CORONADO

I don’t have anything against John Wesley Powell. I just don’t think he should be lionized as the first guy to notice the river and the canyon and end up the star at the Imax show in Tusayan. Hell, he was 300 years after Coronado’s guys, and after the California gold rush at that. It’s true he only had one arm left when he rafted down the river, having lost the other in the Civil War. So he had to be one heck of a guy. But he sounds a little crazy to me. . I wouldn’t have done it, not with one arm.

Any who, he was an amateur naturalist who got the Illinois Natural History Society to sponsor him on a specimen collection excursion to the west. While he was at Grand Lake, Colorado, he got intrigued with what might be downstream and, in 1869 he and his buds did a float in wood boats down the Grand River to the Green, and on down the Colorado. Rubber/inflatable rafts hadn’t been invented yet, and I don’t mind saying I might have skipped that trip. The result was that some maps got straightened out.

Author Wallace Earle Stegner’s book Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West details the efforts of this environmentalist at a time when his environmentalism wasn’t any more popular than his interest in American Indian culture. Aura digs this dude...GET BOOK

AURA

I do dig him. John Wesley Powell Memorial Museum includes a replica of the wood boat Powell used to travel down the Colorado River before any dams existed.

CORONADO

Wood. - It’s bad enough in an air filled rubber dingy.

AURA

His museum is in Page, Arizona, at 6 N. Lake Powell Blvd. Sine added some links to get you going.

●John Wesley Powell Bio

●Museum——Overview, Hours, Admission, Contact

●10 day weather forecast