Prior to the 1850s, the canyonlands of northern Arizona were known only to Native Americans and a few European explorers. In 1858, Lt. Joseph Ives of the U.S. Army led an expedition up the Colorado River to explore and map this mysterious region. Ives took along Prussian artist and naturalist Balduin Mollhausen to make sketches and watercolors of the topography, flora and fauna, and native peoples they encountered. Mollhausen's artworks are the first known depictions of the canyonlands.

To illustrate the published report of the expedition, Mollhausen created both simple pencil sketches and dramatic watercolors depicting the Colorado River landscape and its few inhabitants in the years just before the great migration to the Southwest. These works, the subject of an exhibition organized by the Amon Carter Museum, are reproduced in their original color for the first time.

Considered both as works of art and as documents of a new, virtually unknown land, the watercolors are interwoven with journal entries by the explorers and a narrative of this journey of discovery. The resulting volume will interest not only historians and anthropologists, but anyone who has traveled the Colorado River or experienced the magnificence of Arizona's canyonlands.