Sue Slick, Collection Information Specialist
Our blog manager, Katy Thompson, runs a tight ship and recently assigned all the writers their deadlines for the coming year. She also asked if I would write a post for our newest acquisition, Sockdolager, a bronze sculpture recently donated to the museum by Patricia Schaeffer and just installed in our atrium. It’s a complicated piece with lots of interesting details worth noting:
When I started reading about this piece, which portrays an open boat frozen in a moment of peril tossed by violent waves as the crew valiantly struggles for their lives, I was captivated by the true story. I hope you will be, too!
What extensive accounts of this slice of American history tell is that this scene is just a small portion of a larger saga. The sculpture portrays a specific drama from the greater tale in precise detail: the brush with death experienced by these three intrepid rivermen, which occurred at about 11 a.m. on August 15, 1869, in the Granite Gorge of the Grand Canyon. The artist, Clyde “Ross” Morgan, is known for his historical accuracy and love for stories of the American West. First-hand journals and various historical studies of the expedition provide an astonishing amount of detail of this bit of Western Americana–which, upon close looking, are found in the minutiae of the sculpture.
The terror of the scene portrayed is realistic, and was just one of many events in a thousand-mile journey. The trip became a true man-against-nature tale with an enormous impact on our understanding of the region; in fact, the man leading the expedition would go on to expand our knowledge of this region exponentially.
But first, that name — “sockdolager”, a very strange word that is probably not familiar to most 21st century folk. Linguists do not agree on its source, but are in consensus that it was popular slang in mid-1800s America defined as boxing parlance for a “knock-out punch” or resounding, final blow. It also describes someone or something very impressive. It‘s pronounced sok-DOL-a-jer.
Sockdolager is also the name for a treacherous section of the Colorado River as it winds through the Grand Canyon – a name given by the man you are about to meet.
Major John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), above, an educator from Illinois who lost his right arm to a Minie ball at the Battle of Shiloh, gathered ten men, four boats, and supplies for several months of exploring the West. The team launched from the banks of the Green River on May 24, 1869 on a government-sponsored scientific expedition. Their mission was to survey, map, and study the Green and Colorado Rivers from the Green River Station, Wyoming Territory to the mouth of the Grand Canyon in present-day Arizona; all part of the last large unmapped tract of the American West. Powell was not a trained geologist, though he had an insatiable curiosity for the natural world and the “Great Unknown”. Most importantly, his courage matched his bottomless curiosity. His expedition crew was made up of his brother, Walter Bramwell Powell; George Y. Bradley; William Hawkins; Andrew Hall; Oramel Howland; Seneca Howland; John Sumner; William Dunn, and Frank Goodman.
Several of the men were also Civil War veterans selected for their toughness and bravery. The journey was not expected to be an easy one. The four boats were Whitehalls made in Chicago by Thomas Bagley and transported to the Green River Station by the newly launched intercontinental railroad. The boat portrayed in the sculpture is the Emma Dean, named for Powell’s wife, and the smallest of the four at 16 feet.
Though Powell and his crew were not the first people to traverse the rivers theirs was the first scientific expedition to study and map them. There was much evidence along the route of the communities of the Ancestral Puebloans who lived within the canyon 1,000+ years before Powell and his crew arrived. Tabuats Ute also lived along the rim of the canyon and knew its features and landmarks long before visitors of European descent appeared in their lands.
Before the expedition team, which at the end of the journey consisted of six men and two boats, emerged from the Grand Canyon after 99 days, they endured injuries, fire, mutinous internal fights, spoiled food, debilitating rationing, a destroyed boat, lost supplies and gear, and extreme weather alongside the treachery of the rivers.
On August 13, they beached on the shore and sheltered in a cave for the night, resolving to enter the river the following day, though with some anxiety. What alarmed Powell and his team was the view of a narrowing gorge where the river ran swiftly through steep granite, more so than anywhere else they had ventured. The view was limited, but it looked threatening. The three boats progressed through dams of boulders and fast, narrow chutes of whitewater until the men heard a deafening roar from a stretch of the Colorado around a bend out of their view. They had heard rumors of massive waterfalls and feared what they would find if they continued down the river, which was a stretch so congested with rock falls, ledges, and pinnacles that the river was a boiling frenzy of giant, churning waves littered with sharp granite. Above this stretch were sheer walls of granite thousands of feet above them and no means to portage, or “line” the boats, meaning they must run these deadly rapids or abandon the mission. Though they did not succumb to a Niagara-sized waterfall, the violent waters lashing with white foam, whirlpools, eddies, and a continuous torrent of massive, colliding waves nearly destroyed them. This violence was the source of the dreadful roaring they had heard — for Civil War Veteran Sumner, more frightening than battle. Despite broken oars and swamped boats they all made it through with their lives intact but, days later, hungry and exhausted, the crew broke apart in a dispute over a lost watch. Three of the men also felt the remaining journey through worsening granite gorges too foolhardy to continue. After a somber parting, Bill Dunn, Oramel, and Seneca Howland left the expedition on foot and were never heard from again; their exact fate is still unresolved. Sadly, the badly damaged little scout boat, the Emma Dean, was abandoned then as the remainder of the crew and two boats safely navigated yet another terrifying rapids. They traversed the last granite gorge that evening, exiting the Grand Canyon the following day and completing their mission.
Powell went on to further explorations of the West, including another data-gathering journey down the Colorado, and eventually lead the United States Geological Survey, which he was instrumental in forming. Powell and his contributions to our understanding of American topography, natural history, and the geological record were essential to the establishment of geology as a discipline and critical to the understanding of the Earth, its history, and its resources. Powell also led the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian, a powerful institution influencing the government’s handling of Native American affairs, which at this time was focused on “civilizing” Native Americans and removing them from sites of future expansion. In this role, Powell and his team documented over 500 unique Native American languages and countless traditions in their anthropological data-collecting missions.
Morgan’s sculpture captures the moment when an oar has broken and waves swamp the Emma Dean but before the blow that drove a hole through her side. The contents of the boat – beaver traps, gold dust pans, rifles, rope, a hat, signal flag, bucket, and dry powder secured in an old boot are in danger of being washed away (can you spot the hat already swept up in the current?). The state of the crew’s clothing, broken down boots for those fortunate enough to still have footwear and Sumner clad only in long underwear, depict their pathetic condition. At least Powell still wears a form of life preserver, especially necessary for their one-armed leader. The men, Sumner in the prow, Powell in the mid-section, and Dunn attempting to steer, are exhausted and wet; however, desperation has not replaced their will to survive. We know from the explorers’ journals that the other boats and their crews were in a similar state. Somehow, they managed to regain control of the swamped boats and made it out of the stretch of river that became known as the Sockdolager Rapid:
Two miles later they heard the throaty rumble of yet another menacing rapid, so thunderous that they had to shout to be heard—“a long, broken fall, with ledges and pinnacles of rock obstructing the river,” wrote Powell, the torrent breaking “into great waves on the rocks” and lashing itself “into a mad, white foam” for a third of a mile before the river turned sharply to the left and out of view. Sumner, never one to show fear, noted that a line of 15-foot standing waves made his hair curl. The steep walls offered no point of purchase to line the boats or any places to portage. “We must run the rapid,” wrote Powell, “or abandon the river.”
Sumner, Powell, and William Dunn shoved out into the turbulence, riding one wave to its top like a roller coaster, then dropping precipitously into the trough. Again and again they bounced and thrashed through these mad waves until they struck the crest of one as it broke. The boat plunged underwater, its center compartment filling completely, Sumner and Dunn desperately trying to avoid the rocks. Powell frantically bailed as best he could. A whirlpool spun them, but the boat did not sink, and somehow came through.
They named the rapid Sockdolager, a 19th-century term for a bare-knuckled knockout punch. They had just entered what later boaters call Adrenaline Alley—40 miles of chaotic whitewater.
– Excerpt from The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West, John F. Ross, Viking, 2018.
Created using the lost wax casting technique, Sockdolager consists of over 130 separate parts cast and then welded together to complete the work, an edition of 20. You can find it now on view, on long-term display, in the Museum’s Atrium just outside of the Paradigm Gallery.
References
Crossing the River at Green River Station https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/crossing-river-green-river-station
Fretwaterlines: Powell’s Whitehall Boats https://fretwaterlines.blogspot.com/2012/04/powells-whitehall-boats.html
National Parks Service: USGS: John Wesley Powell’s Exploration of the Colorado River https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/geology/publications/inf/powell/sec1.htm#:~:text=On%20May%2024%2C%201869%2C%20Major,Colorado%20River%20and%20its%20canyons.
Outside: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey Down the Colorado https://www.outsideonline.com/2304721/john-wesley-powells-perilous-journey-down-colorado
Panorama: Deep Respect: https://panoramajournal.org/issues/issue-4-seen/seen-deep-respect/
PBS: American Experience: Lost in the Grand Canyon https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/other-explorers/
Scientific American: The Darker Side of John Wesley Powell https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-darker-side-of-john-wesley-powell/
The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley Powell’s Perilous Journey and His Vision for the American West, John F. Ross, Viking, 2018.
USGS: The 150th Anniversary of the Powell Expedition https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1475/cir1475.pdf