The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko
Authors: Kevin Fedarko
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other of the West’s first scientists. Then, in 1857, Powell rowed down the Illinois River to its mouth, and from there up the Des Moines. On the way, he put together a collection of mollusk fossils, a diverse class of ancient marine invertebrates, that would later win several prizes from the Illinois State Agricultural Society.
His rowing and mollusk-gathering days, along with the modest career in academia for which he seemed destined, ended abruptly in the spring of 1861, when he enlisted in the Union Army and went off to war. By April, he was a second lieutenant and serving on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff as a captain of artillery and an expert on fortifications. A year later, on the first afternoon of the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee, as he raised his right hand to signal his gunners to stand clear of the recoil of one of the half-ton cannons that he commanded, a Confederate minié ballentered his wrist and plowed toward the elbow, shattering his entire forearm. The following morning, in a makeshift military hospital set up in the town hall of Savannah, Tennessee, the arm wassawn off two inches below the elbow and tossed onto the pile of amputated limbs outside the building.
He returned to command the men of Battery F in nine more battles during the next three years, eventually rising to the rank of major before resigning in January of 1865. Within two years of mustering out, he was appointed professor of geology and natural history at the Illinois State University at Normal. Around the same time, he was also named curator of the Illinois State Natural History Society. Both positions served as a springboard for trips to Colorado during the summers of 1867 and 1868 to gather museum specimens—and there he came up with the scheme of resolving the mysteries of the canyon country by launching a fleet of small wooden boats down the most pugnacious and defiant river in the entire West.
T he river that transected, knit together, and defined the last unexplored region in the United States had not one source but two. The first, the Green, was originally known to members of the Shoshone tribe, and later to the mountain men of the American fur-trade era, as the Seedskadee. Born amid the black and ice-studded tarns of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, just south of what is now Yellowstone National Park, the Green serenely gathered up the waters of a succession of small creeks cascading out of the Teton and Gros Ventre Ranges and meandered southward through a wide, shallow valley carpeted in sagebrush and lined with cottonwood trees, where, from roughly 1825 to 1840, several hundred trappers staged a rendezvous each summer to sell their peltries and replenish theirsupplies of salt, gunpowder, lead, and whiskey.
At the southern end of this valley, the Green bent to the southeast and continued boring across the alkaline plains of western Wyoming until it reached the trestle bridge of the Union Pacific at Green River Station, where Powell and his bedraggled boatmen were launching their expedition. Fifty or more miles south, somewhere near the border separating the territories of Utah andWyoming, the river ran smack up against the Uintas,the only major mountain range in the United States that runs from east to west, speared through a fault in the cliffs offlaming-red quartzite and shale that marked the portal to a massive gorge, and disappeared.
Meanwhile the Green’s sister stream, known in Powell’s day by the now half-forgotten name of the Grand, was making a roundabout journey from its own point of origin in an idyllic Colorado meadow located in the heart of what would later become Rocky Mountain National Park. Tumbling out of a range called the Never Summers, the Grand cut a diagonal slant down the western slope of the Continental Divide, following a west-trending route that would eventually accommodate a long stretch of Interstate 70. Along the way, it collected the runoff from half a dozen or more tributaries, all
His rowing and mollusk-gathering days, along with the modest career in academia for which he seemed destined, ended abruptly in the spring of 1861, when he enlisted in the Union Army and went off to war. By April, he was a second lieutenant and serving on Ulysses S. Grant’s staff as a captain of artillery and an expert on fortifications. A year later, on the first afternoon of the Battle of Shiloh in southwestern Tennessee, as he raised his right hand to signal his gunners to stand clear of the recoil of one of the half-ton cannons that he commanded, a Confederate minié ballentered his wrist and plowed toward the elbow, shattering his entire forearm. The following morning, in a makeshift military hospital set up in the town hall of Savannah, Tennessee, the arm wassawn off two inches below the elbow and tossed onto the pile of amputated limbs outside the building.
He returned to command the men of Battery F in nine more battles during the next three years, eventually rising to the rank of major before resigning in January of 1865. Within two years of mustering out, he was appointed professor of geology and natural history at the Illinois State University at Normal. Around the same time, he was also named curator of the Illinois State Natural History Society. Both positions served as a springboard for trips to Colorado during the summers of 1867 and 1868 to gather museum specimens—and there he came up with the scheme of resolving the mysteries of the canyon country by launching a fleet of small wooden boats down the most pugnacious and defiant river in the entire West.
T he river that transected, knit together, and defined the last unexplored region in the United States had not one source but two. The first, the Green, was originally known to members of the Shoshone tribe, and later to the mountain men of the American fur-trade era, as the Seedskadee. Born amid the black and ice-studded tarns of Wyoming’s Wind River Range, just south of what is now Yellowstone National Park, the Green serenely gathered up the waters of a succession of small creeks cascading out of the Teton and Gros Ventre Ranges and meandered southward through a wide, shallow valley carpeted in sagebrush and lined with cottonwood trees, where, from roughly 1825 to 1840, several hundred trappers staged a rendezvous each summer to sell their peltries and replenish theirsupplies of salt, gunpowder, lead, and whiskey.
At the southern end of this valley, the Green bent to the southeast and continued boring across the alkaline plains of western Wyoming until it reached the trestle bridge of the Union Pacific at Green River Station, where Powell and his bedraggled boatmen were launching their expedition. Fifty or more miles south, somewhere near the border separating the territories of Utah andWyoming, the river ran smack up against the Uintas,the only major mountain range in the United States that runs from east to west, speared through a fault in the cliffs offlaming-red quartzite and shale that marked the portal to a massive gorge, and disappeared.
Meanwhile the Green’s sister stream, known in Powell’s day by the now half-forgotten name of the Grand, was making a roundabout journey from its own point of origin in an idyllic Colorado meadow located in the heart of what would later become Rocky Mountain National Park. Tumbling out of a range called the Never Summers, the Grand cut a diagonal slant down the western slope of the Continental Divide, following a west-trending route that would eventually accommodate a long stretch of Interstate 70. Along the way, it collected the runoff from half a dozen or more tributaries, all
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