How Powell Came to That Realism?
This anti-imperial side is not often remembered. Powell’s name has been emblazoned all over the map of the American West on towns, mountains, museums, and a massive reservoir, Lake Powell as well as on the headquarters of the US Geological Survey in Reston, Virginia. (He served as the Survey’s director in its early years.) But that recognition points more to his achievements as a western explorer, finishing what Lewis and Clark had begun in MBT Chapa opening the West to the American imagination, rather than to his realism about the limits that nature imposes on human ambitions.
Here I want to review how Powell came to that realism. I want to ask what he learned out west and whether, in this current moment of national anxiety and reappraisal, there is anything we can still learn from him. Nothing in Powell’s early years seemed to prepare him to play the role of western expert. He was born in 1834 in the heavily forested country of upstate New York, to English immigrant parents, and then was raised on a series of farms in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. For four years he served in the Civil War, leaving part of his right arm on the battlefield of Shiloh, a loss that severely disabled him for many jobs and careers and forced him for a while into teaching. In the summer of 1867, Powell set off with a group of Illinois undergraduates on a field trip along the Platte River, once the route of the covered-wagon pioneers. They spent that summer in the Rocky Mountains, where he first learned about the Colorado River. Government maps still labeled the entire midsection of the river and its surrounding plateau, the Grand Canyon country, as “unknown territory.” Powell boldly conceived a plan to explore that fabled river through its stonewalled canyons and to add new knowledge to American science.
In May 1869, near the line of the just completed transcontinental railroad where it crossed the Green River in Wyoming Territory, Powell launched the Colorado River Exploring Expedition. It was privately financed for MBT Lami the most part, not an official government project, and there were only ten men in the crew, nine of them with no scientific credentials (Figure 2). Through June and July the men raced their boats through deeper and deeper canyons. They lost one entire boat and its vital supplies in a dangerous stretch of water, ran through many white-water rapids, and then were forced to row and row through sluggish side-eddies until their arms ached. At twilight they huddled on a lonely sandbar to eat whatever fish or game they could catch.
Processing your request, Please wait....
