Utah State Historical Society State Capitol—Salt Lake City, Utah
Vol. XVI Vol. XVII
January, April, July, October, 1948 January, April, July, October, 1949
Nos. 1-4 Nos. 1-4
INTRODUCTION W i t h this volume of its Quarterly, the Utah State Historical Society completes one of its most ambitious and most important projects, the publication of the original journals of the Powell expeditions of 1869-72. The introduction to the last volume of the Quarterly, in which the journals of the Powell Colorado River Exploring Expedition of 1869 were published, devoted attention to explorations of the Green and Colorado rivers antedating those of Powell. The present introduction, dealing with the second Powell expedition of 1871-72, appropriately looks to the larger significance and fruits of this work of exploration and discovery, for the second expedition was what the first was not, a carefully constituted and admirably equipped scientific organization. Although our lives are touched today at every point by our cultural inheritance from the great labors of Major J. W . Powell and his contemporaries. King, Wheeler, and Hayden, it is one of the curious paradoxes of our history that the early explorations of Utah and the West, having limited objectives and being largely of reconnaissance character, are better known than the great surveys of the seventies. Major Powell and his contemporaries did their work so well that we, the beneficiaries, have become not merely unappreciative but even incurious concerning it. It is thus a peculiarly valuable service that the Utah State Historical Society does in assembling and publishing the original records of one of the greatest of the early surveys, focusing attention upon it and making the records themselves available for study. Undoubtedly the genesis of all these surveys was Clarence King's Fortieth Parallel Survey, which in 1867 embarked upon a hundred-mile-wide geological survey covering the entire length of the new Pacific Railroad. King's corps of geologists reached Utah in the summer of 1869, and in this and succeeding years, notably in 1871, achieved the first systematic mapping of north-