Tales of the Old West

* THE LAST CANYON: A Novel, By John Vernon, Houghton Mifflin: 352 pp., $24

* STAGECOACH: Wells Fargo and the American West, By Philip L. Fradkin, Simon & Schuster: 250 pp., $27.50

When John Wesley Powell set out to run the Colorado River in 1869, he embarked upon the last great journey of exploration on the North American continent. The telegraph and the transcontinental railroad had already reached the Western frontier, and “Manifest Destiny” was a practical reality. Still, one place on the continent remained a mystery: No white man had rafted the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, and the one-armed Civil War hero was determined to be the first one to do so.

“[T]he height of the walls causes birds to exhaust themselves before they can fly out, with the result that they drop back senseless into the canyon,” went one of the tall tales that cautioned Powell and his men on the eve of their adventure, or so we are told in John Vernon’s richly imagined historical novel, “The Last Canyon.” “I told the men such stories are ant paste,” writes Powell to his wife, “and they agreed to come along with my solemn assurances--but who really knows?” The question of exactly what happened on the Powell expedition has spawned a literature of its own, starting with Powell’s own account and continuing for more than a century. Wallace Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” in 1954 was the first of the modern biographies of Powell, and the most recent one, Donald Worster’s “A River Running West” was published only last year. Thus Jack Sumner, a member of the Powell party, was prescient when he titled his 1909 memoir “Colorado River Controversies.”

At the heart of the controversies--and of Vernon’s novel--are the quality of Powell’s leadership and the scale of his heroism. Indeed, Vernon suggests that some of Powell’s men regarded him as not much of a leader or no hero at all. “Sometimes,” grouses one of the characters in “The Last Canyon,” “I think a chained lion would scare him.” Another one rehearses what he will say to the overly cautious expedition leader: “Stop this dilly-dallying and stir your stumps pronto, you one-armed bag of pus.”

Several of the men on the expedition were so despairing that they simply abandoned the man they dismissively called “Professor,” climbed out of the canyon and headed into the wilderness in the hope of reaching a remote Mormon settlement. Here is the ultimate puzzle of the Powell expedition: We know that the mutineers were found slaughtered on the canyon rim, but we do not know the particulars of their deaths. Vernon, who is both a novelist (“La Salle”) and a memoirist (“A Book of Reasons”), resorts to historical fiction to explain why and how they came to such a gruesome end.

Vernon also uses his novel to make a point that is often underplayed or overlooked altogether in history and biography: Powell may have regarded the Colorado River as “the Great Unknown,” but it was well known to the native dwellers of the Southwest. Pausing now and then in his account of the Powell expedition, Vernon makes the point by telling the compelling tale of a family of Paiutes on a search for a missing daughter. To the Paiutes, the Colorado River is the Pawhaw, and the side canyons of the Grand Canyon were familiar places where they cultivated corn, squash and melons--”a world inside the world,” as Vernon puts it.

The climax of “The Last Canyon” is an intriguing intersection of the two tales--Vernon imagines an encounter between the men whose exploits are a fact of history and the Paiute band whose exploits are purely imaginary. “They threaten us with guns. They go off into the bushes with our women. They take our rocks,” complains one of the Paiutes. “What will they take next? The trees? The river?”

“They can’t take a river,” retorts his companion.

“Oh no? They’re pretty crafty.”

Thus does Vernon inject the saga of the Powell expedition with an even stronger dose of irony, tension and tragedy than history itself provides, and thus does “The Last Canyon” leave us with both a plausible explanation of an old mystery and an augury of what will follow in the wake of Powell’s famous riverboats.

The deeply familiar image of a stagecoach and a team of six horses clattering over a raw landscape is both a shimmering icon of Western myth and legend and the carefully tended trademark of a bank. For precisely that reason, “Stagecoach” by Philip L. Fradkin can be approached as both a colorful work of frontier history and a cool-headed corporate biography.

As early as 1865, for example, Wells Fargo had already won a place in “the heart and habit” of the Old West, as one frontier newspaper editor put it, carrying mail and holding deposits of gold and silver in far-flung settlements and outposts from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. “It is the Ready Companion of civilization,” enthused the editor who is quoted in “Stagecoach,” “the Universal Friend and Agent of the miner, his errand man, his banker, his post office.”

Fradkin appreciates the richness of the lore that has attached itself to Wells Fargo, but he indulges in no such rhetorical excess. “Follow Wells Fargo and you follow the path of money,” he points out bluntly. “Wells Fargo was a business dedicated to remaining in business and making a profit, which was sometimes considerable and a few times excessive.”

Indeed, Fradkin is a seasoned journalist whose credentials include a stint as a war correspondent in Vietnam, and his coverage of the Watts riots helped to earn a Pulitzer Prize for the Los Angeles Times. One measure of his honesty and sobriety is the fact that he feels obliged to disclose, at the very outset of his book, that he and his wife once took out a loan from a bank that was eventually acquired by Norwest Corp., the conglomerate that now owns Wells Fargo.

“Stagecoach” focuses on the liveliest era in the company’s long history, from its founding in 1852 until 1918. Henry Wells and William Fargo were former messenger boys who went on to launch both American Express and the company that bears their names, and they were visionaries as well as entrepreneurs: Wells once proposed to relieve the Post Office of the burden of delivering of the U.S. mail. “Zounds, sir!” said one alarmed official. “It would throw 16,000 postmasters out of office.”

Fradkin surveys the history of Wells Fargo in all its sweep, and he shows how the company played a crucial role in--and not incidentally prospered from--such national upheavals as the Gold Rush and the Civil War. Now and then his eye falls on an endearing detail. Thus, for example, he literally deconstructs the Concord mail coach that served as the trademark of Wells Fargo right from the beginning, and he shows us how these “Rolls-Royces of stagecoaches” were lovingly put together by hand. “At a time when brands were rare,” he points out, “the Concord coach was as recognizable as the Colt revolver.”

Clearly, even the hardheaded Fradkin is charmed by his subject, and he betrays a certain sense of regret when he reports how the company moved its corporate headquarters to New York City in 1903. “The company suffered a loss of its western essence--its mystique, if you will--with the move back to New York City,” he concludes. “Wells Fargo became just another profitable business.”

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Jonathan Kirsch, a contributing writer to Book Review, is the author of, most recently, “The Woman Who Laughed at God: The Untold History of the Jewish People” (Viking).