Down the Great Unknown

In 1869, a huge portion of the western United States was unexplored and unmapped, including the Grand Canyon. A one-armed Civil War vet named John Wesley Powell set off with a team of ten men in Wyoming to navigate down the Green River and then ultimately the Colorado, encountering roaring rapids and cliffs a mile high.

This adventure is recounted in Edward Dolnick's Down the Great Unknown. It took me a while to get involved in this book, even with Dolnick employing a casual writing style. The prose just didn't sing for me. Later on, though, when Dolnick makes parallels with Powell's journey and the state of the Canyon today, where tourists routinely cover the same ground that was treacherous over a hundred years ago, did the book have some snap.

Part of Dolnick's problem (or mine) is that I had trouble following who the ten men were. Powell is pretty vividly etched, as he was the leader and a bit of a taskmaster. But the other nine men (one of them quit early, and three more left when they faced a horrifying rapid near the end) came in and out of focus. Also, Dolnick makes some side trips along the way. Some of them work, like the description of an ill-fated expedition some twenty years later by a man who wanted to build a railroad through the canyon, but some do not, like a chapter about the battle of Shiloh, where Powell lost his arm. Dolnick writes as if it had never occurred to anyone before that the Civil War was extremely bloody.

I think the best thing about the book is capturing the sense of adventure. These men literally did not know what was coming up ahead of them, and either shot through or portaged over 400 different rapids (including Cataract Canyon in Utah, which some say is tougher than the Grand Canyon). Dolnick has succeeded in one way--I spent a few minutes on the Net browsing through sites that offer guided trips down these rivers. Maybe someday...