Down the Great Unknown by Edward Dolnick Read Free Book Online Page A

appearance alone—with no bold underlinings, no exclamation points, no crossed-out words, no stars or arrows in the margin to hint at excitement—one might take Bradley’s journal to be a record of experiments in a none-too-promising chemistry lab. No one would guess that it records one of the great American adventures.
    It is tempting to see Powell’s bold, sprawling handwriting as reflecting his taste for splash and melodrama, especially when his writing is compared with Bradley’s tiny, finicky penmanship, but the true explanation is simpler. Powell had lost his right arm at Shiloh seven years before, and he had not quite mastered the art of writing with his left hand. Writing outdoors, in the wind, perhaps on a rock serving as a makeshift desk, made matters worse. A friend who came to know Powell later observed “the difficulty of writing with his left hand and keeping the paper from blowing away by trying to keep it in place with the stump. I have often seen him struggling this way.”
    Powell’s description of the 1869 expedition is the most compelling but the least straightforward of the firsthand accounts. He kept two journals, first of all, and the two are quite different. Powell’s river diary contains short, spare entries, written in free moments in camp and not published in his lifetime. One day’s entire entry, for example, reads: “Wrote until 10:00 A.M., and then came to camp with Walter.” (This is the diary at the National Museum of Natural History.) Powell’s published account, which is the one nearly always cited when people quote him, was lovingly and painstakingly composed years after the expedition had ended.
    Powell purposely blurred the distinction between the diary he composed on the river and the account he published in 1875 as an official government report. The published journal is written in the present tense, in diary format, as if each entry had been composed by firelight at the end of a hard day on the river. In fact, it was dictated half a dozen years later to a secretary as Powell paced back and forth in his office, waving his cigar and gesturing as though he were addressing a vast lecture hall and not a lone listener.
    For the most part, the reader is grateful for Powell’s literary sleight of hand. His river diary is as dry as the Southwest it described, but the published account continues to draw new readers even after a century and a quarter. What other government publication can say as much? At a glance, few books look less inviting. The title, usually abbreviated to Exploration of the Colorado River , runs on for more than two dozen words; the publisher is the Government Printing Office; the text is introduced by a formal note carrying the signatures of the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. But even in such an austere setting, Powell’s personality bursts forth like a dancer from a birthday cake.
    The government imprimatur gave Powell’s version of events a credibility it did not always deserve. * Powell described his formal account as simply a carefully worked-out version of the telegraphic river diary. “I decided to publish this journal, with only such emendations and corrections as its hasty writing in camp necessitated,” he declared. This seems a stretch—the river diary contains only three thousand words, for example, in comparison with the published journal’s nearly one hundred thousand—but diaries, after all, are not written for outsiders. And perhaps those three thousand words spoke to Powell even years later, summoning complete memories, as a scrap of melody can call forth a symphony. But at some points in this official report, Powell soared beyond his own adventure, magnificent as it was, and touched up stories or actually invented them.
    May 25, the first full day on the river, was another day of bad weather and good spirits. The men