Customer Reviews

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Even if you are illiterate, the drawings in this book are frequently incredible. While true, that the drawings don't always fit with the adjacent text, this will neither lessen the impact of the journal nor irritate the enjoyment of its descriptions. Like Lewis and Clark, Powell suffered great hardships on the way, going so far along known courses, and then emerging into the great unknown. His account of his last ten critical days on the Colorado River is compelling, his descriptions of the Grand Canyon and other canyons are frequently better than the illustrious drawings, and his geographic and geologic explanations of the basin's creation help shape a broader view of one of America's most visited places.

I highly recommend this as a reference book, a history book of the area, an adventure story, and an art portfolio.

One of the most enthralling and astonishing adventure books I've ever read. Powell was an ace geologist, a pretty good naturalist, a fearless explorer, and a very good writer. Add the unexplored waters of the Grand Canyon -- they truly didn't know what they were getting into when they started down the Canyon -- and you have a great book. The illustrations are first-rate as well.

On May 24, 1869, Major John W. Powell, a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, along with nine others (geologists, geographers, scouts and adventurers), set out from Green River, Wyoming to explore the last great unmapped and unknown portion of the continental U.S. No man had ever descended the Colorado river as it cut its way through 1,000 miles of incredibly rugged badlands. However, Powell and his band of men completed a remarkable journey of exploration through this country.

A passage from Powell's narrative of the expedition, after they had been on the river nearly two months, conveys very well a perspective of the challenge Powell and his men faced, the courage they demonstrated and Powell's matter of fact, but powerful writing style.

"We are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown. Our boats, tied to a common stake, chafe each other as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month's rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito-net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried and the worst of it boiled; the few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun and reshrunken to their normal bulk. The sugar has all melted and gone on its way down the river. But we have a large sack of coffee. The lightening of the boats has this advantage--they will ride the waves better; and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage. We are three quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above. The waves are but puny ripples. We are but pigmies, running up and down among the sands or lost among the boulders. We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not. What rocks beset the channel, we know not. What walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah, well! We may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever. To me, the cheer is somber and the jests ghastly."

This book is a classic tale of exploration and discovery!

Anyone who is enthralled by the beauty of the Southwest, or as Powell defines it - the Colorado River watershed, should read this book. It's not the same now as it was in his day. For one thing, Glen Canyon, which he named, is now submerged under Lake Powell (could any name be more ironic?). No one today can feel the same kind of wonder and awe as Powell and his companions did as they pushed their boats into the raging rapids of the muddy Colorado without having any idea of what was ahead. Even the part of the Colorado watershed that has not been developed, and there is a considerable extent of land under protective status, today has nothing like the remoteness that Powell experienced. Everything has been mapped and carefully scutinized.

Yet, anyone who has spent some time sizing up the immense water-carved rock canyons, can still feel something of the sublimity that Powell felt. It requires more imagination; it is true, but anyone who is determined to make more of a commitment than just standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon can still experience the really sublime features of this landscape. How much more difficult will it be in the future? Will these wilderness wonders become more degraded?

The book describes by daily journal entries the historic river run of 1868 starting at the Flaming Gorge in Wyoming and ending at the Virgin River as well as a follow-up expedition the next year. Powell does not overdo the apprehensions and hardships of himself and companions, nor does he make mention that he accomplished the physical exertion of climbing the canyon walls and navigating the boats with one arm: but largely confines himself to descriptions of the events and the incredible landforms. The extent of the journey and all the spectacular features that he finds and names is impressive. That Powell's group experienced hardships there can be no doubt.

One of the more interesting parts of the book to me was the way Powell approached the Indian tribe that killed his three companions, who decided to abandon the expedition and hike out of the Canyon. In those frontier days, it was the accepted norm to meet violence with violence. But Powell, I thought here, really showed himself to be an exceptional human being. He had a inquiring mind and a sincere desire to learn everything he could without inflicting retribution.

John Wesley Powell, for better or worse, made the American West what it is today. He was the primary founder of the Bureau of Reclamation, the agency that has vandalized the West, and of the United States Geological Service. He also completed the last great feat of exploration on American soil when he and his cohorts undertook the voyage that is the main subject of this book. That the book combines two voyages into one epic adventure is not widely known, but it does not detract from the narrative to any meaningful extent.

Powell's narrative of the so-called Grand Canyon voyage is simply, yet powerfully, written, even carrying touches of the poetic. It is easy to sense his feelings of awe and wonder, particularly in exploring the canyons themselves. Powell never put his main function, scientific discovery, out of mind until the race through the Grand Canyon became one against the calendar as well as the power of the river. Even then, his writing evidences a sense of charity and concern toward his men.

Powell's narrative evokes many vivid memories of the beauty and timelessness of the country he explored, particularly his writings on the now-vanished Glen Canyon. It seems a pity, somehow, that much of what he saw is buried under stagnant, polluted reservoirs, the worst of which ironically carries his name. Would this brilliant, feeling man approve? I do not think so.

The growing recognition of the role native Americans have played in our country's history and development would find a more sympathetic vein with Powell, and his studies of ethnography and acclimatation to the arid habitat by native Americans may prove a more lasting memoir. These parts of the book should be read with equal care.

As to the canyons themselves, Powell would be the first to tell you that the artificial plug of stone at Page, Arizona, is only temporary, and that, as with the volcanic debris at Lava Falls, the river will soon have its way again.

John Wesley Powell wrote one of the finest dedications that's ever been written when, as a very old man, he penned thanks to the men, dead many years, with whom he'd explored the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River. Those moving words alone intimate the power and excitement awaiting this epic adventure.

Powell's writing is so factual that you have to strain at the words to get a real sense for the incredible dangers that Powell and his men faced. One crew member abandoned early on, and three who gave up just before the expedition's end were killed before ever getting out of the wilderness. Their deaths have been blamed on Mormons or native Americans. Starvation, drowning, and accidental death of every variety threatened the crew at every step of their three-month odyssey.

This trip down the primeval, untamed, terrible Colorado River and the first ever exploration of the Grand Canyon, all done by a one-armed Civil War veteran, ranks perhaps as the literary starting point for the opening of the Southwest. The etchings in the book and the grandeur of the scenery described by Powell are extraordinary.

John Wesley Powell was a fascinating guy.
John Wesley Powell was a scientist, geologist, and Civil War veteran whose right arm was shot off by a cannonball; he was the man who named Glen Canyon, and the man Lake Powell was named for. He was the first man to lead an expedition down the Colorado--the first two expeditions, actually--back when the river flowed wild, without dams.
He didn't worry about all the details like a knowledgeable crew, funds, both arms, having an experienced crew, not knowing if there was a Niagara-sized waterfall around the next bend or not, and so on--he just went. He understood you don't need experience to gain experience. He and his crew paid for their inexperience by nearly drowning, nearly starving, and by misadventure after misadventure but in the end MOST of their group emerged from the southern end of the Grand Canyon with stories, experiences, and first-hand knowledge of a part of the world that few people had ever seen before.
(Three of his crew abandoned the expedition, and their fates are uncertain.)
This is Powell's story. It's also a story of the geology of the Colorado Plateau, of the Colorado River, and of the West. It's not a perfect account, but it is a classic one. Powell's prose is at times high-falutin', he recklessly combines details from his first and second expedition, and he gives too little credit to his crew, but he is always an optimist, and always fun to read.
Take a river trip, and take this along. Or, take "Down the Great Unknown" by Edward Dolnick--that's a good account of that trip as well. (I actually prefer it.)

It's easy to get the impression that this is a reprint of either 1) Powell's "official report" from the 1870's, or 2) Powell's "popular account" published by Flood and Vincent in the 1890's.

The sad reality: it is neither.

National Geographic Adventure Classics could - and should - have done better...but if they'd reprinted the Flood and Vincent version, it would be nothing but a knockoff of the popular Dover paperback edition. And if they'd done the "official report" version - it would have been of even less popular interest.

So what you get in the National Geographic edition: the text from Flood and Vincent, and a bunch of popular illustrations used by Powell (somewhere, sometime). And some introductory material that tells part - but certainly not all - of the history of this particular version. But this is certainly NOT a reprint of the Flood and Vincent edition - it's another bastardized version.

However - maybe you don't care about that. At least the illustrations (wonderful in and of themselves) are very well reproduced, much better than they are in the Dover and other editions that I am familiar with.

John Wesley Powell lost his right arm at Shiloh, in the Civil War battle of 1862. As Wallace Stegner says of him, in his excellent book, "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,": "Losing one's right arm is a misfortune; to some it would be a disaster, to others an excuse. It affected Wes Powell's life about as much as a stone fallen into a swift stream affects the course of the river." The war finally ended, and Powell felt he still had much to do with his life. He saw an immense "white space" still on the map of the continental United States, in the southwest canyon country, and decided to "fill it in" by taking the first river voyage down the Green and Colorado rivers, in 1869. He was the commander of nine others, one of whom was to die, three deserted, and were killed by Indians, but he and the other five completed the entire journey, and this is their story, in Powell's own words. It took them almost 100 days to complete the journey, and they ran the entire gambit of dangers such a journey entailed, including sudden death in turbulent waters, starvation, and disease.

Many of the other reviewers focused on the portion that involved the Grand Canyon, and indeed anyone contemplating a modern-day raft trip would benefit from reading the original trip down the river; but this is only a tenth of the book. Of course the overall boat trip was much longer, commencing in Wyoming, and traversing all of modern day Utah. What the other reviews seem to understate is his ethnographic work - the study of the Indians that he met along the way, and afterward, including his visit at Zuni. His empathy for them is revealed in such passages as, in referring to Spanish efforts to convert them to Christianity: "The interpretation of the picture-writing is this: `Be baptized as this saved heathen, or be hanged as that damned heathen.' Doubtless, some of these people preferred another alternative, and rather than be baptized or hanged they chose to imprison themselves within these canyon walls."

Regrettably the current edition does not seem to include the numerous drawings and pictures that are available in my Dover edition, which does not seem to be available, and is easily half the story. Numerous of these drawings are in the Stegner work, and they can enchant the reader. As Stegner says, most of these prints and drawings are exaggerated in scale and detail, but they seem to capture the essence of the "canyon experience," a magic realism in drawings, if you will.

This is a classic and realistic work of the exploration, by the "white man," of the American West, and should be an essential component of any school curriculum dealing with the subject. May we all be inspired to fill in the additional "white spaces" of life.

Quite the accomplishment for anyone, let alone a one-armed Civil War veteran.

Major John Powell and a handful of men bounce, bound, rebound, splash, crash and portage from Wyoming's Green River all the way down the Colorado River thru canyons, mesas, gorges, buttes and cliffs 3,000 feet tall and then take on the Grandest of all Canyons. This was the blank on the map which needed to be filled in.
As Major Powell notes in his introduction, this was a scientific expedition to satisfy geological and geographical questions for the country. His descriptions of landforms are poetically captivating and enchanting. Of added interest are his portrayals of contemporary and ancient Indian cultures and ruins.

A minor correction to his speculations on William Ashley who ventured down the Green in 1825 and ultimately wrecked in the rapids (this may have been edited in later editions).
Ashley and all six of his men did survive their disaster, met up with some members of the Ute Indian tribe and French fur trappers, bartered for horses and eventually began the first mountain rendezvous along Henry's Fork in Wyoming. He did not go directly to Salt Lake City after the Green River wreckage to obtain provisions from the Mormons as they came to this part of the country in the late 1840's.

A good read for those into landforms, natural history and daringness.