This volume presents the narrative, from my point of view, of an important government expedition of nearly forty years ago: an expedition which, strangely enough, never before has been fully treated.

In fact in all these years it never has been written about by any one besides myself, barring a few letters in 1871 from Clement Powell, through his brother, to the Chicago _Tribune_, and an extremely brief mention by Major Powell, its organiser and leader, in a pamphlet entitled _Report of Explorations in 1873 of the Colorado of the West and its Tributaries_ (Government Printing Office, 1874).

In my history, _The Romance of the Colorado River_, of which this is practically volume two, I gave a synopsis, and in several other places I have written in condensed form concerning it; but the present work for the first time gives the full story.
In 1869, Major Powell made his famous first descent of the Green-Colorado River from the Union Pacific Railway in Wyoming to the mouth of the Virgin River in Nevada, a feat of exploration unsurpassed, perhaps unequalled, on this continent.

Several of the upper canyons had been before penetrated, but a vague mystery hung over even these, and there was no recorded, or even oral, knowledge on the subject when Powell turned his attention to it.

There was a tale that a man named James White had previously descended through the great canyons, but Mr.
Robert Brewster Stanton has thoroughly investigated this and definitely proven it to be incorrect.