Part 1 (2/2)

Moreover, to bring water to land at any distance from the source was an undertaking expensive beyond the ability of an individual landowner to afford. As the distance increased it would become expensive beyond the ability first of co-operative groups, then of profit-making corporations, and finally of the individual states to afford. At the heyday of ”individual enterprise” elsewhere in the United States, therefore, the natural conditions of the West demanded federal action in the procurement of water. And this was repugnant not only to our set of mind but, especially, to our mystical vision of the West, the very citadel, so we insisted on believing, of ”rough individualism.”

Furthermore, if in large parts of the West the individual landowner required a homestead of at least four square miles, then the traditional pattern of settlement would result in his living in fearful isolation from his kind. Loneliness, hards.h.i.+p, and social deterioration would inevitably follow. (Which is the history of the high plains down to the automobile and the coming of good roads.) What the Western realities demanded was not the ranch pattern of the Dakotas but the village pattern of the Spanish-American Southwest and of Mormon Utah. And in the arid region the traditional political organization within the states, by counties, would be c.u.mbersome, illogical, and intolerably expensive. Far better to avoid such irrational units and to organize politically in accord with the Western realities, by river valley or watershed.

This does not state all the immutable conditions of the West against which inst.i.tutions and eventually ideas shattered but it will do here. The history of the West derives from them - a history of experience failing to overcome in time our thinking, our illusions, our sentiments, and our expectations. The results were hards.h.i.+p, suffering, bankruptcy, tragedy, human waste - the overthrow of hope and belief to a degree almost incredible now, and only now beginning to be understood in the historical context.

These principles are described and a.n.a.lyzed, and most of the inst.i.tutional changes necessary to bring Western society into effective accord with them are stated, in Powell's Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. In fact, they are set forth in the first forty-five pages of that monumental and astonis.h.i.+ng book, a book which of itself opened a new era in Western and in national thinking. It is one of the most remarkable books ever written by an American. In the whole range of American experience from Jamestown on there is no book more prophetic. It is a scientific prophecy and it has been fulfilled - experimentally proved. Unhappily the experimental proof has consisted of human and social failure and the destruction of land. It is a doc.u.ment as basic as In fact, they are set forth in the first forty-five pages of that monumental and astonis.h.i.+ng book, a book which of itself opened a new era in Western and in national thinking. It is one of the most remarkable books ever written by an American. In the whole range of American experience from Jamestown on there is no book more prophetic. It is a scientific prophecy and it has been fulfilled - experimentally proved. Unhappily the experimental proof has consisted of human and social failure and the destruction of land. It is a doc.u.ment as basic as The Federalist The Federalist but it is a tragic doc.u.ment. For it was published in 1878 and if we could have acted on it in full, incalculable loss would have been prevented and the United States would be happier and wealthier than it is. We did not even make an effective effort to act on it till 1902. Half a century after that beginning, we are still far short of catching up with it. The twist of the knife is that meanwhile irreversible actions went on out west and what we did in error will forever prevent us from catching up with it altogether. but it is a tragic doc.u.ment. For it was published in 1878 and if we could have acted on it in full, incalculable loss would have been prevented and the United States would be happier and wealthier than it is. We did not even make an effective effort to act on it till 1902. Half a century after that beginning, we are still far short of catching up with it. The twist of the knife is that meanwhile irreversible actions went on out west and what we did in error will forever prevent us from catching up with it altogether.

Yet those statements, though true, will not hold of themselves. For meanwhile, before the effective beginning was made, inst.i.tutions which Powell founded were ama.s.sing the knowledge that made the beginning possible. And they were steadily changing American opinion as they added to knowledge - to the treasury of knowledge that is the heritage of all mankind. And they, with what has issued from them, have steadily changed not only American social and political inst.i.tutions but the structure and functions of the government of the United States. Finally, as this change has progressed it has become a force which, joined with others working in the same direction, has greatly changed our ideas of what government ought to do and how it should do what it ought.

That story, however, is Mr. Stegner's book. I began by alluding to a gap in historical understanding which has caused distortions in the writing of American history. Mr. Stegner has now filled the central and biggest part of that gap. Henceforth a prizewinning book about American intellectual history will not dismiss Powell as a believer in the cult of action who wrote an adventure story.

Mr. Stegner's subject is nineteenth century America and the part the West played in creating twentieth century America - wherein, how, but most of all why. He has added a basic book to the small shelf of books that give history basic knowledge of Western experience. As recently as twenty years ago there were no such histories, at least there were none sound enough and understanding enough to be used for interpretation. There are just about enough of them now, they have ama.s.sed just about enough basic knowledge, to justify someone in bringing them together to construct a new general synthesis of American history. Any day now we may expect the appearance of a historian with a generalizing mind who is bent on achieving a hypothesis about the West in American history that will square with the facts. When someone achieves it, it will be a more realistic and therefore a more useful theory than Turner's.

BERNARD DEVOTO.

I.

THE THRESHOLD.

1. Independence Day, 1868

ON JULY 4, 1868, about the time when Henry Adams was turning back toward New York to face a new and sharply altered America after ten years of study and diplomacy in the service of the old, two men who would have been worth his attention as a historian were going about their business on the western edge of the Great Plains.

One, the Honorable William Gilpin, was at fifty-five a veteran of large actions and an old Western hand.1 He had been a friend of Andrew Jackson's, and Jackson's personal appointee to West Point; his brother had been Attorney General in Van Buren's cabinet. Gilpin himself, blown westward by an accidental encounter with Fremont's expedition in 1843, had gone with Fremont as far as Walla Walla and then continued to Fort Vancouver by himself. He had brought back to Was.h.i.+ngton the 1844 pet.i.tion of settlers in the Willamette valley for American occupation, and had become an authority and adviser on Western affairs to Was.h.i.+ngton statesmen, including Thomas Benton of Missouri. As a major in Doniphan's First Missouri Volunteers he had fought Mexicans in 1846, and later than that he had joined expeditions against the Comanches and p.a.w.nees. When Abraham Lincoln went to Was.h.i.+ngton to face the consequences of his election as President of the United States, William Gilpin went with him; for weeks he slept in the White House as one of the volunteer bodyguard of one hundred, a service which he relinquished to become the first territorial governor of Colorado. In that office he had been active and effective in holding Colorado for the Union, and he had been through all his life a consistent and impa.s.sioned advocate of the imperial dynamism of Old Bullion Benton. He had been a friend of Andrew Jackson's, and Jackson's personal appointee to West Point; his brother had been Attorney General in Van Buren's cabinet. Gilpin himself, blown westward by an accidental encounter with Fremont's expedition in 1843, had gone with Fremont as far as Walla Walla and then continued to Fort Vancouver by himself. He had brought back to Was.h.i.+ngton the 1844 pet.i.tion of settlers in the Willamette valley for American occupation, and had become an authority and adviser on Western affairs to Was.h.i.+ngton statesmen, including Thomas Benton of Missouri. As a major in Doniphan's First Missouri Volunteers he had fought Mexicans in 1846, and later than that he had joined expeditions against the Comanches and p.a.w.nees. When Abraham Lincoln went to Was.h.i.+ngton to face the consequences of his election as President of the United States, William Gilpin went with him; for weeks he slept in the White House as one of the volunteer bodyguard of one hundred, a service which he relinquished to become the first territorial governor of Colorado. In that office he had been active and effective in holding Colorado for the Union, and he had been through all his life a consistent and impa.s.sioned advocate of the imperial dynamism of Old Bullion Benton.

Speaking to the Fenian Brotherhood in the capital of the seven-year-old territory of Colorado on this Fourth of July, 1868, he repeated and summarized the things he had been saying in speeches and books since before the Mexican War and would go on saying until his death. It is almost awe-inspiring to contemplate this veteran Westerner, with twenty-five years of hard firsthand experience behind him, as he stands up in the raw frontier town of Denver and looks clear over the continent of facts and into prophecy.

”What an immense geography has been revealed!” he shouted at the sweating Fenians and their guests. ”What infinite hives of population and laboratories of industry have been electrified and set in motion! The great sea has rolled away its sombre veil. Asia is found and has become our neighbor.... North America is known to our own people. Its concave form and h.o.m.ogeneous structure are revealed. Our continental mission is set to its perennial frame....”

Gilpin's version of America's continental mission he had already elaborated in 1860, in a book ent.i.tled The Central Gold Region, The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America with Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations on the Pacific Railroad. The Central Gold Region, The Grain, Pastoral, and Gold Regions of North America with Some New Views of Its Physical Geography and Observations on the Pacific Railroad. He would reprint it with additions in 1873 as He would reprint it with additions in 1873 as The Mission of the North American People, The Mission of the North American People, and extend its ideas in 1890 in and extend its ideas in 1890 in The Cosmopolitan Railway. The Cosmopolitan Railway. The Manifest Destiny which he had learned from Benton, and which was a creed and a policy of his generation, was a pa.s.sionate vision to Gilpin. He saw the West through a blaze of mystical fervor, as part of a grand geopolitical design, the overture to global harmony; and his conception of its resources and its future as a home for millions was as grandiose as his rhetoric, as unlimited as his faith, as splendid as his capacity for inaccuracy. The Manifest Destiny which he had learned from Benton, and which was a creed and a policy of his generation, was a pa.s.sionate vision to Gilpin. He saw the West through a blaze of mystical fervor, as part of a grand geopolitical design, the overture to global harmony; and his conception of its resources and its future as a home for millions was as grandiose as his rhetoric, as unlimited as his faith, as splendid as his capacity for inaccuracy.

All the wishful convictions of his time and place had his credence. The Great American Desert whose existence had been vouched for by travelers and vaguely indicated on maps at least since the report of Zebulon Pike in 1810 was waved away with a gesture. The semi-arid plains between the 100th meridian and the Rockies, plains which had barred settlement and repelled Spaniard and Anglo-American alike, were no desert, nor even a semi-desert, but a pastoral Canaan. Belief in such a desert, he said, had preceded settlement, the location being put ever farther west like the homeland of the White Indians, until now it pinched and disappeared before the eyes of gold seekers and pioneer farmers. Gilpin joined the politicians and the railroads, eager for settlers, in finding most of the plains region exuberantly arable. He had distinguished corroboration for his belief that artesian waters would unlock the fertility of the whole subhumid region east of the Rockies, and if he had chosen to he could have quoted everything from frontier folklore to government geologists in support of the theory that settlement improved the climate, that in very truth ”rain follows the plow.”2 No hindrances to settlement now existed, Gilpin said; the Mississippi Valley which now supported eighteen million people could easily support eighteen hundred million, ten times the total population of the Roman Empire under Trajan and the Antonines. On the more westerly plains, though there was little surface timber, a beneficent Nature had so disposed the rooting system of the low growth that settlers were able to dig dig for firewood and find plenty. And on these plains, once the wild herds were exterminated, three domestic animals could be pastured where one wild one had formerly roamed. for firewood and find plenty. And on these plains, once the wild herds were exterminated, three domestic animals could be pastured where one wild one had formerly roamed.

Throughout the vast concave bowl of the continental interior was ill.u.s.trated the unifying effect of geography, for here where everything ran toward the center instead of being dispersed and divided by central mountains, the people could never be divided into a hundred tribes and nations as in Europe, but must be one. The native race was an ill.u.s.tration: all the tribes from Florida to Vancouver's Island exhibited a ”perfect ident.i.ty in hair, complexion, features, religion, stature, and language.” To this same healthful h.o.m.ogeneity our fortunate geography would within a few generations bring white Americans also.

But marvelous and fecund as the valley was, the great plateau region, including the parks of the Rockies, was more wonderful. Superlatives were futile for the description of the salubrity, richness, health, prosperity, and peace this West offered. The painful struggles of earlier times and harsher climates would not be found. Even houses were unnecessary, so temperate were the seasons. The aborigines used none, and Gilpin himself, in six years of living there, had rarely slept under a roof. (The Mormon handcart companies who starved and froze on the Sweet.w.a.ter in 1856 might have been astonished to hear this; likewise the men of Fremont's 1848 expedition, reduced to the practice of cannibalism in the Colorado mountains.) Agriculture was effortless: no forests needed clearing, manual tillage was not required, even the use of the plow was not essential, so eager were seeds to germinate in this Paradise. As the plains were amply irrigated by underground and artesian waters, the plateau was watered by mountain streams of purest melted snow, and to arrange fields for irrigation was no more trouble than fencing, which the ditches here superseded. No heat or cold, no drouth or saturation, no fickle climate or uncertain yield, afflicted this extensive region, and no portion of the globe, even the Mississippi Valley with its potential eighteen hundred millions, would support so dense a population. San Luis Park would in time become as renowned as the Vale of Kashmir; South Pa.s.s would be a gateway more thronging than Gibraltar. And all up and down the length of the cordillera that stretched through two continents, the unlimited deposits of precious metals a.s.sured the people of a perennial and plentiful supply of coin. In a moment of caution, keeping his feet on the ground, Gilpin admitted that there were a few - a very few - patches of gravelly and unproductive soil in the mountain parks, but he hastened to add that these could be depended upon to contain placers of gold.

Owning a territory that stretched from sea to sea and brought America face to face with Asia on the West as it was face to face with Europe on the East; possessed of unlimited gold and other resources; endowed with a population energetic and , enduring, which the peculiar geography of the continent would soon blend into one people; blessed with a political system divinely appointed to emanc.i.p.ate the world's oppressed millions and set an example that would recreate the globe; tested and unified by the late b.l.o.o.d.y civil strife, and with a geographical position squarely upon that isothermal zodiac which had nourished all the world's great civilizations, America lacked nothing for the most extravagant future. On the brink of the mountain West (and already past the threshold of the Gilded Age) Gilpin looked into the sunburst dazzle of Manifest Destiny and panted for words to express his triumph and his vision.

And he had some justification. West of the hustling capital on Cherry Creek the gulches were pouring out gold. North of it the Union Pacific tracks had crossed the pa.s.s between Cheyenne and modem Laramie and were approaching the continental divide at Creston. The tracks that had already surmounted alt.i.tudes greater than any railroad had surmounted before would ceremoniously mate with the Central Pacific rails north of Great Salt Lake on May 10 of the next year. Instantly the hards.h.i.+ps of a continental crossing would be replaced by the luxury of Mr. Pullman's palace cars, and the symbolic union at Promontory would convert virtually a whole nation to the optimism of seers like William Gilpin. The cattle which would replace the buffalo were already coming north from Texas, beginning the fleeting romantic history of the cowboy West. The buffalo which were to be replaced were already being hunted to death for their hides or the sport of tourists, and it would not be too many years before the pioneer farmers of Kansas would make two and a half million dollars simply by clearing their fields of bones and s.h.i.+pping them east to fertilizer mills. Within five years of the time Gilpin spoke, literally millions of hides would go east via the Union Pacific, Kansas Pacific, and Santa Fe.3 The West was ready to welcome its happy settlers. The West was ready to welcome its happy settlers.

But on the same day when Gilpin summarized his geopolitical and prophetic extravaganza for the Fenians, an exploring party was camped a few miles out of Cheyenne, in what would in three weeks become Wyoming Territory. It included something over a dozen people, among them the wife and sister of the leader. Some of the rest were college students, some were teachers, some were amateur naturalists, one or two were merely tourists. All were so recently arrived that the camp was a disorderly collection of duffle and half-broken mules and half-organized intentions. Backing the expedition was an a.s.sortment of scientific and educational inst.i.tutions, all in on a penny ante basis: the Illinois Natural History Society, the Illinois Normal University, the Illinois Industrial University, and by virtue of some donated instruments and some good advice, the Smithsonian Inst.i.tution.

Leading the party was a man who before he was through would challenge almost every fact and discourage every att.i.tude that William Gilpin a.s.serted or held about the West - challenge and attack them coolly and on evidence - and in place of Gilpin's come-all-ye frenzy would propose a comprehensive and considered plan for the opening of the regions beyond the 100th meridian. That plan, beside Gilpin's, would be so sober as to seem calamitous; it would employ consistently what a recent historian rather unhappily calls ”deficiency terminology” 4 4 when speaking of the West, and it would be decades before parts of it would get a calm public hearing. when speaking of the West, and it would be decades before parts of it would get a calm public hearing.

If William Gilpin was enthusiastically part of his time, yapping in the van of the continentally confident, Major John Wesley Powell was just as surely working against the current of popular optimism in the policies he developed, and decades ahead of it in his vision. It was to be his distinction and in a way his misfortune that in an age of the wildest emotionalism and nationalist fervor he operated by common sense, had a faith in facts, and believed in system. It was also one of his distinctions that in an age of boodle he would persist in an ideal of public service which most public men of the time neither observed nor understood.

Major Powell was no pioneer Westerner as Gilpin was. The summer of 1868 was only his second summer in the West, and he was thirty-four years old to Gilpin's fifty-five. As yet he was not much of anything - not much of a scientist, not much of a schoolteacher, not much of an explorer. But to the problems which the West suggested, and which from this time on absorbed his interest and shaped his career, he brought eventually science where Gilpin brought mythology, measurement where Gilpin brought rhetoric; and he brought an imaginative vigor as great as Gilpin's but much better controlled and much closer to fact. In his one trip to the Rockies in the summer of 1867 he had learned more basic truths about them than Gilpin would ever know. By the end of his career he would know the West as few men did, and understand its problems better than any.

He would know enough to correct Gilpin in all his major a.s.sumptions and most of his minor ones. Even in 1868 he knew enough not to say that ”North America is known to our people.” On the maps he carried there were great blank s.p.a.ces: in less than a year he would be embarked on an exploration that would replace hundreds of square miles of cartographical guesswork with information. As part of his mature work he would plan and begin the systematic mapping of the whole country, a project that even yet is incomplete and will never be finished as he planned it. Through years of public life he would resist with all his energy the tide of unreasoning, fantasy-drawn settlement and uncontrolled exploitation that the Gilpins explicitly or implicitly encouraged. He would continue to believe in a modified Great American Desert, to talk in ”deficiency terms,” to insist that instead of supporting eighteen hundred million people the Mississippi Valley could be made, in its trans-Missouri reaches, a barren and uninhabitable wasteland by the methods used to irritate it into fertility. He would protest the plow that broke the plains, he would deny that rain followed the plow, he would fight Western Congressmen and Senators and land speculators and dreamers who persisted in the Gilpin belief in ample artesian water under the Dakota buffalo gra.s.s. Instead of taking on faith the existence of unlimited seams of metals and coal, he would have a large hand in the careful survey of all these resources, and he would have the vision to add water and gra.s.s and land and timber to those limited and destroyable riches. He would have the courage to seek a revision of the public land laws and a modification of the sacrosanct freehold of 160 acres to match the conditions of the West, and would fight for his proposals cunningly and tenaciously. He would labor to conserve the public domain and to withdraw lands from entry in order to protect for posterity and the public good watersheds and dam sites and playgrounds. The irrigation which to Gilpin was simpler than building fence would be a lifelong study to Powell, and he would father a public interest in the subject that would eventually flower in the Newlands Act of 1902, establis.h.i.+ng the Reclamation Bureau which has remade the face of the West. He would be a prime mover in the establishment of the federal government as the sponsor of science for the public welfare. Instead of preaching unlimited supply and unrestrained exploitation he would preach conservation of an already partly gutted continent and planning for the development of what remained.

And even the matter of racial h.o.m.ogeneity. It is hard to imagine what enthusiasm could have led Gilpin to say that all of the North American Indians were of one stature, language, complexion, religion, and culture. A glance at Gallatin's work would have told him differently; his own experience with Indians should have forced him to other conclusions. Powell would demonstrate, the first to bring a comprehensive order and system to the study, that the Indians were on the contrary of an incredible variety in every way. He would undertake the cla.s.sification of all the Indian languages, would study Indian myth and folklore, and would found a government bureau whose whole purpose was the scientific investigation of that variety, before the tribes were obliterated by the tide of Gilpin's settlers. In the course of those ethnological studies, he would contribute to the remaking and enlarging of the science of cultural anthropology.

But all of these activities, knowledges, and achievements were in the future. On July 4, 1868, they lay around in Powell's mind half realized and half intended, as much in need of thought and discipline and organization as the half-organized camp of the Rocky Mountain Scientific Exploring Expedition.

2. The Dynamics of a Homemade Education

THE BOY HENRY ADAMS, appraising the careers that were open to him, felt that of all the possibilities, the West offered him least. ”Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantages, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.” 1 1 Adams could not have been expected to know in 1854 the shape of things to come, but the reminiscent Adams who was writing his Adams could not have been expected to know in 1854 the shape of things to come, but the reminiscent Adams who was writing his Education Education in 1905 might have admitted that to certain politicians - Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield among them - as well as to certain businessmen - Miller and Lux, Isham, Henry Villard, Leland Stanford - as well as to numerous teachers, preachers, writers (Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Edward Eggleston) - the West had offered not merely opportunity but golden opportunity. One did not have to like everything the West brought into the nation's life to be aware that it had brought something, even that long before 1905 it had come to have a certain dominance in national affairs. Yet Adams, forgetful or not of how the nation's center of gravity had s.h.i.+fted from the Quincy and Beacon Hill of his boyhood, was certainly right in not going west to grow up with the country. Whatever his education had prepared him for, it had not prepared him for that. That took an education of a special kind. To grow up with the West, or to grow with and through it into national prominence, you had to have the West bred in your bones, you needed it facing you like a dare. You needed a Western education, with all the forming and shaping and the dynamics of special challenge and particular response that such an education implied. in 1905 might have admitted that to certain politicians - Lincoln, Grant, and Garfield among them - as well as to certain businessmen - Miller and Lux, Isham, Henry Villard, Leland Stanford - as well as to numerous teachers, preachers, writers (Twain, Howells, Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Edward Eggleston) - the West had offered not merely opportunity but golden opportunity. One did not have to like everything the West brought into the nation's life to be aware that it had brought something, even that long before 1905 it had come to have a certain dominance in national affairs. Yet Adams, forgetful or not of how the nation's center of gravity had s.h.i.+fted from the Quincy and Beacon Hill of his boyhood, was certainly right in not going west to grow up with the country. Whatever his education had prepared him for, it had not prepared him for that. That took an education of a special kind. To grow up with the West, or to grow with and through it into national prominence, you had to have the West bred in your bones, you needed it facing you like a dare. You needed a Western education, with all the forming and shaping and the dynamics of special challenge and particular response that such an education implied.

The thing that many western boys called their education would have seemed to Adams a deprivation, so barren was it of opportunities and so pitiful were its methods and equipment. Considered in any way but in terms of its results in men and women, it was a deprivation. But the men it produced over a period of several generations showed such a family resemblance that until immigration drowned them under they const.i.tuted a strong regional type, and their virtues as exemplified in a Lincoln or a Mark Twain force the conclusion that this crude society with its vulgar and inadequate culture somehow made n.o.ble contributions to mankind. John Wesley Powell, without being a Lincoln or a Mark Twain, was of that persuasion, one of a great company. It is worth looking for a moment at how he was made.

It is easy enough to summarize: he was made by wandering, by hard labor, by the Bible, by an outdoor life in small towns and on farms, by the optimism and practicality and democracy of the frontier, by the occasional man of learning and the occasional books he met, by country schools and the ill-equipped cubs or worn-out misfits who taught them, by the academies and colleges with their lamentable lacks and their industry and their hope, by the Methodism of his father and the prevailing conviction that success came from work and only to the deserving. If there were not many opportunities, if the cultural darkness was considerable, it was also true that in that darkness any little star showed as plainly as a sun.

A homemade education did something to the people who acquired it, and a homemade education was not the exclusive invention of the western settlements. Any rural area, once frontier, retained some of the stamp: the boyhood of a Thurlow Weed or a John Burroughs or a Jay Gould in upstate New York was not greatly different from the boyhood of a Lincoln or a Garfield or a John Muir in the Midwest. But in the Midwest, over immense regions of a peculiar h.o.m.ogeneity in climate, geography, people, and economic status, the homemade education was typical, and it was made more typical by the way in which successive westering waves repeated the whole process in new country. Ohio and Kentucky repeated the backwoods experience of Ma.s.sachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania; Indiana repeated Ohio; Illinois and Wisconsin and Michigan repeated Indiana; Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri repeated Illinois and Wisconsin; the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas repeated, or tried to repeat, Iowa and Minnesota. 2 2 The bearded, one-armed young man who commanded the Rocky Mountain Exploring Expedition, and who had acquired the lifelong t.i.tle of Major in the same volunteer service that cost him his arm, was almost cla.s.sically a product of that special frontier education. His character, his ideas, his very weaknesses and his peculiar strengths derived from a social and intellectual climate nearly rudimentary, nearly unformed, but of a singularly formative kind. He is not comprehensible as man or as career except in the context given memorable expression by Lincoln, and containing, among Powell's own contemporaries, such distinguished names as Garfield, Mark Twain, Howells, Eggleston, Muir, Garland and Lester Ward. These, and many others like them, at once expressed and helped to shape the emerging West. The education of John Wesley Powell is less interesting as a personal than as a regional experience. 3 3 Wandering was a part of it, and the wandering led always west. Born in Mount Morris, New York, the eldest son of an immigrant Wesleyan preacher, young Powell spent his boyhood in Jackson, Ohio, near Chillicothe, and knew what it was to be stoned as an abolitionist for his father's sake, and learned something of the southern Ohio country from the reports his father brought home from the circuit, and watched a town grow up from raw beginnings around him, and had some chance to observe leading men of the town and region. By the time he was twelve he was adding the rural experience to that of the small town, taking over the major responsibility for a frontier farm in Walworth County, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee. By the time he was eighteen he was helping his family to move across into Bonus Prairie, Illinois, and was ready himself to break loose on a series of summer trips and summer jobs that took him from St. Paul to New Orleans, from Pittsburgh to St. Louis, across Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, up and down the Mississippi and its tributary rivers. The princ.i.p.al purpose of those trips was amateur natural history, but they were adventure too - and education. The Civil War could hardly be said to have dragged him away from home; his home had been hardly more than a wharf to tie his boat to for years. And no sooner was the war over than his itchy foot led him west. His migratory family finally came to rest, long after Powell had broken away, in Em poria, Kansas.

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: ”The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.” A frontier boy with a l.u.s.t for books was not choosy. It is hard, in an age with more books than it wants, to comprehend the enduring pa.s.sion for reading that kept Lincoln up half the night with his bushy head almost in the fire, and led John Muir to rise at one o'clock in the morning to read and work on inventions, and induced Powell, hauling grain to market from the Walworth County farm, to put under the wagon seat any books he happened to have available, to be read on the slow tedious road. A frontier child who liked to read read what he could lay his hands on, and he laid hands on some peculiar things and in odd quarters. The boy who got a homemade education rarely could buy books until he was well grown, though Edward Eggleston's father took the precaution of providing in his will for a library for the use of his sons. Generally a boy borrowed his reading, and generally there was someone whom accident or ambition had tossed out on the frontier who brought his love of books and some of the books themselves to the wilderness. Inferretque Inferretque deos Latio. Acquiring learning in the rural Midwest was like an elaborate egg-hunt - but the rules were fair; there were always eggs if you hunted long and hard enough. Somebody always turned out to have a book you hadn't read. deos Latio. Acquiring learning in the rural Midwest was like an elaborate egg-hunt - but the rules were fair; there were always eggs if you hunted long and hard enough. Somebody always turned out to have a book you hadn't read.

Quite as often, somebody in town or within reach turned out to have some sort of intellectual or professional or scientific interest or capacity, too, and that when it showed was a very bright star to tell direction by. In an extraordinary number of cases that first man of learning or enthusiasm that a frontier boy encountered gave his life a twist that it never outgrew. It happened that when Lincoln walked twenty miles to borrow books in Rockport, he borrowed them from Pitcher, and Pitcher was a lawyer. It happened too that from Dave Turnham, the constable at Pigeon Creek, he borrowed The Revised Laws of Indiana, adopted and enacted by the general a.s.sembly at their eighth session. To which are prefixed the Declaration of Independence, the Const.i.tution of the United States, the Const.i.tution of the State of Indiana. The Revised Laws of Indiana, adopted and enacted by the general a.s.sembly at their eighth session. To which are prefixed the Declaration of Independence, the Const.i.tution of the United States, the Const.i.tution of the State of Indiana. And it happened that Ann Rutledge's father sponsored a debating society, and that Abe Lincoln came. The accidents of his light-starved youth pushed him toward the law and politics just as surely as Edward Eggleston's contacts with Julia Dumont and with his stepfather in Vevay pushed him toward literature and the ministry, or Mark Twain's and William Dean Howells' experience in the print shops that Lincoln called the ”poor man's university” pushed them toward a career in words. And it happened that Ann Rutledge's father sponsored a debating society, and that Abe Lincoln came. The accidents of his light-starved youth pushed him toward the law and politics just as surely as Edward Eggleston's contacts with Julia Dumont and with his stepfather in Vevay pushed him toward literature and the ministry, or Mark Twain's and William Dean Howells' experience in the print shops that Lincoln called the ”poor man's university” pushed them toward a career in words.

There was more than one ”poor man's university,” and more than one profession into which a boy with a homemade education could be directed. Though free schools did not come to the Midwest until after 1848, and though illiteracy in 1840, when Powell was six years old, ranged from about 5 per cent in Ohio to more than 14 per cent in Indiana and Illinois,4 there were forces which had some of a school's effects. The Methodist circuit riders were one such force, both through their preaching and through the books and tracts they distributed. Peter Cartwright is said to have given away as much as a thousand dollars' worth of reading matter in a single year, and the very character of the circuit rider's mission took him to places where reading matter was most needed. Three fourths of the early students of Asbury (DePauw) University came from homes that were visited by itinerant Methodist preachers. What impulse toward learning and a wider world was generated by the crude culture of those men it would be impossible to measure, but it was undoubtedly great. Powell, like Eggleston, had it in his own home -

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