Dowsing Books in Order

Roberts’s Dowsing books are an unusual three-volume detour from his historical fiction. Instead of soldiers and privateers, the central figure is Henry Gross, a Maine game warden whose skill with a forked twig convinced Roberts that dowsing could find water at great distances. Across Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod, The Seventh Sense and Water Unlimited, Roberts mixes travelogue, case files and argument into a running story about what he thought science had overlooked.

Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod introduces Gross and traces how a few local demonstrations in Maine grew into headline-grabbing searches for wells across New England, the American West and even islands hundreds of miles away. Roberts walks through each job in patient detail, noting the maps, letters and on-the-ground checks he believes confirm Gross’s rod responses. The book also captures the pair’s growing friendship and Roberts’s sense of wonder as outcomes seem to match Gross’s predictions more often than chance would allow.

Skeptics appear here, but mostly as background voices.

In The Seventh Sense Roberts turns more directly to critics and theory. By this point he and Gross have helped form Water Unlimited, Inc., and the book chronicles a year in which they tackle bigger projects for towns, industries and the military. Roberts replays failed tests along with the sensational hits, speculates that dowsing may be a kind of extra sense, and even jokes that he might lose friends by publishing the book at all.

Published near the end of his life, Water Unlimited reads like both a summing-up and a defense brief. Roberts piles up correspondence, contracts and drilling reports in an attempt to answer his critics point by point and to show that Gross’s methods worked often enough to be taken seriously. The tone is more combative, but there are still vivid episodes of muddy back roads, farm kitchens and field tests with hopeful clients looking over Gross’s shoulder.

Modern readers generally approach these books knowing that mainstream geology and psychology rejected Gross’s claims. That distance makes the trilogy less a manual on how to dowse and more a portrait of mid-twentieth-century curiosity, credulity and stubbornness, set against small-town Maine and dusty Western landscapes. Roberts’s willingness to put his name behind such a disputed subject is part of what makes the series fascinating now.

If you are new to the Dowsing books, starting with Henry Gross and His Dowsing Rod gives you the basic story before the arguments heat up. From there The Seventh Sense and Water Unlimited feel like deeper dives into the same mystery, as Roberts wrestles with the gap between what he believes he has seen and what science is prepared to accept.