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with amateurs in the district. He saw that I was being given a rough time and he went to my father and offered to tutor me privately in his little farm school yard. And that really set the destinies of my life. He taught me to love science, took me on rambles throughout the district, showed me how to maneuver on water courses. After a few months, he went to my father, who was a very puritanical sort of man and not a generous one, an immigrant from Scotland, and he said to him, "Burton, give me your son and I will make him a scholar." My father was reluctant. He had offered to pay for my college if and only if I would agree to become a minister, which I chose not to do. And so my education was almost entirely informal under the guidance of George Crookham. Later I made a tour of the southern states to collect specimens and float down the Mississippi River and some of its tributaries. This was 1857 and 1858, and I knew that something ominous was in the air, that war was surely coming. And when war broke out, I immediately enlisted in the 20th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. I went off to war. I was also an independent and a self-taught student and so I taught myself the science of fortifica- tion, sufficiently to win the respect of John e. Fremont. I helped, in fact, to create the fortifications for Fort Gerardo in Missouri. And then I won some respect from General Grant. In fact, he gave me a leave in November of 1861 to go back to Chicago. I arrived in Chicago on the 27th of November and I married my friend, Emma Dean, the following day. The Civil War, the most vicious and violent war in our history, was nevertheless gentile by your stan- dards, and Emma came with me to the war, in fact, spent the entire rest of the war with me nearby. It was on the 6th day of April 1862 at the Battle of Shiloh that I lost this arm. I was shot by a Confederate soldier with a mini ball that entered my elbow and shattered it. After two days of excruciating pain, my arm was severed just above the elbow. I never let this get in my way as an adventurer. I used to cradle my arm when I walked around Washington, D.e., as a federal bureaucrat. The only problem with this arm was that the nerves, over time, began slowly to regenerate. The pain at the end of the stump became excruciating, one reason why I tended to cradle it in my hand. And late in my life, after I had retired from government service, I had the deep pain of having to sit through surgery in which those nerves were drawn from that arm, without anesthesia. That was the only significant pain that I ever endured in my life. But I didn't let this get in the way of my adven- tures on the Colorado. In fact, it was an advantage of a certain sort: when we portaged our equipment, I was always relieved and therefore was able to go geologizing or botanizing up and down the canyons of the Colorado. But the Civil War cut through the American social structure like a hot knife through butter and after it, nothing was ever the same. Many of us felt that the eastern states, and particularly the southern states, were forever tainted. I did my one piece of effort at national reconciliation. There was a Confederate soldier, an officer at Shiloh, named e.E. Hooker, and he had the unfortunate accident of having his left arm severed in that battle. Therefore, for the rest of my life, at every Christmas, I bought the finest pair of kid gloves that I could afford and sent him one of them. But the West seemed to me to be the place of promise and I joined the thousands who REFLECTIONS OF AN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY I want to be remembered primarily as a scientist and also a government were moving into the west as the future of the United States. I went first in 1867, it's accidental that I came to Colo- rado. I intended to go to the Dakotas. That was my chief source of interest at the time but there was a war scare with the Sioux in the Dakotas, and I was advised by railroad officials to come to Colorado instead, so I came here with Emma and a group of students. We climbed Pike's Peak that year. The following year, 1868, we returned and 1, so far as I know, became the first man ever to climb Longs Peak, 14,255 feet. I placed a little speech in a canister on top of the mountain and gave that speech to the winds. That year, I met a man named J.e. Sumner and we explored a bit the headwaters of the Grand River and I got it into my head that it would be a great lark and scientifically interesting to float the entire Grand and Colorado River system. And so the following spring I made preparations. The Union Pacific agreed to carry my boats from Chicago to Green River Station and we put in at Green River Station on the 24th of May, 1869. There were 10 of us in four boats, the Emma Dean, Kitty Clyde's Sister, the Maid of the Canyon, and the No-Name. And we distributed our gear as evenly as we could. The Emma Dean, the pilot boat, was smaller than the others and lighter, made of pine. It was 20 feet in length, the others were 24 feet, all wooden dories. And we embarked with a salute to functionary, but mosdy as a planner for the future of the American West. SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 <)