d their exploration at a ranch, from which the
way was easy to Salt Lake City. "Now the danger is over," writes Major
Powell in his diary; "now the toil has ceased; now the gloom has
disappeared; now the firmament is bounded only by the horizon; and what
a vast expanse of constellations can be seen! The river rolls by us in
silent majesty; the quiet of the camp is sweet; our joy is almost
ecstasy. We sit till long after midnight talking of the Grand Canon,
talking of home, but chiefly talking of the three men who left us. Are
they wandering in those depths, unable to find a way out? are they
searching over the desert-lands above for water? or are they nearing the
settlements?"

It was about a year afterward that their fate became known. Major Powell
was continuing his explorations, and having passed through Pa-ru-nu-weap
(or Roaring Water) Canon, he spent some time among the Indians in the
region beyond, from whom he learned that three white men had been
killed the year before. They had come upon the Indian village starving
and exhausted with fatigue, saying that they had descended the Grand
Canon. They were fed and started on the way to the settlements, but they
had not gone far when an Indian arrived from the east side of the
Colorado and told of some miners who had killed a squaw in a drunken
brawl. He incited the tribe to follow and attack the three whites, who
no doubt were the murderers. Their story of coming down the Grand Canon
was impossible--no men had ever done that--and it was a falsehood
designed to cover their guilt. Excited by a desire for revenge, a party
stole after them, surrounded them in ambush and filled them with arrows.
This was the tragic end of Dunn and the Rowland brothers.

Little need be added. The unflinching courage, the quiet persistence and
the inexhaustible zeal of Major Powell enabled him to achieve a
geographical exploit which had been deemed wholly impracticable, and
which in adventurousness puts most of the feats of the Alpine Club in
the shade. But the narrative may derive a further interest from one
other fact concerning this intrepid explorer, whom we have seen standing
at the bow of his boats and guiding them over tempestuous falls, rapids
and whirlpools, soaring among the crags of almost perpendicular
canon-walls and suspended by his fingers from the rocks four hundred
feet above the level of the river: Major Powell is a one-armed man!

WILLIAM H. RID