THE MAN WHO REDISCOVERED AMERICA

With the title as a spur, one might expect to find a successor worthy of Mr. Terrell's colorful and lively biography (1964) of Pierre Jean de Smet, Black Robe. If so, one will be disappointed. The Man Who Rediscovered America is the story of John Wesley Powell, the nineteenth-century American geologist and ethnologist who explored portions of Arizona and Utah and surveyed the course of the Colorado River, and who, among other things, inspired and directed the U.S. Geological Survey. Despite Powell's importance, and notwithstanding his courage (--he made the dangerous passage through the Grand Canyon by boat, for example--) this biography is lusterless. Perhaps it is because Powell himself, if one may judge by his own journals, seems dull. Or perhaps it is because Mr. Terrell seems to have contented himself with a mere recital of facts, fleshed out by extensive quotations from Powell's Explorations of the Colorado River and Canyons of the Colorado.