by John F. Ross
ALSO BY JOHN F. ROSS
Enduring Courage
War on the Run
The Polar Bear Strategy
Smithsonian Guides to Natural America: Atlantic Coast & Blue Ridge Mountains
VIKING
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Copyright © 2018 by John F. Ross
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ISBN 9780525429876 (hardcover)
ISBN 9780698409989 (ebook)
Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward
Version_1
To Timothy Dickinson
Contents
Also by John F. Ross
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Maps
Introduction
1. Into the Cauldron
2. Osage Oranges and Pink Muckets
3. Thinking Bayonets
4. First Thoughts West
5. Descent
6. The Canyon
7. Encore
8. Fighting the National Surveys
9. A Radical Idea
10. Taking Over Washington
11. A Tough Opponent
12. Last Stand
Epilogue
Photographs
Notes
Index
About the Author
Acknowledgments
No single experience put me closer to John Wesley Powell than a raft and dory trip down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. I’m indebted to the Arizona Raft Adventure river guides, who did so much more than conduct my family and me safely down the river. Second-generation river guide Bruce Quayle not only shared his stories of the river in 1983, meeting Ed Abbey, and how to negotiate immense standing waves, but also read from his father Amil’s cowboy poetry. “Tater, the Invincible Dachshund” tells the hilarious, but trenchant life of a dog that gets half eaten by coyotes, run over by a Datsun pickup, chewed up by German shepherds, and stolen by Mexican bandits, yet still manages to survive and does so cheerfully. Could be a parable for writing books, if not living one’s life. Thank you to trip leader Derik Spice, and guides Aaron Cavagnolo, Larry Vermeern, Phil Sgamma, and Natalie Zollinger for sharing their personal journeys, insights about life on the river, and theories about Powell’s 1869 river expedition. And a warm thanks to Ann Crittenden for setting up the trip. Experiencing the Grand Canyon, especially on the river itself, is a gift—and the guides are the purveyors of the stories that keep alive the history of the Grand Canyon and its great river, tales of fortitude and exploration, of geology and the extraordinary richness of Native American cultures, of the Kolb brothers, and the eccentricities of Georgie White. Thanks to all my paddling buddies with whom I’ve shared enjoyable river time in the Canadian Arctic and Siberia, on the Yak, the Potomac, and Kennebec.
One of the great joys of writing a book is engaging with passionate scholars and independent historians. The topic of John Wesley Powell has spawned a particularly robust—and opinionated!—group. Among them are the inveterate river rats who have meticulously traced Powell’s river trips and seize every opportunity they can to grab a paddle and get wet, the geologists who have examined the rock strata along the Green and Colorado, the boat builders who have re-created Powell’s rowboats from scratch, and the historians who have spent years digging for clues and theorizing about Powell and the expedition members on that famous trip just about 150 years ago. This book draws on their work and taps into their passion for history and discovery. I thank Wayne Ranney, Richard Quarteroli, Brad Dimock, Earle Spammer, and Michael Ghiglieri for generously sharing their insights. Don Lago, who has done quality work sleuthing Powell’s documents that relate to the 1869 river trip and has offered multiple fascinating theories, never failed to respond thoughtfully to my myriad questions. I would particularly like to thank Ray Sumner, a descendent of Jack Sumner, who opened up so many new doors for me with his assiduous research and penetrating questions. His enthusiasm reminds me of why I write history.
This book would not have been possible without the fine work of dozens upon dozens of archivists, librarians, and historians, only a few of them that I can personally thank here. They include Lizeth Zepeda, the Arizona Historical Society; Stephen J. Pyne, Arizona State University; Scott House, Cape Girardeau, MO; John F. Underwood, Christ United Methodist Church, Jackson, OH; Sarah Gilmor, Stephen H. Hart Library & Research Center, History Colorado; Kevin Cummings and Jeremy Tiemann, Illinois Natural History Survey; April Karlene Anderson, Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives, Illinois State University; Meg Miner and Tony Heaton, the Ames Library, Illinois Wesleyan University; Mike Stroth, Jackson (OH) Historical Society; Cynthia Nelson, Kenosha History Center; William Kemp, McLean County (Illinois) Museum of History; Louisa Hoffman, Oberlin College Archives; Scott Tutti Jackson, Ohio History Connection; Carol Holliger, Archives of Ohio United Methodism, Ohio Wesleyan University; Heather Henson, Shiloh National Military Park; Marc Rothenberg and Kathy Dorman, The Joseph Henry Papers, Smithsonian; Tad Bennicoff, Mary Markey, Heidi Stover, Smithsonian Institution Archives; William Fitzhugh, Senior Scientist, National Museum of Natural History; Art Molella, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, Smithsonian; Mark Shenise, General Commission on Archives and History, the United Methodist Church; Gregory M. Walz, Research Center of the Utah State Archives & Utah State History; David Slay, Vicksburg National Military Park; Ann Wake, The Wake Kendall Group; Lee Grady, Wisconsin Historical Society; Terry Hogg; and Justin Solonick.
I would also like to thank the descendants of Emma Powell, William and Wendy Crag, who generously shared their portrait of Emma with me. Thanks to the always engaging members of the Literary Society of Washington, which Powell himself once belonged to, who were always ready to challenge me and support this project. And thanks to the history committee of the Cosmos Club for their committed effort to celebrate Powell’s work and encourage mine.
I extend my deep thanks and appreciation for those who read all or parts of my manuscript: Sam Holt, Joseph Meany, Albert J. Beveridge III, Donald Ritchey, Kirk Johnson, Richard Quarteroli, Wayne Ranney, and Peter Cozzens. A special thanks goes to my researcher, the incomparable Marcia Thomas, who steered me through the maze of Powell’s primary material and historiography with particular deftness. Her ability to wrest obscure documents from institutions was exceeded only by her sage guidance when my interpretations veered too close to the edge. Her good cheer was always a tonic. Any mistakes I’ve made, of course, are all mine.
I extend my deep gratitude to Timothy Dickinson, to whom this book is dedicated. Our frequent spirited conversations and debates at the Lisner-Louise-Dickson-Hurt Home in Friendship Heights, Washington, D.C., resulted in an abundance of important insights about Powell and his times. Over the years, no one has taught me more about the beauty and the extraordinary precision of the English language. I am deeply honored to call him my friend.
To my editor at Viking, Wendy Wolf, I take a deep bow. Her enthusiasm about this project, her excellent editing, rapier wit, and sound judgment, made this a far better book—and a more enjoyable exper
ience along the way. And the editorial suggestions made by her assistant editor Georgia Bodnar on the manuscript hit the mark. And thanks to Terezia Cicel, who has carefully and patiently guided the book process, designer Nancy Resnick, cartographer Jeffrey Ward, indexer Stephen Callahan, production editor Eric Wechter, managing editors Tricia Conley and Tess Espinoza, jacket designer Elizabeth Yaffe, and senior publicist Tony Forde.
Not enough can be said about my first-class agent, Stuart Krichevsky, whose counsel, sagacity, humor, and patience I have come to rely on. And thanks also to his assistants Laura Usselman, Aemilia Phillips, and Hannah Schwartz.
My friend Larry O’Reilly was always ready to share a laugh, listen to my new discoveries, and cheer me on when the mountain sometimes seemed too difficult to climb. Thanks as well to my fellow writer Daniel Stashower—our walks around Wyngate became a forum for hashing out writing issues. Thanks to Cindy Scudder for her spot-on design and picture advice and Adam Gibbons for his web savviness. Thanks to my friend, the author, painter, and photographer Scott Warren, who is more knowledgeable about hiking the American Southwest than anyone I know. Our hiking and backpacking trips have always been a source of inspiration. And thanks to Sari Ateek for just always being there.
A round of applause for my parents and brother, Jim, who are always a great source of support. And thanks to my son, Forrister, tossed off a boat in Granite Rapid by a giant wave, for the adventures we have shared that have provided such sustenance to me. And to my daughter, Grace, a literary fiction agent and kayaking buddy who was a frequent sounding board on matters of writing and whose enthusiasm for this project and my work was unflagging.
But above all, no thanks can adequately express my love and deep appreciation for my wife, Diana Ingraham, who has stood beside me through thick and thin, and whose counsel is 24-karat gold.
Introduction
On January 17, 1890, John Wesley Powell strode into a Senate committee room in Washington to testify. He was hard to miss, one contemporary comparing him to a sturdy oak, gnarled and seamed from the blasts of many winters. Clear gray eyes stared out from a deeply lined face, mostly covered by a shaggy bird’s nest of gray beard, flecked with cigar ash. No one would call the fifty-six-year-old veteran and explorer handsome, but one knew immediately when he entered a room. Only five feet six inches tall, he spoke rather slowly, but forcefully, with a fearless independence of mind. When he expressed himself emphatically, the stump of his right arm would bob and weave as if boxing with the ghosts of the war that had maimed him; every once in a while, Powell would reach around his back with his left hand and forcibly subdue it—a movement that invariably silenced a room. It was not often comfortable to watch him, but most always mesmerizing. The authority he radiated even in a room crowded with titanic personalities was palpable.
Only a few years after losing his forearm to a minié ball at the battle of Shiloh, he had organized the most daring exploration in American history. Ten men had climbed aboard puny wooden rowboats and pulled out into the Southwest’s Green and Colorado rivers, then spent three months flying, crashing, and bounding through the terrible unknown cataracts of the canyonlands, and, finally, through the Grand Canyon itself, not knowing whether a falls or killing rapid lay around the next bend. Six men came out at the other end, barely alive, half naked, with only a few pounds of moldy flour between them. The experience had deeply changed Powell—and he had become a great American hero. Now, two decades later, Powell had come to testify not as a hero or explorer, but as one of America’s foremost scientists, the head of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), and an architect of federal science. He had something deeply important to communicate about America’s future.
The Senate Select Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation of Arid Lands was the gatekeeper of an issue pivotal to the development of the nation—through them the federal government could bring water to the western deserts and thus open great new lands to new generations of pioneers. The committee was composed mostly of senators from western states devoted to fulfilling their constituents’ dreams of a home and ever-increasing affluence. They wanted to hear from Powell—arguably the most comprehensively knowledgeable person about those still-little-understood western lands. They craved to hear that irrigation works would bring an Eden to the West, vouchsafing the vision of Manifest Destiny—the divinely conferred right of Americans to push across the continent with wealth and industry bringing to blossom whatever they touched. But Powell would not tell them what they wanted to hear. He told them all too rightly that the West offered not enough water to reclaim by irrigation more than a tiny fraction of its land. Their dreams of a verdant West needed to be tempered and shaped to reality. Powell might as well have told them the Earth was flat. The senators were outraged.
He had brought a map to explain—one of the profoundest such documents ever created in American history. The “Arid Region of the United States” features the western half of the United States, the territory carved up in a jigsaw-puzzle riot of color. Shapes of various sizes, some half the size of states, are colored in oranges, greens, blues, reds, yellows, and pinks. It’s a visually stunning, beautiful map. At first glance, one is captivated purely by its aesthetic. But the power of a well-designed map—as this one certainly is—comes from the powerful perspective it imparts, the intersection of geography and imagination: Contained within such maps lie entire worldviews, reams of fact, conclusions, and assumptions, which can often persuade its viewers into confronting new, sometimes revolutionary, ways of taking in the world.
Powell’s map, assembled under his direction by USGS cartographers, revealed the western half of America separated into watersheds, the natural land basins through which water flows. Each patch represents a watershed—a hydrographic basin—wherein all entering raindrops or snowflakes drain into a common outlet. Where a raindrop fell, on one side of a mountain ridgeline or the other, for instance, the two points separated only by a matter of inches, would determine which stream or creek it fell into to be raced into larger rivers and finally into the sea. Drops hitting one edge of the Continental Divide, which runs along the crest of the Rockies, eventually reach the Pacific, while drops on the other edge will flow into the Atlantic or Arctic oceans.
This marked the first time that a map had been used to visualize a complex intersection of geographical factors—integrating water and land into a nuanced understanding of the Earth’s surface. It was the Earth’s first ecological map, building on, but pushing far beyond, Alexander von Humboldt’s efforts earlier that century. Previous maps had mostly defined the nation by political boundaries or topographic features. Powell’s map forces the viewer to imagine the West as defined by water and its natural movement. For its time, Powell’s map was as stunning as NASA’s photographs of Earth from space in the 1960s. The orderly drawing of Jeffersonian grids and political lines—Powell implicitly argued through this map—did not apply in the West; other, more complicated, natural phenomena were at play and must be taken very seriously.
Powell would use this map to unfold an argument that America should move cautiously as it plumbed its natural resources and developed the land—and to introduce the idea of sustainability and stewardship of the Earth. In that Senate room, the immensely powerful William Stewart from Nevada listened to Powell, and the more he heard, the more it grated against everything he stood for. In that gilded age, riches were there for the taking, enshrined as a divine promise to America. Powell would proffer a wholly new outlook by claiming that Americans needed to listen not only to their hearts, pocketbooks, and deep aspirations, but to what the land itself and the climate would tell them.
Stewart and Powell would lock into a titanic struggle over the very soul of America—the future of the American West and the shape of the nation’s democracy. America’s story had always closely aligned with that of Exodus—the tale of a people who left behind an oppressive Old World to enter a wilderness and ultimately build a divinely inspired,
promised land. How would that promise look? Powell singlehandedly tried to change the American narrative.
This is the story of the most practical of American visionaries who arose in the vast midlands of a brand-new continent—at least from the perspective of its European newcomers—and was forged by the vise of a bitter dispute over slavery, then given new edges honed in the American West. From the perils of these experiences, his imagination enlarged and primed, he would launch a new vision for America, a bold challenge to the status quo. It is a particularly national story that profoundly shapes the country to this day.
This one-armed scientist-explorer threw down a gauntlet that remains essential and important for the time we live in. Not only for the drought and water shortage now afflicting the West, but for the larger world of climate change. While cautionary, it also offers a clear way forward.
CHAPTER 1
Into the Cauldron
In 1838, four-year-old Wes rode next to his father, Joseph Powell, on the last leg of their journey south to Jackson from Chillicothe, their horse-drawn cart rolling easily down the unusually wide dirt road that wound through the rugged Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio. They may have felt like pioneers, but that same hard-beaten path had carried multifarious travelers since the last Ice Age, all drawn by the region’s salt licks—the deposits of natural saltwater springs—so thick as to permanently frost the banks of local creeks.
First had come the mastodons and shaggy mammoths of the Pleistocene, later followed by herds of bison—and then the first human beings to leave a mark on the land, the mysterious mound-building peoples of a mere two millennia before. In historic times, the Shawnee had padded silently on moccasined feet, and just three decades earlier, the first European settlers had crossed the Appalachians to settle. Six age-old “salt roads” converged like the spokes of a wagon wheel upon what had only very recently become the town of Jackson.
