“This book is an attempt to write a biography that is the history not of a personality but of a career.”
I am not from the West and have spent almost no time there, except through books and movies and one trip to California, where I flew over most of it. I also wasn’t sure about Wallace Stegner as an historian, as he’s primarily a novelist, who once wrote in the voice of an historian. Regardless, we learn very early on that he’s been enlisted into this task through a series of grants, and one of his most consistent touchstones is the work of Henry Nash Smith, whose work I do know.
This is the history in the form of a biography of John Wesley Powell, who went from being a Civil war office in the Union Army under Grant to taking on a number of survey missions across the West. Stegner positions Powell as antithetical to the myth-making voices of Western expansion in the form a stark rationalist whose major concerns involve the ready supply of water and arable land. He was primarily worried that too many people would tramp bravely into the West and either die there, or come clawing back wasting time and resources and lives in the process.
He was also both an early adherent to working the system a little bit and understanding how laws are written and applied. So in one situation, by securing the rights to a certain kind of surveying request, he works backward to commission several others because of the implication that they would have to be completed before the specific one, or else no work could be done. He’s a prefiguration of someone like Robert Moses with this spirit, but he also gets shut out of the process late in the game too and dies in relatively obscurity at a not particularly old age.