Title: Down the Great Unknown
Author: Dolnick, Edward
Published by: Perennial
Year: 2002
First published: Harper collins, 2001
Date reviewed: 05.15
ISBN: 0-06-095586-4

It’s probably a safe bet that not many people outside the USA have heard of John Wesley Powell, but he and a motley assortment of backwoodsmen and adventurers made one of the great exploration journeys that helped open up the American West.

In 1869 Powell led a ten-man expedition in four boats which eventually achieved the first navigation of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Powell himself was a one-armed Civil War veteran interested in science, especially geology, which he taught at a minor college. Described as a natural leader he was a complex character, physically and mentally strong and determined, vain, and not above stealing the credit from others. Some of the others he knew already, some he recruited for their back-country skills (which some of them in turn may have exaggerated). The boats they used were clumsy, heavy, broad-beamed but strong, unmanoeuverable and completely unsuitable for the conditions they would meet. No-one on the expedition had ever taken a boat through white water rapids before.

Despite all this the expedition was finally successful, although not all the original ten made it to the end. Nor did all the boats. By the time the survivors finally emerged from the chaos of the Canyon they were near starvation. Their remaining supplies would have perhaps lasted just another two days.

Dolnick has researched his tale thoroughly, drawing on contempoary and later sources including the first-hand accounts of Powell and some of the others. Although the account of the journey itself is basically one rapid after another the story never palls and the individual characters begin to emerge. Into the day-by-day account Dolnick interweaves commentary and analysis from modern white-water riders (mostly astonished that anyone survived), discussion of white-water techniques, the technology of the boats (hardly any), and the historical background. He also covers Powell’s own history in some detail, including an account of how Powell lost his arm at the battle of Shiloh. His account of the battle itself is vivid and horrific, bringing out the futility, chaos and carnage of one of the first major battles of the Civil War. Dolnick quotes one historian: it was

just a disorganized, murderous fistfight, a hundred thousand men slamming away at each other. … The generals didn’t know their jobs, the soldiers didn’t know their jobs. It was just pure determination to stand and fight and not retreat. … It was the first great modern battle. [Shelby Foote]

You’ll have to make up your own mind whether to admire the men’s courage, despair at their foolhardiness, or both. Read the story, and along the way you’ll learn a little about white water and the jargon of the rapids: holes and eddy fences, boils and pillows, whirlpools, haystacks and rooster tails. You can imagine manhandling heavy boats through violent waters on a meagre diet of rancid bacon and damp flour, and share the explorers’ genuine fear that the next rapid waiting round the bend might be an unavoidable two-hundred-foot vertcal drop to their deaths.