by John F. Ross
Joseph set to translating faith into action, handing out copies of Wesley’s antislavery tract to the townspeople. On one occasion, Joseph, Crookham, and a visiting abolitionist professor took to Jackson’s courthouse steps to exhort passersby about the evils of slavery. In no time, men emboldened by cheap whiskey poured angrily out of French’s Tavern. They loudly heckled the dissenters. As the small crowd surged forward, taunts became jeers, then erupted into threats. The trio ducked into the nearby house of a friendly physician, where they spent the night, waiting for tempers to cool.
* * *
Soon Wes’s classmates at the town’s one-room school on Ford’s Hill heard their fathers decry the senior Powell. Things became more difficult for him. The log cabin with benches along the walls housed a single class of widely varying ages, taught by a single schoolmaster, who summoned students by sounding a large metal horn. Attendance was irregular, large swaths of the school year taken up when the children needed to help their families harvest crops, hunt, and fulfill the other myriad demands of frontier life. A few of the boys were much older than Wesley, their voices already those of men, their fists already hardened from use.
One afternoon when Wes was ten, a knot of boys confronted him after school. They taunted him, calling his father a nigger lover. Their jeers soon boiled beyond commonplace bullying. If he and his family liked blacks so much, they shouted, then why not go to live with them at Berlin X-Roads? With cold alarm Wes saw hands reaching into pockets stuffed with rocks. It all happened so quickly.
Stones started flying, several of them finding their bruising marks. Wes flew home pell-mell. When his mother opened the door, she found her son panting and wild-eyed, tears clouding his gray eyes. Wes had been bullied before, but the malevolence of this particular attack, with its Old Testament overtones, was something new and deeply troubling. His shame at being mobbed stung far more than the bruises themselves. As a northerner, Wes was already an outsider, but this act severed any possibility that he might fit in. The memories of those hailing stones and faces distorted in rage would linger on the edges of Wes’s consciousness for the rest of his life.
His parents sensibly pulled him out of school. They turned to their friend Big George, who operated an informal classroom on his property, which he had started originally to educate his sixteen children, but had grown to take in the odd student interested in an education more robust than the locality’s meager offerings. He had built a schoolhouse, connected by a dogtrot to a museum in which he stored his library and large collection of natural history specimens. Crookham fondly called it his Jack Oak College after the boards used to build it. John Wesley Powell, who became Crookham’s temporary ward, would prove to be his most engaging student.
One of Jackson’s earliest pioneers, Crookham had come from Pennsylvania as a twenty-year-old in 1799—not long after a settlement with the Shawnees had made southeastern Ohio tolerably safe for whites—to labor at a saltworks, the state’s first industry. Jackson, then known as Purgatory, was a ramshackle huddle of shacks, overrun by tough young men who performed the hard, hot work of boiling down brine into piles of the darkly streaked salt crystals necessary to cure and preserve food. All along the sandstone banks of Salt Lick Creek lay holes or salt pans, dug by Native Americans. When these holes filled with salt-rich brine from saltwater springs, or licks, the Indians procured the mineral by using fire-heated rocks to steam off the water. In Purgatory, the pioneer men poured brine into long lines of twelve- to fifteen-gallon iron kettles, which bubbled over wood fires twenty-four hours a day.
From these old Indian wells, the young Crookham pulled out—much to his surprise—the oversized bones of what are now called megafauna: the huge, curious, and long-extinct animals that had roamed the land more than ten thousand years ago. The magical discoveries of tusks and breadloaf-sized mammoth molars, along with the superpredatory curves of saber-toothed cats, opened up its own well of cosmic questions in the teenaged Crookham. While some learned men had contemplated the possibility that species might become extinct, the idea was yet to be accepted, let alone understood. Dinosaurs had yet to be named or described. In the future lay the knowledge that more than 99.99 percent of all Earth-born life had already gone extinct. To the other salt boilers, such bones were simply obstacles, but in George Crookham, they ignited a fiercely burning curiosity in natural history that would last him a lifetime. The forests and creeks around Jackson would become his almost exclusive collecting area.
In Crookham’s museum, Wes could touch the cool ivory of a nearly eleven-foot-long mammoth tusk, which Big George had wrestled out of the bank of Salt Lick Creek. At that time, few people had the opportunity to examine such an exotic fossil so closely. Imagining what kind of huge creature could support a pair of these tusks thrilled the boy. The darkened room held other treasures: the prodigious length of an eastern rattlesnake skin and a menagerie of skulls and pinned beetles, mounted birds, and glittering cave crystals. That room became a sanctuary from the chore-driven responsibilities of home and those taunting schoolboys. Big George, in turn, found an able disciple.
The hulking man and slip of a boy mounted frequent expeditions, seeking blue-flag irises that fringed beaver ponds, or the pink ladyslipper orchids blossoming in the shadows of the hardwood forests to the east. Some five hundred ancient earthworks lay within the vicinity of the salt licks, lost witness to a long-vanished indigenous culture now known as the Mound Builders. The pair explored one complex known as the “fort,” a rectangular earthen enclosure measuring about 100 by 110 feet, just northwest of town. It was easy enough for Wes to fill his pocket with arrowheads. His guide to this ancient world was a man far bigger than life, not only in his sheer immensity that would shake almost violently with laughter, but in his passionate long view of the connections between so many things visible to the naked eye. With Big George there was room to ask questions that Wes would not dare to put to his father.
Crookham taught Wes how to read a landscape: Far from a trackless wilderness, the land around Jackson revealed surprising secrets to those with patience and an inquisitive eye. The inexplicable fossil bones and the great earthen mounds spoke of a world shaped by others than the present immigrants. To Wes, the natural world was coming to be visibly governed by an intrinsic logic and unfolding clarity that his father’s faith could not match. Big George provided a trellis onto which Wes’s wonder could grow.
Of all the expeditions they took together, none thrilled him more than when William Mather joined them. Descended from the firebrand Puritan preachers Cotton and Increase, this was a quieter, gentler soul, whose dedication to the new science of geology had led him to organize Ohio’s first geological survey. The former West Pointer had bought up part of the Pigeon Roost north of Jackson, a patch of forest into which passenger pigeons not long before had flocked to by the millions. There Mather had built a house, which Wes loved to visit so he could examine the geologist’s extensive mineral collection, which counted twenty-six thousand items by the time of his death in 1859. Wes could not take his eyes off this mentor’s maimed hand, a finger lost to snakebite. When the surgeon had been unable to sever the swollen digit with one blow of mallet and chisel, the unanesthetized Mather had calmly directed him to finish the job. Heavyset, with a thick thatch of dark hair set off by light eyes, Mather was manly and self-reliant, yet also admitted to an abounding curiosity in the so little discovered natural world.
Most often, the threesome would head out just beyond the licks, where Salt Creek suddenly angles northward and dashes through a several-mile-long gorge, revealing layer upon layer of Earth’s history. Big George and Mather would debate why fossil shells could be found in the fine-grained sandstone, but not in the shale. The science of geology was only just beginning to open up the world’s wonders. For most mid-nineteenth-century Americans, explanations of their physical world and of Earth itself remained locked up in biblical exegesis, from which many scholars had deduced or accep
ted an age of six thousand years. Christians viewed the formation of the world through the lens of a long string of catastrophic events, such as Noah’s flood. Yet for Mather, Crookham, and the growing number of people reading the new textbooks pouring in from Europe, their understanding of Earth’s formation was fast washing away. The myth-bending cutting edge of early nineteenth-century science was geology, especially as presented in three volumes published by the Englishman Charles Lyell between 1830 and 1833. Principles of Geology may have promised a summation of the latest in that science, but Lyell actually devoted the entire opus to a single line of argument, which on its surface appeared rather prosaic, but whose implications proved as revolutionary as the works of Galileo. Drawing on the work of an obscure Scotsman, Lyell argued that all forces that had shaped Earth’s surface remained visible today. A journalist would christen this idea with the cumbrous name uniformitarianism, which in its very consonance reflected the gradual, slow-acting but cumulative processes that were shaping the Earth.
Lyell’s argument cut to the core of how Christians construed Genesis. Believers in a world thrown together with violence and cataclysm were known as “catastrophists.” Lyell’s theory quietly overturned all it came into contact with. If catastrophic change had not formed the Earth, but gradual wearing had, then the Earth’s age would stretch far, far further back than ever before imagined. More than a century later, the writer John McPhee would aptly label this “deep time” and offer a metaphor: If the span of Earth’s history is reduced to the length from a king’s nose to the end of the fingertip of his outstretched arm—the original definition of the English “yard”—then all human history could be erased with the single swipe of a nail file on the nail of the middle finger. Scientists of Powell’s age did not know, as McPhee’s contemporaries did, that Earth had existed for more than four billion years but did grasp that its age ran for many millions, not just a few thousand.
Similar to Copernicus’s revelation that the sun did not revolve around the Earth, the idea of geologic time further distanced humanity from the center of things. A thoughtful gentleman scientist named Charles Darwin took Lyell’s book on his long voyage aboard HMS Beagle. Freed from having to imagine a world only created in fire and flood, but one that stretched for eons and bore the accumulation of many gradual changes, Darwin began fleshing out his ideas about natural selection, which would rock humanity’s inflated conception of itself and its place in the universe.
Mather and Crookham, with the curious boy in tow, were keenly feeling—and contributing to—seismic changes that would shift America in less than a century inexorably from a nation of faith-based explanations into one rooted in secular science. By mid-century, as Powell matured, geology had become not only fashionable and popular but vital to the economic expansion of the American West. The book most framing Wes’s emerging worldview would not be the stately King James Bible but rather Lyell’s dynamic Principles.
* * *
In the fall of 1846, Joseph was ordained in the Wesleyan Methodist Church, a recently seceded Methodist denomination more in line with his abolitionist views. As a result, he ended his circuit riding. His full-time presence now became even more unpleasant to the townspeople. One morning sometime that fall, the Powell family awoke to find its horse without its tail, its flanks splashed with paint, some of which had bespattered the walls of their house. The always-close siblings pulled together even tighter. In September, dark forces closed upon Berlin X-Roads when the badly beaten body of one of Thomas Woodson’s sons was found by the roadside, a bounty hunter’s devilry. Either he had been discovered with escaped slaves or had refused to divulge the whereabouts of those he was helping. Woodson had already lost another son to those seeking to derail the Underground Railroad.
The final blow for Joseph came when the Powells opened their door early one morning to find a shaken Big George. A mob had torched Jack Oak College the night before. Up in flames had gone all his notes and work on the history of Jackson, a book he would now never finish. A magnificent lifetime’s collection of plant and animal specimens lay in ashes.
Joseph understood that his vulnerable family lay only a heartbeat away from bloody massacre. His wife had just given birth to their eighth and final child, Julietta. This radicalized preacher had arrived at a moment of hard reckoning. Until then, the spiritual uplift of outspoken abolitionism had outweighed its mostly social disadvantages. The risk calculus now needed recalculation. Joseph brought his affairs together, selling his house and some other parcels of land he had acquired. He secured appointment to a Wisconsin parish. It would take the Powells well to the north, away from border violence.
They never looked back. Wes would not mention Jackson in all his voluminous writings, nor would he ever return. But some wounds would never heal, although they helped to inflame a new passion within him. Wes clutched a book or two that Crookham had given him, and tucked away a growing treasury of arrowheads and freshwater mollusk shells. In the rough layering of stone and earth, in the splendid variety of knapped arrowheads, in the rainbow-colored spectrum of beetle species, he had glimpsed a bright new world, cosmically larger and more fascinating than that found in the Methodist Book of Discipline. His faith would embrace a natural theology every bit as strong as his father’s Methodism. He would find his god manifest in the magnificence of the natural and physical world—his reverence for which would never die, and would impart radiance and meaning to all his future work.
Hardship and opportunity had conspired to blaze a path that led away from Joseph’s plans for him. But it would take all that Wes had to resist his powerful father: the growing boy would learn to keep his own counsel, to choose his movements quietly and wisely, and always to avoid direct confrontation, except when his own emerging sense of righteousness demanded it. Although he might ultimately reject his father’s strict doctrine, it yet bequeathed him a militantly evangelical approach to life, along with an implacable commitment to human freedom. Wesley’s firsthand experience of the freedmen of Berlin X-Roads and the fugitives on the Underground Railroad led him to listen empathetically even to those most different from him, a cast of mind that would evolve into an unusual thoughtfulness toward the Native Americans and Mormons he would encounter later. The ordeal on Ford’s Hill had seared into Wes his outsider status; and with that came the outsider’s gift of seeing the world differently. His father’s evangelism had forced upon him the belief that the world must be remade—and awoke in him a prophetic obligation to bring light to the people. One’s beliefs had to be worth fighting for—and so his life would become a series of willed battles.
The challenges would begin right away.
CHAPTER 2
Osage Oranges and Pink Muckets
As the Powells journeyed north into Indiana in 1846 and on to the Great Lakes, then turned west and north again, the living land changed underfoot, craggy southern Ohio giving way to smooth, rolling prairies, any rough edges crushed under the press of a once mile-thick glacier and now scarred by the wagon-wheel ruts of the westward movement. The tracks they would travel on hardly resembled roads at all—little more than paths, crude trails carved through wooded lands or corduroyed with logs over long marshy stretches. The U.S. military had cut some roads the Powells would take, but lack of maintenance left them little better than mere cart paths, their beds turning into seas of wheel-sucking mud for much of the spring and summer. Even the Powells’ Devon oxen could not negotiate such mires after a heavy rain. That year, the first plank road companies formed, but the toll highways of oak had not been built when the Powells traveled. “It was jirk and jolt, this way and that,” wrote a pioneer girl who traveled their same trail.
They were not the only Americans on the move—much of the country was that year, as hundreds of wagon trains started off from Independence, Missouri, on a grueling 2,200-mile ordeal to the Pacific Northwest, while yet others headed southwest on the Santa Fe Trail from Franklin, Missouri. That year the re
markably enterprising, self-taught carpenter, and devout leader of the Latter-day Saints, Brigham Young, drew thousands of Mormon pioneers across the plains and on to establish a new republic the following year on the desolate shores of the Great Salt Lake. At the same time, the Erie Canal and Ohio River bore a westward advance of expectant migrants while steamboats were beginning to ply the Mississippi between St. Louis and New Orleans. For this restless nation, 1846 marked one of the high points of America’s movement to the far West. “I have often perplexed myself to divine the various motives that give impulse to this migration,” wrote the historian Francis Parkman about a trip he took on the Oregon Trail.
Whereas opportunity certainly moved many Americans to spill across the continent, a mounting sense of the nation’s conquering birthright gave further agency and authority to this impulse, which a journalist had termed “Manifest Destiny” the year before. While John O’Sullivan’s column in the New York Morning News was directed toward the bristling conflict between Great Britain’s and America’s claims to ownership over the Pacific Northwest, his invocation of the phrase locked in a continental vision of the country’s great expectations: “And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.” When Horace Greeley issued the famous command “Go West, young man,” it was bound with iron-ribbed assumptions of an almost-divine sense of national self-discovery and superiority, a birthright of conquest so exalted as to often blind Americans to the consequences of their actions.