All of which meant that when a one-armed veteran of the Civil War named John Wesley Powell finally led a survey party of nine men in four wooden boats down the Colorado River in the summer of 1869, the canyon would win the additional distinction of being the very last of the country’s major landscape features to be officially explored—although the tantalizing possibility that other voyagers may well have preceded Powell is suggested by the legend of Tiyo, a Hopi boy who is said to have floated through the canyon in a hollow log, riding the river all the way to the Sea of Cortez before
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