Season 1, Episode 8 — Into the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 One-Armed Descent of the Grand Canyon

In the summer of 1869, the year the golden spike was driven, the canyons of the Green and Colorado Rivers were still a blank space on the map of the United States, labeled with a single word: Unexplored. On May 24, a 35-year-old Civil War major who had lost his right forearm at Shiloh pushed off from Green River City, Wyoming Territory, with nine frontiersmen and four wooden boats to find out what lay inside.

In Episode 8 of American Tapestry, we follow Major John Wesley Powell and his crew roughly a thousand miles through the Gates of Lodore, the wreck of the No Name at Disaster Falls, a camp fire that drove them into a rapid, Desolation Canyon (where Sgt. George Bradley saved the one-armed Major from a cliff with a pair of long drawers), Cataract and Glen Canyons, and finally into the black granite of the Grand Canyon. Back east, a hoaxer told newspapers the whole party had drowned. Down in the gorge, with rotting flour and a roaring rapid ahead, three men, Oramel and Seneca Howland and Bill Dunn, chose to climb out at what became Separation Rapid. Powell and five others ran it and floated into open country the next day. The three who walked away were never seen alive again, and how they died is still a mystery.

Season 1 · Episode 8 · American Tapestry: the stories, struggles, and spirits that built a nation.