by John F. Ross
In the mid-1840s, much of the North American continent still lay up for grabs to white arrivals: While America and Britain contested the vast northwestern region of today’s Oregon and Washington states, and the British emphasized their possession of Canada, all other lands west of Texas and the Continental Divide were foreign territories over whose indigenous communities and land Mexico and Russia made rather vague legal claims. The lands of the future state of Alaska were indubitably part of the Russian empire. But James Polk, the ruthless, phenomenally shrewd son of a North Carolina farmer would give new heft to the manifest-ness of destiny and west-going when he rode a populistic expansionist wave into the presidency in 1845. The dark-horse Democrat was determined to redraw the political map of North America once and for all.
Whereas Jefferson had played the negotiation for the Louisiana Purchase cleverly against a Bonaparte preoccupied with Europe, there was nothing subtle about Polk’s rapacious grab for the Southwest and Pacific territories. After provoking a war with Mexico, he sent troops across the international border and then claimed the territory encompassing the modern-day states of Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah. Meanwhile an independent Texas had just voted to join the United States. Polk negotiated the Oregon Treaty of 1846 with the British, which extended the American domain west of the Rockies and north of California by 285,000 square miles, stopping only to leave what would become western Canada to the British. That same year, U.S. warships sailed into California’s Monterey Bay and raised the flag over the customs house, ending the short-lived, homegrown California Republic. In a single term, Polk had nearly doubled the nation’s land area, all of it lying well west of the Mississippi.
Neither Mr. Polk nor the most vociferous advocates of manifest destiny, however, were prepared for what such continental scope might bring, even though Emerson had an inkling, writing that “the nervous, rocky west is intruding a new and continental element into the national mind, and we shall yet have an American genius.” The nation came to its continental understanding only slowly and unsteadily, although the vague but red-hot beliefs engendered in manifest destiny and the later notions of the frontier would give the white man’s conquest of North America extraordinary dimension. In that year of decision, young Wesley Powell, sitting with reins in hand atop one of the family’s two wagons, would feel his own strong part in his nation’s restless need to move west. More perhaps than anyone else, he would shape the newly emerging American West and, in so doing, help cast the national identity.
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With the money from selling his holdings in Jackson, Joseph bought a 120-acre farm for $1,200 cash down in an area soon to be called South Grove in southeastern Wisconsin’s Walworth County. The parcel, already bearing a tidy frame house and barn, soon swelled to 140 acres, of which 55 were improved. A stream ran through the property, teeming with pickerel; nut-laden trees delivered bagloads of hazelnuts, hickory nuts, and butternuts every fall. Frequent prairie and forest fires would often light the horizon while winter brought glimpses of the aurora borealis, the dancing lights of the northern sky, and the tracks of gray wolves coming near the Powells’ increasingly crowded livestock pens. Of some reassurance to Joseph, the county derived its name from a former president of the New York Temperance League. Sober industry meshed perfectly with his plans for the future.
In a surprising, but nevertheless quite common, example of simple American pioneering optimism, Joseph had determined that his family’s fortunes lay in farming, despite his near-complete ignorance of planting cycles, crop pests, varieties of weather, animal husbandry, or any other of the myriad skills and knowledge sets demanded by the farming life. Yet that optimism was not ill founded: The earliest hardscrabble European-American pioneers had discovered that wheat and other small grains thrived without fertilization in the Wisconsin Territory’s loamy soil, producing ten to fifteen or even more bushels per acre. The Territory’s grain production would swell from little more than two hundred thousand bushels in 1839 to more than four million only nine years later, when soaring population brought statehood.
Not that Joseph planned on doing the farming himself. He pressed these onerous responsibilities onto the shoulders of twelve-year-old Wesley and his eight-year-old brother, Bram. After purchasing a cow, chickens, and a pig, Joseph turned his attentions to ministering a nearby Methodist community populated by Welshmen who had landed at Southport harbor in July 1842. Once more he would mount up and ride off, leaving all farm responsibilities to children not yet in their teens. When Wes cracked his ox-whip and drove the breaking plow through the sod, he would be on his own, engaging far-older farm laborers to plant and harvest the twice-annual wheat crop, besides growing barley for the swine, Irish potatoes for general family use, and oats, hay, and buckwheat for the stock. There was so much to learn. Venomous massasauga rattlesnakes occasionally emerged from the wetlands or tall prairie grass and had to be killed. The Powells would raise eighteen pigs—and young Wes would oversee the killing and butchering.
In 1849, a band of Winnebago Indians crossed onto the Powell property and camped without permission on the creek bank. Wes remembered them as “footsore and disconsolate,” sinking down to camp in shoddy canvas tents, while their horses drank thirstily from the creek. They returned weeks later in better shape, the Indian agents in Chicago having showered them with calico dresses, blankets, and shoes. They camped again, this time for a week of feasting and celebration, not seeming to mind the presence of Wes, his mother, his brother, and two older sisters. From one of them who spoke passable English, Mary discovered that the newly acquired goods came in payment for their agreement to hand over their ancestral lands, some of which the Powells now occupied. Their forefathers had camped here for as long as they could remember, particularly on the north side of the creek amid the burr oaks. “The strip of land on which we had planted our apple orchard,” recalled Wes, “had been their rabbit preserve.” Wes joined them at the campfire inside their circle of tents, fascinated by the colors of dress, the strange tongue, and the subtle flow of the dancers. He had never encountered Indians before—and this experience would spark a lifelong fascination with them and their cultures.
Such moments of reflection, however, remained rare. There was always something to do. The conservationist John Muir, only four years Wes’s junior, had also grown up on a Wisconsin farm, not seventy miles from Southport. He vividly remembered that even during heavy rains or snowstorms, the whole family worked in the barn “shelling corn, fanning wheat, thrashing with the flail, making ax-handles or ox-yokes, mending things, or sprouting and sorting potatoes in the cellar.” Muir’s Presbyterian father also piled onerous responsibility on his son, John taking on the brunt of farm work at age eleven. Such responsibility imposed at an early age was nothing out of the ordinary, whether in agricultural communities or in the factories springing up in New England.
While the Powells might sell their wheat locally, far better profit lay in delivering it to the port towns of Southport or Racine on Lake Michigan. No hired hand could be trusted to take so valuable a cargo, nor buy or barter the items necessary to keep up the farm, so that ordeal fell on Wes, too. In the autumn when the muddy roads dried, he took the five- to six-day roundtrip journey half a dozen times a year or more. As an early teenager, Wes would stow a small sack of flour or cornmeal under his seat and join a line of farmers’ carts heading east. He buried himself in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, that compelling religious allegory tracing the journey of its workaday protagonist, Christian, in flight from his hometown—the “City of Destruction”—to the “Celestial City.” Along the way, he becomes mired in the “Slough of Despond,” an awful swamp that plays upon his doubts and fears, an experience that Wes could all too readily empathize with. Young Powell also had to overcome the travails of the broken roads, repeatedly mending the ox yoke, shivering through rain and snowstorms. He joined rowdy gatherings of other farmers, most far older than he, hearing probably much-distorte
d tales of the wider world and learning to draw deeply upon his own bank of fortitude. He had no choice: His family depended on it. But for the young boy on the brink of manhood, the time away from the constant farm chores and the kerfuffle of family life became something he enjoyed, and a time to flex his newfound independence. Bunyan’s words resonated deeply. Christian did not merely grind mechanically through life but was instead energized and directed by a quest for the truth. Wes would come to define his life in these terms.
Most often he headed to Southport; although Racine boasted a new plank road that proved more negotiable in wet weather, it cost two cents a mile to use. When Wes reached Southport, soon to be rechristened Kenosha, he crossed Pike Creek over a queens truss bridge at Main and Church streets, entering a thriving lakeside town of several hundred oak-and-black-walnut frame houses, boasting a blacksmith forge and funeral home, as well as shops to mend and buy harnesses, saddles, carriages, wagons, and cabinets. Visitors could find refreshment in a sprinkling of taverns and hotels. In 1845, the Territory’s first free public school had opened here. He would sell his load of wheat either at the Durkee or C. I. Hutchinson & Co. warehouses for as much as a dollar a bushel in those first years.
Mr. C. I. Hutchinson was the brightest example of entrepreneurial success in this lakeside timber boomtown. Wes would have been likely to catch sight or sound of “the General” at his warehouse or around town. Before turning up in Southport in 1841, this Connecticut Yankee had run a Georgia textile mill. The still-sleepy Southport had never seen anything like him, a man who in short order would build not only an immense grain storehouse and the longest pier that had ever graced Lake Michigan but also a large steam mill and two modern vessels efficiently designed to carry maximum grain cargoes to Chicago.
The grain boom times had been generous. But then a series of droughts, savage storms, and pestilences beset the area. The overleveraged Hutchinson took a bad hit when a storm sank his schooner Samuel Hale, ruining eleven thousand bushels of wheat. Hutchinson’s enterprises teetered on the edge of solvency. During the fall of 1849, desperately short of cash, he offered farmers IOUs for the grain they delivered, redeemable in the spring, when the ice would break and open the lake to navigation. Whether the Powells took Hutchinson’s paper is unknown, but even had they not the events of the next several weeks would certainly have hit them inescapably hard, as it did every other farmer in the region.
When the ice broke on April 6, 1850, Southport’s dock grew lively with workers loading ships with grain from Hutchinson’s warehouse. When the farmers showed up, however, and presented their IOUs, Hutchinson could not be found. Word soon came that he and his wife had left early that spring for California. In short order, more than two hundred angry farmers massed in front of the warehouse, the crowd soon doubling, many now wielding clubs, pitchforks, and axes. There being no police force, only the interdiction of the brave mayor prevented the mob from turning violent. His honor gave word that no more grain would leave until matters sorted themselves out.
Before skipping town, Hutchinson had sold most of the wheat to an Ohio merchant, who was probably unaware of the IOUs issued, and certainly wholly uninterested in covering them. The following day, a deputy U.S. marshal attempted to enforce a writ of replevin permitting the gentleman from Ohio to ship the grain. But the surging crowd prevented it from being removed to the brig Buffalo at dock. Later that day, a farmer broke into the warehouse and started taking back the grain, soon joined by others. “Riot in Southport!” screamed the headlines in the Milwaukee Sentinel, as even more farmers streamed into town. “Walking with hickory canes has been customary for a day or two past,” Colonel M. Frank wrote in his journal. Two companies of Milwaukee militia arrived to enforce the federal writ. The small farmers, already running narrow margins, had been “egregiously swindled,” as one U.S. congressman observed. The ill feeling would last for years. Hutchinson escaped unscathed to become a successful mayor of Sacramento, whose obituary in the Daily Union read: “Having died with his harness on. A man with many friends, few enemies and a fame free from scandal or misdeed. His example is a legacy to the commonwealth.”
In the fall of 1850, the wheat market fell again, opening the “red-eye years,” so named from the tear-stained faces of so many farm families. Wes had seen up close how benign conditions could reign one year, only to be reversed the following summer season, as pests, bad weather, or a fluctuating market dropped the bottom out. Tack on a systematic lack of credit, crippling mortgage indebtedness, and sky-high interest rates, and farmers had narrow room indeed left to maneuver. But perhaps most vividly, Wes saw how powerful interests could abuse the farmers without their having any legal recourse. Such an experience might well have soured Wes on agriculture, as it did with Muir, who came to regard farmers as aliens who “toiled and sweated and grubbed themselves into their graves years before their natural dying days, in getting a living on a quarter-section of land and vaguely trying to get rich.” But for Wes, his Wisconsin days engendered a far warmer regard for the small farmer and his way of life—more in line with Jefferson’s idea of the natural nobility of the American yeoman. The work was hard but honest. The small farmer and local entrepreneur made America strong and great, just as long as their efforts upon the land were smartly planned and unimpeded by duplicitous individuals.
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The Hutchinson debacle convinced Joseph of the need to move. Before 1850 ended, he had sold the property and taken the family to northern Illinois. At that moment, Wes turned sixteen, the legal age of majority, which meant that he could guide his own future more firmly. He then began a long, frustrating pursuit of an education. That winter, he trudged twenty miles to the one-room schoolhouse of Janesville, Wisconsin. It turned out to be a bitter disappointment. The schoolmaster proved little better educated than he. A farm family gave him room and board, delighting in the enthusiastic young man with a strong tenor voice, who knew how to attend to their infant, rocking it to sleep in the evenings as he studied in front of the fire. The following summer, Wes returned home to a parcel of unimproved but promising land in Bonus Prairie, Boone County, Illinois, to help break sod for his father.
Despite the setbacks that plagued many farmers, each move had improved Joseph and Mary’s financial situation, which now grew secure. Joseph took to sponsoring Wesleyan Methodist camp meetings in warmer weather. But farming never lay close to his heart, and in the matter of little more than a year, he once more sold his fields, this time set on helping to found a Wesleyan Methodist college in Wheaton, Illinois, thirty miles west of Chicago. This new school would follow the liberal tenets of Oberlin, accepting any qualified candidate whether black or white, male or female, so long as they followed a strict body of rules. Joseph would become a trustee. The five-acre lot on East Jefferson Street would be the last place that Wes’s father and mother lived.
Joseph battled to guide his son’s future into the ministry with his purse strings. Wes’s passion for natural science had only grown more pronounced. He often raised eyebrows in Wheaton when he returned from his frequent collecting expeditions, his mother’s glass preserve jars filled with creatures, including, on one occasion, a large eastern rattlesnake. Bringing home one of God’s unholiest creatures most certainly must have set Joseph’s teeth on edge, but it did not shake his conviction that Wes would someday spread the word of God. Joseph gladly paid for Wes’s enrollment at colleges that taught theology but would not support tuition at schools that boasted offerings in natural history and science. Wes could enroll in his father’s new Illinois Institute, but it did not offer a single class in science, logic, or more than basic mathematics. Over the next six years, Wes tested wills with his father and attempted to get an education on his own terms; he would find himself seesawing between brief fits of college study and spells teaching school after his tuition money invariably ran out. To make money he would teach in Jefferson Prairie, Decatur, and Clinton. He would enroll in three colleges: Illinoi
s College, Illinois Institute (later Wheaton), and Oberlin, but drop out of each, bored with the limited coursework in the sciences. His education would come through other channels.
* * *
In the fall of 1854, Wesley, now twenty years old, moved just east of Decatur, Illinois, to live with his older sister’s family. Martha had married John Davis, a progressively minded farmer, and now oversaw a busy household of ten children. Wes took to teaching the sons and daughters of farmers at the Cherry Point schoolhouse for $24 a month. This short, energetic, already charismatic young man, now sporting a fashionable pair of bushy sideburns, discovered a new talent: teaching his geography lessons by singing. Not uncommon in midwestern classrooms, teachers singing not only made lessons more memorable but also cut through the boredom of a culture more concerned with the plow than the book. Wes’s singing class proved so popular that he offered one in the evening, open to the townspeople. Hundreds flocked to sing, each carrying a candle. Wes led them in singing at the top of their voices the names of the states, their capitals, rivers and their lengths, capes, bays, and mountain peaks, an exuberant celebration of their American heritage. Wes discovered that he had a knack for drawing people together in common, excited purpose.
Although he enjoyed the teaching and the joyful noise of his young nephews and nieces, Wes yearned for a wider world. His brother-in-law belonged to a movement of agricultural populists rolling over the midwestern prairies before the Civil War, devoted to raising the standards of the farmer and reworking the agricultural way of life. Davis wrote occasional pieces on his prairie-spun philosophy for the Dewitt Courier, waxing warmly about the growing mechanization of the prairie that was raising a new American prosperity. When Davis broached the idea of starting a fruit-tree nursery, Wes eagerly jumped aboard, borrowing the considerable sum of several hundred dollars to make up his share. But Wes’s entrepreneurial experiment came to an abrupt end when his father wrote curtly from Wheaton that “the borrowing of money to make money is not one whit better than highway robbery.” Reluctantly Wes heeded the commandment, withdrawing his investment as fast as he could and repaying his lenders. The incident no doubt marked the beginning of his practical distancing from his father. His parents’ offer still stood to pay for his attendance at the Illinois Institute or Oberlin, but Wes again turned down an education confined largely to religious instruction.
