e upon a fall like Niagara?"
He regarded me a moment with his penetrating gaze, and then answered:
"I don't know." Perhaps he thought that what we now would find there was
enough for the moment.

Captain Mansfield, reporting to the Secretary of War, wrote in his
letter of December 10, 1867: "Above Callville for several hundred
miles the river is entirely unknown." He recommended Callville as the
starting-place for exploration, and a small steamer for the work, with
skiffs and canvass boats for continuing beyond the steam-navigation
limit; but Captain Rodgers, who had gone with the steamboat Esmeralda up
through Black Canyon, thought the great canyon should be entered above
Callville after the fall of water in the spring, and his was more nearly
a correct idea. The War Department continued, however, to butt against
the wrong end, even after the success of the other way had been
demonstrated. Some Mormons, who did not know, reported the two hundred
miles above Callville to be better than the one hundred below. The two
hundred miles above contain some of the most dangerous portions of the
river. Colonel Williamson stated in March, 1868, that he could obtain
no information of importance with regard to the "Big" canyon except
that contained in Dr. Parry's account of White's alleged journey, which
journey, as I have pointed out, was a myth.

"If that report be reliable," he says, "it is evident that in the high
or middle stage of the river a strongly built boat can come down the
canon with safety. Before reading that report I had an idea that it
would be a very dangerous experiment to attempt to go down this canon in
a boat of any kind, because I feared there were falls, in going down,
in which a boat might be upset or even dashed to pieces. As it is, now
I believe there are no falls, and I am inclined to think the best way is
to start above and descend."

During these efforts of the regular army officers to secure information
as to the possibility of exploring the great canyons, Powell approached
the problem from an entirely different direction, and his quick and
accurate perception told him that to go down with the tide was the one
and only way. He was not a rich man; and expeditions require funds, but
this was no more of a bar to his purpose than the lack of an arm. His
father was a Methodist clergyman of good old stock, vigorous of mind
and body, clear-sighted, and never daunted. My immediate impression in
meeting the