CHAPTER 35
John Wesley Powell’s early years is a story that started in western New York in the 1830s, a time in history when adventurous families were pouring over the Appalachian Mountains into the river valley of America’s heartland. For the explorers of this new western frontier, life was an adventure of discovery as they were stumbling on unexplainable artifacts, giant earthwork structures, mounds and fortifications. They were wondering how to define these ancient monuments, for in the 1800s, there were no professional anthropologists or archeologists to call upon, only a lot of talented amateurs who were taking interest in these ancient monuments.
It was with this same spirit of adventure that John first viewed these ancient works of the Mound Builders, a spirit that was inherited from his father who migrated to America across the ocean to New York. After leaving New York, the Powell family did not remain long in Ohio. Arriving in 1838, they left in 1846, moving on to South Grove, Wisconsin, just a few miles north of the Illinois line. It was here that John Wesley Powell would start to explore the mounds along the convergence of the many river valleys. In “1846 -1850’s [John]…would leave school to work on his family’s farm as he pursued a course of self education, especially in natural history.”296
It was in this same period, 1846-1848, which Squier and Davis were finishing up their explorations and surveys of the ancient Hopewell and Adena cultures earthworks, and at a time when the Smithsonian Institution was still in the process of being organized. The Squier and Davis report was completed to the point that they turned it over to the Smithsonian for review before publication in 1847.
Their explorations and the amount of artifacts that were being recovered from the mounds were creating a great deal of speculation and more than just a casual local interest. It was generating international interest, for little was known about America’s natural and pre-Columbian history. All of these discoveries came at a time in history when there were no formal educational opportunities in the sciences of archaeology and anthropology. They had not been developed as yet. Thus Powell’s education in these fields would not come as a result of a formal education, but was largely self-taught.297
In the book, The Mound Builders, Robert Silverberg provides some additional insights into Powell’s early life:
John Wesley Powell, who had so much to do with demythologizing the American mounds, first encountered them as boy in Ohio. He was born in 1834, the son of a Wesleyan preacher; his birthplace was near Palmyra, New York, where Joseph Smith supposedly had found the golden plates of Mormon. In gradual stages the Powell’s moved west until they settled in Jackson, Ohio, not far from Chillicothe.
Jackson was a community of about 250 people, with six stores and three taverns. Among its citizens was George Crookham, a successful farmer, a self-taught amateur scientist, and an enemy of slavery, who regularly helped escaping slaves reach freedom. Crookham and the Powell’s had much in common: eager minds, love of learning, and a willingness to accept unpopular ideas. A hatred of slavery drew the Powell’s and Crookham together, and George Crookham became a second father to young John Wesley Powell.
It was Crookham who gave the future director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology his first look on the earthworks of Ohio. He was a kind of unofficial schoolmaster, who taught, without fee, local boys wishing to improve themselves. He owned a two-room log cabin in which he kept his collections of plants, animals and Indian relics, his library, and his chemical apparatus, Young Wes Powell was one of his best pupils. On his walking tours with Crookham he collected crawfish and minnows, pried fossils from rocks, and examined unusual geological formations. He also dug in the mounds of Chillicothe, finding and treasuring flint points and other artifacts, while Crookham explained to him what was known about the Mound Builders in 1844.298
In a two-room log cabin, with an open-air ‘dogtrot’ down the middle, he set up a classroom on one side, where from time to time he took private pupils free of charge, mainly young adult men who wanted to learn how to read, and on the other side, a museum of natural curiosities- stuffed birds, discarded snake skins, unusual rocks, Indian artifacts he had collected in the vicinity…
[Powell] was captivated by this large old man, who knew so much about the outdoors, who could identify the trees along the creek, who knew the songs of birds, and who was excited by rocks. Crookham was on friendly terms with William Mather, [a geologist who would include John Wesley when] Crookham and Mather went on wagon rides into the countryside to examine the lay of the land, they managed to squeeze a small, shy Wes between them. For all his natural reticence Wes was more than a tag-along. He became the protégé of the big man, and the experience, he always believed, changed his life. From this point on he sought to become a naturalist- a lover of rivers and shells, of botany and geology, of all the branches of knowledge called natural history.299
In the summer of 1846, a gang of pro-slavery hoodlums burned down Crookham’s little museum, and the Powell’s began to think of moving on. In 1851 the Powell’s moved again, this time to northern Illinois, Wes, now 17, found a job as a schoolmaster at $14.00 a month. He taught arithmetic, geology, and geography, and taught himself geometry so he could teach it, lesson by lesson, to the pupils who followed a step or two behind him. His father had helped to found a college in Wheaton, Illinois, and Powell went to enroll there in December 1853. But, he turned away bitterly when he discovered that no courses in science or mathematics were offered. He continued teaching school, and in his spare time went on field trips to excavate mounds or to collect fossils and shells. On one trip he traveled nearly the whole length of the Mississippi alone in a small rowboat. He also picked up a sketchy college education through brief stays at several schools, but mainly he was his own teacher, attaining a deep knowledge of geology, archaeology, and natural history.300
During these years of searching for an education and wrestling with his parents (over religious issues), Wes discovered rivers. They flowed through the landscape of his mind like songs of freedom and escape. They sang of catfish, beaver, blue herons, grape vines festooning the trees, the smell of mud. He had known rivers since a boy- the Genesee, the Salt Lick and Scioto, the Rock of Illinois. Now he began to turn back to rivers to find what no college offered, an education out of doors where on his own he could learn to read the book of nature.301
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296 deBuys, Powell: Seeing Things Whole, 25.
297 See: Grolier Incorporated J.W. Powell, Encyclopedia Americana, International Edition first published in 1829 this Edition published 1995.
298 Silverberg, 125, 126
299 Worster, 29.
300 See: Silverberg, 126, 127
301 Worster, 76.