Читать книгу One Best Hike: Grand Canyon. Everything You Need to Know to Successfully Hike from the Rim to the River—and Back онлайн

16 страница из 51

MAJOR JOHN WESLEY POWELL

Because of his two pioneering descents down the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871, John Wesley Powell’s name is synonymous with the Grand Canyon region. When he boarded the Emma Dean, a boat he had named after his wife, he was not new to river exploration. Already in 1856, at age 22, he had rowed a length of the Mississippi River, followed by the Ohio River the next year.

Powell grew up in the Midwest on a succession of farms, as his parents moved about. His strong interest in natural history emerged in 1857 while taking a botany course at Oberlin College in Ohio. In subsequent years he made extensive botanical and zoological collections across the Midwest, before changing his focus to geology. With the onset of the Civil War, he enrolled immediately in the Union Army and had risen to the rank of captain when he lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh. After the Civil War he accepted a geology professorship at Wesleyan University. He was recognized as being an outstanding scientist—in particular one who had high standards and was very resourceful and endlessly inquisitive. This position allowed him to spend the summer of 1867 making scientific collections in what is now Colorado. In 1869 he returned west with the goal of exploring the virtually unmapped Green and Colorado rivers.