John Wesley Powell biography

Dromo's Den

John Powell Biography

POWELL, John Wesley (1834–1902). An American soldier, explorer, geologist, and anthropologist, born March 24, 1834, at Mount Morris, N. Y. His parents had come to the United States from England a short time before his birth, and his early childhood was passed in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. He studied in the preparatory departments of the Wesleyan College at Wheaton, Ill., and of Illinois College, and during 1857–58 at Oberlin College, where he discovered his bent towards natural science. When the Civil War broke out he at once enlisted as a private in the Union army; after short service he rose to the rank of major, and was subsequently offered the commission of colonel, but declined. While serving as major at the battle of Shiloh he lost his right arm. At the close of the war he accepted an appointment as professor of geology in Illinois Wesleyan University, at Bloomington, in 1867 resigning this to take a similar position in Illinois Normal University. In the summer of the latter year Major Powell visited the Rocky Mountains of Colorado for exploration and research. The following year he organized a party of mountaineers and explored a portion of the Colorado River region, finally going into winter quarters on the White River. On May 24, 1869, the party of 10 set out on a voyage through the cañon which lasted more than three months and was fraught with great dangers and hardships. The result of this daring expedition brought Major Powell into prominence before the scientific world, and from that time until his death he was an active and conspicuous personage among American scientists. In 1869 he induced Congress to establish a geological and topographical survey of the Colorado River and its tributaries, an undertaking which consumed the following 10 years. Meanwhile, to enable Powell to make further explorations, Congress voted $10,000, and during 1871–73 he made his second expedition down the Colorado River. The establishment between 1865 and 1875 of many surveys of the Western country, which acted independently and often in competition with one another, led Powell to attempt a satisfactory adjustment of these surveys under some combined system of operation. As a result of this, Congress, in March, 1879, discontinued the separate surveys and established the United States Geological and Geographical Survey, which had Clarence King as its first director. During Powell's Western work he gathered for the Smithsonian Institution much valuable ethnological and anthropological material regarding the American Indians, and in 1876 this was published as Contributions to North American Ethnology. On the retirement of King from the directorship of the Geological Survey in 1881, Powell was appointed his successor. In 1894 he resigned this office to devote himself to the directorship of the Bureau of Ethnology, and to psychological and philosophical studies, in which field he published Truth and Error (1899). He died at Haven, Me., Sept. 23, 1902.

Major Powell was a member of most of the important scientific societies of the United States, and served as president of the Anthropological Society of Washington and (1888) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was the recipient of many honors from foreign societies, among which was the Cuvier prize, awarded to him and his associates on the Survey in 1891. In 1915 a monument to him (a great seat with a bronze tablet) was about to be erected by the government on Hope Point, Colorado River. His important contributions to scientific literature include the following: Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and its Tributaries (1875); Report on the Geology of the Uinta Mountains (1876); Report on the Arid Region of the United States (1879); Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages (1880); Studies in Sociology (1887); Canyons of the Colorado (1893); Physiographic Processes, Physiographic Features, and Physiographic Regions of the United States (1895). Consult: G. K. Gilbert (ed.), John Wesley Powell: A Memorial (Chicago, 1903); F. S. Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage: The Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition (New York, 1908); id., The Romance of the Colorado River (3d ed., ib., 1909); W. M. Davis, in the National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs (Washington, 1915).

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 140-141.