Down the Colorado: Diary of the First Trip Through the Grand Canyon

Promontory Press, 1972. Hardcover. Good/Good. 15x12x0. Some light fraying to lower spine of book; the dustjacket has some chipping and edgewear at spine. One hundred years ago John Wesley Powell set out to explore the Grand Canyon of the Colorado - something no man had attempted before. His official report of the voyage remains one of the great adventure stories in all the literature of the American West. John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 September 23, 1902) was an American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for his 1869 geographic expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and Colorado rivers, including the first official U.S. government-sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon. Powell served as second director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881 1894) and proposed, for development of the arid West, policies that were prescient for his accurate evaluation of conditions. He became the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution during his service as director of the U.S. Geological Survey, where he supported linguistic and sociological research and publications. Eliot Furness Porter (December 6, 1901 November 2, 1990) was an American photographer best known for his color photographs of nature. For twenty years, Porter pursued a project to publish nature photographs combined with quotes from works by Henry David Thoreau. Not until an associate introduced him to the executive director of the Sierra Club did Porter find a willing publisher. His 1962 book, In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World featured Porter's color nature studies of the New England woods. The book enjoyed considerable success despite its high price, pioneered the genre of the nature photography coffee-table book, and lead to several other titles by Porter in a similar format published by the Sierra Club and others. It increased Porter's reputation greatly, and he served as a director of the Sierra Club from 1965 to 1971. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1971. In 1979 the work of Eliot Porter was exhibited in Intimate Landscapes, the first one-person show of color photography at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. This exhibition earned Porter praise as the individual who brought credibility to color photography as a medium of fine art. The image selection defined what is now meant by the term intimate landscape: the close-range, quiet compositions of natural elements with muted colors and dense textures, meditative and dense with layered meanings, which were the hallmark of Porter's work at the exclusion of more expansive and spectacular landscapes.