Powell

There is something undomesticated in the heart of a man.  Eve was created in the Garden of Eden but Adam was created in the outback and has never since stopped exploring.  As a child who grew up in the Flint-Osage Hills, I can still visualize what my dog and I discovered along Mill Creek.  A rock table on a hillside where rattlers used to sunbathe, a chesnut stump still trying to regrow, despite dying from the Great Chesnut Blight of the 1890s, and the only existing surface expression of the Nemaha Fault, a 60 foot cliff.  I was told not to get too near the cliff.  I used a lariat to go down over a lesser side.

            John Wesley Powell was the son of an itinerant Methodist preacher from New York.  The family moved to Wisconsin and then Ohio, then Boone County, Illinois.  Little John didn’t miss a thing.  He walked for 4 days to cross Wisconsin.  When he turned 20 he rowed from Decatur, MN to the sea on the Mississippi River.  Then he did the same thing on the Ohio from Pittsburgh and the Des Moines River and the Illinois River.   His dad didn’t want him to study naturalism, but John took after Adam to go where no man has ever gone before.  He studied at Wheaton College, a Christian Liberal Arts college but didn’t get a degree.  The Civil War had started and he joined the 20^th Illinois volunteers.  Such forces were put in light duty and he was an engineer.  Stationed at Cape Girardeau, he recruited an artillery battery and was transferred to the east.  At Shiloh, he lost an arm and the raw nerve damage left him in pain for life. Despite his loss of an arm he returned to fight at Vicksburg and then in the battle of Atlanta. Faithful, wounded vets get government appointments and Powell was appointed to teach at Illinois State U. and also serve as professor of geology at Illinois Wesleyan and be curator of IL. St. Museum of Natural History.  But Powell was itchy.  He went “West, young man.”

            His goal was to explore Colorado and travel the Green and Colorado Rivers.  In 1868, his team became the first to climb Long’s Peak in Colorado.  Despite the fact--no because--nobody had ever lived to navigate the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and everyone said it couldn’t be done, Powell wanted to do it.  With 4 wooden boats and a homemade life preserver, the one-armed man took 9 men down the rapids. One man quit and 3 others were lost, but 930 miles later they emerged at the Virgin River.  Powell knew that he had descended into a geologic cut-bank that went a mile deep into the heart of the continent. One trip was not enough to get photographs and samples of rocks and plants.  So a year later Powell led a larger team to retrace part of the journey. Powell’s notes on the Indian tribes of the area led to the establishment and his appointment as Director of Bureau of Ethnology. Though his ideas were 19^th Century, his works assisted later Indian Reform Movement leaders and anthropological studies and protections.  He served over a decade as head of US Geological Survey.  Powell disliked plans of the railroads to place settlers in the arid West.  With time, his foresight of conservation and water rights problems proved true, especially after the Dust Bowl era. But his scientific advancements pale in the hearts of males everywhere, compared to the memory of the brave guy with one arm who went down the whitewater of the Grand Canyon in a fishing boat.  For men are created in the image of God, Wild, Dangerous, Unfettered and Free.