Down the Great Unknown

Author: Edward Dolnick
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 006176034X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Great Unknown is the first book to tell the full, dramatic story of the Powell expedition. On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis—and as perilous. The ten men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona. Lewis and Clark opened the West in 1803, six decades later Powell and his scruffy band aimed to resolve the West’s last mystery. A brilliant narrative, a thrilling journey, a cast of memorable heroes—all these mark Down the Great Unknown, the true story of the last epic adventure on American soil.

Down the Great Unknown

Author: Edward Dolnick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780783897769
Category : Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description

The Emerald Mile

Author: Kevin Fedarko
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439159866
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river.

A River Running West

Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195156355
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Book Description
This text is a magisterial account of John Wesley Powell, the great American explorer and environmental pioneer. It tells the true story of undaunted courage in the American West.

There's this River

Author: Christa Sadler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Book Description

The Great Unknown

Author: Marcus du Sautoy
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735221812
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description
“An engaging voyage into some of the great mysteries and wonders of our world." --Alan Lightman, author of Einstein’s Dream and The Accidental Universe “No one is better at making the recondite accessible and exciting.” —Bill Bryson Brain Pickings and Kirkus Best Science Book of the Year Every week seems to throw up a new discovery, shaking the foundations of what we know. But are there questions we will never be able to answer—mysteries that lie beyond the predictive powers of science? In this captivating exploration of our most tantalizing unknowns, Marcus du Sautoy invites us to consider the problems in cosmology, quantum physics, mathematics, and neuroscience that continue to bedevil scientists and creative thinkers who are at the forefront of their fields. At once exhilarating, mind-bending, and compulsively readable, The Great Unknown challenges us to consider big questions—about the nature of consciousness, what came before the big bang, and what lies beyond our horizons—while taking us on a virtuoso tour of the great breakthroughs of the past and celebrating the men and women who dared to tackle the seemingly impossible and had the imagination to come up with new ways of seeing the world.

Down the Colorado

Author: Eliot Porter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Explorers
Languages : en
Pages : 12

Book Description
One hundred years ago John Wesley Powell set out to explore the Grand Canyon of the Colorado - something no man had attempted before. His official report of the voyage remains one of the great adventure stories in all the literature of the American West.

Canyons of the Colorado

Author: John Wesley Powell
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3387313845
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 506

Book Description
Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.

Vision and Place

Author: Jason Robison
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520976231
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The Colorado River Basin’s importance cannot be overstated. Its living river system supplies water to roughly forty million people, contains Grand Canyon National Park, Bears Ears National Monument, and wide swaths of other public lands, and encompasses ancestral homelands of twenty-nine Native American tribes. John Wesley Powell, a one-armed Civil War veteran, explorer, scientist, and adept federal administrator, articulated a vision for Euro-American colonization of the “Arid Region” that has indelibly shaped the basin—a pattern that looms large not only in western history, but also in contemporary environmental and social policy. One hundred and fifty years after Powell’s epic 1869 Colorado River Exploring Expedition, this volume revisits Powell’s vision, examining its historical character and its relative influence on the Colorado River Basin’s cultural and physical landscape in modern times. In three parts, the volume unpacks Powell’s ideas on water, public lands, and Native Americans—ideas at once innovative, complex, and contradictory. With an eye toward climate change and a host of related challenges facing the basin, the volume turns to the future, reflecting on how—if at all—Powell’s legacy might inform our collective vision as we navigate a new “Great Unknown.”

The Promise of the Grand Canyon

Author: John F. Ross
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143128957
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
“A convincing case for Powell’s legacy as a pioneering conservationist.”--The Wall Street Journal "A bold study of an eco-visionary at a watershed moment in US history."--Nature A timely, thrilling account of the explorer who dared to lead the first successful expedition down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon—and waged a bitterly-contested campaign for sustainability in the West. John Wesley Powell’s first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition—starving, battered, and nearly naked—they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before. With The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John F. Ross tells how that perilous expedition launched the one-armed Civil War hero on the path to becoming the nation’s foremost proponent of environmental sustainability and a powerful, if controversial, visionary for the development of the American West. So much of what he preached—most broadly about land and water stewardship—remains prophetically to the point today.