February 18, 2001
An explorer seen as an exemplary 19th-century American.
By JOHN VERNON
A RIVER RUNNING WEST
The Life of John Wesley Powell.
By Donald Worster.
Illustrated. 673 pp. New York:
Oxford University Press. $35.
n May 24, 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell and nine other men gathered on the Green River in the Wyoming Territory beneath a bridge built for the just-completed transcontinental railroad. There they launched four boats to begin the last major voyage of exploration in United States history, through its only remaining stretch of terra incognita: the remote and barren course of the Green and Colorado Rivers south from Wyoming into the red rock wilderness of Utah and Arizona. Ninety-eight days and 1,000 miles later, Powell emerged from the Grand Canyon with only five half-starved men and just two boats. They had endured harrowing rapids, smashed and battered boats, and the defection of part of the crew. At the end of their journey, the first English-speaking people they met were a Mormon family on the lookout for the remains of Powell and his crew floating in the river.
In his biography of Powell, ''A River Running West,'' Donald Worster expresses the significance of this voyage succinctly: ''If Lewis and Clark opened a century of exploration, Powell closed it with comparable success.'' Still, one might quibble with the word ''comparable.'' Even Powell's best-known biographer, Wallace Stegner, called the 1869 voyage ''relatively unimportant.'' It was rather symbolic and symptomatic, Stegner said -- but in this instance ''symbolic'' pulls a lot of freight. If Powell's most lasting achievements lay in his later career as a Washington bureaucrat and policy maker, the 1869 voyage set both the tone and major themes of that career. In Powell's view, the Far West required a major overhaul of the land and water laws that historically had fueled American boosterism. It was a place that compelled both settlers and explorers to adapt to its natural limitations and harsh conditions, and what greater example of those conditions existed than the brutally beautiful landscape of the Green and Colorado Rivers?
''A River Running West'' is the first biography of Powell (1834-1902) since Stegner's ''Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,'' published in 1954. (An earlier biography, William Culp Darragh's ''Powell of the Colorado,'' appeared in 1951.) From the outset, Worster acknowledges Stegner's book as ''one of the most influential . . . ever written about the West.'' It also accounts for Powell's canonization in recent years, says Worster, whose portrait of Powell aspires to be something of a corrective. Worster, who teaches history at the University of Kansas, gathers together more material on Powell than that contained in both previous biographies combined, and the result is a more complex and richly detailed picture of a man he sees as an exemplary 19th-century American.
Powell's parents immigrated from England to the New World in 1830 and spent their son's youth moving west. Worster's vivid account of their Methodist roots, their restless relocations, and their fierce opposition to slavery reads like the story of mid-19th-century Midwestern America. He places the Powells in a context of historical change and describes their son as both the product and, in his later career, the agent of that change. Educated by farmer-philosophers, yet ''always the autodidact,'' Powell enlisted in the Civil War, quickly rose through the ranks, lost his right arm at Shiloh and wound up a major. Meanwhile, he was teaching himself geography, geology and the principles of surveying. In Worster's view, Powell's career embodies the rise of American science and its replacement of traditional religion in American life. The man named by his father for the founder of Methodism became one of the most prominent champions of Darwin in the United States.
After his two Colorado River expeditions -- the 1869 voyage was followed by a second one in 1871, in which he famously ran the rivers while seated on a chair nailed on the lead boat's middle compartment -- Powell helped found the United States Geological Survey and became its second director. And he was the founder and first director of the federal Bureau of Ethnology, which he ran for more than 20 years. His idea about the antecedence of rivers -- that most rivers were there before their accompanying mountains uplifted -- helped to confirm the victory of uniformitarianism in American geology, the notion that most geological change is slow and unvarying (as opposed to catastrophism, the doctrine that geological change is discontinuous and sudden). But Powell the ethnologist had perhaps a more lasting influence, Worster writes, describing Powell's attitude toward American Indians as unusually sympathetic, balanced and humane for his time. His study of Indian languages became the foundation of all such work in the 20th century.
Still, it is Powell the adviser to Congressional select committees on the irrigation and settlement of the West -- Powell the policy maker and expert on arid Western lands -- who receives Worster's most minute attention. Both Stegner and Bernard De Voto saw Powell as something of an environmental prophet and saint. Not completely true, Worster contends; his description of Powell's views brings clarity and balance to a complex and controversial topic. Yes, Powell warned about the ecological and economic consequences of exploiting the West; yes, he called for limited settlement of Western lands, for, as he said, there is not sufficient water to irrigate the region. But throughout his career Powell also held that science and reason must force nature into submission, and this meant ''driving the wildness out of the land, turning the continent into a more productive garden'' and therefore building dams -- lots of them. According to Worster, Powell never entirely reconciled the contradiction between these competing principles.
Worster sees Powell as a man ''of emphatic, extraordinary ambition.'' But his habit of command, learned during the war, did not serve him well during his first river voyage, which was afflicted by personal conflicts between the visionary Powell and his ragged group of mountain men. He spent the last 30 years of his life in Washington and, according to Worster, never indulged in nostalgia for a river expedition any environmentalist, river rat or adventurer today would have died to go on. Whether that expedition was as important or consequential as Lewis and Clark's hardly seems to matter; its sheer enterprise, brilliance, tragedy, folly and luck all recommend it to us. Though he ruffled a lot of feathers, he was an extraordinary man, and Worster hardly seems to diminish him by removing some of the gloss from the icon; for this splendid, vivid, and prodigiously researched biography also brings him back to life.
John Vernon's forthcoming novel, ''The Great Unknown,'' is about John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers.
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