Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

...wrapped up in a lyrically written and finely researched history.

I had not read anything by Wallace Stegner for many years, until a recent trip to the Grand Canyon restored my interest in the history of its exploration. Many choices are available to discover the history of the last part of the American west to become marked as something other than "unknown" on government maps. In "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" Stegner expands the horizon beyond the confines of the dangerous canyon walls that threatened John Wesley Powell's 1869 expedition through the Grand Canyon.

To be sure, Stegner is an excellent chronicler of the that trip down the Colorado. He captures the adventure, the danger, the great unknowns that faced Powell's crew. That voyage is the centerpiece of the first half of the book, and could stand on its own as a a tour de force of American discover.

Stegner gives us much more. He incorporates sophisticated discussions of the cultural climate, and the intersection of antebellum political mores in Washington, the fabric of relationships between the US government, native Americans, the Mormons and western settlers. He illustrates fine points of topography, geology, geography and river hydrology as he focuses on the essential element of any migration to the west: water. He explores the grand topics and the often overlooked (would "Big Canyon" be as good a name as "Grand Canyon" ? It almost got this name!).

As these lessons unfold, the book never comes across as a textbook. The writing is vibrant and often lyrical, without being overblown or self important. If you've spent any time in the parts of the United States where the rain is scarce and the vistas are vast, this book will provide an important education in the many forces that came to bear on its settlement. Even if you haven't, you'll acquire a solid foundation in the complex calculus that provides the initiative for discovery.

This quite simply a great piece of historical writing.

This is an excellent biography of John Wesley Powell--exlorer, geologist, scientist, writer, and politician.

Anyone who reads this is sure to increase the amount they know about this historic figure, and about the West in general as the stories of each are inextricably tangled. The book excels at its account of John Wesley Powell's life AFTER his famous trips down the Colorado River, and does a great job of describing Powell's role in the battle against over-populating the West.

If the book has faults though, they lie in that many of Stegner's sources have since been expounded upon or dismissed entirely, and so the facts in this book aren't entirely current. Also, Stegner dismisses too quickly the merits of the story of James White, a man who very possibly went down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon two years before Powell did.

And, it's kind of ridiculous how Stegner criticizes Powell's second expedition's photos as if they were famous works and art: This photo "is marred by too much nondescipt low-water beach in the foreground," and that sort of thing.

This is a great book for anyone interested in John Wesley Powell or the Colorado River. It's possibly Stegner's best nonfiction work, though "Mormon Country" is good as well.

For another great account of John Wesley Powell, read "Down the Great Unknown" by Edward Dolnick.

Or, for a half-decent book about Wallace Stegner's peculiarly white view of the American West, read, "'Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner' and Other Essays" by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn. That one's kind of interesting.

Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain are two of my favorite books. And I'm a geologist. So I thought this book would be really great. Boy I was wrong. Stegner has packed this book with far too many names and dates for it to be at all interesting. He spends most of the book hemming and hawing about DC politics in the late 19th Century (spoiler alert: not much is different today), and glosses over history of the West and the Survey. To top it off, his tone is very smug, it seems like he just wanted to impress the reader with his wordplay.

This is a still a must-read for serious river rats, showing how our belief in the "big rock candy mountain" overruled the evidence before our eyes as we developed the West. This book was written in the early 1950s, and two signs of age were apparent. First, Stegner had not seen many of the river sections he describes, including the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the Desolation-Grey Canyons section of the Green. The boom in commercial river running now makes many of us more expert than Stegner on that subject - kind of fun! Second, and less fun, the old boy has many subtle ways of downplaying the importance of women in the story. Small example: Stegner names Powell's brothers but only mentions the number of sisters, even though their roles in the story all quite small. These are nits born of his times. Still a fascinating tale.

I thought this book would be the story of mountain men exploring the canyon-lands of Utah and Arizona, and for, say, seventy-five or a hundred pages it was. I learned something of the planning, conduct and misadventures of an expedition intended to map the region. I learned something of the Mormon settlement of the region.

But then, the story broadened to tell of the push and pull of interest and politics vs. reasoned policy based on scientific analysis, as the western US was organized and incorporated into the rest of the country. This aspect of the narrative is very instructive if you want to understand the path that us in the west to our present situation-water scarcity, rampant and probably foolish development. It is also instructive to see that moneyed interest, through vehemence, demogoguery and hypocrisy, played the key role in setting policy in the 1890's, as it continues to do today.

Recently, I asked a friend to reccomend some stuff on the history of the US west, and he reccomended, among other writers, Wallace Stegner. So, there I was at half-price books a week ago, and that's where I found John Wesley Powell. Then, reading and enjoying a nice cappuccino at Starbucks, a lady came over to my table to say she loves Wallace Stegner. Nearby, another guy piped up to say Stegner is his favorite writer. Looks like I've come across a vein of reading. I love that.

Stegner opens his hagiography by paralleling the early lives of Wes Powell and John Muir: the backbreaking farm work in Wisconsin, the scientific curiosity about nature, the Biblical father adamantly opposed to science. Both teenagers abandoned the farm and went wandering; if you’re a true believer, they did that solely because of a lust for education. Stegner drags in Abraham Lincoln here: “my best friend is a man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.” Both young men attended college sporadically, became schoolmasters and non-degreed scientists. Powell enrolled as an Army private in 1861, rose rapidly through the ranks to join Grant’s staff, and within a year lost his right arm at Shiloh. But, according to Stegner, Powell barely noticed, and continued to rise, through 9 battles, to Major, whereupon he resigned. After the war he went to President Grant directly to get money to finance his adventures. Powell made one trip to the Rockies, and then his famous ride down the Colorado. After that he moved with his wife to Washington, becoming one of many M Street self-promoters and lobbyists. He continued to leverage his connection to Grant in order to get money and jobs, and to build a network of allies. Stegner lauds Powell’s skill at manipulating personal connections to get money and power, and he condones Powell’s hiring of relatives and friends as just normal for the times. Stegner could have dragged George Washington Plunkitt in here: “I seen my opportunities, and I took ‘em.” Stegner writes this section with a noticeable dissonance, as he’s accepting Powell’s behavior while deploring similar pork-barrel spending and nepotism by others.

The last 2/3 of the book deals with Washington during the 1870s and 1880s, where Powell participated in the explosive growth of the federal government, particularly in the formation of many new agencies dealing with Western lands. Stegner often mentions “The Education of Henry Adams” as if trying to elevate his insights to the level of Adams’. But Stegner’s book is a purple-prose paean to Powell as a far-sighted saint whose science-based vision for federal flood control and irrigation projects in the seven Western drainage basins wasn’t implemented until after the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Stegner devotes many pages to detailing the many historians who failed to recognize Powell as the origin of that vision. The major point of the concluding chapters is that Stegner is the only historian perceptive enough to pierce the haze over the past.

Powell was not, as Stegner would have it, the first person working to bring science into government policy-making. Franklin and Jefferson had emphasized it from the beginning. Nor was Powell the only voice for science after the Civil War. Lincoln had established the National Academy of Sciences specifically for that purpose. The Smithsonian had a ‘revolving door’ relationship that today’s Ivies can only envy. As has been discussed by Tim Parks in the NYRB, when a biographer depicts the subject as an especially admirable human being, glossing over faults, or even flipping them into praiseworthy attributes, it makes the book much less interesting. Maybe Stegner needed a through-line of lofty and inspired vision to make a coherent narrative out of Powell’s life. Or maybe… Stegner wrote this soon after WW II, when the U.S. government, as the world’s dominant power, was greatly expanding its international bureaucracy, analogous to the growth of ‘Western’ bureaucracy after the Civil War. Stegner was a proud right-wing Westerner, and he may have been trying to encourage young Westerners to follow in Powell’s footsteps: go to Washington and fight for the American Way. Whatever Stegner’s reason for it, the saintly slant greatly diminishes the book.

Stegner apparently had access to all the diaries of the 9 people on Powell’s daring expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. His detailed story of that wild river ride through unknown rapids in unknown canyons is gripping. It could well be published as a stand-alone chapter in a book of explorations. Even if you’re not interested in Powell, or Washington bureaucracy after the Civil War, just read the river trip. It’s well worth it. Personally, I’m most impressed by Powell’s extensive work with Indian languages. He compiled many dictionaries of different languages, and learned to speak several of them. If you look up Uto-Aztecan Languages on Wikipedia, you’ll read of raging controversy about the classification of those languages. The conclusion of that controversy is that Powell got it right in the first place.

A bit dry and tedious at times, but probably due more so to the time it was written than the subject matter.

Wallace Stegner is more able than any other writer I can think of to give a sense of the majesty of a scene or the treacherousness of an encounter with the wild. In this book, he takes on the tale of John Wesley Powell, who put together a team of amateur scientists and hunter/trappers and became the first group to run and portage down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.

Powell's exploits on that first voyage are the stuff of legend, and they would have been sufficient for a book. (Would you follow a one-armed, part-time university professor down an unmapped river in wooden boats?) But Stegner then goes a step further to describe the even more remarkable aftermath of the trip. Powell used the knowledge and fame he accrued on that trip to jump-start a career in public service that is, arguably, unmatched in the sciences. For nearly 30 years after the Colorado expedition, Powell turned his attention to geology, mapping, ethnic studies, topography, hydrology, and more, becoming, in essence, the leading advocate of scientific research in the country and the head of numerous government science agencies simultaneously. He also brought an awareness about the Western U.S. that was decades ahead of his time.

It's humbling to think about the energy that Powell displayed and the range of learning he accrued -- much of it in fields that were barely emergent at the time. He wasn't just learning; he was discovering. And then, in true 19th century fashion, he decided to categorize and organize entire fields of knowledge (and almost succeeded).

Finally, Stegner wraps up the tale by describing the politics of the West in the 1860s-1890s and how the failures of understanding on the part of politicians and many Western leaders led to environmental and human disasters for decades hence. That tale resonates today, as the Western states struggle even more severely with water issues than ever before, and yet the same myths predominate: independence of settlers, bravery of Americans moving west, irrelevance of Native Americans, and a Garden of Eden of irrigated farms in the desert, and more.

Read this book as history. Read it as an adventure story. Read it as a cautionary tale. But read it.

I read the biography of Ferdinand Hayden some twenty years ago, and Powell is the unquestioned antagonist of that book, depicted as something of a monster.

I wish I had read this book first: there is no question that Powell was the more astute of these two giants, and had a vastly greater vision for the West. So many of the issues we face today (lack of water, land use, wilderness experience) were adumbrated by the life and thinking of this extraordinary man.

The first half is riveting. The second half more thoughtful. But definitely one of the best books in Stegner's fabulous canon.

Buy it! Read it!

This is a well written historical narrative about the adventure of exploring the Grand Canyon. But it's also a book about the opening of the West and the complexities of settlement, the role of government, water rights, etc.