The Rivers Ran East: Travelers' Tales Classics [Paperback]

Leonard Clark (Author)

Book Description

Series: Travelers' Tales Classics | Publication Date: April 9, 2001

Long out of print, this is a riveting firsthand account of Leonard Clark’s search for the legendary lost Seven Cities of Cibola — reputedly home to enormous reserves of gold — in the rain forest east of the Peruvian Andes. A former U.S. Army intelligence officer, Clark is joined on his expedition by Inez Pokorny, a gutsy, multilingual female explorer. Their treacherous journey includes encounters with head-hunting Jivaro Indians, man-eating jaguars, 40-foot-long anacondas, poisonous plants, and shamanistic healers. Against the odds, Clark and Pokorny reach their destination, but nearly starve to death trying to transport sacks of gold out of the dense tropical foliage.

Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Travelers' Tales; New Edition edition (April 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 188521166X
• ISBN-13: 978-1885211668
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,209,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Rivers Ran East, February 18, 2002

By 

Linda B. Drumheller (Delran, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rivers Ran East: Travelers' Tales Classics (Paperback)

Leonard Clark was my uncle, and the new edition having been released, I have recently re-read The Rivers Ran East.

I found this book to be most incredible, not simply for the storytelling, but more importantly for Len's foresight into the value and preciousness of the South American rainforest. While he was admittedly not an environmentalist, he was truly a man ahead of his times in that respect. His appreciation for and finely detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Amazon River basin are extremely topical and perhaps even more pertinent today than when he wrote the book. Among all else, he identifies specific native tribal practices and forest herbs as remedies unknown by Western medicine; as with many other products of the rainforest, these hold great promise and yet remain unresearched. Furthermore, his anthropological descriptions of the Amazonian natives capture a culture that now, just 50 years later, has largely been transformed to modern society and lost.

Purely on a swash-buckling adventure-tale level, the book is priceless: this is a real-life Indiana Jones! Len's hair-raising stunts, death-defying experiences, and encounters with Amazonian headhunters hit the reader one after another with nearly a breath in between.

Altogether five of Leonard's books were published: A Wanderer Till I Die (1937), The Rivers Ran East (1953), The Marching Wind (1954), Explorer's Digest (1955), and Yucatan Adventure (posthumously in 1958). All five make for fascinating reading. Many of his books were translated into Italian, Japanese, and other languages. My mother was Len's younger half-sister and I inherited her collection, which includes first editions in English of all five, as well as several of the translated versions, for example, the Japanese edition of The Marching Wind. In addition to The Rivers Ran East, The Marching Wind has also recently been republished and is now also available on Amazon.com. Beyond his books, articles by Len were published in National Geographic, Life, Literary Digest, Field and Stream, Popular Science, and American Weekly. The family still receives inquiries from time to time about possibly make a film based on one of his adventures, but none has been produced to date.

All of Len's books except for A Wanderer Till I Die were written after World War II. However, it was during the war that he perhaps made his greatest - though unpublished - contributions. Leonard served as an officer in the OSS, spending a good portion of the war in the China-Burma-India corridor conducting intelligence work in the Yellow River valley. Near the end of the war, he was stationed on Formosa and accepted the first (unofficial) surrender of the Japanese there. He earned the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and the Order of the White Cloud with Ribbon, the highest honor given by the Chinese to the foreigners who served them.

All of Leonard's works are fact, not fiction, and he is very highly regarded in our family as a military hero and quintessential adventurer. After the war, he built a log cabin near Fresno, California that I visited as a child. I remember Len as a large, quiet, gentle man who liked to tease us children, smoke his pipe, and take long contemplative walks in the woods with my mother. Yet he also embodied a sophistication, powerfulness, and seriousness that I sensed even as a child.

Len was born on 1/6/1907. He died on 5/4/1957 under mysterious circumstances while exploring for gold and diamond mines on the Caroni River in Venezuela. You will find a fairly extensive biography in Current Biography, Volume 17, No. 1, January 1956, although this does not cover his last years. In addition, my father devoted 20 pages in our family history to Len. For more information, please feel free to contact me.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The most thrilling true adventure I've ever read, December 18, 2004

By 

Sandra Feder "Author of Side Effect and One o... - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Rivers Ran East: Travelers' Tales Classics (Paperback)

I still vividly remember when and how I discovered this treasure of a book (years ago, at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh). It was the most incredible true adventure I had ever read, and it still is. I have read it repeatedly over the years; somehow the story is always fresh and exciting.

Leonard Clark was a former intelligence officer and a first-class explorer when he set his sights on the fabled land of gold, El Dorado. He started his journey in Lima, Peru, in 1946, with a thousand dollars and a very old Spanish parchment map of El Dorado. One one person was going to accompany him: Jorge Mendoza, a young, college-educated Peruvian who spoke perfect English.

Everyone in Lima remotely acquainted with the area Clark proposed to travel warned him not to go. Much of his path was through completely unexplored and impenetrable jungle territory, where people were regularly murdered or disappeared. Compounding the difficulty was the political situation in Peru, which forced Clark to take a very long and indirect route. He had to first travel east from Lima to Iquitos, then travel west to Borja and Bella Vista, in order to reach El Dorado. His 'cover' was that he was looking for medical secrets of the Indian brujos (witchmen). He did indeed discover amazing jungle remedies, many of which he brought back with him.

The constant stress of heat and humidity; the threat of attacks by headhunting and cannibalistic Indians; insect bites (some of which could blind a man); dangers from wild animals, including enormous man-eating snakes -- and over it all, the incessant sounds of the jungle -- were nearly unendurable for the two men. Every single page in this book is captivating, packed with sounds and smells and images of the jungle that linger in your memory.

About two-thirds of the way through the story, before they reached Iquitos, Jorge's brother died, and he left to head his family's estates -- leaving Clark alone. Inez Pokorny, an American woman who had already traveled for eight months on her way up the Amazon, accompanied Clark on the rest of his journey, from Iquitos west. Her help was inestimable; he described her as 'the best friend any explorer ever had.'

Clark's journey and its culmination surpass any adventure fiction. This is a remarkable book -- describing not just an amazing treasure hunt, but one of the finest pieces of exploration in the Amazon Valley.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There are no better adventure stories, November 30, 1999

By 

Russell Heath - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Rivers Ran East (Hardcover)

I read this book many years ago and am now hoping to find copies for young friends just now poking their way into the world. I am very disappointed this book is out of print -- I have read countless adventure stories and none excedes this in excitment, "exoticness" and amazement. If there is a copy in your local library -- read it.