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A review by bobbo49
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West by Wallace Stegner
4.0
As I am a Stegner devotee, this biography of John Wesley Powell - and indeed, of the exploration and evolution of the American West and its waters - has been on my to-read list a very long time. My interest was piqued when David Abelson called me recently to urge me to pick it up, and so I did - and what an amazing book it is.
The first third is a riveting account of Powell's exploration of the Colorado River and as the first non-native American down the Grand Canyon; not just a great outdoor tale, it presents the development of Powell's post-Civil War scientific explorer persona.
The second third of the book covers the immediate post-Colorado River years, during which Powell evolved his relationship with Congress and government funding, while also performing deep and broad ethnological research on the remaining native tribes.
The last third of the book is essential background for the water wars of the last 100 years in the West. Powell devoted twenty years to a scientific and bureaucratic and political effort to reign in the corporate cannibalizing of western lands and water. Powell's efforts were aimed at a rational, federally-funded study of the topography and water resources of the west, while further claims on federal lands were suspended until a local cooperative or state-based system of dams and water and irrigation rights could be implemented. While he obtained substantial support and funding from Congress initially, political, media and capitalist forces worked in Congress and, through a public spectacle of half-truths and anti-federalist fears, defeated Powell's project half-completed. While Stegner documents the subsequent periodic resurgence of Powell's ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, the second decade of the twenty-first century provides ample evidence that these battles will not cease until the rivers are dry and the soil is dust.
While parts of the book - the middle third, in particular - are a bit slow, most of the writing is Stegneresque, and the life of John Wesley Powell is one that all Americans - and especially we westerners - should know and appreciate.
The first third is a riveting account of Powell's exploration of the Colorado River and as the first non-native American down the Grand Canyon; not just a great outdoor tale, it presents the development of Powell's post-Civil War scientific explorer persona.
The second third of the book covers the immediate post-Colorado River years, during which Powell evolved his relationship with Congress and government funding, while also performing deep and broad ethnological research on the remaining native tribes.
The last third of the book is essential background for the water wars of the last 100 years in the West. Powell devoted twenty years to a scientific and bureaucratic and political effort to reign in the corporate cannibalizing of western lands and water. Powell's efforts were aimed at a rational, federally-funded study of the topography and water resources of the west, while further claims on federal lands were suspended until a local cooperative or state-based system of dams and water and irrigation rights could be implemented. While he obtained substantial support and funding from Congress initially, political, media and capitalist forces worked in Congress and, through a public spectacle of half-truths and anti-federalist fears, defeated Powell's project half-completed. While Stegner documents the subsequent periodic resurgence of Powell's ideas in the first half of the twentieth century, the second decade of the twenty-first century provides ample evidence that these battles will not cease until the rivers are dry and the soil is dust.
While parts of the book - the middle third, in particular - are a bit slow, most of the writing is Stegneresque, and the life of John Wesley Powell is one that all Americans - and especially we westerners - should know and appreciate.