Books can take you in new and unexpected directions. When author Scott Thybony read about a journey to the Grand Canyon by a band of scalphunters in the 19th century, he had no idea it would lead him to an important fossil tracksite millions of years old. He recounts the experience in this month’s Canyon Commentary.
Certain books act as a catalyst to draw you away from the page and into places totally unexpected. That happened when I read a book by Samuel Chamberlain with the curious title, My Confession, Recollections of a Rogue. It tells the adventures of a young dragoon in the Mexican War and his journey to the Grand Canyon with a band of scalphunters. Chamberlain continually revised the manuscript throughout his life to the point where history and imagination blurred.
His story took a dark turn when he deserted the army to escape a drunken, brutal commander. He reluctantly joined the scalphunters who were led by the notorious John Glanton. They rode north from Mexico in 1849 with a bounty on their heads. Along the way they searched for “the mystic city of Cibola,” which Glanton planned to sack and plunder. To their surprise, it turned out to be a line of sharp-cut buttes resembling the towers and walls of a vast city.
They continued toward Grand Canyon where Glanton hoped to follow the Colorado River downstream. But the mountain men in his party advised against it, knowing deep gorges blocked the way. A well-educated scalphunter, Judge Holden, encouraged them to continue. He wanted to see what he called “the greatest natural wonder of the world, the unexplored Great Canyon of the Colorado.” Reaching Marble Canyon, they descended a cliff-walled drainage leading below the rim.
“As we advanced,” Chamberlain wrote, “the rocky walls rose higher and higher until we seemed shut out from the world. We halted at noon and cooked our dinner of Bear and Mule meat, at a fire built from the drift wood that lay jammed among the rocks, the debris of former floods.” Eventually they reached an impassable drop and had to settle for a distant view of the river.
William Goetzmann, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, spent years researching Chamberlain’s account. He was able to confirm many of the key events in it, identify most of the people, but questioned its overall reliability. In the end he came to regard the book as “a rough-hewn literary masterpiece.”
Curious about the route Chamberlain took, I tried matching his account with the actual terrain. His landscapes, I found, floated unanchored to any known geography, and he often got the vegetation wrong in his watercolor sketches. He might transplant a saguaro cactus from the lower deserts to Northern Arizona, using it more as a prop to convey the idea of desert than as a botanical record. His distances didn’t hold and the sequence of events was suspect. Still, a thread of truth ran through it.
Canyon trekker Harvey Butchart was the first person I knew to have searched for the location where the scalphunters saw the Grand Canyon. The best candidate, he told me, was a tributary gorge in its upper reaches. Following his lead, years later, I entered the canyon and found it roughly matched Chamberlain’s narrative, allowing for exaggeration and a fading memory. And several of his illustrations closely fit the setting. Then something he hadn’t mentioned caught my eye.
While deep in the gorge, I followed a ledge along a cliff face. Suddenly, I found myself on a trail much older than soldiers and scalphunters. Set in the sandstone ahead were the fossil tracks of an animal who had trudged up the steep face of a sand dune 280 million years ago. And a closer inspection turned up hundreds of footprints left by these ancient reptiles.
The discovery resulted in a documentary aired by National Geographic and an exploration grant to continue the search for more trackways. Sometimes an obscure book can end up leading to a surprising find in an equally obscure canyon.
Scott Thybony is a Flagstaff-based writer. His Canyon Commentaries are produced by KNAU Arizona Public Radio.
