The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, recently ranked number four on Adventure magazine’s list of top 100 classics, is legendary pioneer John Wesley Powell’s first-person account of his crew’s unprecedented odyssey along the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon. A bold foray into the heart of the American West’s final frontier, the expedition was achieved without benefit of modern river-running equipment, supplies, or a firm sense of the region’s perilous topography and the attitudes of the native inhabitants towards whites. What started as a scientific exploration of uncharted territory quickly turned into a harrowing quest for sustenance and survival. Shaped from Powell’s original field writings, this book is as exciting today as it was when first published in 1874. This handsome new edition from National Geographic Adventure Classics also features an exclusive introduction by adventure historian Anthony Brandt that puts into perspective Powell’s achievement and traces its great legacy across United States history.

John Wesley Powell?completed his famous expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869.?But his life as one of America's great men of science was only just beginning. As an Indian commissioner, he became a student of the Paiute and Ute tribes, an interest that led in 1879 to the birth of the Smithsonian's Bureau of Ethnology, where he was director for 23 years. That same year he would be instrumental in the founding of the US Geological Survey, an agency which he would head just two years later.?At 47 he was perhaps the most powerful and influential scientist in America.?His ideas for harnessing water in the West inspired the birth of the Bureau of Reclamation and, in 1888, he joined 32 scientists and prominent Washingtonians to establish the?National Geographic Society. After his death in 1902 at the age of 68, he continued to influence government science: He donated his brain to research. It's preserved today at the Smithsonian Institution.