Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon
Where to buy Down the Fantastic Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Gap books online?
Product Description
0n May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last fantastic quest in the American West. No one had ever explored the fabled Grand Gap; to adventurers of that era it was a region nearly as mysterious as Atlantis — and as perilous.
The ten men set out down the mighty Colorado River in wooden rowboats. Six survived. Drawing on rarely examined diaries and journals, Down the Fantastic Unknown is the first book to tell the full, right tale.
Amazon.com Review
Edward Dolnick’s Down the Fantastic Unknown depicts the “last epic journey on American soil,” John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the Grand Gap and the fulminating, carnivorous Colorado River. The book, a model of precision, clarity, and serene passion, outshines, arguably, its bestselling brother-volume, Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage.
On May 24, 1869, Powell, an ambitious, autocratic, one-armed Civil War veteran and amateur scientist, and a casually recruited crew of nine–lacking a lick of white water experience–embarked from an obscure railroad stop in the Wyoming Territory to travel through a region “scarcely better known than Atlantis.” Ninety-nine days, 1,000 miles and nearly 500 rapids later, six of the men came ashore in Arizona–the first humans to run the waters of the Grand Gap. Dolnick tells this tale of courage, naiveté, hardship, and petty squabbling simply and authoritatively using entries from the men’s journals, deft overviews (we permanently know where we are), and fleeting science, history, and psychology lessons, as well as the prodigious knowledge of present-day river runners and his own first-hand observations. His prose carries the day: Powell looks like a “stick of beef jerky adorned with whiskers,” the boats are “walnut shells,” which in rapids are small better than “ladybugs caught in a hose’s blast” or “drunks trying to negotiate a revolving door,” while the river is a “taunting tough,” a “colossal mugger,” a “sumo wrestler smothering a kitten,” and a notable rock formation looks like what might take place if “Edward Gorey had designed the Bat Cave.”
Down the Fantastic Unknown brushes against perfection. This is history written as it should be–and too rarely is: enthusiastic, rigorous, painterly, gloriously free of both pedantry and hyperbole. –H. O’Billovitch
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This book was informative but not a real “page turner”. The leader went off on tangents regularly that took away from the tale at hand. It was not a terrible book, but it was not full of the adventure that you would have expected the trip to have been.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This non-fiction book is about the expedition of John Wesley Powell and their pioneering and death-defying exploration of the Grand Gap in 1869. Powell, a college professor who had lost an arm at Shiloh, was well-prepared to map the canyons of the Colorado and do a scientific andgeological survey. Sorry to say, he was no leader, and the expedition suffered terribly for it. He rounded up a crew of mountain men and ne’er-do-wells, as well as a few neurotic ex- Civil War veterans and set off in rowboats that couldn’t have been more ill-suited to running the violent rapids of the Colorado. Powell and his men saw incredible sites, but they nearly corroded multiple times. Finally there was a mutiny in which several men finished up leaving the party and trying to hike out of the gap(they were never seen again); the others ran the rapids and somehow lived to tell the tale.
While I liked learning more about Powell’s expedition, Dolnick has small sense of pacing, and uses annoying modern descriptions every time he gets the chance. The result is a plodding read on what should have been a can’t-miss tale. Down the Fantastic Unknown has its merits, but the definitive book on Powell and the Grand Gap has yet to be written.
Reviewer: Liz Clare, co-leader of the past novel “To the Ends of the Planet: The Last Journey of Lewis & Clark”
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
I finished this book because the theme matter was so appealing, when all the while the narrative style was killing me!
The leader really beats a dead horse trying to drive home how treacherous, quick, and powerful the river is. I felt like screaming “enough already”!
But, some images from the book still haunt me. And I did end it take in to take in, staying up late at night, despite the annoying leader!
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
This is a pretty decent book for the newcomer who has never read anything about Powell. I establish it less entertaining than my fellow reviewers though, as it follows the tedium of the daily journals a small too closely. I also establish the narrative to be interspersed with too many digressions. These range from opinions of the Green/Colorado river by modern rafting experts to accounts of additional early rafting expeditions, and a lengthy 2-chapter segment on the American Civil war and Battle of Shiloh. This latter exercise contributes nothing to the book, by the way! The reader is also left in the dark about the Native American peoples, Mormon settlers, and miners who inhabited this area at the same point in time … Really, it is as if the expedition were done in a vacuum. Even worse was the lack of information on 9 of the 10 men who took part in the expedition. While there is more than enough about John Wesley Powell, readers get only sketchy details about the lives of the additional 9 men. Even the simplest details like where these men were born is left out, nor are we agreed much about the kinds of lives they lived (careers, families, etc.) prior to the expedition (and precious small afterwards as well). Although 6 of these 9 men were, like Powell, fellow Union veterans of the Civil War, but we get nothing about their wartime experiences! We also have no clue what motivated them to join this expedition. This oversight would not doubt have suited the proud Powell, but is a serious oversight for a modern historian.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
It is a “page turning” real life adventure tale objectively told. The tale is perfectly place into the context of the time and place and the way people thought. Lots of citations and a large bibliography as well. Fantastic book. My congratulations to the leader for a job well-done; thank you.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5