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By Root 1535 0

’s education, rambling cross-country in order to become intimate with forests and fauna, with hydrology and weather. In the summer of 1855, Powell struck out for four months and walked across Wisconsin. Two years later he floated down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to St. Louis. A few months later, he was gathering fossils in interior Missouri. The next spring he was rowing alone down the Illinois River and up the Mississippi and the Des Moines River to the middle of Iowa, then a wilderness. Between his peregrinations Powell picked up some frantic education—Greek, Latin, botany, a bit of philosophy—at Wheaton, Oberlin, and Illinois College, but he never graduated and he never stayed long. Powell learned on the run.

When the Civil War broke out, Powell enlisted on the Union side, fought bravely, and came out a major, a confidant of Ulysses Grant, and minus an arm, which was removed by a steel ball at the Battle of Shiloh. To Powell, the loss of an arm was merely a nuisance, though the raw nerve endings in his amputated stump kept him in pain for the rest of his life. After the war he tried a stint at teaching, first at Illinois Wesleyan and then at Illinois State, but it didn’t satisfy him. He helped found the Illinois Museum of Natural History, and was an obvious candidate for the position of curator, but decided that this, too, was too dull an avenue with too visible an end. Powell, like the mountain men, was compulsively drawn to the frontier. In the United States of the late 1860s, there was but one place where the frontier was still nearly intact.

By 1869, the population of New York City had surpassed one million. The city had built a great water-supply aqueduct to the Croton River and was imagining its future subway system. Chicago, founded thirty years earlier, was already a big sprawling industrial town. The millionaires of San Francisco were building their palatial mansions on Nob Hill. New England was deforested, farms and settlements were spilling onto the prairie. However, on maps of the United States published in that year a substantial area remained a complete blank, and was marked “unexplored.”

The region overlay parts of what is now Colorado, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada. It was about the size of France, and through the middle of it ran the Colorado River. That was about all that was known about it, except that the topography was awesome and the rainfall scarce. The region was known as the Plateau Province, and parties heading westward tended to avoid it at all costs.

Some of the Franciscan friars, who were as tough as anyone in the Old West, had wandered through it on the Old Spanish Trail. Otherwise, the Mormon Outlet Trail skirted the region to the west, the California and Oregon trails swung northward, and the El Paso-Yuma Trail went south. From a distance, one could see multicolored and multistoried mesas and cliffs, saurian ridges, and occasionally a distant snowcapped peak. There were accounts of canyons that began without reason and were suddenly a thousand feet deep, eroded more by wind than by water. A distance that a bird could cover in an hour might require a week to negotiate. The days were hot and the nights were often frigid, owing to the region’s high interior vastness, and water was almost impossible to find. Lacking wings, there was only one good way to explore it: by boat.

On the 24th of May, 1869, the Powell Geographic Expedition set out on the Green River from the town of Green River, Wyoming, in four wooden dories: the Maid of the Canyon, the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, the Emma Dean, and the No Name. For a scientific expedition, it was an odd group. Powell, the leader, was the closest thing to a scientist. He had brought along his brother Walter—moody, sarcastic, morose, one of the thousands of psychiatric casualties of the Civil War. The rest of the party was made up mostly of mountain men: O. G. Howland, his brother Seneca, Bill Dunn, Billy Hawkins, and Jack Sumner, all of whom had been collected by Powell en route to Green River. He had also invited a beet-faced Englishman