| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Drifting West: The Calamities of James White and Charles Baker. By Virginia McConnell Simmons. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. xxx + 210 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

The Grand Canyon, larger than many states and some European countries, holds its share of mysteries. Many of these involve unexplained death or disappearance; the Honeymoon Couple, who vanished in the Canyon in 1928, comes quickly to mind. One of the best-known and most enduring mysteries, however, involves someone who neither died nor disappeared, but showed up unexpectedly one day and lived to a ripe old age. James White drifted up to the riverbank at Callville, Nevada, in September 1867—two years before John Wesley Powell's famous voyage—starving, sun-blasted, all but incoherent. When he was finally able to talk, he told a story of prospecting in Colorado, being chased by Indians, the deaths of his companions, and floating all the way through the Grand Canyon tied to a cottonwood-log raft. Whether he did or whether he didn't has been a subject of intense debate among historians, canyon addicts, and river runners ever since.

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