Book Review

The great Harvard physical geographer, William Morris Davis, described his intellectual progenitor, John Wesley Powell, as a "scientific frontiersman" who left others to plow and plant while he tilled the soil of knowledge and inquiry. It is in this mold that Donald Worster has cast his central character in a remarkable biography of one of the most important figures in the history of the American West. Worster's Powell possessed the characteristic most necessary for both frontiersman and scientist: unflagging optimism. He was, the author notes, a man of hope who believed in both the limitless potential of his country and the "unlimited promise of human intelligence" (p. 384). This study of Powell's life and work revolves around that duality of belief that made Powell so much a man of the West, even while he was involved in the debilitating political struggles of Washington bureaucracy.

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One of the greatest difficulties under which Worster must have labored in writing this book is that two biographies of Powell—one competent and one brilliant—are already a part of the literature. William Culp Darrah's Powell of the Colorado (Princeton, 1950) was a workman-like treatment of the geologist-as-hero written by a practicing geologist. Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (Boston, 1954) is, on the other hand, a transcendent work that Worster himself acknowledges as "one of the most influential books ever written about the West" (p. xii). Why, then, another biography of Powell, as important a figure as he was? The simple answer is that Worster has the advantage of fifty years of scholarship on Powell and access to documentary information—particularly about Powell's early life—that were available to neither Stegner nor Darrah. He has used that additional material wisely and, as marvelous a book as Stegner's is, one comes away from a reading of Worster's biography with a better feeling for Powell as a human being.

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