25 the meeting, during which one of the young man’s skills intrigued Major Powell. Dellenbaugh aspired to be a painter of nature and was a surprisingly gifted draughtsman for his age (ten years later, Dellenbaugh was to study painting in Paris and became a fairly accomplished landscape painter). Three weeks after his interview, Dellenbaugh found himself in Green River, Wyoming, a stop on the recently completed Union Pacific transcontinental railroad and the launch site for Powell’s second (and much better organized and funded) exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its tributaries. There were three boats and eleven crew. Its goal was scientific identification and mapping of the vast area around the Grand Canyon region. Unlike the 1869 journey, on this trip they exited the Colorado River halfway through the Grand Canyon at Kanab Creek. Dellenbaugh was assigned to Powell’s lead boat for the trip as assistant boatman, expedition artist, and topographer. His primary art-related duty was to record in panorama style the geology of the many canyon walls as well as other views assigned by Major Powell. These three- sheet-wide sketches today reside in the National Anthropological Archives in the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. (For a number of illustrations, see The Wild Colorado: The True Adventures of Fred Dellenbaugh, Age 17, on the Second Powell Expedition into Grand Canyon, Richard Maurer, Crown Publishers, New York, 1999.) Ironically, Dellenbaugh’s first sketch, inscribed “Monument Butte” and made at Green River City, Wyoming, is in the same locale where several months later Thomas Moran would make his first sketch of the West, Green River, Wyoming (Collection Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma), on a train stop heading to Yellowstone to join the Ferdinand Hayden U.S. Government Survey. One hundred fifty years later, Tony Foster’s Green River journey did not include the railroad stop, as access to Green River can be made in several locations by automobile. However, there are multiple overlaps between Dellenbaugh’s and Foster’s journeys, including sites in Lodore Canyon, Steamboat Rock, and the confluence of the Green River and the Colorado River hundreds of river miles to the south. Dellenbaugh, in addition to his assigned duties, kept a thorough diary of the Powell Expedition (Collection of New York City Public Library), describing primarily the weather, his daily duties, food source challenges, the difficulty of running the river rapids, and noting the locales where the expedition’s official photogra- pher, Elias Olcott Beamon (1837–1876), executed views. Sadly, Dellenbaugh’s own sketches are only mentioned as “working on sketches in camp” or “made a sketch.” Documentation of journey activity was the young artist’s focus, not a broader sense of place or even discussion of color, mood, or feelings that must have been sublime to such a young man whose life had been in Buffalo, three trips to Chicago, and now the wilderness surrounding the Green River. Just over 40 years later in September 1911, two adventuresome, entrepreneurial brothers found them- selves in almost the exact spot of the Powell party launch, readying their two specially designed boats loaded with food stuffs, gear, and numerous cameras, one of which was a newly marketed motion picture camera. Their goal: to photographically retrace the famed Powell Expedition and to make the first movie of the wild, powerful Green and Colorado Rivers that carved the dramatic canyons of the American Southwest. Ellsworth and Emery Kolb owned the Kolb Studio at Grand Canyon Village, a business they started in a tent in 1904, located at the Bright Angel trailhead where they photographed tourists making their way into and out of Grand Canyon. Ellsworth had arrived first, just weeks after the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad had opened a spur to this awe-inspiring site where the railroad built the now-famous El Tovar Lodge in 1905. Ellsworth was a photography hobbyist who had been kicking around the West for five years, having left his home near Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, Sketch from Powell’s 1871 Colorado River Survey. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, 2030_122
