The ten railroad surveys conducted by the United States in the 1850s 
and 1860s provided excellent opportunities for scientists to study the 
natural history of the West. Christopher C. Parry was a scientist who 
labored on the Union Pacific Railroad Survey. As a corresponding 
member, Parry sent the Academy of Science of St. Louis news of the 
scientific work being done on the survey. He also occasionally wrote 
romantic accounts of his experiences. His description of what he saw 
when he climbed Pike’s Peak, for example, no doubt stirred the im- 
aginations of many Transactions readers. He wrote: 
As the sun rose majestically above the well defined horizon of the plains, 
the resemblance to a wide open sea was strikingly manifested. A slight 
haze served to heighten the pleasant illusion, the inconsiderable eleva- 
tions appearing only as ripples, or low islands, on its surface. To carry 
out the resemblance still farther, the rounded grassy swells, the reef- 
like edges of tilted rock, at the foot of the mountains, could easily be 
taken for surges and breakers.** 
The most thrilling tale of Western exploration to appear in the 
Transactions told the exploits of a mining prospector. It also came from 
Christopher C. Parry’s pen. As a group, mining prospectors roamed 
the West even more extensively in the 1850s and 1860s than the moun- 
tain men of an earlier era. Christopher C. Parry reasoned that these 
men probably knew more about Western topography than anyone else. 
To find out about the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, which had been 
explored in part by Joseph Ives in 1857-58, Parry questioned a former 
prospector named James White. 
White claimed that he and three other men had left Fort Dodge 
to float down the Colorado in 1867. Traveling through the summer, 
the prospectors reached the Green River, where Indians attacked their 
camp killing one man. White and the other two survivors escaped in 
a raft and floated down the Green to the Colorado. The party felt lucky 
after their escape. Their mood soon changed as they rushed down the 
fierce Colorado. Only White escaped the violent rapids of the river, 
he told Parry. Reaching a downstream settlement after passing through 
what would become known as the Grand Canyon, White settled down 
and was living on the banks of the Colorado when Parry questioned 
him.*? 
Parry published White’s account in the Transactions in the late 1860s. 
White’s assertion to have been the first European-American to pass through 
the Grand Canyon was later discredited by the doughty, one-armed ex- 
plorer/scientist John Wesley Powell, who struggled through the canyon 
two years after White said he had4° The announcement of White’s claim 
in the Transactions demonstrated how strongly the Academy felt its 
responsibility to disseminate the latest information about the West. 
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