The Major

Donald Worster. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell.New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. xiii + 573 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00.

Admirers of Donald Worster's numerous environmental works will not be disappointed in his new biography of John Wesley Powell. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell is at once massive and masterful, dense and deliberate, packed with facts yet finally dramatic in its interpretive impact. Worster's is biography in the classic "life and times" tradition. His subject appears in successive geographical, professional, and political settings, a central and often dominant figure in these several landscapes yet always as a member of shifting communities of followers, collaborators, competitors, and enemies. Many of the creative communities Powell himself founded and dedicated to his ideal of a scientifically directed democratic society, which nevertheless fosters as much local initiative and freedom as possible. Powell emerges from Worster's pages as the embodiment of the nineteenth-century universal man with wide-ranging interests in geology and climate, ethnology and anthropology, land planning, and the philosophy of history. The Major, as he was called, also appears as a man of prodigious will and immense ambition, a firm manager of subordinates but a victim ultimately of the greedy and self-serving little men he could not handle.

If Powell remains at the center of the author's focus, he moves steadily through a series of unfolding landscapes lovingly detailed by Worster and filled with family, friends, mentors, rivals, bureaucrats, and politicians playing roles first on a regional and then on a national stage. Readers view the Major as he presents himself but also as he is seen by disciples and critics alike, a dominating intellectual force but also a distanced sensibility slightly removed from his companions of the moment. Which is to make of Powell a multi-faceted, intriguing, and occasionally contradictory figure.

The author traces the westward flow of rivers, which eventually carried Major Powell to the unexplored Colorado, on a verbal map of the continental United States beginning with the Genesee, out to the Scioto and the Ohio, down to the Mississippi and the Missouri, across the plains bordering the Platte, to the headwaters of the west-running Colorado. The original source of this westward current lay in the English midlands city of Birmingham and the marriage on January 31, 1828 of "Joseph Powell, Bachelor," a tailor age twenty-three, and "Mary Dean, Spinster," two years his elder. Both were devout Methodists drawn to America by the promise of opportunity but also and more compellingly by the urge to spread the gospel of Christ crucified in their new homeland. Arriving in New York, the Powells headed immediately for the state's burned-over district and the town of Palmyra, the first of a succession of temporary locations as the couple worked their way west in search of economic security and spiritual sustenance. Next on the route came Mount Morris where "Wes," as they called him, was born on March 24, 1834, soon after which the family moved on to Castile, founded in 1835 by energetic Methodists, another temporary stop on a sojourn that soon carried the family across Lake Erie and down through Cleveland, Akron, and Massilon to the southern Ohio town of Jackson hard by the west-flowing Little Salt Creek.

Joseph Powell lingered in Jackson long enough for his eager son to receive the beginnings of an education in the natural sciences at the hands of George Crookham, a local notable who recognized young Powell's hunger for learning and fed it. Crookham, an amateur geologist, botanist, and an outspoken abolitionist, was an inveterate collector of local flora and the self-appointed director of his tiny museum in which he housed his collection until a proslavery mob burned it down. While Wes and his mentor spent their days roaming the countryside in search of specimens, Joseph Powell was succumbing to his perennial urge to pack up and move on...