The Great West

A Review

Wallace Stegner fills the pages of this classic with bigger-than-life personalities. Of course, Major John Wesley Powell – the one-armed, swashbuckling Civil War veteran – towers center stage in this masterful book, but he is surrounded by other epic figures: explorer Ferdinand V. Hayden, geographer Clarence King, artist Thomas Moran, and even President Ulysses S. Grant.  Still, despite such a stellar cast, the character who plays protagonist in this work, the hero with the mightiest role and the most complex personality, is the American West itself. Stegner’s depiction of the rugged and treacherous country along the eastern edge of the Great Basin, where Powell made his now famous explorations, showcases the West as the primary player within this tale of exploration and adventure. The author obviously loves his hero, and Stegner simply uses Powell’s exploits and insights as a way to champion the West, as well as the cherished Progressive Era measures designed to protect it.

            From the outset, Stegner assures his readers that, “I am not interested in Major Powell’s personality … I am interested in him [as] the personification of an ideal … as an instrument of social understanding and social change” in Americans’ relationship to the West.  Powell serves as the instrument whereby Stegner etches his masterful interpretation of a country he so obviously loved. The result is a book that questions the peculiar ideas Americans had of the West as they attempted to settle the area during the last third of the nineteenth century. Through Powell, the book questions wide-spread notions of American individualism and the many popular misconceptions that settlers brought with them as they attempted to colonize the arid desert regions west of the hundredth meridian, once known as the Great American Desert, a generalization that Powell would help deflate.

            Many of the nation’s ideas about the West had changed only slightly during the seventy-five years or so that elapsed between Powell’s era and Stegner’s. True, by the 1950s Americans had gone through the Dust Bowl, they had seen the effects of unplanned agriculture and settlement in the irritable West, and they had watched once mighty rivers like the Colorado lose their waters to Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. Like some one-armed Cassandra, Powell had predicted much of these ecological calamities for the West, but few had listened and hardly a soul had changed their minds about what it would take to make the desert bloom.

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Rainbow Bridge

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