The Grand Colorado;: The Story of a River and its Canyons

Description

Here is the complete story, in text and more than two hundred pictures, of one of America’s great rivers – probably the most important river in the history of the West. Through these pages flow more than four thousand years of human history, from the ancient time when Indians inhabited the incredible wilderness of the Colorado canyons to the day in 1540 when Coronado’s soldiers were the first Europeans to view the awesome wonder of the Grand Canyon; from seventeenth-century “Black Robes” who wandered the river’s deserts in search of souls to twentieth-century engineers, who have tamed and crippled the river in the name of progress. As Wallace Stegner notes in his Foreword to The Grand Colorado, “The whole river is literally here, as I think it has been in no single book heretofore, not to make propaganda for a specific conservationist or resource-development position, but to illustrate the complexity – and I insist it is a human complexity – of a great river.”