OPINION:
THE PROMISE OF THE GRAND CANYON: JOHN WESLEY POWELL’S PERILOUS JOURNEY AND HIS VISION FOR THE AMERICAN WEST
By John F. Ross
Viking, $30, 281 pages
John Wesley Powell lived more lives than a cat. He was a farmer, teacher, soldier, explorer, naturalist, bureaucrat, author and visionary. He was a pioneering geologist and ethnologist, a dishonored prophet, a Washington insider, and founder of two enduring institutions. He was — or ought to have become — a Great American Hero up there with the Founding Fathers. Now he has been handsomely rescued from neglect, if not oblivion.
Powell lived an ungainly life, and John F. Ross has brought order to it in this engaging biography. Don’t be deterred by the bromidic title or the Brobdingnagian subtitle. This is a biography, pure and complex, the recounting of an extraordinary life and trailblazing career. Told chronologically, it appraises its subject’s achievements, accounts his fewer failings, and highlights the times in which he lived. But the cover and the publisher’s flakkery avoid a certain term. Has “biography” lost market share? Have corp-think publishers banned it in favor of motivational terms like “vision” and “perilous”? Pity.
Powell grew up poor, son of an abolitionist preacher who named his firstborn for the founder of Methodism. As a boy, “Wes” took to natural science naturally, collecting live and fossil mollusks and wondering at their antiquity. He consumed education where he found it, in bits and pieces, and became a teacher, then heard Lincoln’s call to quash the insurrection and joined the 20th Illinois.
Recognized for leadership and quick-study intellect, he rose to command an artillery battery. Fighting valiantly at Shiloh — perhaps saving the day for the Union — Maj. Powell caught a Minie ball in the wrist, lost his good right arm, and returned to fight again.
After Appomattox he entered a new growth industry: Surveys of the West. Ignoring his handicap, this one-armed Ulysses embarked on an odyssey down the virgin Colorado River through the Grand Canyon on one of America’s epic adventures. Mr. Ross tells this as a gripping yarn (having followed in Powell’s wake — on inflatable rafts with GPS-savvy guides, gourmet grub and campfire seminars).
In beefed-up rowboats, Powell’s crew coursed the uncharted river that could turn from millpond to maelstrom around a bend, and race for miles between sheer cliffs that allowed no landing or escape. Punctuated by waterfalls, the river broke the boats and so nearly broke the nine men that three of them gave up, hoping to reach civilization on foot, and vanished.
Mr. Ross evokes bone-chilling, palm-wrinkling, stomach-curdling whitewater rapids. For Powell the experience was transcendent as he studied the rocks that the river carved: Nineteen strata, “some of them many hundreds of feet deep From the merely 270-million-year-old Kaibab [Limestone] deeper into the past, coming to the so-called basement rocks nearly half the age of the earth.” For this pioneer geologist who climbed cliffs one-handed, the Grand Canyon was “the library of the Gods the stony leaves of one great book” that rewrote Genesis.
After three months, starving and in rags, Powell came out alive, and a hero celebrated in the illustrated press. Returning to Washington, he became chief of the Geological Survey and a public-policy swashbuckler. Intrigued by native cultures, he chartered the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. Devoted to intellectual colloquy, he founded the Cosmos Club. Putting USGS on the map (no pun intended), he championed scientific exploration of the American continent, and proposed cogent policies for its restrained settlement, and was overruled.
The Midwest was America’s breadbasket and cockeyed optimists imagined its fruited plains stretching to the Pacific. Powell identified a practical boundary at the 100th parallel (i.e., the Texas panhandle’s eastern edge). From Mexico to Canada, the arable land ended along this isohyet where rainfall measured 20 inches a year, the minimum for farming. What he called the “arid lands” to the west could not support crops without extensive irrigation — and there was not enough water to irrigate with.
Powell proposed policies to use the land according to limits dictated by nature. A “winner” in the field, he came a cropper in political debates over western expansion. The moneyed interests won — railroad magnates, speculators, lobbyists and their toadies in Congress. Yes, it was ever thus, though one thing changed, the isohyet is moving eastward now. Blame climate.
Mr. Ross concludes, Powell “asked Americans to temper their desires with a practical understanding of what the land and its climate was capable of — how far it could be pushed and how much it could be used. He did not ask for reverence for the land but rather for humility when regarding it. It was not then, and not today, an easy message for Americans to hear.”
• Philip Kopper, founder of Posterity Press, Inc., in Chevy Chase, writes about American history and culture.
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