Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [16]
The “useful” role ascribed to the mountain men is that they opened the door to settlement of the West. It might be more accurate, however, to say that they slammed it shut. The terrors they endured were hardly apt to draw settlers, and their written accounts of the region had to lie heavy on a settler’s mind: plains so arid that they could barely support bunchgrass; deserts that were fiercely hot and fiercely cold; streams that flooded a few weeks each year and went dry the rest; forests with trees so large it might take days to bring one down; Indians, grizzly bears, wolves, and grasshopper plagues; hail followed by drought followed by hail; no gold. You could live off the land in better years, but the life of a trapper, a hunter, a fortune seeker—the only type of life that seemed possible in the West—was not what the vast majority of Americans sought.
There were those who believed, in the 1830s, that the Louisiana Purchase had been a waste of $15 million—that the whole billion acres would remain as empty as Mongolia or the Sahara. And then, just a generation later, there were those who believed a billion people were destined to settle there. It seemed there was only one person in the whole United States with the wisdom, the scientific detachment, and the explorer’s insight to dissect both myths and find the truth that lay buried within.
John Wesley Powell belonged to a subspecies of American which flourished briefly during the nineteenth century and went extinct with the end of the frontier. It was an estimable company, one that included the likes of Mark Twain, John Muir, Abraham Lincoln, William Dean Howells, and Hamlin Garland. They were genuine Renaissance men, though their circumstances were vastly different from those of Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin. The founding fathers, the most notable among them, were urban gentlemen or gentlemen farmers who grew up in a society that, though it sought to keep Europe and its mannerisms at arm’s length, had a fair amount in common with the Old World. They lived in very civilized style, even if they lived at the edge of a frontier. Powell, Howells, Lincoln, and the others were children of the real frontier. Most grew up on subsistence farms hacked out of ancient forests or grafted onto tallgrass prairie; they lacked formal education, breeding, and refinement. Schooled by teachers who knew barely more than they did, chained to the rigors of farm life, they got their education from borrowed books devoured by the embers of a fireplace or surreptitiously smuggled into the fields. What they lacked in worldliness and schooling, however, they more than made up in vitality, originality, and circumambient intelligence. John Wesley Powell may be one of the lesser-known of this group, but he stood alone in the variety of his interests and the indefatigability of his pursuits.
Powell’s father was a poor itinerant preacher who transplanted his family westward behind the breaking wave of the frontier. As a boy in the 1840s, Powell moved from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Walworth County, Wisconsin, to Bonus Prairie, Illinois. Nothing was paved, little was fenced; the forests were full of cougars and the streams full of fish. To Powell, the frontier was a rapturous experience. Like John Muir, he got a vagabond