Having known intimately the cruelties and injustices of poverty, Garfield found ways to help not just the despairing, but even the despised. As head of the Appropriations Committee, he directed funds toward exploration and westward expansion, the only hope for thousands of men much like his father. It was to Garfield that the geologist and explorer John Wesley Powell turned when he needed support for a surveying expedition. Powell, who navigated rapids and climbed cliffs with one arm, having lost the other to a lead bullet in the Civil War, published a full report of his historic exploration
...more
