William Lewis Manly was a forty-niner, explorer, and humanitarian whose story most people have never heard Born in Vermont, William Lewis Manly was drawn out west by the lure of gold. Previous scholarship claims that the Yankee frontiersman floated only 292 miles to the Uinta Basin, but author Michael D. Kane's research of primary source materials suggests that Manly went 150 miles further, all the way to what is now Green River, Utah. If this was the case, then Manly's exploration of the Green River would have taken place twenty years before John Wesley Powell's famous first expedition. Determined to prove his theory and establish Manly's legacy as a trailblazer, Kane conducted research, and then built his own wooden canoes and made the trip, tracing Manly's footsteps and comparing notes with the earlier traveler. Country Never Trod: William Lewis Manly's 1949 Voyage Down the Green River shadows Manly's little-known expedition down the Green River and his overland trek through some of the most desolate stretches of Utah, interspersed with Kane's journal entries and photographs documenting his own trip.