After eight peripatetic years in New York, the family moved to Jackson, in southern Ohio, where they lived for a short time. Then they settled on a farm in Walworth County, Wisconsin. Powell had some formal schooling in Ohio, but he was mostly self-taught, reading widely in literature, history, science, and philosophy. When he was eighteen, he helped his family move to Illinois, and at roughly the same time he left home and began the first of a series of teaching jobs in Illinois. He also squeezed in a few terms as a college student at Illinois College in Jacksonville, at Illinois Institute in Wheaton (later Wheaton College), and at Oberlin College. During the summers he collected fossils along the Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, and other midwestern rivers. Powell aspired to be a scientist, and the field knowledge, river skills, and self-confidence he acquired on these trips proved valuable, especially during his 1869 voyage down the Green and Colorado Rivers.
When the Civil War began in 1861, Powell promptly enlisted and within a month rose to the rank of second lieutenant. In fall 1861 he married his first cousin Emma Dean of Detroit and then rushed back to Missouri to find that he had been commissioned a captain in the artillery.
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