During westward expansion in the nineteenth century, thousands of anonymous individuals drifted into the American West in search of opportunities in trapping and trading, prospecting and mining, military service, railroad construction, freighting, agriculture, town-building, and adventure. Few of these emigrants achieved sufficient notoriety for their names to be recalled today. Two exceptions are James White, who is said to have accidentally traversed the Grand Canyon on a makeshift raft two years prior to the first expedition of John Wesley Powell, and his erstwhile companion Charles Baker, who played a prominent role in prospecting in Colorado's San Juan Mountains in the 1860s. The exploits of these two drifters and the ongoing debate about the veracity of the Grand Canyon story and other legendary adventures provide the basis for lively narrative history in Virginia McConnell Simmons's "Drifting West."