Down The Great Unknown [Paperback]

The tale of the Powell expedition hardly needs embellishing. He set out with nine men down the Green and Colorado rivers through what at the time was virtually unknown territory in wooden boats battling some of the most forbidding whitewater in the world. That his party survied at all is remarkable. That they did so without any deaths or serious injury (at least from accident or mishap), is astounding.

Dolnick's problem as a narrator presents itself early on when he detours from the trip for two full chapters describing Powell's losing his arm at the Battle of Shiloh. Certainly, the injury is an important part of Powell's story, but a complete retelling of the history of battle itself is unnecessary. As the book progresses, Dolnick gets distracted with other Grand Canyon anecdotes, and often spends time describing in the second person what it is like to go rafting in the area today. One or two such descriptions would have sufficed, but the author keeps going back to them again and again.

Overall, "Down the Great Unknown" covers a fascinating subject, but is a widely uneven reading experience.

Having read and enjoyed John Wesley Powell's own book about his 1869 expedition, I was shocked to hear that is was written decades after the events had taken place. Time had added an optimistic, even roseate glow to what was actually one hundred days of hell on earth with a crew that was grumbling and even mutinous at times. Instead of basing his book exclusively on Powell's book, he used the actual diaries written by Powell, Bradley, and others at the time to round out his tale.

No doubt, you know that thousands of people of floated down the Colorado in recent years. But Powell and his men used keeled rowboats in which the men with their oars faced the rapids with their BACKS. In other words, they were facing the wrong direction most of the time. When they undertook the journey, they had no way of knowing whether there were waterfalls that would plunge them to their deaths. (There is one such waterfall on the Little Colorado, which feeds into the Colorado proper south of Lee's Ferry.) As it was, irrespective of how much they grumbled, Powell saw all his men landed safely, except for the three who abandoned the party at Sepration Canyon and were mysteriously murdered by Indians or (possibly) paranoid Mormons who disbelieved their story of running the Colorado.

Dolnick's descriptions of the perils of white-water running rival Krakauer's descriptions of climbing Everest in INTO THIN AIR or the tempest in Sebastian Junger's THE PERFECT STORM. The author's attention to detail and apparent knowledge of his subject made DOWN THE GREAT UNKNOWN a joy to read.

My only real complaint is that Dolnick interrupts the journey with a multi-chapter flashback of Powell's experiences at the battle of Shiloh, where he lost his arm. The matter, however interesting in itself, should have been introduced earlier, along with more background information about his crew, rather than interrupting the main narrative. My only other complaint is that I would have preferred standard superscripted numerical endnotes to the phrase cues he uses; and I would have preferred a better map of the entire expedition that appears on the endpapers of the hardback version.

Still and all, this is a superlative page-turner that I would recommend to anyone with an interest in American history or even tales of adventure.