Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the potentials and pitfalls of the adventure genre for historians who narrate human encounters with the more-than-human world, drawing on more than one hundred such stories of adventure travel on rivers in the American Southwest.

Paper long abstract:

Most government reports gather dust on shelves. But John Wesley Powell’s official report, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875), as well as a popular account by crew-member Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage (1908), did not produce monotonous logs of quotidian experiences and observations, nor dry-as-dirt geological descriptions. They composed stories that pitted the landscape as a formidable opponent in a heroic struggle for survival. Subsequent scientists, engineers, adventurers, and tourists followed their lead by constructing their own adventure stories, echoing Powell. Indeed, they rehearsed their trips by reading Powell, Dellenbaugh, and others, whose dramatic narratives framed and structured their own experiences. Drawing on more than 100 diaries and publications from the century following Powell’s 1869 voyage, I explore the potentials and pitfalls of the adventure genre for historians who narrate human encounters with the more-than-human world.