Thus, the scholars who wrote each chapter take a facet of Powell’s writing, thinking, or actions, hold it up to the present, and see how it bears up now. Robert W. Adler, for example, examines Powell’s advocacy for the development of water resources by communities in what we now call watersheds, rather than by big government or big capital. Adler’s chapter and the eleven others offer fascinating insights, are well written, and are well researched. Powell’s greatest relevance to our times was in showing the environmental reality of the Colorado River Basin and the Intermountain West; namely, that its aridity would always be a limiting factor. And Powell’s communitarian approach to water resources is not dead, as a case study of the Dolores River by Amorina Lee-Martinez and Patricia Limerick demonstrates. The Bureau of Reclamation has mostly
UHQ 89_3 Text.indd 265
N O . I
Despite his prophetic skills, Powell was all too human and often got it wrong. As numerous authors point out, he did not foresee the ways in which land and water agencies would have to account for environmental factors like beach preservation in the Grand Canyon or endangered species like the Colorado pikeminnow. Nor could he have foreseen the recreation boom of the post–World War II era that even took his riveting account of his 1869 trip as a sort of wild-river bible. These are just a few of the ways Powell, like almost all of us, was hemmed in by his times.
8 9
The sesquicentennial of John Wesley Powell’s epic 1869 trip down the Green and Colorado rivers inspired this anthology’s editors to ask the question: how do Powell’s ideas about the Colorado River Basin and the West stand up a century-and-a-half later? To answer it, they divided the book into Powell’s three main professional interests—water, public lands, and Native Americans—and let numerous scholars sort out the rest. Throughout, the authors do not just restrict themselves to the past and present. They give us much to chew on in looking forward. As the twelve excellent chapters included herein show, there is still much to learn—negatively and positively—from the one-armed Civil War veteran. Sometimes Powell’s vision peered through the fog and beyond; other times the fog of his time clouded his view.
V O L .
Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. xxv + 317 pp. Cloth, $85.00; paper, $34.95
I
Edited by Jason Robison, Daniel McCool, and Thomas Minckley
followed Powell’s idea to construct reservoirs at higher locations because most farms sit at lower elevations. Finally, as Jack Schmidt eloquently notes in his afterword, and as other scholars mention throughout, Powell always made a strong case for using science and rational planning to plot the future of land and water issues.
U H Q
Vision and Place: John Wesley Powell and Reimagining the Colorado River Basin
3
REVIEWS
265
Perhaps the most important topic covered within these chapters is that of Native Americans. Unlike many of Powell’s ideas about water, which were ignored in his day and ours, his influence as the head of the Bureau of Ethnology mattered then and matters now. Even though Powell was somewhat progressive for his time in being an assimilationist (rather than an annihilationist), he appears very ethnocentric, even racist, now. Powell certainly acknowledged the extraordinary diversity of Native American tribes and was no social Darwinist, but he always presumed the superiority of Euro-American civilization. The only thing missing from this section, from a Utah point of view, is an assessment of what Powell contributed to the scholarship of Numic-speaking tribes, namely the Utes and Paiutes. Every one of these essays contributes significantly to the discussion, and it is hard to say which is best. Two of them held personal interest to me: William Debuys’s chapter, “Stewart Udall, John Wesley Powell, and the Emergence of a National Commons,” and Weston McCool’s
5/10/21 12:18 PM
