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 canyons of the Green and the Colorado, from the Uinta Mountains to the lower end of the Grand Canyon, had never been mapped, and the voyage through them was, in the words of the historian William Culp Darrah, the last great exploration through unknown country in the continental United States. Trappers had been wrecked in the upper canyons and walked out; in 1843 Frémont had written that no trapper had been found bold enough to attempt a voyage “which has so certain a prospect of a fatal termination.” The Union Pacific had just reached Green River, so a party could come to the head of the canyons by train. Powell had no government money, only the right to draw army rations, and he set off with ten months of supplies and four Chicago-built boats 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

   Ten men push four boats off from the railway town of Green River, 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

   About two 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 more than twelve hundred feet below the desert and become the Colorado.

5. Cataract Canyon

   1869 CE

   A canyon forty-one miles long, its rapids and falls passed by lowering the boats on ropes or carrying everything round.

6. The Great Unknown

   13 August 1869

   From the mouth of the Little Colorado they set off into the Grand Canyon with a month’s rations, much of it spoiling.

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 recorded traverse and section of the Grand Canyon.

John Wesley Powell

One-armed Civil War major who ran about a thousand miles of the Green and Colorado rivers in 1869, most of it through 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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