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John Wesley Powell, Anthropologist
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 37, 1969, No. 2
John Wesley Powell, Anthropologist
BY DON D. FOWLER AND CATHERINE S. FOWLER
JOHN WESLEY POWELL was one of the principal figures in the development of American anthropology in the nineteenth century. Between 1868 and 1902, the period of his active interest in the field, the subject became a professional discipline. It changed from an activity pursued as an avocation by men trained in other fields to a profession of full-time research workers and academicians. Most of the individuals engaged in continuous anthropological research in the United States during this period were salaried or otherwise supported by one of Powell's organizations. By the time of his death in 1902, anthropology had emerged as an academic discipline at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California, and there was a federally-sponsored program of anthropological research within the United States. Powell's own initiative in research and administration and his support of the men who developed the academic programs were crucial to their success.
Powell's career as an anthropologist may be regarded as a transitional one between the anthropology of the nineteenth century with its antiquarian eclecticism and strong orientation toward cultural evolutionism, and the more systematic approach and anti-evolutionary orientation that developed in the latter part of that era — the so-called "American Historical School" led by Franz Boas and his students. In his own research and writing, Powell represents one culmination of nineteenth, and even eighteenth century thinking and research. In some cases he was able to complete studies proposed and begun as early as 1780; e.g., his linguistic classification of Indian tribes. Powell's theoretical orientation was patterned after that of his close friend, Lewis Henry Morgan, and included his conception of unilinear cultural evolution through a series of "stages," — savagery, barbarism, and civilization. In all this he was a man of his time; but, it was Powell's organizational and administrative abilities and his support for those with new ideas that greatly facilitated the development of the "new" anthropology of the twentieth century. Hence, his position as a "transitional" figure in American anthropology.
Powell's career as anthropologist is best discussed in three parts. First, his own ethnographic and linguistic field work among the Indians of Utah, northern Arizona, and Nevada; second, his organizational and administrative work in the Bureau of (American) Ethnology and various scholarly societies; and third, his ethnological work, especially the linguistic classification, the Synonymy of Indian tribal names, and his theoretical writings. The latter two aspects of his work are interrelated and a discussion of one necessarily includes the other.
As a prelude we shall review briefly some of the ideas and concepts current in the developing discipline of anthropology in the United States at the time Powell began his field studies. Our aim here is not a history of American anthropology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but rather to place some of the questions which Powell investigated and the procedures he employed in their historical context.
The principal subject matter of American anthropology, as well as much of European and American literature, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the American Indian. The confrontation of European and Indian cultures produced an enormous literature, both fictional and non-fictional. In fiction Indians were both heroes and anti-heroes, e.g., in Cooper's Leather stocking Tales and Longfellow's Hiawatha. The Indians were also the subject of more or less factual scholarly treatises in philosophy and history. In fiction and scholarship, as well as in the popular imagination, the Indians were often viewed with a sense of wonderment, curiosity, and fear. To the ethnocentric eyes of the settlers, schooled in European traditions and modes of thought, Indian customs were strange, hence feared and ridiculed. The Indians did not possess the art of writing, nor the blessings of Christianity, hence they were regarded as inferior — perhaps innately inferior. Their languages were strange to the ear, a meaningless babble of grunts, mumbles, and gestures, to those who took Latin as the epitome of human speech, and did not bother to learn the Indian languages.
This mixed concern with the Indians in both the fiction and nonfiction of the 1700's and 1800's resulted in a series of themes that recur over and over. These themes or stereotypes have been called the concept of "savagism" by Pearce. The Indian as "savage" had many, often contradictory, attributes. These ranged from the "noble savage" exemplifying all that is good and true in human nature, to the "savage savage," who was brutish, uncivilized, degenerate, and possibly soulless, hence fit only for slavery or extermination. At best he would have to be thoroughly Christianized before he was in any way acceptable. Finally, a question which vexed many observers was that of origins. How did the Indians come to be in the New World? What was their origin? How did they fit (or did they fit) into the scheme delineated by the Christian scriptures?
The question of Indian origins excited much comment and speculation from the sixteenth century onward. Proposed solutions to the problem were many and varied, so much so that we cannot deal with them here in any detail. Suffice it to say, by the late eighteenth century, scholars had agreed that a possible solution to the origins problem was through the study of languages. If linguistic connections could be demonstrated between American Indian languages and those spoken in some part of the Old World, the question of origins might be settled, or at least placed on an objective footing. The current successes of European scholars in demonstrating the genetic connections of Indo-European languages and in working out the history of Indo-European-speaking peoples based on those connections, gave added impetus to a linguistic approach in the New World. But the comparative linguistics approach (now more properly called "historical linguistics"), demanded factual data: vocabulary lists of words with the same "meanings," so that lists might be compared, cognates found, and genetic connections established. By 1780 scholars had begun to collect Indian vocabularies as basic data for this enterprise. Thomas Jefferson, among others, was a collector of Indian vocabularies. In fact in Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, written before 1784, we find a program for scholarly research on the origins question; a program that was carried on intermittently throughout the nineteenth century and finally brought to fruition by Powell and his associates 110 years later. Jefferson wrote:
But, factual data on Indians were also needed for administrative and political purposes. In Jefferson's extensive instructions to Lewis and Clark, we find a program for gathering such data on the Indians of the Louisiana Territory. These instructions were based on a circular previously developed by a committee of the American Philosophical Society, under Jefferson's direction. Following these instructions, Lewis and Clark gathered a considerable body of ethnographic data. (All subsequent federally-sponsored expeditions were charged with gathering such data, and all did so, e.g., the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1819, the Wilkes Expedition to the Pacific in the 1840's, and the several wagon road and railroad surveys of the 1840's and 1850's.) Throughout the nineteenth century there was increasing interest in the Indians on governmental, scholarly, and popular levels. There was recognition also that the Indians, and their languages and cultures, were being rapidly overwhelmed, or in Jefferson's words, "extinguished," by the onrush of settlement. The recognition of this fact gave rise to what is now known as the concept of the "vanishing savage," that the Indians were passing away and it was a scholarly, if not a moral, obligation to record as much of their culture as possible prior to their demise.
As previously pointed out it was recognized on the scholarly level that an adequate classification of the Indian tribes, on a linguistic basis, was a necessary first step to the proper study of the origins question, as well as to general anthropological studies of the Indians.
By 1836 Albert Gallatin had accumulated enough vocabularies to be able to present a provisional classification of the Indian tribes east of the Rocky Mountains, those along the Northwest Coast, and the Eskimo.
Scholars and government officials continued the use of circulars and questionnaires as means of gathering ethnographic, demographic, and linguistic data on the Indians. Such circulars were sent to missionaries, military officers, traders, and others. In 1823 Lewis Cass, then governor of the Northwest Territory, had an extensive circular printed and sent out, but he apparently received few replies. At about the same time, Gallatin had sent out a vocabulary list. He too received only a few answers which were printed in his "Synopsis," together with a large body of data he had personally collected. Gallatin's list contained 186 words, including terms for persons, body parts, kinship, implements and utensils, meteorology, the seasons, geography, plants and animals, colors, adjectives, abverbs, and verbs. 19 In other words he chose Jefferson's "appellations of the most common objects in nature . . . ."
Gallatin's list was the basis for later vocabulary lists prepared by George Gibbs for the Smithsonian Institution, and widely circulated to missionaries, army officers, and others. Powell carried copies of the Smithsonian list on his second expedition in 1871.
Henry Rowe Schoolcraft apparently used the Cass circular (he was Cass' Indian agent in the Northwest Territory) as a basis for his own extensive "Inquiries" through which he gathered the hodge-podge of data contained in his massive six volume compendium on American Indians.
In 1861 the Smithsonian Institution circulated a questionnaire by Lewis Henry Morgan 22 which brought him much of the data on kinship terminological systems which he used in his classic "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family."
Thus, when John Wesley Powell began his own anthropological investigations in 1868, he did so within an intellectual and methodological framework going back at least to Jefferson's time. This framework included the idea of the "vanishing savage," coupled with the apparent urgent necessity to record Indian languages and cultures while time remained; a concern with the question of Indian origins and the need for an adequate and accurate classification of linguistic/tribal units; and a method of using circulars and questionnaires as a means of gathering data.
Powell carried forward work on all these subjects, and brought some of them (e.g., the linguistic classification) to completion. He and his staff improved the circulars used for collecting vocabularies, including an attempt to standardize the orthography to be used in recording vocabularies. 24
POWELL'S FIELD INVESTIGATIONS
In the summer of 1867, Powell organized his first expedition to explore and make natural history observations of an area of the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, Colorado. The field party, consisting of several relatives and students, was sponsored by Illinois State Normal University, where Powell was teaching, and the Illinois Natural History Society. Powell planned to have the party gather new data on a dozen or more fields, from climatology to ethnology and ornithology, in keeping with his long standing interests in these subjects. The party had originally intended to explore the Badlands of Dakota Territory, but reports of Indian troubles diverted them southward.
In the summer of 1868, Powell again led a party of volunteers to the Rockies under the same sponsorship. After a summer and fall of exploration, Powell, his wife Emma, and three other members of his party remained in the Rockies, wintering on the White River in an area now called Powell's Bottoms. He spent much of the winter exploring the Green River and also resolved to descend the river the following spring and explore the unknown lands beyond.
During the winter on the White River, Powell began his ethnographic studies of the Ute with Chief Douglass and his band who were camped nearby. Although his main purpose in the area was exploration, as time permitted, Powell took down vocabularies and participated in economic and ritual activities. By the end of his stay, Powell had some familiarity with the Ute language, which he enhanced through the following years until he spoke Ute and its dialect, Southern Paiute, passably well. It was also during this time that he came to be known as Kapurats, "arm off," a name still associated with him today by the Southern Paiute.
Following his sensational Green and Colorado rivers trip in 1869, Powell received a congressional appropriation to continue his explora- tions. In effect the appropriation created the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, better known as the Powell Survey or the Rocky Mountain Survey. The exigencies of the first trip had convinced Powell of the necessity of bringing supplies overland to the river at accessible points. He also wanted to make peace with the Indians who had killed three members of his crew after they left the river party and attempted to make their way to the safety of the Mormon settlements.
Powell arrived with two men in Salt Lake City on August 19, 1870. He intended to scout out supply points and, if possible, meet and make peace with the Shivwits Indians, a Southern Paiute band inhabiting the plateaus immediately north of the Grand Canyon. On the advice of Brigham Young, Powell hired Jacob Hamblin as a guide and interpreter. Powell and Hamblin accompanied Brigham Young, John D. Lee, and others south toward St. George and Kanab in early September 1870. En route, Powell and Hamblin met Chuarumpeak, a leader of the Kaibab Southern Paiute band, on the headwaters of the Sevier River. Powell's relationship with Chuarumpeak would be extended over much of the period of his canyon-country explorations.
Powell, Hamblin, and Chuarumpeak continued on to Pipe Spring, Arizona, from there onto the Kaibab Plateau, and thence westward to the Uinkarets Plateau. On September 17, 1870, they arrived at a Uinkarets Paiute settlement at the foot of Mount Trumbull. A council was held with the Uinkarets and some of the Shivwits bands from further west, including the men who had killed Dunn and the Howland brothers. Powell recorded this meeting in his diary:
During this meeting Powell recorded a number of myths and tales, miscellaneous data, and vocabulary items by the light of the campfire. He would draw on this collection and his later ones for his writings on North American mythology.
Powell also expressed his admiration for Jacob Hamblin, the "silent, reserved man," who spoke the native language in a "slow, quiet way that inspires great awe." "This man, Hamblin speaks their language well and has a great influence over all the Indians in the region round about." Their friendship and association would continue over the years Powell and his men worked in the canyon country.
Later in the fall Powell and Hamblin went south through House Rock Valley, crossed the Colorado River, and journeyed to the Hopi mesas. They remained there a month, during which time Powell gathered vocabularies and other ethnographic data most of which he later reported in a popular article. Still later, Powell and Hamblin met with various Navajo groups at Fort Defiance, New Mexico Territory, to negotiate a peace between the Navajo and the Mormons of southern Utah. Powell then returned to the East via Santa Fe and Denver, arriving in Washington on January 10, 1871.
The second Colorado River exploring trip began in May 1871. On July 10, Powell left the river party at the mouth of the Duchesne River to go to the Uintah Indian Agency for supplies. Learning of his wife's illness, he traveled on to Salt Lake City. He then returned to Uintah and instructed A. H. Thompson to take charge of the river party and meet him at Gunnison's Crossing at the end of August. Hamblin and his men had been unable to find an overland route to the mouth of the Dirty Devil River, a key supply point for the river trip. Powell then accompanied them during August, but again, they were unsuccessful. Along the way, Powell seized an opportunity to continue his ethnographic research:
Failing to find the mouth of the Dirty Devil, Powell rejoined the river party on August 29 at Gunnison's Crossing and remained with it until it reached the Crossing of the Fathers. He then returned to Salt Lake City via Kanab. The rest of the party continued to Lonely Dell (Lee's Ferry) at the mouth of the Paria River where they stored the boats for the winter.
With the river trip completed as far as Lonely Dell, Powell and his men established a winter camp at Kanab. The primary work for the crew was establishing a base line for topographic triangulation, but Powell intermittently gathered information from a band of Kaibab Paiute camped near Kanab.
Powell was in Washington from late February until late July 1872. Then, with a party that included Indians, Powell made a brief trek across the Kaibab Plateau in early August, prior to starting on the last leg of the river trip through Marble and into Grand Canyon.
After completing the trip, Powell and S. V. Jones, accompanied by Chuarumpeak and another Kaibab Paiute, explored the upper Kanab Canyon area. Powell had intermittent contact with members of the Kaibab, Uinkarets, and Shivwits Paiute throughout the fall of 1872 until he left for Washington in late November.
In the spring of 1873, Powell was appointed as Special Commissioner of Indian Affairs to investigate the "conditions and wants" of the Great Basin Indians. He and George W. Ingalls devoted the summer and fall of 1873 to this task. The investigations brought Powell into contact with many of the Great Basin Indian groups, or at least delegates from these groups. In addition to gathering the data required by the commission, Powell used the oportunity to gather vocabularies, myths, and tales, and to have John K. Hillers make a series of photographs of the Indians. 42 During this time Powell contacted Utes, Gosiutes, "Northwestern Shoshones," Nevada Shoshoni, Northern Paiute, the Ute bands in San Pete and Sevier valleys, those at Corn Creek near Fillmore, the several Southern Paiute bands near Kanab and St. George, and those at Moapa and near Las Vegas. He also made a brief trip into southern California where he met with Chemehuevi and a few Mojave.
POWELL AND THE BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY
After 1873 Powell attempted very little ethnographic field work, excepting a six-week trip to northern California and Nevada in 1880. At that time he contacted the Wintun, the Paviotso (Northern Paiute), and Shoshoni, and obtained additional myths and tales and miscellaneous other data. During the mid-1870's, his personal field work was primarily geological, although his interest in American Indians increased. He instructed his survey parties to buy or trade for Indian artifacts whenever possible; these materials were then turned over to the U.S. National Museum. As an additional step toward more thorough and complete work in ethnology, he hired the Reverend James Owen Dorsey as a linguist/ethnologist attached to the Rocky Mountain Survey. By 1876 Powell and his staff were systematically collecting Indian vocabularies in the field and from published sources toward a general classification of North American Indian languages. At his request the Smithsonian turned over to him some 670 Indian vocabularies it had received from the distribution of the 1863 questionnaire. The following year he published an extended revision of the vocabulary form, the Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages which was intended to be the first part of a general ethnographic field manual. The Introduction also provided a suggested orthography for field workers as a further step toward standardization of vocabulary data.
During this same period, in cooperation with the Smithsonian and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Powell directed the acquisition of Indian materials for display at the 1876 Philadelphia International Exposition. He also established a monograph series, the Contributions to North American Ethnology to bring before the scholarly community and the public the results of current field research. But despite these efforts and the general scholarly concern with the "vanishing savage," there was still no systematic, broad-scaled attempt being made to record in depth Indian cultures and languages.
By the late 1870's there was increasing agitation in Washington to consolidate the four major government surveys then operating in the West. The activities of the Wheeler, King, Hayden, and Powell surveys were overlapping, and, to a degree, conflicting. Powell was in the forefront of the fight to consolidate the surveys. Finally, in 1879, with the passage of the Civil Sundry Bill for 1880, the four surveys were merged and the United States Geological Survey created. Most Washington observers assumed that Powell would seek the directorship of the Survey, as he was, in fact, its principle architect. But he did not compete for the position; rather, he pushed hard for the appointment of Clarence King. However, tucked away almost unnoticed in the same Civil Sundry Bill was a brief paragraph that read:
The plan met with the approval of the two secretaries, and on July 9, 1879, Spencer F. Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian, placed Powell in charge of the work. All the accumulated ethnographic and linguistic data were transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Smithsonian. Thus, through this rather ambiguous clause attached to the general appropriations bill, Powell created the Bureau of Ethnology.
It is clear that from the outset, Powell had more in mind than "completing and preparing for publication" work already in progress. As he declared: "It is the business of the Bureau of Ethnology to organize anthropological research in America." Toward this purpose, and despite an immediate assignment to the Public Land Commission and a further assignment to direct the enumeration of Indians for the 1880 Census, Powell took certain steps to insure a firm base and a broader research focus for his Bureau. One of his first acts was to send James Stevenson, Frank Hamilton Cushing, and John K. Hillers to "southwestern New Mexico and contiguous territory" to begin archeological reconnaissance of the "Pueblo ruins and caves of that district of the country" and to make collections of ethnographic and archeological specimens for the National Museum.
With a new party in the field to insure an immediate continuity to research, Powell turned his attentions to broader questions. These concerns, toward which he applied his varied organizational skills, became the Bureau's research program. They included: 1) background studies, including extensive bibliographic work, and such studies as were necessary to continue the basic linguistic and ethnological classifications of the Indian tribes; 2) new field studies, full-time and systematic, of as many Indian tribes as possible; 3) developing and circulating new questionnaires, to extend the limited resources of the Bureau by encouraging as many interested collaborators as possible; and 4) publication of all these results in the series of massive Annual Reports and Bulletins.
Powell and his staff recognized immediately the need for certain background studies. Among these were bibliographic compilations of all previous works on American Indians, especially those of linguistic value, Southern Paiute Indians meeting with the Powell-Ingalls Special Commission near St. George, Utah, September 1873. J. W. Powell is at the left of the picture. Photograph taken by J. K. Hillers and gift of the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology, Bureau of American Ethnology Collection.
to provide data for a linguistic classification. A second effort was to develop a Synonymy, a compilation anw systemization of the thousands of tribal names in the literature on the American Indians for a period of nearly four hundred years. With a standardized tribal nomenclature, growing out of the Synonymy, and an accurate linguistic classification based on genetic affinities, the study of other aspects of Indian life and culture could proceed apace. As Stegner has so neatly remarked: "Before starting to write the science of American ethnology, create its alphabet." In addition to all this, Powell saw a need for bringing together the immense, but scattered, data on Indian land cessions to the United States.
Although logically these three tasks might have been initiated in sequence, characteristically, Powell began them all at once. James Constantine Pilling had already begun compiling his extensive and precise bibliographies while clerk of the Rocky Mountain Survey. For over twenty years, until his death in 1895, in addition to his duties as chief clerk of the Bureau and later the Geological Survey, Pilling labored over his bibliographies. He collected in the process one of the best libraries on American Indians in the world, now a part of the Smithsonian Office of Anthropology library.
Pilling, and at various times all of the regular staff of the Bureau, worked on the Synonymy of tribal names which ultimately consisted of over one million file cards. The Synonymy, begun in 1876, was not finished until after Powell's death. It was finally brought to culmination between 1907 and 1910 in a somewhat altered format, under the editorship of Frederick Webb Hodge, and appeared as the massive two-volume Handbook of American Indian Tribes North of Mexico.
The linguistic classification of the North American tribes, one of the most important and pressing concerns of Powell and his staff, finally was completed in 1891. It listed some fifty-four language families, together with their primary source materials and relationships, and was the first to so organize the whole of native North America. Although somewhat conservative in relating languages, many aspects of it remain valid today. Like the Synonymy, the linguistic classification was the work of all the regular Bureau staff members, guided by Powell and especially Henry Wetherbee Henshaw, who should have been a co-author. The publication of the classification culminated a task laid out in Jefferson's time, more than one hundred years before.
The compilation of data on Indian land cessions was began by Charles C. Royce in 1880, and finally was completed and guided through the press by Cyrus Thomas in 1899.
Powell's second major concern was to encourage the support of the individual field research of his full-time staff members and other collaborators. He had initiated this program by sending Stevenson, Cushing, and Hillers to the Southwest in 1879. These men and others of Powell's staff over the years became, in effect, the first full-time professional anthropologists. The first members of the Bureau staff were all individuals who had started in other professional fields, but, as Bureau employees, became professional anthropologists. Others included James Owen Dorsey, an Episcopal minister and missionary to the Ponka Indians who became an expert on Siouan languages and sociology; Jeremiah Curtin, a polyglot world traveler who studied Old World linguistics and mythology both before and after his work on American Indians for the Bureau; and Henry Wetherbee Henshaw, originally an ornithologist, who worked for the Bureau for fifteen years and later became chief of the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture. Other notables were James Mooney, A. C. Gatschet, Matilda Coxe Stevenson (a Bureau staff member after the death of her husband James Stevenson), W. J. Hoffman, Garrick Mallery, W. H. Holmes, F. W. Hodge, and many more. Others, such as Franz Boas, were given field expenses or occasional honoraria by the Bureau to support their activities. Washington Matthews and John G. Bourke, author of On the Border with Crook, as army officers were detailed to Washington and semi-officially attached to the Bureau. Powell also encouraged many other people already working among the Indians, such as missionaries, Indian agents, army personnel, and others to use their interests for scholarly purposes by completing vocabulary and other circulars that he and his staff disseminated widely. The data returned were incorporated into the various studies published by the Bureau.
Powell's primary anthropological interests were in linguistics and ethnology. But through circumstance, his Bureau was forced to conduct an extensive program of archeological research in the Mississippi Valley, and, in addition, to expend up to $5,000 per year of his appropriation on collections of artifacts for the National Museum. The latter expense was imposed on Powell by Spencer F. Baird, who saw an excellent opportunity to increase the collections of the Museum. This fund was ultimately responsible for large segments of the extensive collections of Indian materials from the Plains, California, and the Southwest now in the Museum.
The archeological program in the Mississippi Valley grew out of other pressures. The thousands of burial, platform and effigy, mounds found throughout the Mississippi drainage system and in other areas of the eastern United States, had been a source of speculation for many years. The mounds figured prominently in many of the discussions of the origins of the American Indians, alluded to previously. Prevalent views were that the mounds were built by one or another people who preceded the historic Indian tribes and who had come from Europe, the Pacific, or some other region. The mounds had been pilfered for many years. One of the earliest scholarly excavations (and a model of scientific procedure and observation) was made by Thomas Jefferson in the 1780's. One of the first major publications of the Smithsonian Institution dealt with the mounds. But by 1880 a factor other than scholarly interest was at work. European universities and museums were busily engaged in excavating mounds and other archeological sites in the United States and carrying the specimens back to Europe. The Smithsonian Institution report for 1879 stated that, "many tons of the choicest objects had already been removed to Paris from California and the Southwest." This was a source of alarm to Americans and a chauvinistic cry was raised to save American antiquities for America. Besides, it was argued by the more cynical, congressmen who controlled appropriations were more likely to be impressed by museum specimens than by lists of words.
One result was that the Civil Sundry Act for 1882 appropriated $25,000 for the Bureau of Ethnology for fiscal 1881, "$5,000 of which shall be expended in continuing archeological investigations relating to mound-builders and prehistoric mounds . . . ,"
The work on mounds was initially placed in the hands of Dr. Will De Hass and the botanist "Dr." Edward Palmer, but later it was assigned to Cyrus Thomas, an entomologist with interests in archeology and Maya epigraphy. He remained in charge throughout, the work culminating in his "Report on the Mound Explorations of the Bureau of Ethnology for 1890—91." Although much of the archeology completed by Thomas and his assistants does not measure up to modern standards, the work did serve to lay to rest the myth that the mounds had been built by groups other than the ancestors of the historic Indians.
A fourth contribution to anthropology by the Bureau, and part of Powell's initial program, was to provide a publication outlet for data on American Indians. The Annual Reports, the Bulletins, and the Contributions to North American Ethnology contain most of the monographic studies on Indians for the nineteenth century.
Under Powell's guidance the Bureau continued to grow and sponsor new research throughout the 1880's and into the 1890's. In 1894 Powell resigned as director of the Geological Survey, a post he had filled after Clarence King's resignation in 1881. After 1894, although in failing health, Powell devoted himself increasingly to rather murky philosophical discussions and attempts to arrive at a five-fold classification of all human knowledge. He probably will not be remembered for these.
Powell's place in the history of anthropology, and of science in general, rests in the main on his organizational abilities. He encouraged great loyalty and respect in his staff and spurred its members to meticulous, exhaustive investigations. His own field research was sporadic, although it is clear that his studies of the Indians of the West were of great importance to his professional career. His works of synthesis, e.g. the linguistic classification, were joint efforts, with his staff doing most of the work. His philosophical discussions are abstruse and cranky. But he used the full power of his positions as head of two government agencies and his positions in the interlocking social networks of scholarly societies to encourage, foster, and develop anthropological and geological research and in the initiation of conservation and reclamation practices,
In anthropology he is clearly a transitional figure. In some of his work, he brought to culmination projects that had been underway for nearly one hundred years, e.g. the linguistic classification. In his adherence to cultural evolutionism he was a product of his time, and his theories, like those of Morgan, Ward, and Herbert Spencer, fell quickly before the rigorous, inductive demands of twentieth century anthropology.
But at the same time it was Powell's organization that helped to make twentieth century American anthropology possible. By the time of his death in 1902, professional anthropology was well established in the leading universities of the country as well as in the Bureau itself. It had passed from the avocation of interested men to a professional discipline. The role played by Powell and his Bureau in this transition was a vital and critical one. In a very real sense, Powell had achieved his aim of "organizing anthropological research in America."
"If danger, difficulty, and disaster mean romance, then assuredly the Colorado of the West is entitled to first rank, for seldom has any human being touched its borderland even, without some bitter or fatal experience. Never is the Colorado twice alike, and each new experience is different from the last. Once acknowledge this and the dangers, however, and approach it in a humble and reverent spirit, albeit firmly, and death need seldom be the penalty of a voyage on its restless waters." (Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, The Romance of the Colorado River. . . [New York, 1904], vii.)
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