JOHN WESLEY POWELL DAVIS 



ing. "The river still continues swift, but we have no serious 

 difficulty, and at twelve o'clock emerge from the Grand Canon 

 of the Colorado." Thus simply is it told that on August 29, 

 three months after the start from Green River, the party 

 victoriously passes out of the deep canyon into the open coun- 

 try of the Great Basin. Some of the men go on down the 

 river ; Powell went northward through Mormon settlements to 

 Salt Lake City, and thence home. He had been preceded by 

 reports of disaster, and had the pleasure of reading a number 

 of obituary notices of his life. 



The good fortune of this daring journey was deservedly of 

 great service to its chief. It developed his capacity for leader- 

 ship in the field. It received much attention in the newspapers 

 of the time, and thus gave its head a national reputation as a 

 bold, adventurous, successful explorer; best of all, it secured 

 the full confidence of men at Washington who could aid his 

 further work, i When in later years of exploration the men of 

 his party gatffered around the camp-fire, and the Major talked 

 to them of his passage through the great canyon, "his influence 

 over all his hearers was so profound that in the days that fol- 

 lowed a word from him was sufficient to cause the men to go 

 anywhere or to do anything, no matter what the personal dan- 

 ger might be ;" and this is no wonder, for he was loyally de- 

 voted to his men. Of his companions through the canyon he 

 wrote years afterward: "I was a maimed man; my right arm 

 was gone, and these brave men, these good men, never for- 

 got it." 



GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OF THE TERRITORIES. 



Powell returned to Utah and Arizona in 1870 and explored 

 the plateaus north of the canyon. A good account of this trip 

 is given in Chapter IX of the "Report on the Colorado River 

 of the West." In 1871 he again made a boat trip on "the 

 river." In 1874 and 1875 he worked chiefly in eastern Utah. 

 Of these three campaigns there is unfortunately no narrative 

 by Powell ;* but many of the results are summarized in a re- 



* F. S. Dellenbaugh, the youngest member of the latest canyon jour- 

 ney, brought out a belated narrative, "The Romance of the Colorado 

 . . . River," in 1903; he also compiled an account of the (earlier 

 journey, "A Canyon Voyage," published in 1908. 



