While Powell and his men struggled through rapids and whirlpools, like Ulysses and his crew in some modern retelling of the Odyssey, the rest of the world had been left with no clue to their fate but a handful of out-of-date letters. A conversation between two strangers in a stagecoach revealed how completely Powell and his men had vanished. Richard Townshend was a blue-eyed, curly-haired young Englishman in search of experiences beyond those available at Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1869, he had set out to see the American West. (Frank Goodman, who had left the Powell expedition in the Uinta Valley, was not the only Englishman smitten with the romance of the Wild West.) Townshend seemed bound for trouble—his nickname was “Cherub”—but he thrived among his new gold-seeking, gun-packing acquaintances. On a stagecoach, he happened to meet one of the West’s most colorful characters, William Gilpin. A biography of Gilpin would make a fat and lively book, and the scene changes would give a reader whiplash.
