The Rivers Ran East: Travelers' Tales Classics [Paperback]

For example, Clark wasn't fond of swimming in the river because there were crocs on every shore, and flesh eating fish at every depth. Explorer Adrian Cowell (The Heart of the Forest), found nothing like this in all his travels and even snorkeled at the Xingu tribe he stayed with. Earlier, Earl Hanson in Journey to Manaos found most of the Indians quite curious. My sister has worked with tribal Indians in Brazil for 35 years and has never reported such savagery. The Indians are known for killing, but usually out of fear - not because they are simply mean.

Loren McIntyre paints a totally different picture of the Amazon and its people in Amazonia (Sierra Club). Don't forget Teddy Roosevelt. He had a great time on the Amazon. And finally, Alfred Wallace's Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro (1889), talks of Indians and fauna, but never had the problems Clark had.

It is my guess that Clark, knowing no one would be able to confirm or deny his wild tales, took poetic license and created a story that is a great read, but simply not totally factual. It is his vivid imagination that makes the journey even more exciting - but I was disappointed because I thought I was going to read a nice historical account of his travels and instead caught myself laughing to myself in disbelief.

I suppose I could be wrong. I've never been to the Amazon in the Peruvian headwaters. Life may be quite different there than the rest of the basin.

I found this book to be most incredible, not simply for the storytelling, but more importantly for Len's foresight into the value and preciousness of the South American rainforest. While he was admittedly not an environmentalist, he was truly a man ahead of his times in that respect. His appreciation for and finely detailed descriptions of the flora and fauna of the Amazon River basin are extremely topical and perhaps even more pertinent today than when he wrote the book. Among all else, he identifies specific native tribal practices and forest herbs as remedies unknown by Western medicine; as with many other products of the rainforest, these hold great promise and yet remain unresearched. Furthermore, his anthropological descriptions of the Amazonian natives capture a culture that now, just 50 years later, has largely been transformed to modern society and lost.

Purely on a swash-buckling adventure-tale level, the book is priceless: this is a real-life Indiana Jones! Len's hair-raising stunts, death-defying experiences, and encounters with Amazonian headhunters hit the reader one after another with nearly a breath in between.

Altogether five of Leonard's books were published: A Wanderer Till I Die (1937), The Rivers Ran East (1953), The Marching Wind (1954), Explorer's Digest (1955), and Yucatan Adventure (posthumously in 1958). All five make for fascinating reading. Many of his books were translated into Italian, Japanese, and other languages. My mother was Len's younger half-sister and I inherited her collection, which includes first editions in English of all five, as well as several of the translated versions, for example, the Japanese edition of The Marching Wind. In addition to The Rivers Ran East, The Marching Wind has also recently been republished and is now also available on Amazon.com. Beyond his books, articles by Len were published in National Geographic, Life, Literary Digest, Field and Stream, Popular Science, and American Weekly. The family still receives inquiries from time to time about possibly make a film based on one of his adventures, but none has been produced to date.

All of Len's books except for A Wanderer Till I Die were written after World War II. However, it was during the war that he perhaps made his greatest - though unpublished - contributions. Leonard served as an officer in the OSS, spending a good portion of the war in the China-Burma-India corridor conducting intelligence work in the Yellow River valley. Near the end of the war, he was stationed on Formosa and accepted the first (unofficial) surrender of the Japanese there. He earned the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star, and the Order of the White Cloud with Ribbon, the highest honor given by the Chinese to the foreigners who served them.

All of Leonard's works are fact, not fiction, and he is very highly regarded in our family as a military hero and quintessential adventurer. After the war, he built a log cabin near Fresno, California that I visited as a child. I remember Len as a large, quiet, gentle man who liked to tease us children, smoke his pipe, and take long contemplative walks in the woods with my mother. Yet he also embodied a sophistication, powerfulness, and seriousness that I sensed even as a child.

Len was born on 1/6/1907. He died on 5/4/1957 under mysterious circumstances while exploring for gold and diamond mines on the Caroni River in Venezuela. You will find a fairly extensive biography in Current Biography, Volume 17, No. 1, January 1956, although this does not cover his last years. In addition, my father devoted 20 pages in our family history to Len. For more information, please feel free to contact me.