the time, "water is not meant to run uphill." So that's been a major ecological problem in the Grand Canyon region for a long time. That the river has been depleted to the point that it is.

We could probably do an entire dark history episode about the misappropriation of resources from the Colorado River Basin because it's pretty egregious. For example, a lake that is named for Powell: Lake Powell, I believe, is sourced also from the Colorado River.

The river was massive. It was pretty wide. Certainly a lot more angry, less meandering than the Mississippi River, but it [00:06:00] certainly was wide and it was high. Very deep, very cold water.

If you're trying to picture what we're talking about, if you Google " Colorado River about 1860s, 1870s," you'll see what we're talking about.

The expedition launches from Green River Station in Wyoming, territory on May 24th, 1869.

The Canyon environment, they will later call the Grand Canyon, is not a destination with known trails and fixed maps at this time, it's basically a trench of stone and side gulches with unpredictable footing and limited water resources away from the main river. If you go a quarter of a mile in either direction, away from the river, you're hurting for water pretty fast, and this will become relevant later on, so put a pin in that.

When the river is high, it's violent. When it's low, it can be technical, with rocks and holes that punish heavy boats.

The river has long rapids measured in fractions of miles that require hours of labor to navigate. The mechanics of travel never get easier either. The men must scout rapids [00:07:00] from the bank, decide whether to run them, line the boats through while holding ropes from shore, or unload and carry supplies around.

And the canyon walls can make escape from troubles slow and dangerous. Bradley's diary passages repeatedly emphasize the physical punishment, long rapids pounding waves, and heat in stretches where air movement is limited.

CJ: Absolutely. The Colorado and the Green Rivers have been carving into the land for eons. So there are places that are straight up. I've been to places in this area where you just look up and there's no other way. Right. You have to make a decision.

LaNae: I've seen it from the air a bunch because my dad lives in California. I lived in Detroit as a child. And I would go out to see him every once in a while and I would always wait for the pilot to be like, "Okay, if you look to your left, you'll see the Grand Canyon."

Yeah, it's huge. It's massive. If you you're looking down at it at 30,000 feet, you can see [00:08:00] what a deep, dark crack it is in the earth. Imagine what it looks like if you're just this little speck on that river. So, yeah, I can imagine it would be very intimidating.

John Wesley Powell is 35. A Civil War veteran who lost most of his right arm, but has managed to build a reputation as a naturalist and lecturer with a talent for making Washington care about geography.

The plan is a river descent that can support mapping, measurement, and a description of canyon country that most Americans know through rumor, sketch and secondhand reporting. The trip is intended to be both practical and scientific, and Powell is not shy about the public interest a hazardous expedition can generate.

He has 10 men and four boats. The boats get names _Maid of the Canyon_, _No Name_, and _Kitty Clyde's_ sister.

CJ: I think they probably. Made those up. Wait a second. We started the cold open with nine people leave. [00:09:00] Yet we just said that 10 people went in.

LaNae: I think one of them leaves before they even get started.

Powell brings his brother Walter H. Powell, one time artillery captain during the Civil War, who was captured on the 22nd day of 1864 at Atlanta and served a 10 months term in prison in Charleston where he was placed with other officers under fire.

Powell referred to him as silent, moody, and sarcastic, though sometimes he would crack a joke or entertain the camp with a song. 

Also on the trip was John Colton, also known as Jack Sumner. Powell described Sumner as a soldier during the late American Civil War, and since that time "has been a great traveler in the wilds of the Mississippi Valley and the Rocky Mountains as an amateur hunter."

Then there was George Y. Bradley, who also contributed a lot of information about the expedition. He was a [00:10:00] lieutenant during the late American Civil War, and since was an orderly sergeant in the regular army.

He was actually discharged by order of the Secretary of War so that he could go on this trip. Powell referred to him as "scrupulously careful --- a little mishap, works him into a passion-- but when labor is needed, he has a ready hand and a powerful arm, and in danger, rapid judgment and unerring skill."

There was also Billy Hawkins. The cook was a soldier in the Union army during the war. When he was discharged, he went west where he was engaged as a teamster on the plains or a hunter in the mountains. Powell described him as "an athlete and a jovial good fellow who hardly seemed to know his own strength."

And lastly, there was Andrew Hall. Hall was a Scottish boy, 19 years old at the time, with what Powell refers to as a "secondhand head," "which doubtless came down to him from some knight who wore it during the border wars. It looks like a very old head indeed, with deep set blue eyes and a beaked [00:11:00] nose."

Powell, described him as having "experience in hunting, trapping, and fighting Indians." And "he made the most of it, could tell a good story and was never encumbered by unnecessary scruples, always ready for work or play and was good at either."

And he's also invited, or Oramel Howland, a printer and editor by trade who becomes one of the men most openly skeptical of the river risk near the end. Oramel is often described in accounts of the expedition as "intelligent and headstrong with a background in printing and editing, and a strong sense of his own judgment."

Seneca Howand younger than his brother, is typically described as "quieter in temperament and closely tied to Oramel by loyalty as well as blood." Their family background and exact pre-ex expedition biography are unevenly documented in popular summaries, but their place in the expedition is clear.

There was also William H. Dunn, the legit mountain man from Colorado. Often described as "a buckskin- wearing trapper [00:12:00] type" in later character sketches, "a man built for rough travel."

They're part of the core working crew that rows, hauls, repairs scouts, and carries gear through canyon after Canyon until the final week.

Let's talk about their equipment.

Okay. I love talking about the equipment.

I'm sure you do. I do.

Powell's party takes the four boats we mentioned earlier. They're heavy freight boats for men provisions and instruments.

One is a lighter craft used for scouting, so they would use that as kind of like a skiff and see how far they could go down without serious impediments, and where they could hopefully avoid big rocks with their bigger boats that once smashed to bits would not be repairable.

The three freight boats were around 21 feet long and built of oak strengthened with internal bulkheads that divided each boat into compartments, while the pilot boat was shorter and lighter and also divided into compartments. They also carried specific instruments for observation and [00:13:00] position, including barometers used for estimating elevation and other surveying tools used for mapping and measurement.

The instruments were not immune to the river. They were fragile, heavy, and easily lost when a boat broke or a man went into the water, which I'm sure happened a lot. There are a lot of rocks in the Colorado that you can't see.

They also carried guns, because there's mule deer, there's a few like animals around that they could potentially hunt if they needed to. They carried tools for repair and caulking because boats take damage constantly, especially in a place like this for sure. They also carried sacks of flour, dried apples, rice, and other staples that they would need to survive.

Bradley describes rations growing sour from constant wetting and heat. I can only imagine how gross that flour would get after weeks on the river getting wet and then drying, getting wet, and then drying.

CJ: I think the first boat lost was the _No Name._

LaNae: [00:14:00] Are you sure?

CJ: I actually think it might be true.

LaNae: Okay. (Yep) Look it up. Also known as the _Bad Luck._

On June 8th at Disaster Falls In Ladore Canyon, one of the three large boats is smashed. The expedition loses a large portion of food and major equipment, including barometers and personal effects. Bradley writes that it is a serious loss and that they're low spirited that night.

I mean, yeah. They had personal journals and clothes and snacks or whatever they packed for themselves, all gone in just one go. One rock did that to them.

CJ: Well, they were at a place called Disaster Falls.

LaNae: I think they named it Disaster Falls because of the disaster.

The next day, Bradley describes the canyon walls rising thousands of feet shutting out the sun for long periods while the river rushes passed in "foam and fury." By June 13th, Bradley notes exhaustion from constant hard labor, rations turning sour, and a fear that poor judgment could [00:15:00] defeat the expedition.

On June 17th, a gust driven fire spreads through pine trees in Echo Park and the mees escape by launching and running a rapid and twilight. So, CJ can you describe where Echo Park is? And what it looks like. I have no idea.

CJ: Do you know why they call it Echo Park?

LaNae: I do not.

CJ: It's because it echoes.

LaNae: A thousand foot cliff face around you. Yeah, I would imagine.

CJ: I've never been there, but apparently if you say whatever you want to echo, it'll go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

LaNae: Wow. I would hold so many people in those boats hostage with a concert they never signed up for. Oh my god. Right. They would love it.

CJ: And in triplicate...

LaNae: Now we're gonna do _Wagon Wheel for the 25th _time.

CJ: You just have to sing it once.

LaNae: Yeah, good point.

Echo Park, for those who don't know, is where the Yampa River flows into the Green River, and it [00:16:00] winds around this massive feature known as Steamboat Rock, which kind of looks like a big fin in the middle of the canyon.

And yeah, the canyon walls are pretty high, so I could definitely see you whispering a secret, and then everybody in the expedition knows.

This is basically where the two rivers meet along a geologic fault, which is why the canyon walls are so high.

When the fire happens in Echo Park, the men escape by launching and running a rapid in twilight.

It's pretty scary, right?

CJ: You have to run from it.

LaNae: You've got a little stone beach there, and then that big like rock that looks like a fin. And then huge cliff faces and the only entrance and exit are along the river.

CJ: If they went there when the river was higher, that beach maybe didn't exist.

LaNae: But then if they were camping there, which I think they were, there had to be some kind of embankment there.

CJ: If there are petroglyphs, then there was some sort of place to start a colony or chill out.

LaNae: There must have been trees and driftwood or something like that along that area for the wildfire to be affecting them as well... so.

[00:17:00] Because their food is moldy and they're not doing really well, they end up camping at the mouth of the Yampa River for several days.

Bradley writes of drying rations and discarding spoiled rice. Relieved to lighten an overloaded boat, but bummed out because a lot of their supplies are gone at this point, right?

By late July, they cover distance more easily for a short stretch, then camp near the mouth of the Uenta River. This is the last point in the journey where they're within striking distance of a settlement.

Powell hikes to an Indian reservation to send letters home and obtain supplies.

On July 3rd, unknown to the men, the Chicago Tribune runs a fabricated account claiming the expedition has perished based on a false 'sole survivor story,' the public is now watching a narrative that has separated entirely from reality.

I looked it up, but there isn't really a lot of information about the person who made this claim. It just seemed like some guy wrote in, was like, "I was the last survivor, [00:18:00] and they all drowned. It's just me." It doesn't seem like the yellow journalism that the Chicago Tribune was doing at this time.

And yeah, I said that.

CJ: National news though, if this was highly hyped and the sponsors are like, 'okay, yeah, this is awesome', and people were just hungry for this type of information from a place that maybe they would never see.

LaNae: True.

CJ: Chicago up in Illinois, was close enough that something like this would really spark their interest. Not in their backyard, however, it is something that they can imagine.

LaNae: Well, this is the height of the Cowboy era. People loved cowboy stories. You got big Western heroes like Wyatt Earp and people ate that shit up with a spoon, so I would imagine, yeah, they were just looking for an interesting story to run about the crazy Wild West.

Even still, yellow journalism is not new. For those of you who don't know what I'm referring to when I talk about yellow journalism, you should look it up. It's a very interesting topic, but [00:19:00] yellow journalism basically refers to newspapers of the time period.

Basically just inventing a bunch of crazy ass stories so that people would buy newspapers and they didn't really have a whole lot of ethics that they deployed when writing these stories. There wasn't a lot of, "journalistic integrity" happening.

A lot of the major newspapers that you would think about, like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, I think The New York Times is probably the most upper crust of them at this time period.

But they too engaged in quite a lot of heady of yellow journalism.

CJ: Do you know why it's called yellow journalism?

LaNae: I don't. Tell me.

CJ: Because at the time a lot of the tabloids in the paper was yellow.

LaNae: He's fired because that's not true.

CJ: That is absolutely true.

LaNae: It's not true.

' The term yellow journalism originated from the innovative, popular 'yellow kid 'comic strips published first in _The World _and later in_ The Journal. _This type _of_ reporting was characterized by exaggerated headlines, unverified [00:20:00] claims, partisan agendas, and a focus on topics like crime, scandal, sports, and violence.'

CJ: Where are you reading that from?

LaNae: Your mother.

CJ: It's wrong.

LaNae: It's not.

Anyway, moving on, on July 5th, Powell returns from the Native American Reservation with flour, and this is where Frank Goodman decides to remain behind, discouraged after losing his belongings in the Disaster Falls wreck.

The expedition continues downstream with fewer men. I do wanna know what Disaster Falls look like. Hold on a second.

Wow.

That doesn't look very disastery to me. But whatever.

CJ: Looks for a great place to lose a boat.

LaNae: Looks like a great place that somebody tips a boat over and then loses all their stuff, but I wouldn't call it a waterfall.

By the expedition's final weeks, the men are worn down. The boats are battered. Repairs are constant. And the food situation is getting worse every single day. Every portage they make requires a lot of labor and risk.

And the high canyon walls can turn even a short detour [00:21:00] into an all day fight. Later summaries emphasized disagreements about leadership, disagreements about how to handle rapids, and a split between men who believed their only chance was to keep running the river, and men who believed continuing would only guarantee a miserable death.

So they were already down one member of their party.

He was like, " I lost all my cool stuff and I don't have any more snacks, and I don't see this getting any better. It seems like it's getting more dangerous, so I'm just gonna go ahead and call it here."

But you know, he's not the only guy that's thinking about leaving and I guess his exit just kind of fanned the flames of doubt, as it were.

On August 25th, the party opens its last sack of flour, and on August 27th the expedition faces another severe rapid that depletes even more supplies and goodwill.

They're like, "okay, this is it. This is the last little bit of food we have, that isn't completely spoiled or that we haven't lost at the bottom of the river somewhere."

Then two days later, they hit another rapid and they lose [00:22:00] even more stuff, and they're just like, " Hey man, you know what? This is kind of a stupid idea. Maybe we should just call it?" I would probably feel that way because I don't like to risk my life, you know. I'm not an intrepid adventurer in this way.

If they don't have food, they have to climb these high canyon walls to go hunt. So I don't know where they would, without a settlement nearby or without something that they could, roll up to, to grab some more food, then I don't know what they would do. Right? So if there's nothing ahead of you that you're aware of, and the only place that you can reasonably escape is a Native American village that you can maybe buy a horse or something like that.

Then, yeah, it would almost feel like your chances of escaping alive are shrinking by the day. I don't know. What do you think about that?

CJ: I can certainly see their viewpoint of, yeah, there's no point in continuing to try to live if we can just go and we probably will live. I [00:23:00] certainly see that. You know, I don't know what was their personal motivation. However, none of it would've paid off if they were dead.

LaNae: Powell hired them to do this trip.

They were like to assist. And again, it's one of those conversations where, you know, if your only profit is death, why continue?

CJ: Exactly.

LaNae: You know?

I can totally understand why somebody would be like, "you know what, this is not a good idea anymore. We were not fully prepared for this trip and we were not fully prepared for all of the incidents and the adventures and the things that we've run into thus far."

Who could predict that you're gonna be on a river and you're gonna have a crazy wildfire that pushes you outta your camp in the middle of the night? Or who could predict that the many boats you brought with you, the very first one that tips over is one that has all your supplies in it, you know?

CJ: I can certainly see the logic.

LaNae: The next morning, August 28th, (Oramel) Howland, Dunn, and Seneca Howland choose the land route out. They're going to try to make it back to the settlement to, rent a horse or [00:24:00] whatever to get out of there. They climb up and away.

Three men on foot in Plateau Country, they don't know very well, aiming for settlements they have not personally seen. Carrying what they can carry in late August heat with whatever they can find.

They were also not really prepared to walk out of there either. So, it's a tough decision they made. I agree with why they did it. It makes rational sense to me. But at the same time, you know, we talked about this before we filmed the episode, but people go missing in desert parks, like all over Utah.

They go missing in Colorado. They go missing here in Grand Canyon all the time because they're not prepared for a hike, just to hike. You know. They don't have enough water, they make a wrong turn, they end up in the middle of the desert-- and nobody finds them. So it's a lot more dangerous than it might have seemed to them, I think.

And they weren't appropriately prepared for it.

You have to carry. A gallon of water on you for a single day's hike in the desert. That's [00:25:00] very, very important. I highly doubt they were carrying a gallon of water each and who knows how long it would take them to get to a settlement, right? Dangerous stuff for sure.

Hard decision to make.

And the irony of the situation is that in Bradley's later entry on August 29th, the river opens up and the rapids stop. The rocks become fewer and fewer. The impediments become fewer and fewer, and they just start to comfortably drift down the river that is no longer trying to murder them.

And if the three men had just stayed, then they would've been out of that canyon in no time.

CJ: But they didn't know. They, they were choosing life.

LaNae: They thought that they were going to die.

CJ: They were like, okay, well if we have another two months of this... because they were going a thousand miles through literally uncharted area.

LaNae: Yeah, for sure.

CJ: They didn't know where they were.

LaNae: Uncharted, dangerous area.

CJ: Exactly. Exactly.

LaNae: Off the river, you don't have water.

CJ: Spent two or three months just trying to survive. Eating what they could [00:26:00] find and they had enough. Like you said, if the profit is death, then what's the point?

LaNae: Bradley writes that the party regretted that the three men who "took the mountains," are not there to share the joy and triumph of the greater expedition. Yeah. I would be like, "oh my God. They just trekked off into the desert and who knows what kind of an adventure they're gonna have over there, and we're already out, we're outta the canyon like the next day."

How crazy is that?

Two days after the split Powell's remaining men reach the mouth of the Virgin River area, and then nearby settlements, the river portion ends with little celebration. They're just glad to be alive after their harrowing ordeal.

CJ: Yeah, they're probably emaciated, you know, they've seen some beautiful things, taken some great photos. But they've lost really so much. Yeah, and you're right. I bet you they were just happy to be alive.

LaNae: I am sick of this fricking river. I'm done.

Also, they [00:27:00] don't know if this is just a reprieve, right?

I mean, I figure, at this point they've, they think they've run the river and it's time to go, but at the same time, where does that river go?

I don't think they know the answer to that question. They would have to come back, which Powell will later on. He's going to continue to map the area for quite a few years.

Anyway. Powell expects, at minimum, to hear that the three men have arrived somewhere else.

How would that happen, Mr. Powell? It takes how long to get from the settlement where you bought some more supplies? How long would it take for you to get back to that settlement, first of all, and then how long would it take for them to get from that settlement to somewhere else?

And how long would it take for the guys that left to get back to the settlement and the fir? I think his completely skewed here.

Instead, the first answers he gets are hearsay. And the hearsay does what it always does. It spreads, morphs, mutates, and spreads again within months, then years, then decades.

The [00:28:00] story of the Missing Three Men becomes a dispute about whose account of the event can be trusted and who might have benefited from a convenient explanation.

The three men never made it to any settlement. They vanished into the desert and were never seen again. And that's incredibly sad. These poor guys just wanted to live.

CJ: Right? Morale was low, food was non-existent.

LaNae: As far as we know, they never made it anywhere.

We're gonna go through theories here in a second about what might have happened to them. But I just wanna really hammer in that these guys did not do anything wrong.

CJ: No, absolutely not.

It's possible that they would've been the only survivors.

LaNae: Right? That's what they probably believed, honestly. Bradley writes about it being a tearful parting on all counts.

They didn't wanna leave them behind, but they were terrified for their lives, then they went missing. To this day, we don't know what happened to them. And I think that is very sad, but it's also a mystery, you know, and unfortunately, [00:29:00] we, Americans-- myself included-- love a mystery. We love to theorize and speculate about what might have happened, because, it's a pastime to try to solve a problem.

It's a human pastime. I do find this situation incredibly sad, and I dearly, dearly hope that maybe one day some remains will be found, or we will have a definitive explanation for what happened to them. But at the moment, we don't.

All we know is that three men walked into the desert never to be seen again.

Now let's get into some theories.

The first possibility is that the three men died from exposure, dehydration, injury, or loss of route after leaving the canyon. The plateau can be unforgiving and the distance between reliable water sources can be fatal, without precise local knowledge. This does not require a human adversary-- only a few wrong decisions chained together. And as I mentioned before, you need a gallon of water to hike, I think it's four miles in the desert?

In whether that's [00:30:00] not horrendous.

CJ: In August.

LaNae: It's August. Exactly. They have no protection from the sun. I would assume that they didn't have a gallon of water each, at all, let alone enough for a couple of days journey through the desert.

How would they carry it if they've lost all their supplies? They've probably got a couple of canteens and maybe a bigger water sack or something like that. But I highly doubt they were dragging a keg behind them. So If you don't know how to find water in the desert, you're going to run out. And if you don't know where you're going and you don't have enough water, what are you gonna do? The answer is nothing. There's nothing you can do. Yeah, horrible death. I think.

For me personally, I think this is the most likely explanation, as I said before.

If you're hiking in the desert now, it's easy to go missing... _now._ People go out there wearing flip flops in the desert and, not having any sunblock and not having a gallon of water. And they don't survive. They go missing, and it happens a lot. So I [00:31:00] can imagine it would be even worse when you specifically don't have a destination in mind.

A second possibility is actually sourced from rumors explaining that a band of Shivets Paiutes killed the three men in retaliation for violence committed by other outsiders, miners specifically, and that Powell's men were taken for the wrong targets. We don't even have like, remotely any kind of information that would make this a possibility.

Other than somebody saying, "you know, who probably did it was those Paiutes." I totally don't agree with or believe at all.

Could it have happened? Sure. Do I think it happened? Absolutely not. I don't.

A third possibility that turns up later is that an expedition member, Hawkins, allegedly said late in life that he quote, "found and buried the bodies a mountainous area", yet no verification follows and no known confirmed site has ever been produced from that claim. Who he said this to and when, I am not sure of either, so [00:32:00] I also don't think that this is the likely possibility at all.

That one seems a little sketchy for me.

And the other theory, this one is actually quite popular in the region and I'm curious as to why... but we're gonna go over it anyway, because due diligence and all that..

A final theory throws the Mormons into the mix.

Southern Utah in the late 1860s was still reeling in the long shadow of the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857. Federal scrutiny and fierce local suspicion of outsiders: in that climate, later writers argue, it is plausible that three men could have been mistaken for federal agents or troublemakers and killed by settlers with blame shifted afterward.

Modern popular retellings point to a letter surfacing long afterward, claiming the men reached Toquerville and died there. That would be Toquerville Utah. But those claims are not the same category as peer reviewed reconstruction or primary [00:33:00] documentation tied directly to 1869.

Not exactly sure how close Utah was to the place that they departed and walked off into the desert.

It could have been pretty close-ish. But I mean, it's still a reach, right? Like, again, without water, how are they going to walk into Utah from Colorado?

CJ: I think that they would've followed the river.

LaNae: That's possible. But even still, from reading Bradley's Journal and from reading Powell's description, they didn't walk along the river.

They went into the desert. So, yeah, I don't know.

Even though this might seem like a convenient explanation for the men's disappearance, without any tangible evidence, it's fairly irresponsible to list this as a firm possibility.

Here's what we actually know: they walked off into the desert. They were going to try to get to the settlement that Powell had gone to purchase their last round of supplies, and they disappeared. Two days later, the expedition found flat, even, calm water. And had they stayed, they would've survived.

CJ: Likely survived.

LaNae: We have no [00:34:00] confirmed bodies. No confirmed personal effects. No identified grave and no DNA confirmation of any remains that might have been brought forward saying this is the three dudes, you know. All of that to say ladies and gents is: all we got to work with besides rumor and hearsay... is nothing.

CJ: I wanna go back to the ability of the entire expedition to complete the journey. Three people and gear-- as much as three people can carry-- is a considerable amount. Having a boat that's much lighter by that, amount of weight, would allow for a greater chance of survival for the rest of the expedition.

LaNae: Well, you're in the desert. Water seems to be the number one resource, right? So boat plus water equals faster travel and you're not gonna die of dehydration, right? They walked off into the desert without a boat, with no [00:35:00] guaranteed, path back to wherever they thought they were going to. No water, or whatever, what little water they could carry with them, which most likely would not have been sufficient to sustain three men through the desert on a trek like that.

So, yeah, I don't know.

I think it's very sad and I think that it was the wrong choice. If I had been them, I would've tried to follow the canyon, also. But then I was thinking about it, the canyon's not shaped like a straight crack. It's shaped like when you spill water or ink on a table, the way that it spreads, it kind of pools out in like a web network.

That's what the Grand Canyon looks like.

I don't think they could have even have walked along the river had they wanted to, they would have to like, trace all of the little fingers that the ink makes. Right? So they would've to walk along and then turn, walk along and then turn, walk along and then turn.

And I can't imagine that would be an easy journey. No matter which way they sliced it.

So what are the most plausible outcomes without pretending we can prove one? If you force this story into the [00:36:00] narrowest set of outcomes that match the geography and the documented uncertainty, you get a pretty short list. They either die of exposure, dehydration, injury, or got lost on the plateau route.

Scavenging and time would remove what would possibly identify them later.

They maybe encountered a group that killed them, either through retaliation logic, mistaken identity, or through opportunism, maybe for their weapons and supplies. The aftermath is never documented in a way outsiders can verify later. It's all rumor and hearsay or they reach settlements and die there under violent circumstances with later rumor substituting for documentation.

This remains the most difficult to support without relying heavily on late secondary claims.

If you want my money on it, I think they got lost. They were outta supplies. They might have been low on bullets or other hunting methods, and they may have run out of water, as I've said 7,000 times, wandering too far in the [00:37:00] wrong direction.

It's frankly the most likely possibility.

These men were equipped for a trip down the river, not for crossing open desert in a hostile landscape with few supplies. It's also important to keep in mind, this actually happens to people today too. If you Google people who go missing in national parks, you might be surprised to learn just how common a death by a wrong turn actually is.

A handful of men in wooden boats pushing into canyon country, taking damage, losing supplies, surviving on stubbornness and improvisation.

Three men decide the river has finally asked for more than they can pay. They choose the desert over the river that had tried its best to kill them for weeks. They walk out of the canyon alive and they're never seen again.

That single fact turns a hard journey into a larger Western fable.

Oramel Howland, Seneca Howland, William Dunn... walk into the sunset, never to return.

That's the story of the Powell Expedition. He would go on [00:38:00] for years later on to continue mapping all of the tributaries and the various canyons of this area for a long time.

He would spend a lot of money and time trying to find these men and never would.

CJ: Or he would've heard something. Right. I agree. They would've been like, "okay, you know, I saw those three people, or I saw a hat. Yeah. That was out there and...

LaNae: I saw a dark wool coat just hanging in some sagebrush.

CJ: Right? A hat or a shoe or something. The area was sparsely populated, but something like that would've stuck out. If somebody had walked past, had found a trail, they would've said, "okay, wait a second. We found something."

LaNae: Think about like Las Vegas, you know, and all the mobsters and stuff digging holes in the desert to bury people they want to get rid of.

Or sometimes they would just like leave somebody out there and the sun would basically strip your flesh fast, you know, and then you just become bones, and the bones get buried by dust and nobody knows what happened to that person.

The desert is a [00:39:00] scary place, if you don't know it, if you're not from the area, like if you're a Paiute, you know how to live, you know how to get water from plants, you know where to dig, you know how to find water. But if you're not from the area and you're from like Virginia, where it's water rich, you have no idea what you're looking for.

And these guys, were civil war vets that were living in the high country in Colorado. It's water rich too. So, you know, my money's on, they wander too far away from the water source and they died. That's what happened there.

CJ: Okay. You know, I, I can see that, but I would also see that at least one of them would've made it.

LaNae: I don't think so. I think that they were dependent on each other for survival and none of them had enough water. That's what I think.

CJ: Okay. Okay. I'm with you.

LaNae: If we were gonna book a trip to go to Havasupai in Arizona, hiking to that village is a 10 mile trek. And it's really, really hard, from what I understand, especially think about it in August when it's, 120 degrees outside, without water, you can [00:40:00] die on that trek. They warn people constantly, you need a gallon of water to make it on this trek from your point of origin to Havasupai.

The Navajo Nation warns people constantly, there's not like a ton of populous areas. If you wander off into the desert, you don't know how to find water, you could die. The park service constantly warns people, if you wander off of these trails and you don't have enough water, you could die.

Don't do it.

If you're driving through the desert right now and you're looking off into the distance and you see like a 40 mile stretch of nothing, that's what those guys walked off into. I don't think anybody walks out there regularly. So I don't think they would be found.

That's my opinion.

We really wanna know what you think happened to them. 'cause I'm interested. I think, it'd be great if we could ever find what happened to these dudes. 

Don't forget that you can email us at the timeandtalespodcast@gmail.com.

CJ: Where are we posting all of these episodes?

LaNae: Everywhere you get podcasts, our podcast is there.

If you like what we do, please like, follow, and share the [00:41:00] show wherever you listen. Nothing helps us more. Also, don't forget to visit the new website at timeandtalespodcast.com or check out the Instagram @timeandtalespod. As always, we list our sources in the show notes so you can follow the trail for yourself.

See you next time guys.

Bye guys.