I have been over the stretch twice, once at low water and again at high, so I speak from abundant experience.  Naively he remarks, “as yet they had seen no natural bridge spanning the chasm above them, nor had fall or cataract prevented their safe advance!” Yet they are supposed to have passed through the forty-one miles of Cataract Canyon’s turmoil, which I venture to say no man could ever forget.  They had been only four days getting to a point below the San Juan, simply drifting; that is about two hundred miles, or some fifty miles a daylight day.  Around three o’clock on the fourth day they heard the deep roar as of a waterfall in front of them.

* Parry’s first record of White’s story is in Report of Surveys for a Railway across the Continent by Wm. J. Palmer, 1868.  Dr. C. C. Parry was assistant geologist of the Survey.

“They felt the raft agitated, then whirled along with frightful rapidity towards a wall that seemed to bar all further progress.  As they approached the cliff the river made a sharp bend, around which the raft swept, disclosing to them, in a long vista, the water lashed into foam, as it poured through a narrow precipitous gorge, caused by huge masses of rock detached from the main walls.  There was no time to think.  The logs strained as if they would break their fastenings.  The waves dashed around the men, and the raft was buried in the seething waters.  White clung to the logs with the grip of death.  His comrade stood up for an instant with the pole in his hands, as if to guide the raft from the rocks against which it was plunging; but he had scarcely straightened before the raft seemed to leap down a chasm and, amid the deafening roar of waters, White heard a shriek that thrilled him to the heart, and, looking around, saw, through the mist and spray, the form of his comrade tossed for an instant on the water, then sinking out of sight in a whirlpool.”

On the fifth day White lashed himself to the raft.  He then describes a succession of rapids, passing which with great difficulty he reached a stream that he afterward learned was the Little Colorado.  He said the canyon was like that of the San Juan, but they are totally different.  The current of this stream swept across that of the Colorado, “causing in a black chasm on the opposite bank a large and dangerous whirlpool.”  He could not avoid this and was swept by the cross current into this awful place, which, to relieve the reader’s anxiety, I hasten to add, does not exist.  There is no whirlpool whatever at the mouth of the Little Colorado, nor any other danger.  But White now felt that further exertion was useless, and amidst the “gurgling” waters closed his eyes for some minutes, when, feeling a strange swinging sensation, he opened them and found that he was circling round the whirlpool, sometimes close to the terrible vortex, etc.  He thought he fainted.  He was nothing if not dramatic.  When he recovered it was night.  Then for the first time he thought of prayer.