In the summer of 1893, a party of sixty-seven men entered a stretch of the Grand Canyon that no one had ever mapped. They carried cameras, survey instruments, pack mules, and supplies for four months under a federal contract. None of them ever came out. Not one.
Sixty-one years later, a government surveyor walked into the same region by accident and found what remained of them, still arranged exactly as they had left it, in a bend of a side canyon that has no name on any map to this day. The name on the papers was the Prendergast Geographic Survey. The Interior Department had wanted an accurate inventory of a section of the northern rim west of the Kaibab Plateau, where surveys from the 1870s had left long white gaps on the master map. Nobody in the department expected trouble.
The area was rough but known. Rangers and cattlemen crossed the plateau every summer. The man hired to lead the expedition, Cassius Prendergast, was forty-seven years old, a Yale-educated geologist who had spent twenty years doing survey work for the Army Corps of Engineers and the western railroads. He had a reputation for caution bordering on sanctity.
He checked every strap on every mule before starting a day. He would not eat before his crew ate. He would not sleep until the perimeter watch was set. He was known as the man you hired when you did not want to lose anyone.
He had brought nineteen men back alive from a March blizzard on the White River in 1886, and fourteen men back from a flash flood in a canyon in the summer of 1890. A letter in the archives from a Santa Fe Railroad chief engineer dated 1892 said Prendergast was the only surveyor in the western states he would trust with his own brother. His party numbered sixty-seven men when they left Flagstaff on July 11, in a convoy of eight wagons and one hundred twelve mules. Twelve trained surveyors served under him, along with a botanist from the Smithsonian named Ambrose Threlkeld, a French cartographer named Sylvain Revel, and a photographer named Cyril Ashe Kittel carrying wet-plate equipment and enough glass to fill two baskets on a mule’s back.
Two hired guides, a cook crew, and muleteers rounded out the sixty-seven. Every name was recorded in the list the Interior Department submitted the following December, when the government finally admitted that none of them had returned. There was one warning. On the morning of July 12, the second day out of Flagstaff, an elderly Havasupai man rode up to Prendergast’s lead wagon on horseback.
Nobody learned his name or thought to write it down. He spoke to Prendergast quietly for about five minutes in a mixture of English and his own language. Threlkeld, the botanist, later said the man pointed twice with an open hand toward the land ahead, then turned his horse and rode back without waiting for a reply. When Threlkeld asked what the man had said, Prendergast told him only that the guide had wanted to know their destination and had wished them a safe journey.
Threlkeld did not believe him. In a letter to his wife that night, he wrote that the guide’s face was not the face of a man wishing anyone a safe crossing. It was, he wrote, the face of a man who had come that morning to say something he did not want to have to say later. That was the last letter Ambrose Threlkeld ever wrote.
It reached his wife in Washington on July 23. One line near the end has been interpreted many ways over the years. Threlkeld wrote, in noticeably less steady handwriting: “Prendergast looked pale for an hour after that man left, and would not say why. I have never seen him pale before.
”
Another detail from that morning emerged later in the sworn statement of a wagon driver named Elias Starbridge in the summer of 1895. When the Havasupai man turned his horse to leave, he passed near Starbridge’s wagon and spoke one quiet sentence in English, directed at Starbridge alone. The sentence was: “Do not eat when they eat, and do not sleep when they sleep, and if you can return tonight, return tonight. ” Starbridge returned that night.
He was the only man from the entire convoy who did. He reported his decision to Prendergast at the second camp on the evening of July 12 and rode back to Flagstaff alone. He is the reason we know what we know, because he was the only person who accompanied the sixty-seven and was still alive to speak two years later when the second search began. The route Prendergast had given the department was conservative.
They were to survey a rugged diamond-shaped area stretching about forty miles from the north rim down to a specific side canyon no white surveyor had ever entered, then exit across the plateau to a resupply point where a smaller party was to meet them on August 7. That supply party arrived at the rendezvous point on schedule. They waited seven days. No one came.
On August 15, they pushed into that country as far as was safe and saw nothing. No smoke, no mule tracks, not even a scrap of paper caught in a sagebrush. They returned to Flagstaff, the sheriff telegraphed the department, and the department did what departments usually do. They sent more men.
The leader of the supply party, a man named Ozric Wetmore, gave a brief statement to the sheriff in Flagstaff on August 17. He said that on the second night of waiting at the rendezvous point, his men heard, from the direction of the area where the survey was working, a sound like the noise of many people talking, unclear but continuous, lasting perhaps an hour after full darkness, then stopping abruptly as if a door had been shut. He said the sound was distant enough that he could not determine the number of voices, only that there were many, and that his men rode toward the sound in the morning and found no one, no trace, no evidence that anyone had been within ten miles of their camp that night. He signed the statement and never amended it.
When the telegram from the sheriff reached the department on August 20, the assistant in charge took no action for six days. His handwritten notes on the margin of the telegram survive in the archives. They read, in order: “Nothing to worry about. ” Then: “Ashe Kittel to develop plates upon return.
” Then, in a different pen, clearly later: “Cotgrave available. ” That third note is the moment the assistant began to be afraid. Cotgrave was not the kind of scout you called when you thought you were sending men to find a party that had wandered farther than expected. Cotgrave was the kind of scout you called when you thought the men you were looking for were probably dead.
The first real search party consisted of twenty-two men led by a former army scout named Wendell Cotgrave, fifty-one years old, a widower who had once tracked a gang of horse thieves for eight days across the Mojave Desert and brought them all back alive. He left on August 29. He covered the entire route Prendergast had provided and found the first camp exactly where it should have been, on the rim above the head of the side canyon, after three days of travel. The fire ash was cold, but the stones were arranged carefully.
The mule pickets had been pulled out of the ground and stacked in a small tidy pile beside the fire ring. Cotgrave said later the strangest thing about that first camp was that nothing had been taken from it and nothing had been left in it. Someone had taken the camp apart correctly. Someone had wrapped the canvas and packed it into the baggage.
Someone had taken the mules away in a straight line, tracks clear for a hundred yards past the camp, and then the tracks stopped. They did not fade. They were not covered by wind. They stopped, as if the mules had walked into the air.
Cotgrave was a hard man not given to such description, and in his official report he said only that the trail became untrackable. But in a private letter to his sister in Denver two months later, he wrote something else. He said: “I have tracked men in rougher country than this and never lost them, but I lost sixty-seven men, one hundred twelve mules, and eight wagons in the afternoon of one of the driest August days I can remember. ” He wrote: “God forgive me, but I do not believe that country wanted them to be found.
”
In the same letter, he said that on the sixth night of the search, his men one by one refused to take the second watch, and he had to take it himself. During that watch he heard a sound coming from the direction of a canyon they had been unable to enter that day because a rockslide had closed the route. It was a sound he had heard once before in his life, in Kansas in 1874, on the night after many people had died in a hotel fire. He said it was the sound of many people trying to keep quiet and failing, knowing they were failing.
He said he did not sleep that night, nor any other night for the remainder of the search. He said he knew then they would not find anyone. He stayed out for six weeks. He found the second camp two days deeper in, and it was the same.
Tidy, empty, cold. He found no third camp. He found no bodies, no belongings, no tools. On the fourteenth day of the search, at a place his men called Turn Camp because they spent one night there going in and another coming out, one of his riders, a young horseman from Utah named Rufus Colwell, wandered off after dinner and did not return for eleven hours.
When Cotgrave found him at dawn, Colwell was sitting on a rock half a mile from camp, hands in his lap, eyes open, not responding to his name. He was breathing. He was warm. He simply was not responding.
He came to himself late that evening and remembered nothing of the night, except that at some point in the darkness he had heard a voice calling his name from behind him in his own voice, and when he turned he could no longer remember the way back to the fire. Cotgrave sent Colwell back with a rider the next morning. Colwell did not speak a word on the return journey. When they reached Flagstaff eight days later, Colwell dismounted, thanked the sheriff, walked into the general store, bought a train ticket to Salt Lake City with all the money he had earned from the search, and boarded the eastbound train that evening.
He never wrote to Cotgrave, never wrote to his family, and as far as Cotgrave could learn in later years, was never heard from again. On October 11, Cotgrave found one thing in a place he and his men had passed twice before. A wooden shipping crate containing unexposed photographic plates belonging to Cyril Ashe Kittel, intact and sealed, placed on a flat red rock in the middle of a dry creek bed with no shade anywhere near it. Cotgrave later wrote that the crate showed no sign of weathering.
It looked as if it had been placed there that morning by someone who wanted him to find it. He carried it out on his own mule. When the plates were developed in Flagstaff at the end of October, three of the twelve plates contained images. The rest were blank.
What those three images showed, we will come to shortly, because they matter. The second search expedition went out in the spring of 1894, thirty-one men under another guide named Ephraim Southworth. He spent March through July in that country. He found nothing new, not one thing.
He found the same two camps Cotgrave had described, in excellent condition, as if nothing had touched them through an entire winter of storms. Southworth wrote in his report that the fire ash in the first camp was the same ash. He was certain of it. He noted in the report that the wind had not moved a single grain of ash in eight months, and that when he bent down and put his hand in it, it was cold in a way that made him stand up and walk away, and not approach the fire ring again.
He did not say what he meant by that. But in a letter written a decade later to a man at the Smithsonian who was preparing a study on disappearances, he said more. He said the ash was cold as a dead man’s hand, and that it did not feel like fire ash at all. He said he reached out expecting warmth because the sun had been on that ring for two hours by the time he arrived, but instead felt a cold that ran up his arm and settled behind his teeth, and he spit on the ground beside the fire ring and could not look at the camp again for the rest of that day.
In that same letter he said that his men, one by one during the second month of the expedition, began having the same dream. He said the dream was about a great crowd of people walking away down a slope in a valley, none of them turning around, and the dreamer could not call to them because there was no sound in the dream at all, not even the sound of the dreamer’s own breathing. He said three of his men asked to be released from their contracts by the end of June, and he released them. He said he thought about releasing himself as well.
A third search went out in the summer of 1895, led by a man whose name is now lost, followed by a smaller private attempt in the summer of 1898 funded by the family of Sylvain Revel, who did not believe the department had done enough. None of them found anything. A small congressional hearing was held in the winter of 1896, in which the widow of the botanist Ambrose Threlkeld testified, demanding that the department be compelled to send a fourth party. The text of that hearing runs to sixty-two pages.
It is one of the strangest documents in the entire federal record of the case. The widow testified for more than four hours, and at the end, the committee chairman asked her whether she believed her husband was still alive. She said: “I believe my husband is somewhere. I do not believe he died the way the department thinks.
I believe he is in a place the department cannot reach. ” She was thanked for her testimony and asked to step down. The department was not compelled to send a fourth party. With the turn of the century, the file was closed.
The word the department chose to close the file was “reckless adventure. ” It was the wrong word, by every measure, for what those people left behind. And it remained the wrong word in the file for sixty-one years. The man who reopened the case was not planning to.
His name was Milburn Osterick. In the spring of 1954, he was fifty-two years old and working for the Bureau of Reclamation in a small office in Kingman, Arizona, doing preliminary site surveys for a series of small dams in the side drainages feeding the Colorado River. He was not a famous man. He was a competent surveyor with a military background from the First War and a good sense for country he did not know.
That April, his assignment was to walk into an unnamed side canyon on the north rim and write a description of its floor so engineers in Denver could decide whether its entrance was worth the trouble. The canyon he was sent to lay inside the section recorded as the Prendergast survey area of 1893. Osterick did not know that when he went in. He found out when he came out.
He entered with one companion, a Havasupai man in his fifties named Osmonde Fairweather, hired from a settlement south of the river to serve as guide and packer, with three mules and eleven days of supplies. They crossed twelve miles the first day and camped on the rim above the drop into the side canyon they had come to survey. Osterick later said in the sworn statement he gave in Kingman that November that Fairweather did not want to camp there. He did not give a reason.
He simply moved his bedding a hundred yards along the rim away from Osterick’s fire, lay down with his rifle on his chest, and did not eat that night. Osterick asked him quietly once whether there was something Fairweather knew about that piece of ground he should share. Fairweather looked at him for a long moment and said only, in English: “We do not enter that canyon. My father did not enter it.
His father did not enter it. If you listened to your dreams, you would not enter it either. ” Then he turned his back and went to bed. Osterick slept poorly.
He wrote in his field journal the next morning that he had dreamed all night of the same thing, over and over. He dreamed of a row of people walking away from him down a slope, none of them turning back, and when he tried to call to them, no sound came out of his mouth. He wrote that when he woke in the dark, he could hear, or thought he could hear, the sound of hooves passing on the sand below the rim, great numbers of them, moving somewhere in haste. He got up.
He walked to the edge of the bluff carrying his lantern. There were no hoof prints. The sand was undisturbed. Yet there was, on a flat piece of limestone about ten feet down the slope, a single row of tracks, small and regular, that had not been there when they made camp.
He wrote in his journal that they were the tracks of a man wearing a worn boot walking east. He wrote that he did not follow them. He wrote that when he returned in the morning to look at them again in daylight, they were gone. They descended into the canyon that evening.
It took them nine hours to reach the bottom. Osterick wrote in his journal that the descent was harder than it should have been for the nature of the country. The route was firm, the light good, the temperature not severe, and yet by the third hour of the descent both men were breathing heavily, and one mule had thrown a shoe in a place where a mule had no business throwing a shoe. He wrote that at the fifth hour of the descent, Fairweather stopped in a wide place in the trail and looked across the canyon and said in a quiet voice: “We are the only ones down here.
” Osterick said: “Of course we are the only ones down here. ” Fairweather said: “No, you do not understand what I am telling you. I am telling you there is not one bird down here. There is not one lizard on the rocks.
There is not one fly on the mules. Look at the mules. Look at their faces. ” Osterick wrote in his journal that he looked at the mules and Fairweather was right.
They were standing with their heads low and ears back, the way mules stand when asked to enter a pen they do not want to enter. The trail was old, worn by hooves and bare feet. Osterick wrote in his journal that the trail was far too finished for a canyon that remote. He wrote in his precise engineer’s hand that someone had spent time on that trail once, a long time, and that whoever it was, it was not Havasupai and it was not recent.
He was right on both counts. When they reached the bottom, there was a wide rise of red sand under the shadow of a bend in the wall. And in the shadow of that bend, there were eight canvas tents arranged in an irregular square. All eight were standing.
All eight were closed. The canvas had faded to the color of bone from sixty-one years of light, but it had not rotted. The guy lines were taut. The stakes were still in the ground.
Osterick stopped walking. Fairweather stopped ten paces behind him and did not come closer. Osterick said in his statement that he stood there for a long time, perhaps five minutes or more, hearing only the echo of his own breathing. No wind.
No bird. No water. Nothing at all. He walked to the first tent, untied the flap, and looked inside.
In the first tent there were six cots made up in two rows of three, laid out and ready for sleep. On the ground between them was a folded woolen blanket with three tin cups on it and an open Bible at the Book of Job. A pair of boots stood at the foot of each cot, dry and dusty but still holding the shape of the feet that had left them that morning. A briarwood pipe rested on one of the pillows.
The tobacco in the bowl had not been smoked. It still gave off a faint scent after sixty-one years in a closed tent. Osterick backed out of the first tent without touching anything. He went to the second tent, and the second was identical.
Six cots made up, a pair of boots at each, a cup, a Bible, a pipe. He went to the third tent, which contained a small folding desk against the far wall, with a leather-bound notebook open on it, an open inkwell beside it, and a pen resting over a blank page. The ink in the inkwell was dry, but there was a small dry drop of ink on the pen tip, as if the writer had lifted the pen from the page in the middle of a word and never brought it back. The last word written in the notebook was, to quote it precisely, listen.
Beneath it, the pen had drawn a single line down the page the length of a palm, as if it had fallen from the writer’s fingers a moment after writing the word. Osterick went into the other five tents as well. He noted what he found in each in his field journal that evening, sitting on the bench outside before he opened that notebook. The fourth tent contained four cots and a portable typewriter resting on a folded coat with a partial sheet still in the roller.
The visible letters on the sheet formed a report addressed to the department dated August 3, describing a productive day of surveying and requesting nothing unusual. The report stopped mid-sentence. The fifth tent contained botanist Ambrose Threlkeld’s collection, or what should have been his collection. Twenty-eight numbered specimen bags arranged in regular rows on a cloth ground sheet, each correctly labeled, each empty.
Not spilled. Not eaten. Empty. The sixth tent contained the cook’s stove and utensils, and a cast-iron pot half full of soup that had dried to a hard black crust.
Beside the stove, three folded shirts lay on a rock, arranged like clothing prepared for the next morning. The seventh tent held Cyril Ashe Kittel’s photographic equipment. The camera was fixed on its tripod and faced the eastern wall of the canyon. Osterick did not touch the camera.
He looked through the ground glass. He wrote in his journal that what he saw through the ground glass and what he saw with his naked eye when he stepped back from the camera were the same wall. He wrote that he was recording that because he wanted a record that they matched when he looked. The eighth tent was empty.
Not empty of people only, but empty of everything. No cot, no equipment, nothing. Just the canvas walls and the sand of the floor. And in the sand of the floor near the back wall, one thing had been placed with care, as if the person who placed it knew someone would come to find it.
A pair of spectacles in a leather case, the case open. The spectacles lay beside the case on a folded square of paper. Osterick lifted the paper. On it, in handwriting he did not know, was a single line.
It read: “We are not lost. Please stop searching. ” He replaced the paper where he found it. He did not take the spectacles.
He went out of the eighth tent and sat on a rock in the sun and did not move for several minutes. When Fairweather finally came up the slope toward him, Osterick asked him what he thought the note meant and whether he knew who might have written it. Fairweather looked at the paper without entering the tent and said, in English: “The one who wrote this did not want you to find him. If he wanted to be found, he would have written it in a language that did not need a translator.
” Then Fairweather turned and went back down the slope and did not approach the tents again. Osterick carried the notebook out into the sunlight. He placed it on a flat rock. He turned back the pages.
The handwriting was Cassius Prendergast’s. It was confirmed later by comparison with letters the man had written to his wife and to the department, but Osterick suspected it before he was told. He had read every word published about the 1893 case when he was a boy, the way boys in that country read about lost expeditions, and the way boys elsewhere read about pirates. He had once held Prendergast’s field notes in his hands, as a graduate student in 1922, in an archive in Washington.
He knew the handwriting the moment he saw it. He turned the pages of the notebook, sat down in the sand, and read every entry from the first day to the last. It took the rest of the afternoon. The first entries were ordinary.
Dates. Weather. Distances. Small notes a skilled surveyor writes for himself at the end of a working day.
“Made camp on the rim. Water good. ” “Revel measured the wall at 914 feet from the opening. ” “The botanist collected samples.
” “Ate well. ” It continued that way for three weeks. Then on August 2, the day the supply party was preparing to leave from 120 miles away for the rendezvous, the tone changed. Prendergast wrote, in his own words: “The senior guide, Coldstream, refuses to enter the third bend today.
When I asked him why, he told me the sound of the canyon is not right. I hear nothing. And then I understood what he meant. The not-right sound is the absence of sound.
There should be sound, and there is none. Even the mules will not move forward. ”
Two days later, on August 4, Prendergast wrote: “We moved camp forward against Coldstream’s advice. He remained at the previous site, and I left him a mule and supplies to walk out.
The others say he was gone by evening, but there are no footprints leaving the rim. I will not write what the others say happened to him. It cannot have happened. I did not see it, and I will not record it on this page.
”
On August 6, he wrote: “The compass hanging at my neck has begun to turn. Not point. Turn. Slowly, like the second hand of a clock, in a full circle, then stop, then begin again.
Revel’s drawing table cannot be leveled here. The bubbles in his levels will not settle. He has broken the instrument and told me it is dust in the glass. I know Sylvain Revel.
There is no dust in his instruments. ”
On August 7, Prendergast wrote: “Marshwood, the junior guide, left camp at midnight. He left everything, his boots, his coat, his rifle. His boots were still warm to the touch when we found them on the rim in the morning.
He is gone. There is no trace. I sent two men to track him anyway. They returned within the hour and said they could not go on.
They did not want to say why they could not go on. Threlkeld told me in confidence that they reached the mouth of the canyon and could not remember why they were there. ”
On August 8, he wrote: “The date above is wrong. I wrote August 8 because that is what my body tells me.
But the last light was three hours ago, and the light before that was three hours before that. We have not slept, we have not eaten, no one is hungry, no one is tired. Threlkeld sat this evening and said his hip does not hurt. He has not said that in twenty years.
He is weeping. He will not tell us why. ”
In what he wrote as August 9, though Osterick later said he was not sure of the actual day because the writing had begun to overlap the previous day’s writing on the same page, Prendergast wrote: “Kittel photographed the east wall this morning. When he developed the plates in the tent tonight, the wall in the photograph was not the wall we see.
In the photograph there is an opening in the wall. An entrance. He has photographed it three times, and there is an entrance in all three plates. There is no entrance.
I walked to the wall and put my hand on it. It is rock. Yet Kittel refuses to put down the camera. He keeps photographing the wall.
He says in the images the entrance is opening. He says he can see people inside it now. I looked at the plate. I saw no one.
God forgive me. I do not believe him, and at the same time I believe him. ”
In what was supposed to be August 10, Prendergast wrote a single line. He wrote: “The wall is thinner tonight.
I can see through it now. God help me. I can see what is on the other side. ” The final entry was undated.
It was one word followed by a line where the pen had rolled. Osterick had already read it in the tent. Listen. Osterick closed the notebook.
He put it in his pack. He looked up, and the sun was very low above the western rim of the canyon, which he could not explain because the last time he had checked his watch it was two in the afternoon, and his watch now read 2:17. He looked at his watch again. The second hand was moving.
The minute hand was not. He called for Fairweather. Fairweather did not answer. He walked back to where the trail descended into the canyon, and Fairweather was already there, standing perfectly still with the three loaded mules, all saddled and tied as if they were leaving that moment.
Fairweather said only one thing. He said: “We are leaving now. ” Osterick did not argue. He looked once, quickly, over his shoulder at the row of eight tents in the shadow of the bend.
He thought for a moment he saw a man standing at the entrance of the third tent, a tall, thin man with a neatly trimmed beard. But when he looked directly, there was no one, and the third tent’s flap was tied exactly as he had left it after coming out. They began the climb. They climbed out of the canyon through the afternoon, evening, and night.
They did not stop when darkness fell. They did not stop when the mules went lame. By the time they reached the plateau, blood was running down the ankles of the two younger mules from stones they should not have felt through their hooves in the dark. Osterick did not remember most of the climb.
He remembered only that all the way up he heard, or thought he heard, behind him and above him, and somehow in both at once, in the canyon walls, a sound he had not heard in the canyon itself. Wind. The sound of a great wind moving through canvas. And beneath that, very faintly, the sound of a great many people trying to speak at once, and not quite managing it.
He wrote in his field journal that night after reaching the plateau and lighting a small fire that, in the last hour of the climb, he had begun to make out words. Not sentences. Words. And the words were his own name, repeated over and over in many different voices at once, some close and some far.
And none of them, none of them, was a voice he knew. He wrote that at some point in the final mile before the plateau, he stopped at a bend because a hand touched him in the small of the back. He wrote that he turned around and there was no one there. He wrote that Fairweather was fifty feet ahead and did not look back.
He wrote that he did not tell Fairweather about the hand. He wrote that he told no one about the hand until he was giving his statement, and even then he only wrote it in the margin of the record in his own hand after the court clerk had left the room. When they came out onto the plateau at what Osterick’s watch now read as four in the morning of the next day, though his body told him no time had passed at all, Fairweather turned to him and said something else. He said: “Do not tell anyone what you saw down there.
Do not tell them where you were. Do not tell them this as long as you live. ” In his statement, Osterick said he asked Fairweather why, and Fairweather said only: “Because they can hear us when we speak of them. Because they are listening.
”
Osterick filed his report through official channels. He did not mention the tents. He did not mention the notebook. He wrote that the canyon was unsuitable for dam construction due to fractured rock and unfavorable geology, and that no further survey was necessary.
The Bureau of Reclamation accepted his report without comment. The file was closed for the second time. But in late October, he took the notebook to the county museum in Flagstaff and handed it to the woman who ran it, Alma Grigsby, seventy years old, who had known Ephraim Southworth in her youth and was one of the few people in the county who still remembered the 1893 case in any detail. She did not open the notebook in front of him.
She took it into a back room. When she returned to him, she said only: “Thank you, Mr. Osterick. I will see that it is preserved.
And I would ask you not to come back for it. ”
Two weeks later, in the second week of November, a fire in the museum archives destroyed the room in which she had placed it. Only that room. The rest of the building was untouched.
The fire marshal reported that the fire had begun in a filing cabinet, inside a drawer that had been locked from the outside for no apparent reason. The notebook turned to ash. Alma Grigsby was found the next morning in her home across the street, sitting in her reading chair, dead of what the county physician called natural causes, with a small brass compass on a leather cord lying on top of her open Bible. No one in the family could explain the compass.
Osterick alone could have explained it. He knew it. He had taken it, though he told no one, from the third tent, from beside the pillow where it lay wrapped next to the pipe that still smelled of tobacco. He had left it on Alma Grigsby’s table with the notebook.
He had not told her what it was. He gave his sworn statement in Kingman on November 12. In the statement, he told what he had seen. He told everything.
He spoke of the eight tents, the boots, the pipes. He spoke of the folded paper in the eighth tent that read “We are not lost. Please stop searching. ” He spoke of the compass.
He spoke of the notebook. He spoke of the sound from the canyon behind him. He spoke of Fairweather’s warning on the plateau. He spoke of the ash in the fire ring in the first tent that was cold like a dead man’s hand, using the same phrase Ephraim Southworth had used sixty years before, though Osterick could not have known that phrase because it was in a private letter he had never read.
The stenographer who recorded the statement, a woman named Loris Enderby, wrote a note at the bottom of the last page after Osterick had signed, stating that the witness appeared, while giving his testimony, to be reliving what he described, and that at the point in the statement where he described hearing his own name called from behind him in voices he did not recognize, he stopped speaking for nearly two minutes and asked her quietly whether she heard anything unusual in the room. She wrote that she told him no, she could not, and that he nodded and continued. Osterick lived fourteen more years. He never returned to that canyon, and never visited any other canyon in the northern part of the state.
He did no further field survey after 1954. He worked from behind a desk in Kingman until retirement, and died in Prescott in the summer of 1968, in his sleep, according to the coroner. According to the woman who came to sit with him in the last week of his life, a niece by marriage who found him, in the days before his death he began repeating something over and over, half asleep. He began saying: “I can hear it now.
I can hear it now. ” She said he did not sound afraid when he said it. She said he sounded almost entirely at peace. She said the strangest thing, on the afternoon of his last day, was that when she came in to give him water, he raised his head from the pillow and looked past her toward the entrance of his bedroom.
And he smiled the smile of a man who had waited a long time, and had just heard the person he was waiting for coming down the hall. Then he lay back and closed his eyes and did not open them again. At the funeral home in Prescott, she requested that the top button of his shirt be left open because she had never seen him wear it closed. When she went in for the final look, she found a small brass compass on a leather cord around his neck.
She had not put it there. No one at the funeral home admitted to putting it there. The compass was buried with him. The Prendergast geographic section is still officially classified as an accidental case.
That is the classification on the file to this day. Sixty-seven men, one hundred twelve mules, eight wagons, cameras, records, instruments, and supplies for four months. Two camps left in order. One box of glass on a flat red rock.
Three photographs held privately in Nevada. One notebook burned. One compass returned to a woman who died that same night, and returned again fourteen years later to the neck of the man who had carried it out of that canyon, who never understood, by his own account, how it came back to him. A folded paper in a tent, written in a hand no one could identify, saying: “Please stop searching.
”
If you believe there are places in this country where the wall of the world is thinner than it should be, this is your story. If you do not believe that, it is also your story, because someone will have to explain what happened to those sixty-seven men, and what Milburn Osterick heard behind him while coming out of the canyon, and what Cyril Ashe Kittel photographed on a wall that was only rock, and why the last word in Cassius Prendergast’s notebook was that particular word. Listen.