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Avoiding Mormons, Running Rapids, Encountering Western Utes: William Lewis Manly’s Voyage Down the Green River and across Utah in 1849
In 1869, with the financial support of the U.S. government, Major John Wesley Powell led a now-famous river expedition. Starting at Green River, Wyoming Territory, Powell and his men traveled down the Green to its confluence with the Colorado River, then down the Colorado to its confluence with the Virgin River in Nevada. The explorers traveled roughly a thousand river miles through Utah and Arizona territories. Powell’s scientific exploration of the Colorado River and successful passage through the Grand Canyon gave Powell considerable notoriety and acclaim—and is remembered today as one of the great adventures of the American West.1
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Twenty years earlier, and far less well-known, a twenty-nine-year-old forty-niner named William Lewis Manly made history on the Green River, too. Scholarship from previous decades has concluded that Manly and a crew of men floated from where the emigrant trail crosses the Green River, twenty-seven miles upriver from present-day Green River, Wyoming, to the Uinta Basin near what is now the ghost town of Ouray, Utah. In the 1909 edition of The Romance of the Colorado River, detailing his experiences as part of the second Powell expedition, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh recognized Manly’s accomplishments and was complimentary of his achievements in running the Green River in 1849. Without explaining why, Dellenbaugh stated that Manly disembarked in northeastern Utah, in the Uinta Basin. Dellenbaugh’s book was the first published reference to try to pinpoint how far Manly floated down the Green. Since that time, many books, articles, and other literary references by historians have followed Dellenbaugh’s lead.2 Given Dellenbaugh’s early assessment, and Manly’s own neglect to specify the end point of his river voyage, the longstanding interpretation that
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