A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell

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.

Reading this book was like being present at the creation of America. It will appeal especially to U.S. history buffs and to anyone interested in the American West. Worster's telling of the feat that won Powell fame, leading the first expedition down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, has definitely renewed my passion for exploring the West. Powell was a man of ideas, as well as action. For a quarter century he was at the forefront of debates over reserving land for American Indians, how to foster family farming in the arid West, and the thorny issue of water rights. For many years, Powell was a prominent official in Washington, as head of the U.S. Geological Survey, which he helped create, and in other positions. From what I gather in this book, Powell may have been as important as any single individual in making support of scientific research a normal function of the Federal Government. From the perspective of one man's career, Worster touches on a multitude of topics: railroads, telegraph, photography, landscape painting of the West, Mormon settlements, and many more. For the comprehension one gains of American life in those times, this biography is the equal of a first rate novel. Although a work of scholarship, it is written to be enjoyed by the general reader.

The life of John Wesley Powell presents a mystery and a meaning. Powell, of course, achieved fame for his explorations of the Colorado River and surrounding regions, accomplished in two expeditions in 1869 and 1871-72. The romance of a one-armed man, wounded in the Civil War fighting for the Union, now beating the toughest river in the West, retains its charm to this day; Powell's visage graces plaques all over the West, especially at the Grand Canyon. But the bulk of Powell's life was spent not in rugged exploration but behind desks in Washington, as director of the US Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology. In his capacity as a bureaucrat Powell proved a tenacious infighter, successful in all but his most important venture (more on that below). The mystery of Powell's life lies in finding the connection between Powell the explorer and Powell the bureaucrat, which seem at first blush to be at such odds with each other. Donald Worster's biography of Powell does not solve this mystery directly, but provides the material out of which a solution can be constructed. In both endeavors it was Powell's ability to claim and retain the loyalty of subordinates (who, in many cases, did the really serious scientific work) and his extraordinary organizational talent that spelled his success. We can see these skills operating clearly in Worster's careful, detailed, chronological narrative of Powell's life. The battles he fought with his Congressional opponents demanded at least as much finesse as the rapids of the Colorado; Worster's book allows us to see Powell's life, despite the surface incongruity of its two halves, as a fundamentally unified whole. The meaning in Powell's life he shared with many men of his generation in both Europe and America. Raised in a traditional, pious Wesleyan family (hence his given names), he shrugged off the strictures of religion for science; it was to science that he devoted his life, science in which he reposed his trust, science which made his career. The United States still struggles with the conflicts and contradictions between religion which makes its powerful, often deeply conservative, claims, and science, to which we owe our wealth and standing. Powell knew from his mid-twenties to which side he belonged. His experience can still speak to us. Worster's interest in Powell was adumbrated in his earlier, passionate book, *Rivers of Empire* (published in 1985). There Powell's plan to divide the West into hydrological basins, each of which would -- if its water supply was adequate -- serve as the basis for a self-governing, democratic, locally controlled water-use district, became the environmental alternative to the path we actually followed -- the construction of gigantic dams redirecting water hundreds of miles, with concomitant uncontrolled growth, pollution, disfigurement of the landscape, and transfer of untold billions of dollars from the East to the West in perhaps the greatest governmental subsidy in histor

This is a beautiful book: well conceived and exquisitely written. It may sound cliché, but this is surely an instant classic. The genius of Donald Worster's A RIVER RUNNING WEST is not that it provides a compelling and captivating account of the life of John Wesley Powell (it does), but rather that through Powell, Worster tells the story of the settlement of the American West, the history of surveying the American West, and the professionalization of science in the 19th Century. Few individuals have represented their times so comprehensively to allow for such a study (only Ben Franklin jumps readily to mind), but Powell serves as a perfect vehicle for a study of period and place. Further, Worster is arguably the finest contemporary writer on the American West, comparable to past greats De Voto and Stegner. To boot, the book's final sentence is an absolute zinger! Anyone interested in the American West must read this book.

Born in 1834, John Wesley Powell died in 1902, the same year the first steam-powered automobile reached the rim of the Grand Canyon (p. 566). As its title suggests, Donald Worster's new biography is as much a book about Powell as it is about the river that carved the Grand Canyon. "Powell's life is . . . the story of the rising influence of the natural sciences, of rationalism contesting the faith of tradiional religion, and of a new nationalism and secularism taking its place," Worster writes in his Introduction. As Powell "was coming of age, science was rising to influence the study of nature and culture and even making the laws. In his day science meant, above all, geology, evolution, and Darwinism. The contest of those ideas with what is now called religious fundamentalism for supremacy in the American mind is mirrored in Powell as nowhere else" (pp. xii-xiii).Worster succeeds in bringing Powell to life in a book that is both well-written and well-researched. We learn, for instance, that although they never met, Powell grew up in Wisconsin less than 100 miles from John Muir. "Both experienced the Wisconsin world of Protestantism, capital accumulation and work ethic, mixed with an intimacy of the land. Both would eventually go into the far-off West to find new meaning for their lives" (p. 50). At age 26, Powell declared himself a "Naturalist," a self-educated man "well versed in the natural history of plants and animals, could tell one species from another, knew the difference between Cretaceous and Carboniferous periods of geology, and spent time collecting for a museum" (p. 60). As a young man, Powell was "in love with the land, the outdoors, the flow of rivers, and the nation's material life" (p. 62). Worster writes, rivers "flowed through the landscape of his mind like songs of freedom and escape. They sang of catfish, beaver, blue herons, grape vines festooning the trees, the smell of mud" (p. 76). After Powell loses his right arm to a musket ball in the Civil War, Worster's biography takes a breathtaking turn to the West.Part Two, "Canyons of the Colorado" (pp. 107-380), is truly the heart and soul of this book. We find Powell exploring "The Great Unknown" (p. 184) of the West in these pages, climbing the "highest peaks in the Rockies" (p. 146), sleeping "on hard rocks and sand" (p. 260) "under western stars in a leaking tent" (p. 370), and travelling the Colorado River in 1869 with the Colorado River Exploring Expedition, a group of men "gathered from the wayside and by chance meetings, men who were all misfits by the standards of domestic middle-class life" (p. 162). I could hear the roar of the River and even sense Powell's feelings of "awe and wonder" in Worster's writing. Worster reveals his subject wanting "nothing less than to possess the vast interior space of the Colorado River as his own intellectual property, to measure it off and stake it out in seven-league boots" (p. 152). Powell perceived "the natural worl