The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  Although tired from the hard travel and countless councils required of his commission work that spring and summer, Powell met Moran and New York Times reporter Justin Colburn at Salt Lake City in July. After securing interviews with Brigham Young and a number of elders, the small party set out south along the Wasatch range. The skinny but wiry Moran, in a full blond beard and wearing his trademark black felt bowler, took cheerfully to the hard life on horseback or in a Mormon farm wagon behind two mules. After a grueling climb up Mount Nebo—then considered the Utah Territory’s highest peak—from which they could almost see the Grand Canyon’s rim, Moran reported, “It was the most magnificent sight of my life,” strong words indeed for someone who had seen Yellowstone and Yosemite. After returning to base camp, all but the painter got sick and vomited from the exertion and altitude. Moran pointed out with satisfaction that even Powell himself had retched.

  Powell sent Moran and Colburn on ahead with teamsters bringing supplies to Kanab, telegraphing to Thompson and Hillers to take the painter and correspondent to the next Mormon town of Grafton, to see the great West Temple of the Virgin, an immense natural edifice of naked rock, which shimmered in the summer sun. They rode up the Virgin River and thence to Mu-koon-tu-weap, more commonly known by the Mormons as Little Zion. Moran’s sketches, soon after to appear in The Aldine magazine, became the first published images of what would become Zion National Park nearly a half century later.

  Powell broke away from his work—this time with the Pahvant Ute—to rejoin Moran in Kanab, intent on guiding the painter to the Major’s favorite distant prospect of the Canyon. On August 14, they headed south across the desert into the Arizona Strip, then climbed into the high forest of the Kaibab Plateau, which Powell knew well, then toward a small plateau connected to the north rim by a narrow isthmus known as Muab Saddle. After negotiating this, the team climbed up Powell Plateau, an eight-square-mile thumb of mesa jutting out into the Canyon, a veritable sky island of Ponderosa pine. A mile below curves the river, a seeming afterthought in this grandly sculpted landscape. On the Canyon’s far side rises the San Francisco range, while a twenty- to thirty-mile view stretches both up and down the Canyon. “The whole gorge for miles lay beneath us,” wrote Moran to his wife, “and it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen.”

  Colburn declared himself equally awestruck, then wrote, clearly prompted by Powell’s eloquent characterizations of what they were seeing: “And yet the force that has wrought so wonderfully through periods unknown, unmeasured, and unmeasurable, is a river 3000 feet below.” Ever the teacher, Powell explained and analyzed, offering his observations and singling out features far in the distance with his good arm, and describing how erosion over millions of years had shaped this impossible landscape. Moran hurried home eager to get to work on his commissions, declining Powell’s offer to take him into the Canyon for a water’s-edge vantage.

  * * *

  That fall, Powell returned to Washington to complete the commission report, which he submitted on December 1, 1873, to the secretary of the interior. A thoughtful, reasoned document, the report argued against the military policing of Indians, recommending instead that committed civilians protect and oversee the reservations—which should not be “looked upon in the light of a pen where a horde of savages are to be fed with flour and beef, to be supplied with blankets from the Government bounty, and to be furnished with paint and gewgaws by the greed of traders, but that a reservation should be a school of industry and a home for these unfortunate people.” Here the practical reformer shines through, Powell arguing that the government should provide conditions under which Indians could learn to live productive lives. A man of his Victorian times, Powell regarded their customs as barbaric. Indians could move toward civilization and enlightenment only by forsaking their hunter-gatherer traditions and becoming self-sustaining farmers. Paternalistic to be sure, yet his views encompassed a genuine concern for these uprooted people and revealed a sympathy often seriously lacking in that day. To attain such Indian independence, he argued, the federal government must go beyond giving out blankets. It must buy out white settlers who squatted on prime cropland and controlled critical water supplies. The commission’s report advocated enlarging some of the reservations so that some tribes long hostile to one another would not have to live in proximity.

  But the reservations never saw the commission’s recommended compensation. The white men would not leave the lawfully designated Indian reservation land, nor did the Indians come. Powell would reveal some of his anger and frustration in a letter in the summer of 1878 to the commissioner of Indian affairs: “The promises made by Mr. Ingalls and myself have not been fulfilled . . . I am constrained to protest against their neglect and against a course which must sooner or later result in serious trouble.” Solving the so-called Indian Question remained out of reach by any single person, even for someone such as Powell, whom the Smithsonian’s Spencer Baird described as knowing “more about the live Indian than any live man.”

  While the commission work may not have spurred much federal action, it had a bracing effect on Powell’s interest in ethnology. Whereas before he had concentrated on collecting, whether of stone axes or words, he now worked on knitting together the relationships of Indian words, and furthermore generally assembling their “systems of consanguinity,” a term very recently coined by another pioneering ethnologist. Powell also began to discern the lines of evolution of Indian myth, poetry, art, language, and religion. The following year, Powell would request—for the first time—a specific congressional appropriation to prepare an ethnological report. Although only $3,000, it would mark a personal commitment to so recently an invisible science, which would only continue to grow, until he founded the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology in 1879. He would turn this tiny initiative into one of the world’s premier anthropological organizations.

  On April 30, 1874, Thomas Moran’s huge painting of the Grand Canyon went on public display in Newark, New Jersey. The contrast between this and his equally large oil of Yellowstone could not be more distinct. In the Yellowstone work, blue skies shine brightly above sunlit rocks; in the foreground, two human figures view Yellowstone’s Lower Falls and blue-watered river. Conversely, few would call Moran’s Grand Canyon scene beautiful: A dark abyss drops away just feet from where the painter has situated the viewer. Stunted dead trees, cacti, and shrublike plants cling to a rocky ledge. A small snake writhes on the rock, while the tiny shadow of a bird appears faintly in the far distance. Life is peripheral here, brushed off to the side and permanently insignificant. Immense rock pillars, buttes, boulders, and sheer rock faces dominate every prospect. In the mid-ground, storm clouds unleash torrents of rain that lash the rock and throw up vaporous clouds. Boulders in the foreground appear ready at any moment to topple into the chasm. Although this rockscape has an eternal quality, the landscape appears dynamic, a patch of blue sky in the upper right corner suggests the passing of the storm. While not beautiful, the scene, like the Canyon itself, inspires awe. The Irish intellectual Edmund Burke once drew a distinction between beauty and sublimity—and few other vistas illustrate his point better than the Grand Canyon. Beauty delivers thoughts of wonder and joy, while sublimity brings unsettling, often frightening, emotions. And yet, as Burke pointed out, contemplating the sublime can awaken deep joys beyond reason.

  Of all of America’s natural spectacles, from the sweep of the mile-wide Mississippi and Denali’s peak cutting the heavens to the thunderous roar of Niagara Falls and California’s groves of towering redwoods, nothing but the ocean itself matches the Grand Canyon in its sheer, incomprehensible power and scale. A mountain range becomes visible long before a visitor reaches its base, but the Canyon confronts its visitor abruptly. One can stroll to within ten yards of its lip and still not know it is there. A newcomer experiences the Canyon’s gaping absence and dizzying drop-off like a slap in the face—no poetry comes to mind, but ra
ther one feels an overwhelming sense of the raw, primeval, and vertiginous—as if one is a voyeur peeking at some unfinished handiwork of God. Only after some minutes does the Canyon’s true scope force itself upon the visitor with a sort of mild horror. By 1874, still only a handful of Americans had experienced the Canyon in person, but now, for the first time, a talented artist had brought the Canyon to life in brilliant color on canvas.

  Early critical comments of Moran’s painting were mixed. Clarence Cook in the Atlantic Monthly repeatedly compared the painting with Dante’s portrayal of hell, observing that “here, there is no loveliness for hundreds of miles, nor anything on which the healthy human eye can bear to look (the scientific eye excepted), and this scene is only the concentrated ghastliness of a ghastly region.” Yet something did touch Cook deeply enough to acknowledge the Canyon’s grandeur in a scene appearing as if the “raging ocean had suddenly turned to stone.” With Moran’s painting, so deeply influenced by Powell’s thinking, ideas about the Grand Canyon’s worth would begin to change.

  White men, from the conquistador Don García López de Cárdenas, who stared down into the Grand Canyon in 1540 and rapidly looked away, to the West Point surveyors who did so just before the Civil War, all deemed the Canyon worthless—hostile even—and to be avoided at all costs. Powell would claim and unveil the Grand Canyon as a national treasure through his tireless advocacy in his writings, his congressional lobbying, and as a result of his hiring renowned painters, photographers, and illustrators. He would give the nation what it needed to “see” this New World’s new world. “It seems as if a thousand battles had been fought on the plains below,” he wrote, “and on every field the giant heroes had built a monument compared with which the pillar on Bunker Hill is but a mile stone. But no human hand has placed a block in all those wonderful treasures. The rain drops of unreckoned ages have cut them all from the solid rock.”

  Indeed Powell gave Americans a way of coming to terms with this frightening chasm, a way to understand it—and begin not only to appreciate it, but come to regard it as one of nature’s most stupendous displays. Only then could it become “our” Grand Canyon, and perhaps America’s most iconic natural feature. Only a man of outsized imagination, immense powers of communication, and burning curiosity could spread the word about this nearly incomprehensible, gigantic feature into American visual consciousness—something that all could wrap their heads around, and embrace as their own. This former vision of desolation now emerged as a distinctive, American landscape, which reflected a further sense of the nation’s growing understanding of itself as exceptional.

  When the organizers of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia requested that the Capitol loan them Moran’s two great canvases, they wrote, “[W]e do not know of any paintings about this Capitol which are more characteristic, which are more strictly national, which would be more interesting or more instructive to submit to foreigners visiting this country than those pictures of Moran.” The Chasm would hang in the Senate for years, then eventually make its way to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it is today.

  Yet even so, the passage that the Grand Canyon would undergo to become one of the most-visited and iconic of America’s national parks would take time. Whereas Yellowstone became a park only a few years after Hayden’s visit and survey, the Grand Canyon would not become a national park until 1919, fifty years after Powell’s first visit. Part of this had to do with the Canyon’s sublimity.

  * * *

  Powell returned that fall of 1873 to find a subdued capital. The postwar boom had finally crashed in September, setting off the Panic of 1873. Between 1866 and 1873, the nation had seen 35,000 miles of new track built, railroads becoming the nation’s second-largest employer, only after agriculture. This new business required high levels of risk taking, not just in laying rails over insufficiently known terrain, but in building a massive national infrastructure, so large as to require federal government intervention in the form of liberal land grants and subsidies. In modern parlance, the railroad sector had become a “bubble,” which burst when the banking firm of Jay Cooke and Company, a federal agent in the government financing of railroad construction, declared bankruptcy in September. Other overextended banks and companies collapsed: 89 of the 364 railroads failed, as did 18,000 other businesses, within two years. By 1876, unemployment had soared to 14 percent. The depression, exacerbated by European monetary policies, would extend through 1880.

  The often overlapping work of the three remaining federal surveys still in the field—King had wrapped up his fieldwork by 1872—could not help but come under congressional scrutiny in these increasingly lean times. In May 1874, the House Committee on Public Lands launched an inquiry, known as the Townsend Hearings, into the duplication of federal surveying. The details of the Wheeler-Hayden feud now became public. Hayden came out swinging: “. . . as far as my own party was concerned, it was generally rumored and believed that the avowed purpose of Lieutenant Wheeler in coming into Colorado was to precipitate a conflict which had been hanging over us for three years.” The two prideful principals would stain the hearings with name calling, Wheeler attacking Hayden as “unable to perform, or intelligently direct” the data gathering necessary, while Hayden charged back that it had not been “the love of science, but of power, that has induced [Wheeler] to precipitate this conflict.” The proceedings quickly turned into a referendum on whether military engineers or civilian scientists could more effectively manage a consolidated survey. Powell quietly stepped into the proceedings, and began methodically to undermine the army’s case,

  Wheeler, Hayden, and the army’s chief of engineers, General Andrew A. Humphreys, underwent a full week of contentious testimony, the record revealing a growing confusion among the congressmen about the details of surveying, which they had earlier regarded as a simple process. Wheeler’s testimony came off as angry and belligerent, dismissive of any congressmen’s interest in matters of which they knew little. He flat-out refused to even outline War Department policy. When Powell took the stand one Monday morning, he extended a guiding hand to the committee: “I have therefore brought a blackboard for the purpose of drawing diagrams for illustration.” The congressmen watched as Powell fell comfortably into his role of intense but dispassionate professor, his chalk clacking and flying across the board, dust settling over his wool suit.

  He lucidly explained Wheeler’s archaic technique of “meandering,” which relied on rolling an odometer or simply counting the steps of a horse, and compared it with the highly exact modern method of triangulation, perfected by Clarence King, and now adopted by him and Hayden. The War Department, including Wheeler’s survey, had simply not embraced modern surveying techniques and technology. Wheeler’s astronomic work, Powell conceded, “ranks with the best that has ever been done in this country . . .” but then he inquired whether he might show the bemused committee “why his map is so inaccurate as not to be available for geological purposes.” On the blackboard there appeared a cross-section of the Pangwitch Canyon, a river gorge cutting through volcanic rock, which showed economically why Wheeler’s technique could not describe it accurately. He also illustrated a plain to the southwest, reputed to contain rich coal beds. Wheeler’s map, Powell calmly demonstrated, displaced the location of the beds, thus giving the impression that the coal lay under 2,500 feet of sandstone, limestone, and shale. In reality, the beds lay on the hillsides, many of them already claimed and opened by settlers. Powell backed off slightly, adding that Wheeler had probably not intended to create an accurate topographic representation of the country, but rather a general sense that the country was broken and mountainous.

  During the previous field season, Wheeler had covered a prodigious 72,500 square miles in four states and territories. A geologist who would quit Wheeler’s survey to join Powell’s a month later would complain about the speed of his old chief’s surveying. “To study the structure of a region under such circumstances was to r
ead a book while its pages were quickly turned by another, and the result was a larger collection of impressions than of facts,” G. K. Gilbert wrote. In Wheeler’s surveys, the business of surveying roads and finding clear routes for supply trains trumped all else.

  Powell argued that no great unexplored region remained in the United States, so such exploring surveying expeditions were no longer necessary. Powell implied that the army-surveying era had ended. “A more thorough method, or a survey proper, is now demanded,” he added in case the congressmen had missed it. The growing nation needed tools that the army could no longer provide.

  The Townsend Hearings censured Wheeler and Hayden for bad manners, but declined to recommend any wholesale changes or consolidation. Competition among various surveys—as long as it remained civil—encouraged good work, the committee stated; and more survey teams could cover greater swaths of ground more quickly. President Grant’s support of Wheeler and the army’s role in surveying probably shielded this officer for the short term. However, the days of army participation in surveying and mapmaking neared an end. Congress shifted Powell’s survey from the Smithsonian to the Interior Department, ostensibly under Hayden’s auspices, although Powell did not report to him directly.