Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

Many admirers of Stegner will argue that his finest book is not one of his most acclaimed novels, Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety, but this book, a biography of the great expedition leader that doubles as a pointed history of how the West was settled. Half the book is an adventure tale of the one-armed Powell's intrepid first navigation of the Grand Canyon (a story that Powell, for what it's worth, told well himself), but the other half, a bureaucratic history of his later battles over the administration of the territories, is the part that remains relevant and prescient. Powell and Stegner may not have been much better than their times in their consideration of the Native American presence on the land, but in their understanding of the importance of water, they were visionaries.