Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of Powell’s career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual ouster from the Geological Survey. In masterful prose, Stegner details the expedition, as well as the philosophies and ideas that drove Powell.
A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West—and he spent a good deal of his life battling Washington politics to get his message across. Only now may we recognize just how accurate a prophet he was.
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“I’d read Major Powell’s own account of his Grand Canyon explorations earlier this year and thought I’d covered the subject, but this book introduced me to the bigger impact of John Wesley Powell. His contribution to the creation of the US Geological Survey, his time as the second director of it, his enormous vision on how the west should have been organized. Any long term inhabitant of the west knows that one of the biggest issues to this day is water rights and corporate land speculation and Powell threw himself into the heart of that (and lost). To me, it was a lost historical chapter on what could have been.”
—
LeeAnn (4 out of 5 stars)
