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A review by ehays84
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
5.0
Wow, what a book. I’d have to say this is one of the best and most important books of US History I have ever read. It is more important than ever today with the ongoing terrible drought in much of the American West. I teach a unit on the settling of the Great Plains every year to my 8th graders, and I found myself thinking many times as I was reading, “I will change the way I teach this or that part of the unit because of this book.”
I am sure that, were I to study all of this on the grad school level, that there are further works that have been published in the decades since the 1950s that will have corrected and improved on certain elements of Stegner’s scholarship here, but I highly doubt they will have written it as well as he did. This was my first Stegner, somehow, and will certainly not be my last.
It’s hard for me to know where to begin on why I appreciated this book so much, but as someone who wrote my master’s thesis about an American in the late 19th century, this book scratched a lot of itches and connected a lot of dots. First, I found out that Powell attended my alma mater, Wheaton College, before it was named that, so that had me at hello. There is the thrilling element of the story of the exploration of the Colorado River. There is the fascinating discussion of Powell’s work on ethnology with Native Americans. This was fascinating because much of what he believed and wrote we would consider problematic and racist today, yet in his own time did much to advance at least some level of an attempt at true interest and study of Native Americans. There is his incredibly keen analysis of the workings of the American democratic system, particularly of how Congress works. I often think about how a huge problem through our nation’s history is our lack of political will to see some needed policy or reform through before it gets tossed out because something else is more captivating to voters and will keep a Congressman in office. If anyone ever needed any convincing of the truth of that pattern in our nation’s history, read this book. There is the fact Powell (and clearly Stegner) loved the landscape of what Abbey calls, “4 corners country” like few other Americans have. You could read this book just to study an aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty. There is the highlighting of Powell’s prescient understanding of the nature of the water problem in the West, which America continues to do its very best to ignore, despite failures and disaster time and time again. The Dust Bowl need never have happened if people had studied Powell more earlier on. But beyond the historical content, Stegner is just such a good writer. He can sum up something very complex with a perfect turn of phrase. His metaphors are deeply meaningful. He is quotable and profound without verging into the extreme or exaggerated. He was clearly someone who did tons of research and who was just very wise. I looked up a list of the authors that he trained while teaching at Stanford, and it’s like a who is who of American western authors of the 20th century. Now I know why.
I plan to read one of Stegner’s works of fiction next.
I am sure that, were I to study all of this on the grad school level, that there are further works that have been published in the decades since the 1950s that will have corrected and improved on certain elements of Stegner’s scholarship here, but I highly doubt they will have written it as well as he did. This was my first Stegner, somehow, and will certainly not be my last.
It’s hard for me to know where to begin on why I appreciated this book so much, but as someone who wrote my master’s thesis about an American in the late 19th century, this book scratched a lot of itches and connected a lot of dots. First, I found out that Powell attended my alma mater, Wheaton College, before it was named that, so that had me at hello. There is the thrilling element of the story of the exploration of the Colorado River. There is the fascinating discussion of Powell’s work on ethnology with Native Americans. This was fascinating because much of what he believed and wrote we would consider problematic and racist today, yet in his own time did much to advance at least some level of an attempt at true interest and study of Native Americans. There is his incredibly keen analysis of the workings of the American democratic system, particularly of how Congress works. I often think about how a huge problem through our nation’s history is our lack of political will to see some needed policy or reform through before it gets tossed out because something else is more captivating to voters and will keep a Congressman in office. If anyone ever needed any convincing of the truth of that pattern in our nation’s history, read this book. There is the fact Powell (and clearly Stegner) loved the landscape of what Abbey calls, “4 corners country” like few other Americans have. You could read this book just to study an aesthetic appreciation of natural beauty. There is the highlighting of Powell’s prescient understanding of the nature of the water problem in the West, which America continues to do its very best to ignore, despite failures and disaster time and time again. The Dust Bowl need never have happened if people had studied Powell more earlier on. But beyond the historical content, Stegner is just such a good writer. He can sum up something very complex with a perfect turn of phrase. His metaphors are deeply meaningful. He is quotable and profound without verging into the extreme or exaggerated. He was clearly someone who did tons of research and who was just very wise. I looked up a list of the authors that he trained while teaching at Stanford, and it’s like a who is who of American western authors of the 20th century. Now I know why.
I plan to read one of Stegner’s works of fiction next.