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This account of the second Powell expedition is a reprint of the 1962 edition and includes all 50 illustrations and a substantial foreword by William H. Geotzmann.

"One of the seminal books on western history . . . The author was only 17 when he began the expedition, and he honestly hero-worshipped Powell all his life. Yet this bright, sharp account is so detailed and truthful that the reader can see through his enthusiasm to discover Powell's mean spirit and sometimes reckless nature. It's also a great river-running book." —Deseret News

"It was decidedly worth writing, this detailed record: a more absorbing, and at times stirring, story of adventure has not seen the light in a long time, and the author's unadorned, yet vivid, style enables the reader to share all the emotions of the explorers:" —The Nation

"In these later years (1909) when amateur travel in the west is frequent, a detailed record of this kind will be of value to seekers after adventure." —Science

In 2009 the University of Utah Press and the Utah State Historical Society co-published three volumes of long out-of-print journals, letters, and other documents from John Wesley Powell’s expeditions down the Colorado River. We are proud to announce the fourth and final volume. Cleaving an Unknown World collects Powell’s journal (Smithsonian Journal of History, 1968); Jack Hillers’s diary and photographs, previously published as Photographed All the Best Scenery, edited by Don D. Fowler (University of Utah Press, 1972); original maps from Francis Marion Bishop (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); Frederick S. Dellenbaugh’s letters (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969); and John C. Sumner’s journal from the first Powell expedition (Utah Historical Quarterly, 1969). Roy Webb’s foreword provides the context for these disparate pieces.

This beautifully illustrated book features Hillers’s photographs—long regarded as a remarkable and unique record of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Cleaving an Unknown World belongs in the library of any reader interested in the exploration of the American West.
 

In some respects the most important of the early Colorado River exploration journals, the diaries of Almon Harris Thompson can naturally be divided into three sections: navigation of the Green and Colorado rivers; exploratory traverse from Kanab to the mouth of the Fremont River; and the systematic mapping of central, eastern, and southern Utah and northern Arizona. Thompson’s maps of the Colorado drainage basin, including the first maps of southern Utah and the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers, place him in the front rank of geographic explorers and they proved invaluable to the later Powell expedition.

Originally published in 1939 as volume seven of the Utah Historical Quarterly, Thompson’s journal is reprinted here for the first time in seventy years. Co-published with the Utah State Historical Society.

“John Wesley Powell: explorer, writer, geologist, anthropologist, land planner, bureaucrat. Which one do we focus on?” This is the question author James M. Aton poses at the beginning of his biography of Powell, though he soon decides that it is impossible to ignore any facet of Powell’s life. Powell was a polymath, one whose “divergent interests resemble one of those braided streambeds in his beloved canyon country, branching out in many directions, but ultimately beginning and ending in the same stream."

Aton beautifully tells the multidimensional stories of Powell’s childhood, his military and teaching careers, his famous and exciting explorations of the Colorado River, and the battles he waged from his influential positions within the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and the United States Geological Survey. This new edition of John Wesley Powell: His Life and Legacy, first printed as an issue of the Boise State University Western Writers Series, includes the original biography, but also features Aton’s new interpretations of Powell’s writings on exploration, land-planning, anthropology, and irrigation, and incorporates the author’s distinguished faculty lecture on Powell and cash-register dams in the Colorado River Basin.

The second Powell Colorado River exploration, consisting of eleven men and three boats at the time of launch, departed from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 22, 1871. Most members kept journals, and this volume contains the writings of three men, Stephen Vandiver Jones, John F. Steward, and Walter Clement Powell, as well as excerpts from the journals of John Wesley Powell. Taken together, they provide diverse points of views about the second expedition, both in terms of its human components and in its scientific labors.

Originally published from 1948 to 1949 as volumes sixteen and seventeen of the Utah Historical Quarterly, this volume looks to the larger significance and fruits of the second of Powell’s explorations, a more carefully constituted and better equipped scientific operation, yet one strangely neglected in historical records. Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society.

Volume fifteen of the Utah Historical Quarterly, originally published in 1947, was primarily devoted to Powell’s initial reconnaissance of the canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers, an expedition that would prove to be the last great exploration through unknown country in the continental United States. Powell and nine companions launched from Green River Station, Wyoming, on May 24, 1869, embarking on a journey that would become a race against starvation and death and grow tragic with the deaths of three of the party at the hands of the Shivwits (Paiute) Indians. The maps, field notes, and journals of this first exploration would guide Powell when he returned to the canyons in 1871 for a second expedition.

This volume contains the journals of Major John Wesley Powell, George Young Bradley, Walter Henry Powell, and J. C. Sumner. Also included are various letters and notes by the members of the first expedition, and the journal of Francis Marion Bishop from the second expedition. All of the writings offer vivid descriptions of both adventure and of able and energetic scientific field work, and are of enduring interest and importance.

 

Copublished with the Utah State Historical Society.
 

John Wesley Powell’s 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers and through the Grand Canyon continues to be one of the most celebrated adventures in American history, ranking with the Lewis and Clark expedition and the Apollo landings on the moon. For nearly twenty years Lago has researched the Powell expedition from new angles, traveled to thirteen states, and looked into archives and other sources no one else has searched. He has come up with many important new documents that change and expand our basic understanding of the expedition by looking into Powell’s crewmembers, some of whom have been almost entirely ignored by Powell historians. Historians tended to assume that Powell was the whole story and that his crewmembers were irrelevant. More seriously, because several crew members made critical comments about Powell and his leadership, historians who admired Powell were eager to ignore and discredit them.
 
Lago offers a feast of new and important material about the river trip, and it will significantly rewrite the story of Powell’s famous expedition. This book is not only a major work on the Powell expedition, but on the history of American exploration of the West.