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RIVER RUNNING WEST: LIFE OF JOHN WESLEY POWELL: The Life of John Wesley Powell
If the word "hero" still belonged in the historian's lexicon, it would certainly be applied to John Wesley Powell. Intrepid explorer, careful scientist, talented writer, and dedicated conservationist, Powell led the expedition that put the Colorado River on American maps and revealed the Grand Canyon to the world. Now comes the first biography of this towering figure in almost fifty years--a book that captures his life in all its heroism, idealism, and ambivalent, ambiguous humanity.
In A River Running West , Donald Worster, one of our leading Western historians, tells the story of Powell's great adventures and describes his historical significance with compelling clarity and skill. Worster paints a vivid portrait of how this man emerged from the early nineteenth-century world of immigrants, fervent religion, and rough-and-tumble rural culture, and barely survived the Civil War battle at Shiloh. The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. But in the end, he fell victim to a clique of Western politicians who pushed for unfettered economic development, relegating the aging explorer to a quiet life of
anthropological contemplation.
John Wesley Powell embodied the energy, optimism, and westward impulse of the young United States. A River Running West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this great American explorer and environmental pioneer, a true story of undaunted courage in the American West.
In A River Running West , Donald Worster, one of our leading Western historians, tells the story of Powell's great adventures and describes his historical significance with compelling clarity and skill. Worster paints a vivid portrait of how this man emerged from the early nineteenth-century world of immigrants, fervent religion, and rough-and-tumble rural culture, and barely survived the Civil War battle at Shiloh. The heart of Worster's biography is Powell's epic journey down the Colorado in 1869, a tale of harrowing experiences, lethal accidents, and breathtaking discoveries. After years in the region collecting rocks and fossils and learning to speak the local Native American languages, Powell returned to Washington as an eloquent advocate for the West, one of America's first and most influential conservationists. But in the end, he fell victim to a clique of Western politicians who pushed for unfettered economic development, relegating the aging explorer to a quiet life of
anthropological contemplation.
John Wesley Powell embodied the energy, optimism, and westward impulse of the young United States. A River Running West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this great American explorer and environmental pioneer, a true story of undaunted courage in the American West.
687 pages, Paperback
First published December 14, 2000
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August 28, 2018
“Each embellishment of Powell’s narrative strengthened the impression that here was a vast unknown part of America that was at last being revealed as unified and coherent. Order was replacing blankness, beauty emerging from the most hostile-seeming environment. A place that had repelled everyone before him was in fact proved to be a place of exquisite color, diversity, light, and form, or natural harmony. Every motion of the river had a rationale explanation. All the strangely contorted physical features, the boulder-choked passages, the pine-covered slopes overhead were part of a single, coordinated design based on the laws of nature and natural processes. As they rounded each bend, as they climbed from the river to the surrounding highlands, the expeditioners, he emphasized, gained new verification of that complexly integrated whole that he called “the valley of the Colorado.”
I was fascinated by this biography, and normally they are not my thing; this one made me hungry to read more from this historian since he gets it, he knows how to make history come alive and engross us, which is really achingly rare. History teaches us the mistakes and successes of the past, and the only way to prevent the same horrors happen is to learn from them. I did not know too much of Powell’s life but it was always a tantalizing story: the first running of a wild Colorado River. I revere the River for the stunning landscapes it creates and it is always like a pilgrimage when I cross the Rockies, cross its headwaters, and follow it down through Colorado and Utah and Arizona. I have stood on its banks and seen it near and far, and near worshipped at the red rock altars it reveals in the rock. Powell is still shrouded in some mystery for me; there is not a lot that survives of the inner life and what he thought and felt, but there is enough to know he felt the holiness (more of a scientific and secular bent, but some of his descriptions talk of the sublimity, more to come later) of the West and was an early advocate for the Native Americans, as flawed as his life and views ended up being.
Powell’s words: “the landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock- cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock- ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand...When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored- buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate...”
Powell became immersed in politics for the latter part of his life, and those chapters do seem to drag a bit and are less lively. He did a lot of writing later in life and came from a place where he “believed that the first requirement is to know the world as it is, honestly and without illusion, before attempting renovation.” He was not a saint, nor a pessimist, but had a love for geology and anthropology and seems to epitomize the freedom and vastness of the West. The meditation or set piece about the sublime echoes in my mind, as such a description of how I feel in nature, and how I felt, New England born and bred, at standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first, second, and every time (8 times so far) and one venturing below the rim, but not to the River yet. The sublime is apparently the language or music my body, mind, and soul understand the best.
“The Grand Canyon painting (The Chasm of the Colorado by Moran) reached back to an older notion of the sublime that did not suit American, middle class, or Christian needs. Edmund Burke’s influential essay distinguishing between the beautiful and the sublime (1757)had identified the latter with the ideas of pain, danger, even death; the sublime was a feeling of terror evoked by the landscape, not a feeling of pleasure or relaxation, though it could bring a peculiar kind of delight. The experience of the sublime lay beyond reason; it defied human understanding, control, or activity. To feel the sublime was to be swept by incomprehensible powers. That was exactly what Moran felt standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but that was not what most Americans wanted to feel about themselves confronting the natural world. They wanted to feel a surge of wonder, but the wonder should leave them in control, or at least leave them reassured that nature was under the control of a God who looked kindly on the American people and had their welfare in mind.”
Fellow geologist Clarence Dutton: “The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, in Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland, or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold and striking would at first only seem grotesque. The colors and tones, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones that are conspicuously absent. But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and even majesty; that colors that had been esteemed unrefined, immodest, and glaring, are as expressive, tender, changeful and capacious of effects as any others.”
Now the sublime took on a new meaning. It continued to refer to those peaks emotions that bring a shiver, a thrill, a sense of the extraordinary power beyond the human. But now the sublime experience came from grasping the full story of a geological landscape developing over hundreds of millions of years- building up land forms and tearing them down, creating with quotidian forces the most incredible effects. “It is hard to realize that this is the work of the blind forces of nature,” Dutton writes. “We feel like mere insects crawling along the street of a city flanked with immense temples.”
Dutton named many of the features of the Grand Canyon. “Pointedly, he does not draw them from the Christian religion- a Saint Peter’s or Church of the Redeemer. Instead, he turns to the ancient pagan religions, which make no belief claim on Americans, but suggest a poetry of power. Asia furnishes the Hindu Amphitheater, Vishnu’s Temple, and Shiva’s Temples. In that borrowing, DUtton initiated a trend that produced temples named for Confucius, Mencius, Isis, and Zoroaster along with the Tower of Ra, Cheops Pyramid, and the Buddha Cloister. On the south side eventually appeared a contrasting section named in honor of leading scientists; Darwin Plateau, Wallace Butte, Lyell Butte, Newton Butte, etc. The eye can move from the old city of superstition to the new one of enlightenment.
The names are meant to reduce the incomprehensible to the manageable. Yet he acknowledges that names cannot really capture the overwhelming power of nature in this place- a nature whose antiquity far exceeds the most ancient human civilizations and whose power can make even industrial America catch its breath. When late afternoon comes to the Canyon all names and stories dissolve into a haze of color. as the sun reddens towards sunset, the walls turn bright yellow, orange, crimson. “The blaze of sunlight poured over an illimitable surface of glowing red is flung back into the gulf, and commingling with the blue haze, turns it into a sea of purple of most imperial hue- so rich, so strong, so pure that it makes the heart ache and the throat tighten.” (Dutton) Nature still has the power to summon up all the feelings of the sublime- feelings instructed and not suppressed by the discoveries of geology, physics, and paleontology.
Powell: “It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of paradise.”
“Powell relished topography, geomorphology, and physiography. He was, and had been since his adolescent years in Illinois, a passionate student of the lay of the land. Where did rivers come from and where did they go, was always his beginning point. Rivers changed their course over time, and that history made him curious. Rivers washed away dirt and uncovered a past when strange forms of life swam the waters and walked the earth. The land was constantly in motion, presenting a different face to its inhabitants from year to year, a restlessness that matched his own.”
The amount of erosion that had occurred in this place, Powell observed, “is so great as almost to stagger belief.” One hundred replicas of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington could be dropped into the Grand Canyon without filling it. A vast labyrinth of deep gorges has been excavated, extending to every part of this region, and should we compute the amount of rock necessary to fill these to the general level of the country, we should have but a meager term of comparison for the sum the material which a has been carried away by rains and rivers.
Nowhere on the Colorado Plateau did Powell find evidence of a catastrophic past...” The agencies of Nature,” he wrote, “produce great results- results no less than the carving of a mountain range out of a much larger block lifted from beneath the sea; not by an extravagant and violent use of power, but by the slow agencies which may be observed throughout the world still acting in the same slow, patient, manner.” Seas advanced and retreated, thick sediments formed on the bottom of those seas, the sediments rose slowly into mountains, rivers cut canyons through them. “There will come a time when the desolate land of Titanic rock shall become a valley of many valleys, and yet again the sea will invade the land, and the coral animals build their reefs in the infinitesimal laboratories of life...when the people shall be changed, by the chemistry of life, into new forms; monsters of the deep shall live and die, and their bones be buried in the coral sands. Then other mountains and other hills shall be washed into the Colorado Sea, and coral reefs and shales, and bones, and disintegrated mountains, shall be made into beds of rock, for a new land, where new rivers shall flow. Thus ever the land and sea are changing; old lands are buried, new lands are born; and with advancing periods new complexities of rock are found, and new complexities of life evolved.”
The history of the treatment of Native Americans is shameful in our past; and I think Powell could have done more, but I think his skill as a politician was not his greatest strength, so that is too harsh. He was an early proponent of photographic techniques and steered the use of not at the River or Canyon, those were better memorialized in paintings, but to document the life of the Native Americans.
Powell seemed to be arguing that it was not enough for Americans to understand or appreciate nature or be inspired by it. People belong in our pictures and places. The Indians are also a source of beauty in the landscape, as are their crops, adobe cities, brushy huts, and household artifacts. They must not be erased or dismissed. A science that leaves the native people out is partial and inadequate. So too is an art that does not integrate them into its sense of beauty. The American mind must stretch back into the distant past to see what the land had been like before any humans existed, but it also must come forward into the more recent past, the non-European past, tracing the sequence of cultures and their stratigraphy to the land. Powell’s mind leaped nimbly back and forth between the unpeopled panoramas on one hand, and on the photographs of the day like three Paiute girls sitting on the ground or an Indian family preparing a meal.”
Thus Powell’s mission was to promote a more secularized but still sublime history of the land while also promoting a more inclusive, deeper understanding of human settlement and inhabitation. No one else on his staff fully shared that integrative ambition, nor for that matter was it the way in which most Americans coming into the country looked about them and tried to understand. It was Powell’s special vision. Such a vision of land and people, old inhabitants and newcomers, of people trying to inhabit a place successfully, would eventually embroil him in politics and economics as well as in art and science.
Conservation was another theme in the book, and Powell learned about this sere, arid land and what it could do, and was passionately criticized and eventually overcome by his opponents who wanted voracious progress and development where it may not be able to be supported. The numbers are astounding, but what I really want to know, is what the fossil water tasted like, and if there is still any left?
Powell:”when all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the the Canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region.” A century later, Powell’s estimate of forty million acres of irrigated land in the West would prove amazingly close to the mark- but only if one included the unexpected explosion of deep well irrigation on the Great Plains. Nebraska would one day pump up enough fossil water to irrigate over six million acres a year; Texas five million acres.”
I could go on and on, this book had such an impact, so far, my favorite book of 2018. In this current political climate, I took some solace in the fact that politics has always been a struggle between our basest natures and better angels, and that America despite its wrenching, terrible history, still has its moments of shining glory, and the land and its people are mine to know and learn and love. It gave me some hope I was lacking. Such a great story and read, from the charmingly mundane (Powell bragged he could tell the difference between fish caught in the Sierra Nevada, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies)to the big themes of his life, the author writes quite eloquently, such as this:
“Powell came looking for a Colorado River in the realm of epistemology and value, nature and the human emergence out of nature’s cradle. Ever the map maker, he wanted to find order in philosophy and landscape and put down its lineaments on paper-philosophy’s watersheds, elevations, contour lines, geologic formations- in order to identify the best place to build a civilization.”
Contemporaries of both positive and negative feelings of Powell and his work agreed on some of his legacies: as one “of the century’s most colossal figures in western exploration,” he never forgot the humanity of the native peoples of the West and remained the director of the Ethnology Department of the Interior even as he slipped into physical and mental decline. He championed the use of science and research to inform decisions at a policy level while also supporting art and writing essays and books. This man defined the term explorer and I can just see him, famously one-armed, scaling canyon walls (and sometimes getting stuck) and looking so curiously at everything. He is the West, the spirit of wandering and restlessness that many of us know very well. He epitomizes this time in American history, when “the still young American nation rose out of the raw materials of a diverse land and the hard labor of its people...He was at the center of a change away from a careless, unplanned exploitation of nature to a more thoughtful, careful ethic of conservation. He had learned that ethic as he had learned the natural contours of the continent, by days and years spent traveling on foot, by mule, and by rail- learned it through the soles of his feet...”
Amen, and may we all do the same.
I was fascinated by this biography, and normally they are not my thing; this one made me hungry to read more from this historian since he gets it, he knows how to make history come alive and engross us, which is really achingly rare. History teaches us the mistakes and successes of the past, and the only way to prevent the same horrors happen is to learn from them. I did not know too much of Powell’s life but it was always a tantalizing story: the first running of a wild Colorado River. I revere the River for the stunning landscapes it creates and it is always like a pilgrimage when I cross the Rockies, cross its headwaters, and follow it down through Colorado and Utah and Arizona. I have stood on its banks and seen it near and far, and near worshipped at the red rock altars it reveals in the rock. Powell is still shrouded in some mystery for me; there is not a lot that survives of the inner life and what he thought and felt, but there is enough to know he felt the holiness (more of a scientific and secular bent, but some of his descriptions talk of the sublimity, more to come later) of the West and was an early advocate for the Native Americans, as flawed as his life and views ended up being.
Powell’s words: “the landscape everywhere, away from the river, is of rock- cliffs of rock, tables of rock, plateaus of rock, terraces of rock, crags of rock- ten thousand strangely carved forms; rocks everywhere, and no vegetation, no soil, no sand...When thinking of these rocks one must not conceive of piles of boulders or heaps of fragments, but of a whole land of naked rock, with giant forms carved on it: cathedral-shaped buttes, towering hundreds or thousands of feet, cliffs that cannot be scaled, and canyon walls that shrink the river into insignificance, with vast, hollow domes and tall pinnacles and shafts set on the verge overhead; and all highly colored- buff, gray, red, brown, and chocolate...”
Powell became immersed in politics for the latter part of his life, and those chapters do seem to drag a bit and are less lively. He did a lot of writing later in life and came from a place where he “believed that the first requirement is to know the world as it is, honestly and without illusion, before attempting renovation.” He was not a saint, nor a pessimist, but had a love for geology and anthropology and seems to epitomize the freedom and vastness of the West. The meditation or set piece about the sublime echoes in my mind, as such a description of how I feel in nature, and how I felt, New England born and bred, at standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon for the first, second, and every time (8 times so far) and one venturing below the rim, but not to the River yet. The sublime is apparently the language or music my body, mind, and soul understand the best.
“The Grand Canyon painting (The Chasm of the Colorado by Moran) reached back to an older notion of the sublime that did not suit American, middle class, or Christian needs. Edmund Burke’s influential essay distinguishing between the beautiful and the sublime (1757)had identified the latter with the ideas of pain, danger, even death; the sublime was a feeling of terror evoked by the landscape, not a feeling of pleasure or relaxation, though it could bring a peculiar kind of delight. The experience of the sublime lay beyond reason; it defied human understanding, control, or activity. To feel the sublime was to be swept by incomprehensible powers. That was exactly what Moran felt standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, but that was not what most Americans wanted to feel about themselves confronting the natural world. They wanted to feel a surge of wonder, but the wonder should leave them in control, or at least leave them reassured that nature was under the control of a God who looked kindly on the American people and had their welfare in mind.”
Fellow geologist Clarence Dutton: “The lover of nature, whose perceptions have been trained in the Alps, in Italy, in Germany, or New England, in the Appalachians or Cordilleras, in Scotland, or Colorado, would enter this strange region with a shock, and dwell there for a time with a sense of oppression, and perhaps with horror. Whatsoever things he had learned to regard as beautiful and noble he would seldom or never see, and whatsoever he might see would appear to him as anything but beautiful and noble. Whatsoever might be bold and striking would at first only seem grotesque. The colors and tones, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones that are conspicuously absent. But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have become replete with strength and even majesty; that colors that had been esteemed unrefined, immodest, and glaring, are as expressive, tender, changeful and capacious of effects as any others.”
Now the sublime took on a new meaning. It continued to refer to those peaks emotions that bring a shiver, a thrill, a sense of the extraordinary power beyond the human. But now the sublime experience came from grasping the full story of a geological landscape developing over hundreds of millions of years- building up land forms and tearing them down, creating with quotidian forces the most incredible effects. “It is hard to realize that this is the work of the blind forces of nature,” Dutton writes. “We feel like mere insects crawling along the street of a city flanked with immense temples.”
Dutton named many of the features of the Grand Canyon. “Pointedly, he does not draw them from the Christian religion- a Saint Peter’s or Church of the Redeemer. Instead, he turns to the ancient pagan religions, which make no belief claim on Americans, but suggest a poetry of power. Asia furnishes the Hindu Amphitheater, Vishnu’s Temple, and Shiva’s Temples. In that borrowing, DUtton initiated a trend that produced temples named for Confucius, Mencius, Isis, and Zoroaster along with the Tower of Ra, Cheops Pyramid, and the Buddha Cloister. On the south side eventually appeared a contrasting section named in honor of leading scientists; Darwin Plateau, Wallace Butte, Lyell Butte, Newton Butte, etc. The eye can move from the old city of superstition to the new one of enlightenment.
The names are meant to reduce the incomprehensible to the manageable. Yet he acknowledges that names cannot really capture the overwhelming power of nature in this place- a nature whose antiquity far exceeds the most ancient human civilizations and whose power can make even industrial America catch its breath. When late afternoon comes to the Canyon all names and stories dissolve into a haze of color. as the sun reddens towards sunset, the walls turn bright yellow, orange, crimson. “The blaze of sunlight poured over an illimitable surface of glowing red is flung back into the gulf, and commingling with the blue haze, turns it into a sea of purple of most imperial hue- so rich, so strong, so pure that it makes the heart ache and the throat tighten.” (Dutton) Nature still has the power to summon up all the feelings of the sublime- feelings instructed and not suppressed by the discoveries of geology, physics, and paleontology.
Powell: “It is a region more difficult to traverse than the Alps or the Himalayas, but if strength and courage are sufficient for the task, by a year’s toil a concept of sublimity can be obtained never again to be equaled on the hither side of paradise.”
“Powell relished topography, geomorphology, and physiography. He was, and had been since his adolescent years in Illinois, a passionate student of the lay of the land. Where did rivers come from and where did they go, was always his beginning point. Rivers changed their course over time, and that history made him curious. Rivers washed away dirt and uncovered a past when strange forms of life swam the waters and walked the earth. The land was constantly in motion, presenting a different face to its inhabitants from year to year, a restlessness that matched his own.”
The amount of erosion that had occurred in this place, Powell observed, “is so great as almost to stagger belief.” One hundred replicas of New Hampshire’s Mount Washington could be dropped into the Grand Canyon without filling it. A vast labyrinth of deep gorges has been excavated, extending to every part of this region, and should we compute the amount of rock necessary to fill these to the general level of the country, we should have but a meager term of comparison for the sum the material which a has been carried away by rains and rivers.
Nowhere on the Colorado Plateau did Powell find evidence of a catastrophic past...” The agencies of Nature,” he wrote, “produce great results- results no less than the carving of a mountain range out of a much larger block lifted from beneath the sea; not by an extravagant and violent use of power, but by the slow agencies which may be observed throughout the world still acting in the same slow, patient, manner.” Seas advanced and retreated, thick sediments formed on the bottom of those seas, the sediments rose slowly into mountains, rivers cut canyons through them. “There will come a time when the desolate land of Titanic rock shall become a valley of many valleys, and yet again the sea will invade the land, and the coral animals build their reefs in the infinitesimal laboratories of life...when the people shall be changed, by the chemistry of life, into new forms; monsters of the deep shall live and die, and their bones be buried in the coral sands. Then other mountains and other hills shall be washed into the Colorado Sea, and coral reefs and shales, and bones, and disintegrated mountains, shall be made into beds of rock, for a new land, where new rivers shall flow. Thus ever the land and sea are changing; old lands are buried, new lands are born; and with advancing periods new complexities of rock are found, and new complexities of life evolved.”
The history of the treatment of Native Americans is shameful in our past; and I think Powell could have done more, but I think his skill as a politician was not his greatest strength, so that is too harsh. He was an early proponent of photographic techniques and steered the use of not at the River or Canyon, those were better memorialized in paintings, but to document the life of the Native Americans.
Powell seemed to be arguing that it was not enough for Americans to understand or appreciate nature or be inspired by it. People belong in our pictures and places. The Indians are also a source of beauty in the landscape, as are their crops, adobe cities, brushy huts, and household artifacts. They must not be erased or dismissed. A science that leaves the native people out is partial and inadequate. So too is an art that does not integrate them into its sense of beauty. The American mind must stretch back into the distant past to see what the land had been like before any humans existed, but it also must come forward into the more recent past, the non-European past, tracing the sequence of cultures and their stratigraphy to the land. Powell’s mind leaped nimbly back and forth between the unpeopled panoramas on one hand, and on the photographs of the day like three Paiute girls sitting on the ground or an Indian family preparing a meal.”
Thus Powell’s mission was to promote a more secularized but still sublime history of the land while also promoting a more inclusive, deeper understanding of human settlement and inhabitation. No one else on his staff fully shared that integrative ambition, nor for that matter was it the way in which most Americans coming into the country looked about them and tried to understand. It was Powell’s special vision. Such a vision of land and people, old inhabitants and newcomers, of people trying to inhabit a place successfully, would eventually embroil him in politics and economics as well as in art and science.
Conservation was another theme in the book, and Powell learned about this sere, arid land and what it could do, and was passionately criticized and eventually overcome by his opponents who wanted voracious progress and development where it may not be able to be supported. The numbers are astounding, but what I really want to know, is what the fossil water tasted like, and if there is still any left?
Powell:”when all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the the Canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region, there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all this arid region.” A century later, Powell’s estimate of forty million acres of irrigated land in the West would prove amazingly close to the mark- but only if one included the unexpected explosion of deep well irrigation on the Great Plains. Nebraska would one day pump up enough fossil water to irrigate over six million acres a year; Texas five million acres.”
I could go on and on, this book had such an impact, so far, my favorite book of 2018. In this current political climate, I took some solace in the fact that politics has always been a struggle between our basest natures and better angels, and that America despite its wrenching, terrible history, still has its moments of shining glory, and the land and its people are mine to know and learn and love. It gave me some hope I was lacking. Such a great story and read, from the charmingly mundane (Powell bragged he could tell the difference between fish caught in the Sierra Nevada, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies)to the big themes of his life, the author writes quite eloquently, such as this:
“Powell came looking for a Colorado River in the realm of epistemology and value, nature and the human emergence out of nature’s cradle. Ever the map maker, he wanted to find order in philosophy and landscape and put down its lineaments on paper-philosophy’s watersheds, elevations, contour lines, geologic formations- in order to identify the best place to build a civilization.”
Contemporaries of both positive and negative feelings of Powell and his work agreed on some of his legacies: as one “of the century’s most colossal figures in western exploration,” he never forgot the humanity of the native peoples of the West and remained the director of the Ethnology Department of the Interior even as he slipped into physical and mental decline. He championed the use of science and research to inform decisions at a policy level while also supporting art and writing essays and books. This man defined the term explorer and I can just see him, famously one-armed, scaling canyon walls (and sometimes getting stuck) and looking so curiously at everything. He is the West, the spirit of wandering and restlessness that many of us know very well. He epitomizes this time in American history, when “the still young American nation rose out of the raw materials of a diverse land and the hard labor of its people...He was at the center of a change away from a careless, unplanned exploitation of nature to a more thoughtful, careful ethic of conservation. He had learned that ethic as he had learned the natural contours of the continent, by days and years spent traveling on foot, by mule, and by rail- learned it through the soles of his feet...”
Amen, and may we all do the same.
December 14, 2012
Excellent; less hagiographic than Stegner's Powell bio
My comment at the end of my title refers to Wallace Stegner's "Beyond the 100th Meridian." While that is a very good book, it comes close to perpetuating a myth of Saint John Wesley Powell.
Compared to Stegner, who may be a point of reference for many readers curious about this book, Worster paints a far more complete picture of Powell, delving much deeper into journals and letters kept by colleagues, underlings, and exploratory co-travlers of his.
We see a Powell who was NOT totally Stegner's beknighted prophet of a kinder, gentler Western development. Powell did favor independent farmers over corporate conglomerates, but just as much as Nevada's Sen. Stewart, he wanted to drain every last drop from the Colorado. And, Worster also shows how he ran afoul of the most ardent forest conservation advocates late in his Washington career.
In short, Worster indicates the semi-mythical Powell, not just of Stegner but some other writers, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Worster puts Powell's evangelical -- yes, evangelical -- fervor for irrigation in the backdrop of his childhood Methodism. While there's no way of proving this, it is certainly a reasonable interpretation.
He also paints a broader picture of Powell the bureaucrat. Here again, he differs somewhat from Stegner, suggesting that Powell bears a bit of the blame, at least, for his own wing-clipping by Stewart et al late in his career.
At the same time, Worster gives a detailed portrait of just how hard-working Powell was, both as a Washingtonian and the explorer of the Colorado River and Plateau.
In essence, this is "revisionist history" at its best and most proper.
My comment at the end of my title refers to Wallace Stegner's "Beyond the 100th Meridian." While that is a very good book, it comes close to perpetuating a myth of Saint John Wesley Powell.
Compared to Stegner, who may be a point of reference for many readers curious about this book, Worster paints a far more complete picture of Powell, delving much deeper into journals and letters kept by colleagues, underlings, and exploratory co-travlers of his.
We see a Powell who was NOT totally Stegner's beknighted prophet of a kinder, gentler Western development. Powell did favor independent farmers over corporate conglomerates, but just as much as Nevada's Sen. Stewart, he wanted to drain every last drop from the Colorado. And, Worster also shows how he ran afoul of the most ardent forest conservation advocates late in his Washington career.
In short, Worster indicates the semi-mythical Powell, not just of Stegner but some other writers, should be taken with a grain of salt.
Worster puts Powell's evangelical -- yes, evangelical -- fervor for irrigation in the backdrop of his childhood Methodism. While there's no way of proving this, it is certainly a reasonable interpretation.
He also paints a broader picture of Powell the bureaucrat. Here again, he differs somewhat from Stegner, suggesting that Powell bears a bit of the blame, at least, for his own wing-clipping by Stewart et al late in his career.
At the same time, Worster gives a detailed portrait of just how hard-working Powell was, both as a Washingtonian and the explorer of the Colorado River and Plateau.
In essence, this is "revisionist history" at its best and most proper.
January 11, 2014
this man and this book blew me away. Powell represents everything that was American what Western exploration in the 19th century. It was a period of unparalleled expectation that our country would be the model for how to rule the world. The western landscape matched that Sensibility. It was wide open. It was rugged. It wasn't untamed.
Powell's energy also important for our country. nothing would stop his focus. he saw irrigation and geology as the keys to the new century. And he worked tirelessly to see this vision come to fruition.
Perhaps what he is best known for, his twice rafted Colorado River expedition, set in motion what would become the National Park idea. When he visited the Grand Canyon for the very first time in those wooden boats, a man with only one arm, he experienced what people even today experience: awe on the grandest scale. And yet Powell was able to use all that awe into energy into conserving our environment so all could enjoy it. even the depths of the Grand Canyon.
Great book, greater man.
Powell's energy also important for our country. nothing would stop his focus. he saw irrigation and geology as the keys to the new century. And he worked tirelessly to see this vision come to fruition.
Perhaps what he is best known for, his twice rafted Colorado River expedition, set in motion what would become the National Park idea. When he visited the Grand Canyon for the very first time in those wooden boats, a man with only one arm, he experienced what people even today experience: awe on the grandest scale. And yet Powell was able to use all that awe into energy into conserving our environment so all could enjoy it. even the depths of the Grand Canyon.
Great book, greater man.
May 5, 2011
The Grand Canyon has always captured my attention, and the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition through its depths has always held the place of mythic hero.
The problem with reading a biography of this scope, length, and depth is that the hero becomes human, not mythic.
Worster’s biography takes us step by step through Powell’s life, from his peripatetic formative years, to his great surveys of the Colorado Plateau. We even endure years and years of his life as an administrator of the USGS in Washington, D.C.
Through it all Major Powell comes across as an eminently sensible man, but most of his life lacks the color of his two forays upon Grand Canyon’s Colorado River. As a result, the highlights come early in his life. After that, his adventures are political ones... interesting in their own way, but not gripping.
Certainly this is a work that will be appreciated by hard-core historians, but others may find Powell’s story losing its spark as the years go by.
The problem with reading a biography of this scope, length, and depth is that the hero becomes human, not mythic.
Worster’s biography takes us step by step through Powell’s life, from his peripatetic formative years, to his great surveys of the Colorado Plateau. We even endure years and years of his life as an administrator of the USGS in Washington, D.C.
Through it all Major Powell comes across as an eminently sensible man, but most of his life lacks the color of his two forays upon Grand Canyon’s Colorado River. As a result, the highlights come early in his life. After that, his adventures are political ones... interesting in their own way, but not gripping.
Certainly this is a work that will be appreciated by hard-core historians, but others may find Powell’s story losing its spark as the years go by.
November 25, 2008
Okay, I feel like I need some non-fiction once in awhile, and I love biographies. Picked this up, began wading through it as he waded through the Colorado river in 1869. Too much about his life pre 1869, then it went on and on and on, 500+ pages. I figured I could skim after about halfway, just to see how his life continued, so I skimmed, and skimmed and skimmed, then eventually realized I DIDN'T CARE HOW HIS LIFE CONTINUED, so last night, I gave up. Interesting historical exploration, ya da ya da. Don't know WHO could read the entire thing
October 3, 2009
This book is hereby abandoned. Powell's expeditions could not have been so arduous.
December 20, 2018
In A River Running West, Donald Worster, one of America's foremost historians of the environment and the west, authored a biography of one of the most important men of the late nineteenth century, John Wesley Powell. Powell was a noticeable figure. He had a long beard that resembled the Old Testament prophet and had lost an arm at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. This limitation did not slow him down at all. He famously explored the Colorado River, a dangerous feat that Worster thinks ranks Powell's expedition second only to the that of Lewis and Clark in the importance of the American west. Although he had almost no formal education, Powell was scientist, who always considered scientific fact as the most important consideration. He relied on climatology, geography, and hydrography, among other scientific fields, over ideology, wishful thinking, and religion, when making policy recommendations. This is a long book, but very much worth the read.
March 8, 2021
The book is terrific in capturing Powell´s participation, sometimes as driver and sometimes as passenger, in the great American movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Methodist traditions of his family fostered a hatred of slavery and his enlistment in the Civil War as well as a deep sense of the humanity of Native Americans. His love for and interest in nature, however, led him to a belief in evolution and rationalism that saw the indigenous cultures as doomed. His advocacy of government support for science was more successful than the use of scientific inquiry in making policy.
For me, it was not as successful in portraying Powell´s personality.
The chapters are structured on topics, so there are sometimes divergences from strict chronological order, but the index provides an easy way to refresh one´s memory of persons and events. The photographs are well chosen, but the selection of maps frustrated me.
For me, it was not as successful in portraying Powell´s personality.
The chapters are structured on topics, so there are sometimes divergences from strict chronological order, but the index provides an easy way to refresh one´s memory of persons and events. The photographs are well chosen, but the selection of maps frustrated me.
July 4, 2021
The book is terrific in capturing Powell´s participation, sometimes as a driver and sometimes as a passenger, in the great American movements of the second half of the nineteenth century. The Methodist traditions of his family fostered a hatred of slavery and his enlistment in the Civil War as well as a deep sense of the humanity of Native Americans. His love for and interest in nature, however, led him to a belief in evolution and rationalism that saw the indigenous cultures as doomed. His advocacy of government support for science was more successful than the use of scientific inquiry in making policy. I think it went too long. The part after the Grand Canyon went on too long. A great American.
December 20, 2020
Portrayal of the various tensions as the west of America was occupied is quite black and white now but this account explains the context and nuances. Many Americans were in fact concerned that Native Americans were given rights and protected but ultimately commerce and the huge numbers of new immigrants to the US overpowered. Portrays the feelings of futility many Americans had. The reservations were a compromise. Perverted by corruption. Indians treated as lesser humans. Their terror.
Very sad story.
Very sad story.
April 22, 2018
I'm glad I read this book. It introduced me to the entire man and not just the explorer. In the end I realized that I disagreed with some of his policies that are still affecting those of us in the west. That in turn lessened my idealization of the very real man grappling with very real problems.
November 3, 2019
Such an interesting man. I had no previous knowledge of the rest of his life beyond his Colorado expeditions.
Read
April 21, 2022My god this book is dense. And dry. I'll try again with this later.
August 2, 2023
New perspective on John Wesley (the original) for me. Very cool to learn about JWP. Interesting the intertwinings of Joseph Smith, too, in the beginning.
September 4, 2023
John Wesley Powell is fascinating, was years ahead of his time, and is deserving of much more acclaim!
August 25, 2018
This book took me forever to read because it’s an almost six hundred page, extremely thorough biography of John Wesley Powell. You may have known him as the one-armed man who was the first white man to ever navigate the entire Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. He was more than that, he became the director of the U.S. Geological Survey and helped shape the vision of the colonization and white settlement of the West. He was a man who relied solely on science as a means and ends of progress and civilization. Of course this always entails the attempted destruction and annihilation of Native people, lands, and culture. Powell emphasized the need to assimilate and progress scientifically so Native Americans could become “civilized”. What stood out about Powell was his genuine interest in learning about the people he met and his extremely flawed attempts to help them.
Powell actually led two expeditions down the Colorado and Grand Canyon. During the first trip, he spent a lot of time documenting the beauty of the Grand Canyon. The second trip was not really about completing the trip through the Grand Canyon, but surveying the land along the Colorado River. The danger of these trips cannot be over emphasized. The members of the expeditions did not really enjoy dangerous rapids in heavy, wooden boats. The way the trips were structured was interesting; Powell would leave his group to gather more supplies or find a better supply route, sometimes leaving his expedition for weeks on their own. Naturally many of the members questioned his leadership style.
Reading about the expeditions was of course the highlight. Then you spend the next two hundred pages about his life after, which while significant is not super interesting. He spent a lot of time in the political arena, fighting against other people’s argument that the USGS provide information to serve the mining industry, versus the need to survey the West to provide information about the land and water resources, and their irrigability.
What did strike me is that Powell had a yeoman vision of the West. He urged Congress to adopt a new form of surveying more conducive to the West, one that centered on the aridity of the land and cooperative farming. Obviously this was never adopted.
In any case, it was a very well-researched book, but I only recommend it for people who want to know basically everything about Powell.
Powell actually led two expeditions down the Colorado and Grand Canyon. During the first trip, he spent a lot of time documenting the beauty of the Grand Canyon. The second trip was not really about completing the trip through the Grand Canyon, but surveying the land along the Colorado River. The danger of these trips cannot be over emphasized. The members of the expeditions did not really enjoy dangerous rapids in heavy, wooden boats. The way the trips were structured was interesting; Powell would leave his group to gather more supplies or find a better supply route, sometimes leaving his expedition for weeks on their own. Naturally many of the members questioned his leadership style.
Reading about the expeditions was of course the highlight. Then you spend the next two hundred pages about his life after, which while significant is not super interesting. He spent a lot of time in the political arena, fighting against other people’s argument that the USGS provide information to serve the mining industry, versus the need to survey the West to provide information about the land and water resources, and their irrigability.
What did strike me is that Powell had a yeoman vision of the West. He urged Congress to adopt a new form of surveying more conducive to the West, one that centered on the aridity of the land and cooperative farming. Obviously this was never adopted.
In any case, it was a very well-researched book, but I only recommend it for people who want to know basically everything about Powell.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 27, 2015
I'm going to call this good for now and treat the rest of it as reference material to be delved into as necessary. This is a well written book that presents a complex man in a well contextualized manner. I especially appreciated the way Worster handles the tension between Powell's religious upbringing and the pressures of an increasingly secularized America, as well as the conflict between American expansionism and the limits of the Western environment, particularly the constraints placed by water resources, or the lack thereof, and by the plain beauty of the the surroundings--the lure of preserving that beauty begins to seduce settlers not to develop its resources fully, placing inevitable limits on the "American" dream. Powell was among the earliest to grapple with this.
August 21, 2010
I have read Powell's account of his two trips down the Grand Canyon,but really did not know the Man. I am Voluntering at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area on Lake Powell and decided that now would be a good time to read about "the Major". this was an excellant book(well written) on his life,and what a life he lead. Very little formal education,Civil War Officer (lost his right arm at Shiloh),Explorer of the Grand Canyon(The last unknown and unmaped area in the US)Native American friend & Advocate and first head of USGS. His writings on the irrigation of the West was great insight to the problems we are still facing today. Nomad
February 8, 2016
Aside from being a great chronicle of John Wesley Powell's life and career, this was a great story. Astonishing that less than half the book was devoted to his exploration of the Colorado River (and other rivers). I had no idea what the rest of the book would describe, but I learned about his interest in geology, ethnology, languages, and leadership and management. I also learned about the american government at the time, and how things progress and grow. And I learned about his later life. It seems like he was born and lived at a time when he found he was able to pursue something he really enjoyed.
June 19, 2009
This is a dense book which required three months of reading before I finished it. There were so many people whom Powell influenced and who influenced or antagonized Powell in the years after his first exploration of the Colorado and its canyons and I felt like Worster discussed them all.
This is a readable documented biography with a long section of footnotes and resources.
It gets four stars because I would recommend it to others. It does not get that fifth star because I would never read it again.
This is a readable documented biography with a long section of footnotes and resources.
It gets four stars because I would recommend it to others. It does not get that fifth star because I would never read it again.
March 21, 2015
An awful lot of research went into writing this book on Wes Powell. It was a long read (a couple weeks) but well worth it! I knew very little of Powell before reading this book now I feel I know a fair amount about him. He was essentially a self-taught scientist much admired by most of his contemporaries. He was also very driven taking the time and effort to learn the Hopi language (among others). I have yet to read Stegner's book so I can't compare the two but suffice to say the author covers a lot of ground and makes it interesting along the way.
August 8, 2011
it has been a number of years since I've read the book. But what I remember about the book was an excellent description of the period in which Powell emerged. And how it influenced him.
The explanation of the indians in the west was informative. The author gave some description of how the east and west are different and how water influences so much in the west.
And finally, the development of the usgs.
Powell led a fascinating life and Donald Worster did a great job explaining it.
The explanation of the indians in the west was informative. The author gave some description of how the east and west are different and how water influences so much in the west.
And finally, the development of the usgs.
Powell led a fascinating life and Donald Worster did a great job explaining it.
May 7, 2012
The first part, covering Powell's young life, his Civil War heroism, and his fantastic voyages in the West were great. But the balance of the book, and Powell's life, was much less interesting. The author might have been better off not trying to write this long book on the same scale of Powell's long life.
January 1, 2013
Excellent biography about John Wesley Powell who explored the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. He was also heavily involved with the native Americans and their issues and with geology and several other sciences. Some didn't like him. But, he seems to have done a lot for the West. Enjoyable read.
January 8, 2013
Chapter 5, Down the Great Unknown, what great, suspenseful, humorous, insightful writing. What a trip! You've got to read it, at least this chapter. Worster is a calm type, prone to find paradox and ambiguity. I like his idea of history, strong sense of place, and his light touch with the crazy characters that surrounded this trip down the Green and Colorado Rivers.
June 11, 2013
Powell is one of my favorite men of the West, old or new. Worster's biography is the authoritative work on the life of this important 19th century man. It is not as lyrical as Stegner's 1953 bio, but it's more comprehensive and researched more thoroughly. Even so, I like Stegner's book as much as this one--both are excellent reads on Mr. Powell.
December 5, 2016
Excellent, thorough piece of research, and enjoyable to read. Contains more coverage of Powell's early years and family history than other biographies. Readers should be aware, however, that Worster hardly gives other explorers due credit, and his personal preferences for understanding the world come through quite obviously in places.
October 10, 2010
Long but insightful biography of the discoverer of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell. Go into it knowing that Powell is an avowed environmental Marxist (yes, it's a legitimate brand of Marxism), and the narrative will make much more sense.
Read
August 30, 2008This book was recomended by author Dan Flores as part of the Rocky Mountain Land Library's "A Reading List For the President Elect: A Western Primer for the Next Administration."
May 1, 2011
Long book that took perseverance to finish but very, very interesting to learn about Powell after visiting the Grand Canyon.
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