Customer Reviews

Colorado

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Great book - as good as "Sand County Almanac" by Oldo Leopold (A Sand County Almanac (Outdoor Essays & Reflections)). These two books are full of wisdom, knowledge, and gives you a better understanding of wild nature than any other textbook on ecology. Easy, pleasant reading, perfect style and language. Look, they simply don't make the books like that anymore - it's a memoire of a lost culture. It is also a written prove of the places and species which do not existed anymore. Minor "minus" - perfect illustrations (drawings) of Russian-American great painter, Nikolai Fechin (Nicolai Fechin, The genius of Nicolai Fechin: Recollections by Forrest Fenn) are not reproduced good enough. But this is a genuine 6-star book

Frank Waters covers all aspects of the history of the Colorado and puts the river as just a part of the entire drainage. It's really a history of the "triangle" of the Rockies that stretches from Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, to the Front Range of the Colorado and over to Utah. The apex is the mouth of the river at the head of the Gulf of California.
Outside of the geologic prominence of the entire region, which he addresses at the begining and then at the end when he talks about the Grand Canyon, he goes into the Indian civilizations, the Spanish settlements, the American trappers and gold miners and on to the Mormons and more recent history. He does a great job describing the development of the Imperial Valley in California, not only for its importance as a use of the Colorado river water, but also because of his familiarity having been a telephone repairman in the 1920s out there.
The descriptions of and respect for the Indians showed where his heart really laid. The stories of the white man, be them Spanish or American, was to describe the man over land mentality.

This is a book written 50 years ago and updated a bit in the 80s, but it gives a history in vignettes of what occurred on the Colorado Plateau over the last, say 1,000 years.

Good book. Thanks, Ross, for giving it to me for Christmas, 2004.

Mike
Oakland, CA
2/5/05

"Colorado" is a superb early work of non-fiction by Frank Waters. It is among over 20 of his books still in print.
It is written in an epic style and may be the best piece written about the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Certainly it is required reading for anyone interested in those subjects. Frank Waters novels such as "Man Who Killed the Deer" and "People of the Valley" are classics of Southwestern Literature causing many to name Frank Waters the Grand Father of Southwestern Literature. Since his death, the Frank Waters Foundation in Taos, New Mexico works to promote Waters work and ideas.

This is one of the best entries in the wonderful Writer's Project series that arose from the WPA era....many of the books are still available in libraries...this is wonderfully engaging writing, the kind that makes you feel you have had a great conversation with the writer, I found that I had mentally retained much of the information long afterwards, as a result...I found the most interesting part of this book to be the description of the old Colorado River steamers; not many are now aware that the river once coursed as far South as old Mexicali; there is a wonderful description of the great tidal bore of the old river which of course was obliterated by damming...a wonderful companion to Waters' novel, "The Yogi of Cockroach Court," which takes place in Mexicali. Highly recommended.