16 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 
PERSONAL REMINISCENCES OF 
JOHN W. POWELL. 
BY FRANCIS MARION BISHOP. 
Gentlemen:— 
It affords me genuine pleasure to be of your number 
at this time, and for a brief space to have the honor of 
speaking to you of one who has left lasting evidence of 
his fitness to do the work he chose, because he loved it, 
and who with Longfellow could say that he believed “The 
talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can 
do WELL, and doing WELL whatever you do without a 
thought of fame,” but only of the work itself, and with 
Dickens could truthfully add—‘‘Whatever I have tried 
to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well, 
whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself 
to completely.” John Wesley Powell’s life was a living 
exponent of these two thoughts. 
His early youth was characteristic of many of our 
American boys—who so full of ambition and purpose can 
hardly brook nature’s apparently slow process in the 
growth of body and mind to make them fit for the work 
they have to do. His parents, Joseph Powell and Mary 
Dean Powell, of old English stock but intensely American, 
gave to the boy that strength of body and those sterling 
qualities of mind that later developed and expanded until 
he became a leader of unusual abilities. His parents 
landed in New York in 1830, after a time removing to 
Palmyra and thence to Mount Morris in Livingston Co., 
where on the 24th of March, 1831, John W. Powell was 
born and as his name would indicate his parents were 
Methodists, but they were conscientiously opposed to 
slavery, which was in a way countenanced by the Metho- 
‘dist Episcopal Church. Joseph Powell, the Major’s 
father, left that church and on the organization of the 
Wesleyan Methodists, he became a regularly ordained 
preacher of the latter church. Mrs. Powell was a highly 
educated and very intellectual woman, and in this atmos- 
