Major John Wesley Powell, 1834–1902

Abstract

THE centenary occurs on March 24 of the birth of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished American explorer, geologist and ethnologist. Born at Mount Morris, New York, of English parents who had emigrated to the United States in 1830, Powell was educated at Illinois and Oberlin College. He served in the army during the Civil War, losing an arm at the battle of Shiloh, and ifr 1865 became professor of geology in the Illinois/Wesleyan University at Bloomington. Two years later he began a series of hazardous and important expeditions to the Rocky Mountains and the Green and Colorado Rivers, which led to a Government geographical and geological survey of the Rockies. Powell served on this for several years and his reports, together with those of F. V. Hay den and G. M. Wheeler, were embodied by Clarence King in the United States Geological Survey bulletins. In 1879 Powell was made director of the United States Bureau of Ethnology, and in 1881, on the resignation of King, he became also director of the Geological Survey. He held the latter post for thirteen years, but retained the former until his death at Haven, Maine, on September 23, 1902. Powell was one of those pioneer geologists of the Far West, who as von Zittel said, “by their vivid portrayal of the work of subaerial denudation roused the intellectual life of the middle of the century to new conceptions on a grand scale”.