John Wesley Powell and an Understanding of the West

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 37, 1969, No. 2

John Wesley Powell And An Understanding of the West

BY WILLIAM C. DARRAH

THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION of Major John Wesley Powell (1834- 1902) pays tribute to a public servant who influenced the course of American government and the development of the West. Powell's influence, far-reaching indeed, was recognized only slowly by historians.

It is fitting that this celebration coincides with the anniversary of Powell's daring exploration of the Colorado River because this feat raised him to a position of prominence and marked the turning point in his career.

There was little in the youth and early manhood of John Wesley Powell that might presage the future. He was born in Mt. Morris, New York, of English parents, his father a tailor and Methodist circuit rider. Powell's formal education was haphazard, in part because the family had moved frequently and took up farming in Wisconsin and Illinois. He did have a propensity for natural history and turned to public school teaching as a vocation.

Upon the outbreak of the Civil War, Powell enlisted in the infantry but organized an artillery battery while stationed at Cape Girardeau. At Shiloh he suffered a wound that necessitated amputation of his right forearm. Nevertheless he remained in combat service until 1865. Powell, forever after known as "the Major," returned to college teaching. He had earned no college degree but managed somehow to secure a professorship.

On May 24, 1869, Major Powell, an obscure professor of geology and natural history from Illinois State Normal University, with nine companions pushed four boats into the quiet waters of Green River at Green River Station, Wyoming. He had determined to explore the unknown canyons of the Colorado River. Two years of preliminary field work had convinced him that the descent was feasible even though it would be impossible to replenish supplies for more than five hundred miles of the river's length. The narrative of the expedition has been retold many, many times. Wild rapids, back-breaking portages, mishaps, short rations, near starvation, and defection of three men placed obstacles at almost every step of the way. Only courage and uncommon individual bravery kept the party together.

Three months later, on August 30, six men passed through the last of the canyons and, at the mouth of the Rio Virgin, met three men and a boy, Mormons, fishing. The last great exploration into unknown and unmapped country in the United States had been completed.

The expedition was a private venture financed through Powell's personal efforts, his own limited funds, sums solicited from several colleges and friends, free railroad passes for men and supplies, and the loan of scientific instruments by the Smithsonian Institution. The men who shared the dangers of the trip received no pay and little glory.

Major Powell found himself a national hero. Newspaper accounts had caught popular fancy but Powell considered the feat nothing more than a scientific endeavor cut short by misfortunes.

It is not necessary to describe the considerable scientific accomplishments of the expedition but the concept of land to be developed by Powell over the years had already taken form. He sensed, almost intuitively, that the Colorado plateau (which he later called the Great Basin) and the river with its tributary canyons represent an equilibrium, a warped uplifted land sculptured by water from melted snows, not a static landscape but a dynamic process of continuously rising land, and continuously eroding waters. Man's occupance and use of this land must fit this equilibrium.

Powell now sought federal support for a second expedition to cover two years work mapping a narrow strip paralleling both sides of the Colorado River. Congress appropriated $25,000 and placed the "Survey of the Colorado River of the West" under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. Three other surveys, two under the War Department, were already engaged in mapping the public domain.

Never one to limit himself to the letter of authority, Powell devoted much of his time to the study of the Indians who inhabited the canyon country. The second Colorado River Expedition of 1871-72 was accompanied by photographers of whom John Hillers is most noteworthy. His several thousand negatives of the region and especially the Indians are historically significant.

To some degree Powell had become an anthropologist and sociologist, interested in social institutions and social change. He had rejected Darwinian and Spencerian theories of human evolution, believing instead that man, by virtue of his intellect, is above animal evolution because he has the power to mold and adapt his institutions. In this manner man influences his own destiny.

Powell observed the degree to which the Ute and Paiute Indian bands were bound by habit and custom to their environment. Even their languages reflected the limited circumstances of their existence. He also recognized the gradual pressure of the white man, pressure which must inevitably displace the Indian but in doing so degrade him in misery.

More striking was the Mormon settlement of Utah which to Powell was the proof of adaptability of social institutions through intelligent management. Here were a people, without prior experience in arid country, who modified their customs, developed cooperative enterprises, devised methods of establishing new settlements, and practiced irrigation. In two decades they had achieved a harmonious balance with the land.

These many observations had not as yet been reasoned into a cohesive concept but this totality of man and the environment became the basic foundation for all of Powell's later work.

The Colorado River Survey received continuing support until 1877. Powell concentrated his efforts to a study of the geology of the Uinta Mountains. In the course of this work, however, he mapped the expanses of forest, the grasslands below them, and everywhere the natural economy of water, be it abundant or scanty. The capabilities —- and limitations — of the land were everywhere manifest.

The tide of western settlement had been accelerating since the Civil War. In 1867 when Powell for the first time had crossed the plains from Council Bluffs by wagon train, the region was nearly uninhabited. Each year Powell returned to the West and noted the striking changes. In a decade virtually all good land had been taken up.

Already in 1874, in seeking federal funds to continue his mapping, Powell had attempted to warn Congress:

"About two-fifths of the entire area of the United States has a climate so arid that agriculture cannot be pursued wihout irrigation. When all the waters running in the streams found in this region are conducted on the land, there will be but a small portion of the country redeemed. . . . It is of the most pressing importance that a general survey be made for the purpose of determining the several areas which can thus be redeemed by irrigation." This warning was published in House Report 612, 43d Congress, 1st Session, 1873-74, page 10.

Powell made many public appeals for prompt federal action during the ensuing five years, but to no avail.

With deep concern Powell foresaw growing conflict between farmer and cattleman aggravated by inept laws born of ignorance. Although he had no authorization to do so, Major Powell prepared a Report on the Arid Lands of the United States (1st ed. 1877, 2nd, 1879). In it he proposed a classification of western public lands based upon capability: irrigable, pasturage, timber, mineral, or coal; that acreage be allotted to homesteaders or commercial users on the basis of capability. A grazing farm should include not less than 2,560 acres because smaller units are incapable of supporting a profitable herd. Such a figure drew scorn and ridicule from politicians in Washington.

The essence of the Arid Lands was that boundaries, laws, and institutions applied to the West must be adapted to the West, not to surveyors' geometry or common law customs based upon experience in the humid East. Despite the fact that several thousand copies of this trail-blazing work were distributed, its immediate influence was slight. The plea for scientific understanding and political enlightenment went unheeded.

Powell, the undaunted propagandist, soon found himself in the position of administrator with power to press for his causes. In 1878 the four western surveys were abolished, one of them, the Clarence King Survey, had previously completed its work. In their place Congress established the United States Geological Survey (1879) under the Department of the Interior. King was named the first director but held the post for less than two years.

Meanwhile the Major had been appointed director of the Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian Institution. When King resigned Powell succeeded to the directorship of the Geological Survey.

The Geological Survey was reorganized to assume a broad program of research, both applied and so-called pure science. Greatly increased annual appropriations made it possible to include every subdivision of geology from water resources to paleontology. The scientific prestige of the Geological Survey and its director was impressive. The Survey became the acknowledged world leader in geological research.

Powell's ambitions were, however, diverted to other objectives: the establishment of an irrigation survey and the creation of a federal department of science, the latter to organize and supervise the scientific work of the government.

Not until October 1888 did Congress appropriate funds to the Geological Survey to implement an irrigation survey. The initial sum, $100,000, supported preliminary studies of water resources and areas capable of irrigation, actually little more than work already in progress. In March 1889 an additional appropriation of $250,000 put the work in full swing. The Director was expected to certify irrigable lands and sites for construction of dams. Proponents as well as opponents of irrigation joined in condemnation of the whole project. Although Powell certified nearly 150 reservoir sites, he wanted the federal government to control the water, to determine who would use the water and how much. This involved temporary closing of the public lands, a situation that was fraught with political consequences. By strange paradox, disastrous drought struck the West in 1890 and sufferers blamed the Survey for its failure to have constructed adequate irrigation works. Congress cut appropriations in August 1890, deliberately omitting mention of hydrographic work and thereby virtually eliminating the Irrigation Survey.

The irrigation movement took on new life but Powell was anguished that its enthusiastic leaders looked upon irrigation as a panacea. When at the Irrigation Congress in San Francisco the Major cautioned the delegates that there was insufficient water to irrigate the lands capable of reclamation, he was howled down. They would not listen to the truth.

Powell's personal power had been threatened, now it had diminished. Further cuts in the Survey's appropriations led the Major to resign in 1894. He took quiet refuge in his directorship of the Bureau of Ethnology, a position he had never relinquished since its creation in 1879. As an elder scientist he devoted his efforts to philosophy. Geology, irrigation, and sociology had passed to younger able hands.

John Wesley Powell died quietly on September 23, 1902, at his summer home in Haven, Maine. He was buried in the officers section of Arlington National Cemetery.

For thirty years he had worked for the nation, for people, for knowledge. His legacy attests to the breadth of his vision and capacity: the United States Geological Survey, the Bureau of American Ethnology, and the Bureau of Reclamation. Among his proposals implemented after his death, were withdrawal of public lands for the public good, harnessing of the waters of the Colorado River, a bureau of forestry, and a federal department or agency of the encouragement of science. His role in the development of environmental conservation is inestimable.

There is a more modest claim that merits our commemoration of this remarkable man. Whatever may have been the accomplishments and contributions of John Wesley Powell, he considered himself a public servant. With little regard for honors or awards, he labored with unyielding faith in the goodness and intelligence of man.

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