Beyond the Hundredth Meridian Quotes

“Verifiable knowledge makes its way slowly, and only under cultivation, but fable has burrs and feet and claws and wings and an indestructible sheath like weed-seed, and can be carried almost anywhere and take root without benefit of soil or water.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

“There is something ominous about a swift river, and something thrilling about a river of any kind. The nearest upstream bend is a gate out of mystery, the nearest downstream bend a door to further mystery.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“But all my life I have worked for other men, and thus am every man's servant; so are we all--servants to many masters and masters of many servants. It is thus that men are gradually becoming organized into one vast body-politic, every one striving to serve his fellow men and all working for the common welfare. Thus the enmity of man to man is appeased, and men live and labor for one another; individualism is transmuted into socialism, egoism into altruism, and man is lifted above the brute to immeasurable height..."

[John Wesley Powell] did man more honor than he deserved. Not everyone was yet willing, at least in 1878, to work for the common welfare or even agree on what the common welfare was.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

“Were there land-hogs trying to corral grazing empires in PoweII’s time, and not above barefaced trespass on the public domain? They are still there, only now they are trying to bite out of national parks and national forests chunks of grazing land, oil land, timberland, that they covet. The conservation forces swamped such a foray in 1947;15 they will have others to fight, and they may never be able to restore the full effectiveness of the Grazing Service which Senator McCarran — a Senator Stewart come again, and from the same state — all but ruined by the profoundly Stewart-ian tactics of investigating and then cutting the budget.16”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“And at some immeasurably remote time beyond human caring the whole uneasy region might sink again beneath the sea and begin the cycle all over again by the slow deposition of new marls, shales, limestones, sandstones, deltaic conglomerates, perhaps with a fossil poet pressed and silicified between the leaves of rock. It”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell & the Second Opening of the West

“His vision of contented farmers controlling their own timber, grass, and water clear to the drainage divides, and settling their problems by an extension of the town meeting, is touched with a prophetic, and perhaps a pathetic, piety. Science and Reason have always been on the side of Utopia; only the cussedness of the human race has not.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

“An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: “The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who’ll git me a book I ain’t read.”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

“prepare for them.12 It was not a spread-eagle speech, but it probably represented in its earnestness and the honesty of its convictions the highest pitch of eloquence Powell was capable of. His heart was still in the irrigation struggle, and the battle could still be won. While he was telling North Dakota what was good for it and urging it to make maximum use of its streams, the North American Review published a Powell article 13 (the source of Senator Stewart’s learning) pointing up the lessons of the Johnstown flood. It said what only an ethnologist might have been expected to know: that agriculture developed first in arid lands, that irrigation agriculture was historically the first agriculture worthy of the name, that on the Indus and the Tigris-Euphrates and the Nile, as well as in the American Southwest, stable civilizations had built themselves on the necessity of controlling streams for irrigation. The only truly agricultural American Indians were desert Indians living in areas where agriculture might have been thought impossible. There was the full hope and expectation, therefore, that the American West would become one of the great agricultural regions of the world, but the hope was predicated on wise use of water and control of the rivers. The Johnstown flood, which had told many Americans that it was fatally dangerous to dam”
― Wallace Stegner, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian - Wallace Earle Stegner: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West