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Lost in the Grand Canyon poster image
Aired April 5, 1999

Lost in the Grand Canyon

Film Description

In the spring of 1869, a thirty-five-year-old, one-armed Civil War veteran and self-taught scientist led an expedition down the Colorado River into the last uncharted territory in the United States. Ninety-nine days later, John Wesley Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon after one of the most daring journeys in American history. Transformed by his experience, Powell would forever change America's attitude toward the West. "Lost in the Grand Canyon" is an account of the dramatic quest to explore one of the most unforgiving, and breathtakingly beautiful, places on earth. Produced by Mark Davis; Joe Morton narrates, and Peter Coyote provides the voice of John Wesley Powell.

"There were only a couple of great unknowns and the greatest of all the unknowns was the Colorado River system," says author and Colorado River guide, Michael Ghiglieri. "It was a mysterious entity, a lost world. And it was a gamble. If you failed, you might be dead, but if you succeeded, you would be the hero of the decade."

On May 24, Powell and his crew pushed off from Green River, Utah. Three hundred miles downstream, the Green merged with the Colorado. From that point on, the map was blank— a wilderness of towering, inaccessible canyons and treacherous whitewater rapids. Somewhere deep in that rugged desert was the Grand Canyon — a place more of rumor than fact, glimpsed from the rim two centuries before by Coronado's soldiers, but shunned ever since.

Powell was an unlikely explorer — but he had always defied expectations. His father had wanted him to join the ministry, but young Powell was moved by nature more than scripture. After losing his arm at the battle of Shiloh, Powell refused to accept his limitations; instead, he returned to his unit and fought for three more years. Despite a limited education, he landed a teaching post after the war at Wesleyan University in Illinois, where he began searching for a way to make his mark. 

He found his answer out West. A mountain guide told Powell about a vast unknown area around the lower Colorado River. At a time when America was obsessed with the promise of the West, Powell set out to conquer its greatest perils. He outfitted four boats with guns for hunting, scientific instruments to map the terrain and measure his party's progress, and enough flour, coffee, and bacon to feed his crew of nine for ten months.

But just eighty miles into the journey one boat was smashed to pieces in the rapids, and a third of the food supply lost. Powell named the spot Disaster Falls.

The loss at Disaster Falls made a leisurely, ten-month trip impossible. Powell became more cautious. He ordered the crew to carry the heavy boats and supplies around the worst rapids, rather than try to navigate them. The backbreaking work slowed their progress to a crawl. "Have been working like galley slaves all day," boatman George Bradley wrote in his diary. "Have been wet all day, and I have nothing dry to put on."

On July 21, fifty-nine days into the journey, Powell and his men passed the point where the Green River merged with the Colorado. From here on, there was no way out but to follow the river. "We have an unknown distance yet to run," Powell wrote in his journal. "What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not . . . With some eagerness and some misgivings, we enter the canyon below."

By the middle of August, Powell and his crew were more than a mile deep in the earth. It was brutally hot; and the crew was close to starvation. They were in the Grand Canyon. Powell was forced to abandon his scientific observations; the goal now was survival. 

On the ninety-seventh day, three men left and began hiking out. Powell later called it Separation Rapid. The three were never seen again. 
Just two days later, on August 30, the Powell expedition reached the end of its journey. They had survived America's last Great Unknown, and filled in the last blank spot on the nation's map.

No longer an obscure professor, Powell became a hero. He gave public lectures and speeches, returned for a second Colorado trip to finish his scientific studies, and popularized the Grand Canyon with an illustrated account of his journey. By the early 1880s, he was the director of both the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian and the new US Geological Survey — the latter putting him in charge of the mapping and disposition of public lands. 

Once more, Powell reached to make his mark. Fearing that an unplanned rush into western settlement would doom thousands of small farmers to failure, he used his influence to block further settlement until a comprehensive survey of arid lands and irrigation strategies was completed. Western politicians were apoplectic. Nevada senator "Big Bill" Stewart claimed Powell had become a law unto himself and vowed to destroy him. Powell tried to rally support on the basis of his heroic past, but he was in over his head. His budget slashed, Powell resigned from the Geological Survey.

A year after Powell's death in 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt visited the Grand Canyon and declared it to be "a natural wonder absolutely unparalleled in the world . . . one of the great sights every American should see." The Grand Canyon would come to be embraced like no other natural place in America, a national shrine for those following in the footsteps of John Wesley Powell.

Credits

Written, produced & directed by
MARK J. DAVIS

Associate Producer
NATHAN HENDRIE

Director of Photography
BRIAN DOWLEY

Music
TOM PHILLIPS

Editor
LARRY ROSS

Narrator
JOE MORTON

Voice of John Wesley Powell
PETER COYOTE

Location Production Support
O.A.R.S. and Grand Canyon Dories

Powell Boatmen
CHRISTIAN ANGUISH
DAVID BODNER
CHRISTIAN J. DEAN
BEGO GERHART
DAVID LYLE
PAUL NIBLEY
DANO PHILLIPS
RUSSELL WALTERS
STEVE " T-BERRY" YOUNG

Replica Boat Builder
PAUL NIBLEY

Additional camera
PETER KRIEGER

Sound recording
JOHN CAMERON
MICHAEL BECKER

Stills Animation
NATHAN HENDRIE

Production Assistants
ANNA DAVIS
SHANNON DENSMORE

Wardrobe
KATHERINE BALDWIN

Stills Research
KATHERINE KING
MICHAEL MADERO

Sound Design & Mix
HEART PUNCH STUDIO

Lab & Video Post
MEDALLION-P.F.A.

SPECIAL THANKS
Regan Dale
Floyd O'Neil
Charlie Every
Barbara Neary
Paula Fleming
George Wendt
Grand Canyon National Park
Canyonlands National Park

ARCHIVAL PHOTOGRAPHS
Arizona Historical Society/Tucson
The Burns Collection, Ltd.
Corbis 
The Denver Public Library, Western History Collection
Deseret News
Grand Canyon National Park Study Collection
Halsted Gallery
Harvard University Archives
Library of Congress
Library of the Gray Herbarium, Harvard University
Manuscripts Division, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah
Medford Historical Society
Edward G. Miner Library, University of Rochester
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Museums at Stony Brook, NY
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
National Archives
National Museum of American Art, Washington DC / Art Resource, NY
New Orleans Museum of Art
Reynolds House, Museum of American Art Smithsonian Institution Archives
Union Pacific Museum Collection
US Dept. of the Interior, Office of the Secretary
US Geological Survey Photographic Center
US Army Military History Institute
Utah State Historical Society

ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE
Energy Productions
Hot Shots / Cool Cuts

For
THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

POST PRODUCTION 
Frank Capria
Maureen Barden

ON-AIR PROMOTION 
James Dunford

FIELD PRODUCTION
Larry LeCain
Bob McCausland
Chas Norton
Robert Tompkins

SERIES DESIGNERS
Alison Kennedy
Chris Pullman

TITLE ANIMATION
Lizard Lounge Graphics, Inc.

ONLINE EDITOR
TBA

SERIES THEME
Charles Kuskin

SERIES THEME ADAPTATION
Michael Bacon

BUSINESS MANAGER
Christine Larson

PROJECT ADMINISTRATION 
Nancy Farrell
Helen R. Russell

INTERACTIVE MEDIA
Danielle Dell'Olio

PUBLICITY 
Daphne B. Noyes 
Johanna Baker

COORDINATING PRODUCER
Susan Mottau

SERIES EDITOR
Joseph Tovares

SENIOR PRODUCER
Mark Samels

EXECUTIVE PRODUCER
Margaret Drain

An MDTV Productions film 
for The American Experience

(c)1999 WGBH Educational Foundation
All rights reserved

Transcript

Hello, I'm David McCullough. Welcome to The American Experience.

The generation of Americans who fought in the Civil War went on to do a great variety of extraordinary things. They built railroads and cities and in some cases, immense personal fortunes. Several became president of the United States. Washington Roebling built the Brooklyn Bridge. Dr. Samuel David Gross of Philadelphia helped transform the practice of surgery. Winslow Homer, an artist-correspondent in the war, went on to paint the American scene as no one ever had.

Our story is about one of the most remarkable men of all that generation and one of the great adventure stories of the American West: John Wesley Powell and the exploration of Colorado River... John Wesley Powell, who had lost an arm in the battle of Shiloh, but who never let that, or much of anything, deter him on his path through life.

A classic American biography is Walace Stegner's book about Powell, "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian," in which he writes of Powell..."Losing one's right arm is a misfortune; to some it would be a disaster, to others and excuse. It affected Wes Powell's life about as much as a stone fallen into a swift stream affects the course of a river. With a velocity like his, he simple foamed over it."

If you've ever been down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, you know what an overwhelming experience it is. It's not just a journey into a totally different place, but into an immensity of time no easier to fathom than the sheer walls of rock rising overhead. But imagine what it was like in the year 1869 when Powell and his party pushed off down river into the Canyon, when it was all unknown.

Lost in the Grand Canyon, by producer Mark Davis.