Bøger af John F. Ross

';A convincing case for Powell's legacy as a pioneering conservationist.'--The Wall Street Journal"e;A bold study of an eco-visionary at a watershed moment in US history."e;--NatureA timely, thrilling account of the explorer who dared to lead the first successful expedition down the Colorado through the Grand Canyon—and waged a bitterly-contested campaign for sustainability in the West.John Wesley Powell's first descent of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in 1869 counts among the most dramatic chapters in American exploration history. When the Canyon spit out the surviving members of the expedition—starving, battered, and nearly naked—they had accomplished what others thought impossible and finished the exploration of continental America that Lewis and Clark had begun almost 70 years before. With The Promise of the Grand Canyon, John F. Ross tells how that perilous expedition launched the one-armed Civil War hero on the path to becoming the nation's foremost proponent of environmental sustainability and a powerful, if controversial, visionary for the development of the American West. So much of what he preached—most broadly about land and water stewardship—remains prophetically to the point today.

Often hailed as the godfather of today's elite special forces, Robert Rogers trained and led an unorthodox unit of green provincials, raw woodsmen, farmers, and Indian scouts on "impossible" missions in colonial America that are still the stuff of soldiers' legend. The child of marginalized Scots-Irish immigrants, Rogers learned to survive in New England's dark and deadly forests, grasping, as did few others, that a new world required new forms of warfare. John F. Ross not only re-creates Rogers's life and his spectacular battles with breathtaking immediacy and meticulous accuracy, but brings a new and provocative perspective on Rogers's unique vision of a unified continent, one that would influence Thomas Jefferson and inspire the Lewis and Clark expedition. Rogers's principles of unconventional war-making would lay the groundwork for the colonial strategy later used in the War of Independence-and prove so compelling that army rangers still study them today. Robert Rogers, a backwoods founding father, was heroic, admirable, brutal, canny, ambitious, duplicitous, visionary, and much more-like America itself.