Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell. On May 24, 1869, Major John Wesley Powell, a 35-year-old professor of natural history, and nine adventurers set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, to explore the Colorado River and its canyons. Only six of the explorers exited at the mouth of the Grand Canyon 3 months and 6 days later. One left the expedition after 6 weeks, and three were killed by Indians after leaving the party only 2 days before it emerged from the Grand Canyon. The expedition members were hunters, guides, Indian fighters, and adventurers. Powell was the only scientist in the group; even he was largely self- taught. His enthusiasm and perseverance, however, were mainly responsible for the trip's completion. The area through which they traveled was then just a blank space on the map of the United States. Today much of the territory is unchanged from what it was when first penetrated by the Powell expedition. Major Powell's request for a Congressional appropriation of $12,000 to complete the topographical and geological survey of the valley of the Green River. From its headwaters on the west slope of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River follows a southwesterly course across the high Colorado Plateau and the low-lying Basin and Range province to the Gulf of California. Its course has been cut through mountains, plateaus, and desert plains; it is cliff-bound nine-tenths of its way across the plateaus of southeastern Utah and northwestern Arizona. Geologically, the part of the river explored by Powell is largely within the Colorado Plateau, an area of nearly horizontal sedimentary rock that stands at great altitude, generally more than 5,000 feet high, and is locally upwarped into mountains. The streams flow in steep-walled canyons, many of which are brilliantly colored. The climate is arid and vegetation is sparse. There are extensive areas of bare rock. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons by John Wesley Powell. Until Powell's exploration, little was known of the Grand Canyon, its surrounding plateaus, or the long reaches of river above it. Legends told of expeditions that had tried to pass through the canyon only to perish in unknown rapids or on lonely rock shores. If any of these early expeditions did get through, they left no record behind. Even the official view of the United States Government was discouraging. Lieutenant Joseph C. Ives, who in 1857 was sent by the War Department to explore the river, traveled by steamer from the mouth of the river as far upstream as Black Canyon. In his report he said: Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locality . . . It seems intended by nature that the Colorado, along the greater part of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed. The steamer "Explorer U. S." in which Lieutenant Ives ascended the Colorado River. But neither legends, Indian warnings, nor the Ives report discouraged Powell. In his own report on the expedition, published in 1870, Powell wrote: For two or three years I have been engaged in making some geographical studies in the mountains to the east and north of the Colorado Basin, and while pursuing them the thought grew into my mind that the canyons of this region would be a Book of Revelations in the rock-leaved Bible of geology. The thought fructified, and I determined to read the book; so I sought for all the available information with regard to the canyon land. I talked with Indians and hunters, I went among the Mormons to learn what they knew of this country adjacent to the "Kingdom of God," the home of the "Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints." I read the reports of the United States Survey, and I explored canyons of the tributary streams that I thought would represent somewhat the nature of the Grand Canyon, on account of similar geological and physical features. From the fabulous stories, the facts, and the reports, and from the knowledge of other canyons, I came to the belief that the "Grand Canyon of the Colorado" could be explored by descending the river in small boats. Major Powell's lead boat with his chair lashed to the deck. Typical equipment of a river explorer—gun, pick, mapcase, and canteen. By spring of 1869, Powell was ready to start. The Illinois Natural History Society and Illinois Industrial University supplied funds. Congress authorized Powell to draw rations from Army posts for a party of 25 men and the Smithsonian Institution provided him with scientific instruments. Personal expenses were borne by the individual members of the party. The four boats for the trip, the Emma Dean, the Kitty Clyde's Sister, the No Name, and the Maid of the Canyon, waited at Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, where the party was to embark. The boats had been built according to Powell's specifications. Three were made of oak, were 21 feet long, and were equipped with compartments for storing food, ammunition, tools, and scientific instruments. The fourth was of identical design but only 16 feet long and of white pine. Being lighter "with a sharp cutwater and every way built for fast rowing," it served as the lead boat. Four men of the party had served as guides and assistants to Powell the year before: Jack Sumner, O. G. Howland, Bill Dunn, and Billy Hawkins. Sumner was a Civil War veteran who operated a small trading post in Middle Park, west of Denver. Abandoning the trading post, he joined Powell and enlisted the services of Howland, Dunn, and Hawkins. Howland was a printer and editor from Denver, and Hawkins was a Union Army veteran who was suspected by Powell's party of being a fugitive from justice. Little is known of Dunn. In addition, there were Seneca Howland, a Civil War veteran and brother of O. G. Howland; Captain Walter H. Powell, the Major's brother, who had been imprisoned during the war; G. Y. Bradley, a veteran of the Civil War and later a sergeant in the Regular Army, who had been discharged to accompany Powell on the trip; Frank Goodman, a young English adventurer; and Andy Hall, an 18-year-old mule driver and Indian scout. Explorers. Early European and American explorers of Grand Canyon and Colorado River were willing to go into "The Great Unknown" risking their lives to learn the canyon's secrets. They were the first to document the power of the Colorado River, understand the immense size of Grand Canyon, and share its beauty and danger with the world. Their adventures still inspire explorers today. The Early Spanish Explorers. The first Europeans to see Grand Canyon were soldiers led by García López de Cárdenas. In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and his Spanish army traveled northward from Mexico City in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola. After traveling for six months, Coronado’s army arrived at the Hopi Mesas, east of Grand Canyon. Cárdenas, guided by the Hopi, led a small party of men to find a reported “great river.” Coronado hoped to find a navigable river that would serve as a waterway to the Gulf of California. The Hopi leaders advised their men to guide the unwelcome soldiers along an exaggerate path to the highest point above the river and to volunteer no information of value. After a twenty-day journey, Cárdenas and his army arrived at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Approximately a mile down was the Colorado River below them. The Spaniards estimated that the opposite rim was 8 to 10 miles away and that the Colorado River was no more than 6 feet across. Cárdenas ordered three infantry men to climb their way down to the river. The men made it down to about 1,5000 feet, a third of the way down, until they saw that the Colorado River was much wider waterway than they had estimated and that there was no way to navigate ships along these intense river. Cárdenas party spent three days looking for water and trying to reach the bottom of the river. The Hopi were able to fool the Spaniards into thinking that the area was an impenetrable wasteland and was not navigable anyway. Due to this response, Coronado dismissed further western exploration, and moved his men out east to Texas. The Grand Canyon was left unexplored for 235 years. Joseph Christmas Ives. 1857-1858 Grand Canyon was the last largely unexplored area of the West in 1857. Often called "The Great Unknown" it was literally a blank space on maps. It was known that the Colorado River made a significant portion of its journey through this area, so the federal government funded an expedition to explore the river and determine its usefulness as a trade route. Army First Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers would embark on this challenge and become the first European American known to reach the river within Grand Canyon. Joseph Christmas Ives would navigate up river using a fifty-foot long sternwheel steamboat, the Explorer . His plan was to steam up the Colorado River from the known into the unknown. However, he crashed just below Black Canyon, not yet in Grand Canyon itself, but continued upriver for another thirty miles in a skiff. Continuing on foot, his overland journey took him down into the canyon at Diamond Creek, today part of the Hualapai Indian Reservation. In his Report upon the Colorado River of the West; Explored in 1857 and 1858 (Washington: GPO, 1861), Ives admires the canyon’s scenery: "The extent and magnitude of the system of canyons is astounding. The plateau is cut into shreds by these gigantic chasms, and resembles a vast ruin. Belts of country miles in width have been swept away, leaving only isolated mountains standing in the gap. Fissures so profound that the eye cannot penetrate their depths are separated by walls whose thickness one can almost span, and slender spires that seem to be tottering upon their bases shoot up thousands of feet from the vaults below." But he could not envision that the scenery alone would bring millions to view the wonder of the canyon. He also writes: "The region is, of course, altogether valueless. It can be approached only from the south, and after entering it there is nothing to do but leave. Ours has been the first, and will doubtless be the last, party of whites to visit this profitless locality. It seems intended by nature that the Colorado river, along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed." John Wesley Powell. It wasn’t until 1869 that another explorer would take on the Colorado River through Grand Canyon. John Wesley Powell was a geologist whose studies of rocks in Colorado and Wyoming sparked his interest in exploring the unknown canyon of the Colorado River. He studied reports from Ives’ expedition, gathered support and supplies from the Smithsonian Institution, railroads, educational institutions, and convinced Congress to authorize the use of rations and supplies from army posts. He designed his own boats and gathered a makeshift crew of ex-trappers, mountain men, and Civil War veterans like himself. The expedition launched four boats from Green River, Wyoming in May 24, 1869. Starting off with ease, the river quickly gained momentum and began to bare its teeth. One boat and all its supplies were lost at Lodore Canyon in a rapid Powell named Disaster Falls. After three summer months spent exploring the upper canyons of the Colorado River, the expedition passed the Paria River on August 4, hungry, with only musty apples, spoiled bacon, wet flour, and coffee remaining, and both physically and mentally tired, as they entered the last and greatest of the canyons. The scientific expedition had turned into a fight for their very survival. In his published account of the river expedition, The Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries (Washington: GPO, 1875), Powell referred to Grand Canyon as “our granite prison” and described an almost unbroken series of rapids that the expedition ran, lined, or portaged, praying all the while for an end to the ordeal. On August 28, the canyon ended and the river became relatively quiet once again. So many of Powell’s notes had been lost, however, that with full federal funding, Powell gathered another crew, this time of amateur scientists and educated men, and began a second expedition on May 22, 1871 from Green River, Wyoming, entering the Grand Canyon at Lee’s Ferry on August 17, 1872 after wintering in Kanab, Utah. Find out more about the Powell Expedition with these books available at the Grand Canyon Conservancy's Online Bookstore: Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, John Wesley Powell. What started as a scientific expedition turned into a harrowing adventure through some of the roughest and most beautiful country in America. It was May of 1869 when a Civil War veteran and nine other men descended with four boats into a branch of the Colorado River for what they believed would be a ten-month excursion through the last unmapped territory of the continental United States. Three months and one thousand miles later, six emaciated men in two boats emerged in the open waters of the Virgin River. They had survived famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man. Their story, recounted by John Wesley Powell in his journals, remains as fresh and exciting today as it did in 1874 when it first appeared in serial form in Scribner's magazine. softcover, 397 pages. More from this collection. Grand Canyon Hiking Kit. Regular price $21.99. Bright Angel Trail Guide. Regular price $4.95. Along the Rim - A Guide to Grand Canyon's South Rim from Hermits Rest to Desert View. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. One of the great works of American exploration literature, this account of a scientific expedition forced to survive famine, attacks, mutiny, and some of the most dangerous rapids known to man remains as fresh and exciting today as it was in 1874. The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons , recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the expedition was achieved without benefit of modern river-running equipment, supplies, or a firm sense of the region’s perilous topography and the attitudes of the native inhabitants towards whites. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. LibraryThing Review. Though plain spoken in describing the portages in such canyons the immensity of the landscape and the task undertaken by Powell and his men permeated the read. Truly an awesome undertaken. And his . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. This write-up by Powell of his trip down the rivers of the southwest is very good. The book is written in first person like a log of the juorney, complete with dates at the start of new paragraphs for . Читать весь отзыв. Избранные страницы. Содержание. Другие издания - Просмотреть все. Часто встречающиеся слова и выражения. Об авторе (2003) John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) was a professor of geology and director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he traveled with his parents and brother all over the West-to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming-before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner received most of his education in Utah, graduating from the University in 1930. He furthered his education at the University of Iowa, where he received a master's and a doctoral degree. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace's teaching career-to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in 1971. A number of his creative writing students have become some of today's most well respected writers, including Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurty. Throughout his career and after, Stegner's literary output was tremendous. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993 he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography, and essays. Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. Although his fiction deals with many universal themes, Stegner is primarily recognized as a writer of the American West. Much of his literature deals with debunking myths of the West as a romantic country of heroes on horseback, and his passion for the terrain and its inhabitants have earned him the title 'The Dean of Western Letters'. He was one of the few true Men of Letters in this generation. An historian, essayist, short story writer and novelist, as well as a leading environmental writer. Although always connected in people's minds with the West, he had a long association with New England. Many short stories and one of his most successful novels, Crossing to Safety, are set in Vermont, where he had a summer home for many years. Another novel, The Spectator Bird , takes place in Denmark. An early environmentalist, he actively championed the region's preservation and was instrumental-with his now-famous 'Wilderness Letter'-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Honest and straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous yet compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the American literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with ferocity, energy, and integrity.