2005-11
This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 10/31/2005
Printed Document, 1p. octavo, June 15, 1868, Headquarters of the Army, Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, being General Orders No. 28, and reads in part: “...the Secretary of War be, and he is hereby, authorized and empowered to issue rations for twenty-five men of the expedition engaged in the exploration of the river Colorado, under direction of Professor Powell, while engaged in that work...” VG. John Wesley Powell (1834-1902)After the Civil War, in which he lost an arm at Shiloh, he was appointed professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan College, Bloomington. He led geological expeditions into Colorado and Utah in 1867 and 1868 and in May, 1869, began, under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, a geographical and geological survey of the Colorado and Green rivers. In the course of this expedition his party passed by boat through the Grand Canyon, a hazardous feat first described in his Explorations of the Colorado River of the West (1875) and later in his Canyons of the Colorado (1895). He was later engaged in geological and ethnological explorations in Arizona and Utah. His efforts toward the reorganization of rival surveys in the West were a factor in bringing about the establishment (1879) of the U.S. Geological Survey, of which he served as director from 1881 to 1894. In 1879, Powell founded and became the first director of the Bureau of American Ethnology.
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