First Through the Grand Canyon: Being the Record of the Pioneer Exploration…

In 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran led nine men into the most dangerous river in America. No one had ever successfully navigated the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The maps did not exist. What followed was a three-month odyssey through white-water rapids, starvation, and the most alien landscape on the continent. John Wesley Powell and his crew became the first humans to document the Grand Canyon's interior - a world of towering sandstone walls, hidden waterfalls, and geological time itself. Powell wrote with the eye of a scientist and the soul of a poet, capturing both the sublime beauty and the mortal peril of a river that had claimed countless lives. This is the original adventure story of the American West, the document that introduced the Canyon to the world's imagination.