By Donald Worster
ISBN-10: 0195099915
ISBN-13: 9780195099911
ISBN-10: 1423760743
ISBN-13: 9781423760740
If the note "hero" nonetheless belonged within the historian's lexicon, it should definitely be utilized to John Wesley Powell. Intrepid explorer, cautious scientist, gifted author, and devoted conservationist, Powell led the day trip that positioned the Colorado River on American maps and printed the Grand Canyon to the realm. Now comes the 1st biography of this towering determine in nearly fifty years--a publication that captures his existence in all its heroism, idealism, and ambivalent, ambiguous humanity. In A River operating West, Donald Worster, certainly one of our major Western historians, tells the tale of Powell's nice adventures and describes his historic value with compelling readability and talent. Worster paints a vibrant portrait of ways this guy emerged from the early nineteenth-century global of immigrants, fervent faith, and rough-and-tumble rural tradition, and rarely survived the Civil struggle conflict at Shiloh. the center of Worster's biography is Powell's epic trip down the Colorado in 1869, a story of harrowing reports, deadly injuries, and breathtaking discoveries. After years within the quarter amassing rocks and fossils and studying to talk the neighborhood local American languages, Powell again to Washington as an eloquent recommend for the West, certainly one of America's first and such a lot influential conservationists. yet after all, he fell sufferer to a clique of Western politicians who driven for unfettered financial improvement, relegating the getting older explorer to a quiet lifetime of anthropological contemplation. John Wesley Powell embodied the power, optimism, and westward impulse of the younger usa. A River operating West is a gorgeously written, magisterial account of this nice American explorer and environmental pioneer, a real tale of undaunted braveness within the American West.
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Extra resources for A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell
Sample text
Courtesy: Powell Memorial, Jackson County Supervisors, Jackson, Ohio) trial uses. The Welsh he rode out to preach to every Sunday were also familiar in a general way with those uses. Though they were intently focused on cropping their rich soils, they might have been assembled into an industrial army. Joseph, moreover, had a little bonanza at his very feet. 36 But he let all such opportunities slide, leaving others to set up coal-extracting and iron-smelting operations. Instead of tumbling to those opportunities, what Joseph did, besides preach many sermons and cut out many waistcoats, was invest in land.
Chapter 2 Rising on the Prairie A straight-line distance to the southern edge of Wisconsin, where the Powells were headed, is about four hundred miles, but their route over the land was longer: north toward Columbus, Ohio, then angling across Indiana and Illinois, skirting marshes and fording streams, swinging around low glacial moraines to save their animals’ strength. They traveled a dusty, rutted road for a full month or more. Each meal they cooked over an open fire, each night they slept inside or under their wagons.
The Powells were dead set against that existence. They had come to America in part to tell the Good News, in part to improve their economic condition, and not to join the desperate scramble of the hapless and miserable. In later years Mary would tell her children how they “thought it a great disgrace to live in a rented home, as they must do in N. Y. ”16 Gathering their belongings, they took passage up the Hudson River to Albany, looking for a more promising situation. At Albany they shifted to a packet boat on the Erie Canal, the longest man-made river in the world, a forty-foot-wide ditch completed just six years earlier.