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Two brothers who took photographs for a living climbed into rowboats and rode a wild river all the way from Wyoming to Mexico, right through the Grand Canyon. Nobody had ever filmed its biggest rapids before. They crashed, they portaged, they developed their film in dark caves, and they made it. This is the older brother’s true story of the trip, and the river is the biggest character in it.
The narrative runs with the river: Green River, Wyoming, in September 1911, then down the Green and the Colorado through canyon after canyon, on the way from Wyoming toward Mexico. Kolb organises the voyage by stretches of water, each with its rapids named and graded by their behaviour, and pauses for the work of photography: cameras in waterproof boxes, film developed in side canyons, plates dried where shade allowed.
Its themes are nerve, craft, and the American West at the moment it was being photographed into memory. The brothers are working men, not gentlemen explorers: the trip exists to make pictures they can sell, and the danger is a business risk as much as a thrill. Under the adventure sits a record of the river before the dams, running free and largely unmeasured.
It lasts because the Kolbs became the canyon’s memory. They settled at the South Rim, showed their film to travellers for decades, and left photographs no one else could have made. This book is the voyage behind those images, told plainly by the man at the oars. Anyone who has stood at the rim wondering about the river below needs it.
In 1911 the brothers Ellsworth and Emery Kolb loaded rowboats with cameras and pushed off at Green River, Wyoming, bound for Mexico through the Grand Canyon. E. L. Kolb’s account, published in 1914, follows the thousand mile voyage: rapids never filmed before, portages around the worst water, film developed in darkrooms wherever the canyon gave shade. Kolb calls it a simple photographic trip, but the river keeps interrupting the modesty. Few books put you this close to the water.
The Grand Canyon had been run before 1911, but never like this: with motion picture cameras, by two brothers who meant to photograph every rapid on the river. Ellsworth and Emery Kolb started at Green River, Wyoming, in September 1911 and rowed the Green and the Colorado through the whole canyon system, finishing the following January. E. L. Kolb’s Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico, published in 1914, is his account of the voyage, and it remains a river classic. Expect the working details other adventure books skip: boats swamped and repaired, loads portaged around water no one dared run, film developed in darkrooms improvised in caves and side canyons, food and tempers both running low. The writing is plain and modest, Kolb calls it a simple photographic trip, and the plainness is the charm: the canyon supplies all the drama anyone could want. Starvard shelves the book with the great exploration narratives, London and Seton and Evans, as the American West’s own entry: the last wild river, run at the moment it could first be filmed, by men who then spent their lives showing the film at the canyon’s rim.
Edition: Text: Project Gutenberg ebook 13150.
The first chapter
Title: Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Author: E. L. Kolb
Author of introduction, etc.: Owen Wister
Release date: August 10, 2004 [eBook #13150]
Most recently updated: September 13, 2026
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13150
Credits: Produced by Carol Brown, Ted Garvin, Keith M. Eckrich, Aaron Adrignola, TBC and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Through the Grand Canyon
from Wyoming to Mexico
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
In the center, a large stylized capital 'M' superimposed over a smaller 'M,' with a bullet above both. To the left, a bullet and the word 'The;' to the right, the abbreviation 'Co.' with a bullet. Below, a line beneath the entire logo with a curl at the left end and a circle in the center, directly below the centers of the two 'M's.
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO · DALLAS
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.
TORONTO
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Color photograph with canyon walls extending up the sides; the left side is sunlit, the right in shadows; a brown river curls through the bottom of the canyon; a light blue sky forms a V at the top between the two canyon walls.
Copyright by Kolb Bros.
THE GRAND CANYON AT THE MOUTH OF HA VA SU CREEK.
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Through the Grand Canyon
from Wyoming to Mexico
By
E. L. Kolb
With a Foreword by Owen Wister
New Edition
With Additional Illustrations
(72 Plates)
From Photographs by the
Author and His Brother
New York
The Macmillan Company
1915
All rights reserved
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Copyright, 1914,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1914. Reprinted
December, 1914. New edition published June, 1915.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico
Dedication
TO THE MANY FRIENDS
WHO “PULLED” FOR US, IF NOT WITH US
DURING THE ONE HUNDRED ONE DAYS OF OUR RIVER TRIP
THIS VOLUME
IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED
FOREWORD
Source: Project Gutenberg. Published 1914. US public domain (author died 1960). Share this book: WhatsApp
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