Danger River: Down the Southwest's Mighty Streams
John Wesley Powell's 1871 expedition
In 1927, a 38-year-old pharmacy manager, former war photographer, and aspiring explorer and writer named Clyde Eddy embarked on a trip down the Colorado River, which he declared was the “World’s Most Dangerous River.” Accompanying him was a crew of thirteen young men, mostly from elite Eastern colleges, who had responded to advertisements reading: “EXPLORERS WANTED” for a “geological-geographical expedition.” Volunteers had to be able to swim and handle a boat, but mostly Eddy wanted boys who were willing to be toughened and transformed into “real men.” His purpose was to write a book, create a film, and find fame and fortune on the lecture circuit. The film fell through, yet Eddy’s story suggests just how much river adventures like his, and the narratives that thrilled the public, performed masculinity.
Gender has been an underexplored analytical category among environmental historians despite its explanatory power for understanding human interactions with the environments of the American West. Nor have many scholars considered how the Southwest region came to be defined imaginatively. Danger River takes up these themes by examining the ways that men and women experienced, narrated, and performed their adventures down the Colorado River and its principal tributary, the Green, during the century beginning with the first narratives published by John Wesley Powell’s Colorado River Exploring Expeditions of 1869 and 1871-72 and ending with the environmentalist and writer Edward Abbey’s trip for Playboy in 1977. Drawing on more than 150 diaries and publications by those who turned these rivers into storied streams, I explore the gendered nature of adventure, the ways in which Powell’s narrative shaped others’ experiences on these rivers, and how the writings of those following in Powell’s wake promoted the Southwest as America’s Adventureland. Imbricated with these stories are the Indigenous peoples they helped dispossess and the role of adventure writers in settler colonialism.
Danger River takes a literary approach to environmental history. The publication of Powell’s official report, along with popular books by crew-member Frederick Dellenbaugh, revealed and defined the Southwest as a region where people could find adventure, test their mettle, and experience wild nature. These explorers didn’t reproduce their quotidian diaries; they structured stories that pitted themselves against nature—formidable opponents in a heroic struggle for survival. Such tales fired the imagination of scores of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, adventurers, and tourists, who then launched their own expeditions. But before embarking, these “river runners” rehearsed their trips by reading Powell and Dellenbaugh, whose dramatic narratives framed and imbued their own bodily experiences.
Gender has been an underexplored analytical category among environmental historians despite its explanatory power for understanding human interactions with the environments of the American West. Nor have many scholars considered how the Southwest region came to be defined imaginatively. Danger River takes up these themes by examining the ways that men and women experienced, narrated, and performed their adventures down the Colorado River and its principal tributary, the Green, during the century beginning with the first narratives published by John Wesley Powell’s Colorado River Exploring Expeditions of 1869 and 1871-72 and ending with the environmentalist and writer Edward Abbey’s trip for Playboy in 1977. Drawing on more than 150 diaries and publications by those who turned these rivers into storied streams, I explore the gendered nature of adventure, the ways in which Powell’s narrative shaped others’ experiences on these rivers, and how the writings of those following in Powell’s wake promoted the Southwest as America’s Adventureland. Imbricated with these stories are the Indigenous peoples they helped dispossess and the role of adventure writers in settler colonialism.
Danger River takes a literary approach to environmental history. The publication of Powell’s official report, along with popular books by crew-member Frederick Dellenbaugh, revealed and defined the Southwest as a region where people could find adventure, test their mettle, and experience wild nature. These explorers didn’t reproduce their quotidian diaries; they structured stories that pitted themselves against nature—formidable opponents in a heroic struggle for survival. Such tales fired the imagination of scores of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, adventurers, and tourists, who then launched their own expeditions. But before embarking, these “river runners” rehearsed their trips by reading Powell and Dellenbaugh, whose dramatic narratives framed and imbued their own bodily experiences.
