Details
IVES, Joseph Christmas (1828-1868). Report upon the Colorado River of the West. 36th Congress, 1st Session. Senate Executive Document [unnumbered]. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1861.
4o (289 x 220 mm). 2 folding maps, 1 profile, 14 views, 7 colored lithographed portraits of Indians, 8 folding panoramas and 3 paleontology plates (some minor scattered foxing). Original black blind-decorated cloth, figure of a steamship in gilt on upper cover, gilt-lettered on spine (front hinge cracked); blue cloth slipcase. Provenance: George M. Smith (inscription on front free endpaper, Washington, 1862).
FIRST EDITION. In 1857 Ives was promoted to first lieutenant and was named to lead an expedition up the Colorado River in order to develop potential routes of supply in the event of a war between the national government and the Mormon settlements in Deseret (Utah).
Ives's expedition included John Strong Newberry as naturalist, the Prussian Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen as artist and unofficial diarist, and F. W. Egloffstein as topographer. "Ives purchased a steamboat in Philadelphia. The vessel was taken apart and shipped via the Isthmus of Panama to California and thence to the mouth of the Colorado River, where Ives and the members of his expedition rendezvoused late in 1857" (ANB). It appears that Ives and his party were the first white men to visit the floor of the Grand Canyon while traveling the Colorado. Heroic and romantic at the same time, Ives predicted that "It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lone and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed." Ives later was the engineer and architect of the Washington monument. Howes I-92; Sabin 35308; Wagner-Camp-Becker 375; Wheat Mapping the Transmississippi West 947, 948.
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FIRST EDITION. In 1857 Ives was promoted to first lieutenant and was named to lead an expedition up the Colorado River in order to develop potential routes of supply in the event of a war between the national government and the Mormon settlements in Deseret (Utah).
Ives's expedition included John Strong Newberry as naturalist, the Prussian Heinrich Balduin Möllhausen as artist and unofficial diarist, and F. W. Egloffstein as topographer. "Ives purchased a steamboat in Philadelphia. The vessel was taken apart and shipped via the Isthmus of Panama to California and thence to the mouth of the Colorado River, where Ives and the members of his expedition rendezvoused late in 1857" (ANB). It appears that Ives and his party were the first white men to visit the floor of the Grand Canyon while traveling the Colorado. Heroic and romantic at the same time, Ives predicted that "It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River, along the greater portion of its lone and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed." Ives later was the engineer and architect of the Washington monument. Howes I-92; Sabin 35308; Wagner-Camp-Becker 375; Wheat Mapping the Transmississippi West 947, 948.