John Wesley Powell and the Green River Descent

Major John Wesley Powell had already lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh when he proposed to lead a nine-man expedition down the Green River from Wyoming into the unknown canyon system of the Colorado Plateau. It was the spring of eighteen sixty-nine. No one in the documented record had run those canyons before. The maps showed nothing useful beyond a few explorers' sketches at the edges.

The expedition put its wooden boats in the Green River on May twenty-fourth, eighteen sixty-nine, and entered a world that unraveled before them week by week: canyon walls that climbed a thousand feet above the river, rapids that broke two of the boats, stretches where the men had to line the remaining boats by rope along the cliff walls. Three men abandoned the expedition before its end, climbing out of the canyon to attempt an overland route home. They did not survive. Powell and the remaining five emerged from the Grand Canyon in late August.

The confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers visible from Canyonlands' Confluence Overlook is the point where Powell's two rivers met. He described the junction as a place of extraordinary silence. The Green arrives from the north, the Colorado from the east; together they bend southwest toward the Grand Canyon and ultimately toward the Gulf of California.

Powell's report to Congress, published in eighteen seventy-five, is the document that introduced the American government to the Colorado Plateau's hydrology. His central argument, that the arid West could not support large-scale agriculture and settlement without federal water management, was prescient and largely ignored by the settlement policies that followed. Every water crisis on the Colorado River today traces back to the gap between what Powell described and what the boosters chose to build anyway.