The Green and the Colorado, 1869

John Wesley Powell · 1869 CE · Earth

Run the unmapped canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers from Wyoming to the Virgin River and measure what they cut through.

Historical context

In 1869 the map of the United States carried one last blank, a region the size of a small country where the Green and the Colorado disappeared into canyons that nobody had come out of. Rumour filled it with whirlpools, waterfalls and underground passages, and the Union Pacific had just made it possible to reach the top of it by train. Powell had no government commission, ten months of army rations and four Chicago-built boats, and he set off to answer the question the way a geologist would: by measuring the rock all the way down.

The voyage, step by step

1. Green River Station, 24 May

   24 May 1869

   Four boats are launched from under a railway bridge into the last blank on the map.

2. Flaming Gorge

   1869 CE

   The river turns into the Uinta Mountains through a gate of red sandstone.

3. Disaster Falls

   1869 CE

   Three weeks in, the No Name breaks up on a rock and a third of the rations go with her.

4. The junction of the Green and the Grand

   1869 CE

   Two rivers meet a thousand feet below the desert and become the Colorado.

5. Cataract Canyon

   1869 CE

   Sixty rapids in sixty-five kilometres, most of them lined by hand from the bank.

6. The Great Unknown

   13 August 1869

   At the mouth of the Little Colorado they face the granite gorge with ten days of spoiled flour.

7. Separation, 28 August

   28 August 1869

   Three men judge the next rapid unrunnable, climb out of the canyon and are never seen again.

8. The mouth of the Virgin, 30 August

   30 August 1869

   Mormon fishermen watching for wreckage find six men alive instead.

Outcome

Six of ten men and two of four boats came out at the mouth of the Virgin on 30 August 1869, with the first traverse and section of the Grand Canyon.

John Wesley Powell

One-armed Civil War major who ran the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869 through a thousand kilometres of unmapped canyon, and afterwards argued that the arid West could not be settled like the East.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

• John Wesley Powell — Wikipedia
• Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871 and 1872John Wesley Powell · Government Printing Office, Washington · 1875

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