The Last Canyon: A Novel

Late in the spring of 1869, a 35-year-old Civil War veteran and nine companions set forth on a voyage that would take them along much of the length of the Colorado River, beginning in Wyoming and ending below the Grand Canyon. In this novel, John Vernon capably reconstructs their journey, adding dramatic nuance to an expedition that has long engaged historians and biographers.

The bare historical facts are these: John Wesley Powell and his party made their way downriver, bouncing over churning rapids, climbing steep canyon walls, scaling seemingly impassable mountains--hard work, and made more difficult by the fact that Powell had lost his right arm seven years earlier at the Battle of Shiloh. Along the way they gathered information and provisions from local Indians, argued among themselves over how best to proceed, and suffered calamities great and small. The journey ended prematurely four months after it began when three disgruntled members of the party left, only to be murdered in a canyon in southwestern Utah. Vernon elaborates on these data while remaining for the most part true to them. He imagines, for instance, what those over-the-campfire arguments that so divided the party must have been about, giving fire and grit to Major Powell's matter-of-fact journal entries, and he considers the voyage from the point of view of the Ute and Navajo peoples whom Powell and company encountered along the way.

Vernon's dialogues are sometimes a little too neat, their anachronistic language sometimes distracting. But he captures something of Powell's brooding personality as well as the perilous nature of his trailblazing journey "through deep gorges, rushing waters, bottomless silences, tall and craggy cliffs built by artists celestial." --Gregory McNamee