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KU historian's new book tells John Wesley Powell's saga

LAWRENCE -- Donald Worster knew nearly 30 years ago as a graduate student at Yale University that he wanted to write a biography of John Wesley Powell.

Nine books and a few awards later, Worster, Hall professor of American history at the University of Kansas, has written "A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell."

It is the first new biography of Powell in 50 years.

"Powell has an important national as well as Western story to tell. I think it's one of the great sagas of 19th century America," Worster said. "This isn't a man that we've written a biography about every year like Abraham Lincoln. He's been very much a neglected figure."

A Civil War veteran who lost his right arm in the Battle of Shiloh, Powell, a geologist, made the first of two heroic expeditions down the unexplored Colorado River in 1869 that added to the national imagination about the West's potential for settlement and resources, Worster said.

After his expeditions, Powell became a major figure in establishing federal support for science. He was the second head of the U.S. Geological Survey and founded the Bureau of Ethnology, the leading U.S. institution for the study of American Indians in the days before anthropology became a subject at universities.

Powell's curiosity and passion about the West as arid country led him into an epic political debate over who was going to control the West of the future, Worster said.

Powell recognized the challenge of arid land for a country settled by people accustomed to Europe's humid climates. "He made a lot of proposals, particularly for changing the way in which land was distributed and land and water was owned and managed in the West. Proposals that essentially led to his downfall and resignation from government office," Worster said.

"Powell wanted a West that would be free of big capital and big government. He was a Populist, a small-scale agrarian political thinker in his sympathies."

In fact, a Kansas Populist congressman, John Davis, who was Powell's brother-in-law and a Junction City newspaperman, influenced Powell's vision of restrained development of the West.

When Powell mapped the West, he began with the 100th meridian, which includes western Kansas and runs through Dodge City.

He chose the 100th meridian because it's a rough approximation of a rainfall line, Worster said. West of the 100th meridian, rainfall drops from 20 inches a year to 17, 15, 10 and, in Death Valley, below 5 inches a year. Farmers know that virtually all traditional U.S. crops require at least 20 inches of rainfall a year to grow.

One reason Worster didn't attempt to write Powell's biography earlier was a deep admiration for Wallace Stegner, a novelist whose book "Beyond the 100th Meridian," was a classic account of Powell's first expedition.

"Stegner was a giant and a man of enormous literary talent and a man whose point of view I deeply shared. To try to revise Stegner's work was a daunting idea at the graduate student level," Worster said.

Now Worster is renowned as an award-winning historian of the environment whose books novelists loved to read. Indeed, Larry McMurtry, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Lonesome Dove," has praised Worster as the only new Western historian whose books he wanted to read more than once.

McMurtry previews Worster's biography, saying, "It's a case of man and mountain matching one another: Donald Worster is one of the finest American historians of his generation, and John Wesley Powell one of the most impressive Americans of his time."

Recognized as a pioneer in environmental history -- the history of the interaction of people and the natural world -- Worster regards himself as a U.S. historian with an interest in the American West and the history of science and of exploration.

"I've been in the process of reforming what counts as history and linking it to new thinking about the human relationship to the natural world. I think the problem of our relationship to the natural world and to the land that supports us is going to be increasingly critical and will probably be the most important issue of the 21st century."

The official publication date for Worster's new book is January 2001, but copies are already available in bookstores around the country, including in Lawrence and through major Internet retailers.