Dreams of El Dorado

by H. W. Brands

  Powell and the others strained their eyes from their elevated vantage, looking for Bradley and the boat to reappear beyond the rocks. But they saw nothing except the furious water. “Bradley is gone, so it seems.” They glanced at one another, saying not a word.

  Finally, far down the stream, something bobbed on the frothy surface. “It is evidently a boat. A moment more, and we see Bradley standing on deck, swinging his hat to show he is all right. But he is in a whirlpool.” The other men had the boat’s stem-post at the end of their rope. They couldn’t tell how badly the craft was disabled.

  Powell at once decided to go to Bradley’s rescue. While two of the men tried to make their way along the bank, Powell and the others challenged the falls and rapids directly. “Away we go over the falls. A wave rolls over us, and our boat is unmanageable. Another great wave strikes us, the boat rolls over, and tumbles and tosses, I know not how.” Powell apparently hit his head on a rock and lost consciousness, for the next thing he knew, Bradley was hauling him out of the water.

  Somehow they all survived. But they were down to a boat and a half, and they still had no idea how much canyon they had left to cover.

  Yet the gods of the canyon were smiling on them. The next day, August 29, 1869, Powell wrote in the log: “We start very early this morning. The river still continues swift, but we have no serious difficulty, and at twelve o’clock emerge from the Grand Canyon of the Colorado.”

  45

  THE ARID REGION

  JOHN WESLEY POWELL’S VOYAGE DOWN THE COLORADO made him a celebrity and a national hero. It filled in a large blank space on the map of the American West, and his journal of the expedition, after he published it, allowed armchair explorers to share the dangers and thrills of a trip none but a handful would ever take.

  Yet Powell remained a scientist, and he employed his fame as a platform from which to speak on the fundamental problem of the West, as he conceived it. In a document titled Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, written for the federal secretary of the interior, Powell declared that the distinguishing characteristic of the West—what made it different from the East—was that the West was dry. East of the Great Plains—specifically, east of the 100th meridian—farmers could reasonably expect to grow crops with the water nature provided as rain and snow. West of the 100th meridian, natural precipitation had to be supplemented by irrigation. There were exceptions: the Pacific Northwest and parts of coastal California. But otherwise, aridity was the rule, and the problem to be overcome.

  This meant that policies, laws and customs that had evolved in the East had to be modified, or wholly transformed, if the West was to thrive. Individualism had built the East, but it would fail in the West unless complemented by large doses of collective action. The yeoman farmer of the East could succeed on his own efforts and those of his family; farmers in the West needed help. “The redemption of all these lands will require extensive and comprehensive plans, for the execution of which aggregated capital or cooperative labor will be necessary,” Powell wrote. “Here, individual farmers, being poor men, cannot undertake the task.”

  Irrigation was the central task, and irrigation, above all, demanded collective effort. Where rain was scarce, successful farming required that what fell on a broad area be collected and delivered to a small area. This in turn necessitated dams, canals and pipelines. No individual farmer had the ability to build such infrastructure. But farmers acting together could marshal the requisite authority and funding. Powell cited the Mormons, who, working in unison, had built irrigation systems and created flourishing farms in the valley of the Great Salt Lake. What the Mormons had done in the name of their religion, other Americans could do in the name of democracy.

  Powell prescribed specific changes in laws. The Homestead Act had been written from the experience of the humid East; it should be amended for application to the arid West. The quarter-section, which suited a family in the East, was too small or too large for the West. It was too small if the Western farmer grew wheat without irrigation, or if he ran a cattle ranch. It was too large if the land was irrigated, for no single farmer could cultivate that much irrigated land, and other worthy claimants would get squeezed out. The homestead law should be adjusted accordingly. Laws regarding water rights should be revised as well. The first Western water laws had been written in California, to suit mining operations. The state laws there permitted water rights to be sold separately from land rights. This pleased the mining industry, but applied to farming, it fostered monopolies of water supplies, to the detriment of whole farming communities. State water laws should be rewritten or preempted by federal law.

  The process had begun, Powell said. “Customs are forming and regulations are being made by common consent among the people in some districts already.” Cattlemen’s associations like Theodore Roosevelt’s in Dakota came to mind. These instances should be extrapolated. Most of the lands in the West were federal lands; the federal government was the appropriate agency to accomplish the extrapolation. The Mormons had made their part of the desert bloom; under Washington’s wise guidance, much of the remainder of the West might see a similar efflorescence.

  POWELL’S CALL FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT OF WESTERN WATER dovetailed with a movement envisioning similar custody for special places in the West. At the moment when Powell was designing the boats that would carry his party down the Colorado, a Scottish immigrant to America embarked on a journey of his own, to the Yosemite Valley of California. “The landscapes of the Santa Clara Valley were fairly drenched with sunshine, all the air was quivering with the songs of the meadow-larks, and the hills were so covered with flowers that they seemed to be painted,” John Muir wrote of his departure from the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Muir took his time, wandering across the Central Valley and into the Sierra foothills. He followed the Merced River upward, toward its origins deep in the mountains, till he reached the goal of his one-man expedition.

  “No temple made with hands can compare with Yosemite,” Muir wrote. “Every rock in its walls seems to glow with life. Some lean back in majestic repose; others, absolutely sheer or nearly so for thousands of feet, advance beyond their companions in thoughtful attitudes, giving welcome to storms and calms alike, seemingly aware, yet heedless, of everything going on about them. Awful in stern, immovable majesty, how softly these rocks are adorned, and how fine and reassuring the company they keep: their feet among beautiful groves and meadows, their brows in the sky, a thousand flowers leaning confidingly against their feet, bathed in floods of water, floods of light, while the snow and waterfalls, the winds and avalanches and clouds shine and sing and wreathe about them as the years go by, and myriads of small winged creatures—birds, bees, butterflies—give glad animation and help to make all the air into music. Down through the middle of the Valley flows the crystal Merced, River of Mercy, peacefully quiet, reflecting lilies and trees and the onlooking rocks; things frail and fleeting and types of endurance meeting here and blending in countless forms, as if into this one mountain mansion Nature had gathered her choicest treasures, to draw her lovers into close and confiding communion with her.”

  Muir was the most ardent of Yosemite’s lovers; the valley and its environs became the object of his enduring affection and the subject of his literary raptures. He returned to Yosemite the next year and subsequently made it his home. From his cabin on Yosemite Creek he explored every creek and rill, every cliff and waterfall, every ridge and dome of the valley and the land around it. He climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, edging dangerously close to the point at which it leaps into space, a thousand feet above the valley floor. “The last incline down which the stream journeys so gracefully is so steep and smooth one must slip cautiously forward on hands and feet alongside the rushing water, which so near one’s head is very exciting,” he wrote. “But to gain a perfect view one must go yet farther, over a curving brow to a slight shelf on the extreme brink. This shelf, formed by the flaking off of a fold of granite, is about three inches
wide, just wide enough for a safe rest for one’s heels. To me it seemed nerve-trying to slip to this narrow foothold and poise on the edge of such precipice so close to the confusing whirl of the waters; and after casting longing glances over the shining brow of the fall and listening to its sublime psalm, I concluded not to attempt to go nearer; but, nevertheless, against reasonable judgment, I did. Noticing some tufts of artemisia in a cleft of rock, I filled my mouth with the leaves, hoping their bitter taste might help to keep caution keen and prevent giddiness. In spite of myself I reached the little ledge, got my heels well set, and worked sidewise twenty or thirty feet to a point close to the out-plunging current. Here the view is perfectly free down into the heart of the bright irised throng of comet-like streamers into which the whole ponderous volume of the fall separates, two or three hundred feet below the brow.”

  Winter gave Yosemite a different look. Blizzards filled the valley and cloaked the mountains with slabs of snow that grew unstable as the snows deepened. Avalanches thundered down the slopes—to Muir’s delight. “One fine Yosemite morning after a heavy snowfall, being eager to see as many avalanches as possible and wide views of the forest and summit peaks in their new white robes before the sunshine had time to change them, I set out early to climb by a side canyon to the top of a commanding ridge a little over three thousand feet above the Valley,” he recalled. The looseness of the snow made the climbing tedious. “Most of the way I sank waist deep, almost out of sight in some places.” He struggled for hours and hours. Yet he still hoped to make the summit, if only to see the sunset. “But I was not to get summit views of any sort that day, for deep trampling near the canyon head, where the snow was strained, started an avalanche, and I was swished down to the foot of the canyon as if by enchantment. The wallowing ascent had taken nearly all day, the descent only about a minute. When the avalanche started I threw myself on my back and spread my arms to try to keep from sinking. Fortunately, though the grade of the canyon is very steep, it is not interrupted by precipices large enough to cause outbounding or free plunging. On no part of the rush was I buried. I was only moderately imbedded on the surface or at times a little below it, and covered with a veil of back-streaming dust particles; and as the whole mass beneath and about me joined in the flight there was no friction, though I was tossed here and there and lurched from side to side. When the avalanche swedged and came to rest I found myself on top of the crumpled pile without bruise or scar. This was a fine experience.”

  Even finer was an earthquake. Muir’s examination of the rocks of Yosemite had convinced him that glaciers had carved the valley. This view contradicted conventional wisdom among geologists, which held that earthquakes had caused the floor of the valley to sink thousands of feet relative to the highlands around it. The earthquake theory wasn’t implausible, given the frequency of quakes in the region. Muir felt one himself in 1872. “At half-past two o’clock of a moonlit morning in March, I was awakened by a tremendous earthquake, and though I had never before enjoyed a storm of this sort, the strange thrilling motion could not be mistaken, and I ran out of my cabin, both glad and frightened, shouting, ‘A noble earthquake! A noble earthquake!’ feeling sure I was going to learn something. The shocks were so violent and varied, and succeeded one another so closely, that I had to balance myself carefully in walking as if on the deck of a ship among waves, and it seemed impossible that the high cliffs of the Valley could escape being shattered.” One cliff worried him particularly. “I feared that the sheer-fronted Sentinel Rock, towering above my cabin, would be shaken down, and I took shelter back of a large yellow pine, hoping that it might protect me from at least the smaller outbounding boulders. For a minute or two the shocks became more and more violent—flashing horizontal thrusts mixed with a few twists and battering, explosive, upheaving jolts—as if Nature were wrecking her Yosemite temple, and getting ready to build a still better one.”

  But the temple was not wrecked. Nor was it apparently enlarged or deepened. The earthquake theory was weakened, if only slightly. In time, Muir’s glacialism supplanted it.

  The flora of Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra sent Muir into raptures of another sort. The dominant species of the valley was the Ponderosa pine. Individual trees could be eight feet in diameter and more than two hundred feet tall. Muir felt obliged to experience the species for himself. “Climbing these grand trees, especially when they are waving and singing in worship in wind-storms, is a glorious experience,” he said. “Ascending from the lowest branch to the topmost is like stepping up stairs through a blaze of white light, every needle thrilling and shining as if with religious ecstasy.”

  Yet the monarch of the forest was the giant sequoia. “The immensely strong, stately shafts are free of limbs for one hundred and fifty feet or so. The large limbs reach out with equal boldness in every direction, showing no weather side, and no other tree has foliage so densely massed, so finely molded in outline and so perfectly subordinate to an ideal type. A particularly knotty, angular, ungovernable-looking branch, from five to seven or eight feet in diameter and perhaps a thousand years old, may occasionally be seen pushing out from the trunk as if determined to break across the bounds of the regular curve, but like all the others it dissolves in bosses of branchlets and sprays as soon as the general outline is approached. Except in picturesque old age, after being struck by lightning or broken by thousands of snow-storms, the regularity of forms is one of their most distinguishing characteristics. Another is the simple beauty of the trunk and its great thickness as compared with its height and the width of the branches, which makes them look more like finely modeled and sculptured architectural columns than the stems of trees, while the great limbs look like rafters, supporting the magnificent dome-head.”

  JOHN MUIR WASN’T THE FIRST PERSON TO HAVE A RELIGIOUS experience in Yosemite. The Indians for whom the valley was named thought it enchanted, as did the neighboring tribes who kept clear of it. During the decade after the first penetration of the valley by whites, a political consensus emerged that this was a special place, worth preserving as nature had made it. In 1864 Abraham Lincoln took a moment from monitoring Ulysses Grant’s campaign against Robert E. Lee to sign an act transferring control of Yosemite from the federal government to the state of California, subject to the condition that the valley should be preserved for “public use, resort, and recreation… for all time.”

  Before long, disputes would develop over what constituted public use. And so when people who felt about Wyoming’s Yellowstone region—the Colter’s Hell traversed by Joe Meek—the way John Muir felt about Yosemite, they employed a different model of preservation. Because no one quite trusted the testimony of Meek and the other mountain men, Congress sponsored a scientific expedition to Yellowstone, led by Ferdinand Hayden, an army doctor during the Civil War and a geologist since. The Hayden survey confirmed everything that Meek and the others had said about the geysers and hot springs, and added convincing testimony on the great falls and canyon of the Yellowstone River and the shimmering expanse of Yellowstone Lake.

  The Hayden report lent decisive support to a campaign to set aside the Yellowstone region as America’s first national park—that is, a natural preserve retained and operated by the federal government. While his official report was being printed, Hayden provided a layman’s summary in Scribner’s Monthly, in which he concluded, “The intelligent American will one day point on the map to this remarkable district with the conscious pride that it has not its parallel on the face of the globe. Why will not Congress at once pass a law setting it apart as a great public park for all time to come?”

  The main reason why not was that privatization remained the default mode of American policy on Western land and other natural resources. The public domain existed to be transferred to private hands as quickly as possible. Privatization was what had made the California gold rush happen. Privatization had justified the grant of federal land to railroads to spur construction. Privatization was the heart of the Homestead
Act. The idea of setting aside federal land for a park cut directly against the privatization grain. It would deprive individuals of resources they could have put to commercial use, and it would deprive the government of revenues that could have been realized from the sale of such resources.

  For this reason, the advocates of a Yellowstone park emphasized the utter worthlessness of the region for anything but a park. “The entire area comprised within the limits of the reservation contemplated in this bill is not susceptible of cultivation with any degree of certainty, and the winters would be too severe for stock-raising,” one of the bill’s proponents explained. Nor would rich ores be discovered in the mountains that surrounded the Yellowstone basin. “These mountains are all of volcanic origin, and it is not probable that any mines or minerals of value will ever be found there.” No buyer would come forward if the land were offered for sale. “The withdrawal of this tract, therefore, from sale or settlement takes nothing from the value of the public domain, and is no pecuniary loss to the Government.”

  A crucial ally of the park advocates was tycoon Jay Cooke, who had rescued the Union from insolvency during the Civil War by canny management of the government’s bond sales. Cooke had pocketed a fortune for himself in the process, and after the war he employed it, and his continuing political connections, to launch construction of another cross-country railroad, the Northern Pacific. Cooke’s first concern was that the Yellowstone park might infringe on the land grants his railroad was due from the government. But once he learned that it wouldn’t—that he couldn’t claim the Yellowstone wonders—he moved to make sure no one else could. He decided to promote tourism on his line, and he didn’t want to have to pay private parties for the privilege. “It is important to do something speedily, or squatters and claimants will go in there,” he wrote to an associate. “We can probably deal much better with the government in any improvements we may desire to make for the benefit of our pleasure travel than with individuals.”