Civil War veteran John Wesley Powell's account of his treacherous exploration of the Colorado River in 1869 with nine other men, in which he discusses the region's terrain, its Native American inhabitants, and such dangerous parts of the journey as famine and mutiny.

When John Wesley Powell became the first person to navigate the entire Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon, he completed what Lewis and Clark had begun nearly 70 years earlier--the final exploration of continental America. The son of an abolitionist preacher, a Civil War hero (who lost an arm at Shiloh), and a passionate naturalist and geologist, in 1869 Powell tackled the vast and dangerous gorge carved by the Colorado River and known today...

A stirring tale of adventure and tragedy



"They brought balls of spun cotton and parrots and javelins and other little things that it would be tiresome to write down, and they gave everything for anything that was given to them. I was attentive and labored to find out if there was any gold."



With these portentous words, Christopher Columbus described one of his first encounters with Native Americans

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"The riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists...

On May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. No one had ever explored the fabled Grand Canyon; to adventurers of that era it was a region almost as mysterious as Atlantis -- and as perilous. The ten men set out down the mighty Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Six survived. Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down...

Presents the story of Sacagawea, a young Shoshone woman who helped Lewis and Clark in their journey to reach the Pacific Ocean in 1804.

Presents the diary of the Civil War veteran who led an expedition down the Colorado River to explore the depths of the Grand Canyon.

In 1902 the passage of the Reclamation Act and its mandate for the federal government to build dams for irrigation in the West created a need for accurate topographical surveys and geological studies of the rivers where the dams would be built. By 1920 the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other agencies had surveyed the easily accessible stretches of the Colorado River and its main tributaries. The remaining segments had yet to be charted because...