long a time the only record concerning this rather mythical locality, was rather magnified than detracted from by the accounts of one or two trappers, who professed to have seen the cañon". According to the San Francisco Herald, in a series of articles run in 1853, Captain Joseph R. Walker in January 1851 with his nephew James T. Walker and six men, traveled up the Colorado River to a point where it joined the Virgin River and continued east into Arizona, traveling along the Grand Canyon and making short exploratory side trips along the way. Walker is reported to have said he wanted to visit the "Moqui" (Hopi) Indians. who he had met briefly before and found exceptionally interesting. In 1858, John Strong Newberry became probably the first geologist to visit the Grand Canyon. In 1869, Major John Wesley Powell set out to explore the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon in the first expedition down the canyon. Powell ordered a shipwright to build four reinforced Whitewall rowboats from Chicago and had them shipped east on the newly completed Continental railroad. He hired nine men, including his brother Walter, and collected provisions for ten months. They set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. On June 7, they lost one of their boats, 1/3 of their food, and other badly-needed supplies: as a result the team eventually had to subsist on starvation rations. Passing through (or portaging around) a series of dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River, reaching its confluence with the Colorado River, near present-day Moab, Utah, on July 17. Continuing on down the Colorado River, the party encountered more rapids and falls. On August 28, 1869, faced with what some felt to be impassable rapids, three men left the expedition on foot in an attempt to reach a settlement away. Ironically, the remaining members went safely through the rapids on August 29, 1869, while Seneca Howland, Oramel Howland, and William H. Dunn were murdered. The area through which the three men traveled was marked by tensions between farming and hunting Shivwits and incoming Mormon settlers. Which group was responsible for killing the three men has been hotly debated. Powell himself visited the area the following year, and was told (through a Mormon interpreter) that the Shivwits had mistakenly killed the men, believing them to be prospectors who had murdered an Indian woman. He choose