The Powell Expedition

In the spring of eighteen sixty-nine, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell set out from Green River Station in present-day Wyoming with nine companions and four wooden boats to do something no one had documented before: float the entire length of the Colorado River through its unknown canyons. Powell was thirty-five years old, a professor of natural history trained as a geologist. He had lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh.

What he had not lost was ambition. The Colorado from Green River to the Grand Canyon had never been systematically mapped. Rumors of enormous waterfalls and underground passages filled in the blank spaces on the maps of the day, and some believed the river simply disappeared underground somewhere in the canyon country.

The expedition launched on May twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-nine. Over three months and six days, the crew passed through Flaming Gorge, the canyon country of eastern Utah, and eventually through the Grand Canyon itself. Three men, fearing the final set of rapids, climbed out of the canyon and were never seen again.

Only six of the original ten completed the journey. Powell returned for a second expedition in eighteen seventy-one, this time better equipped, with artists to document the landscape. Together the two trips produced the first reliable maps of the Colorado River corridor, the first scientific descriptions of Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon's geology, and provided the foundation for what became the United States Geological Survey.

Powell himself named Glen Canyon, moved by what he called the constant beauty of its curving, luminous walls.