The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  But Powell had not the faintest intention of merely tying up loose ends. Quite the contrary. His Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region simply became the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology. Even the most liberal reading of the funding provision could not justify congressional authorization of a permanent government organization devoted to the “science of man.” Yet Powell set out to make just that happen. By late 1879, he had more than doubled the ethnologists on the new bureau’s payroll—six new scientists, the talented artist William H. Holmes, the executive officer James Stevenson, the photographer Jack Hillers, and adequate support personnel, including messengers, clerks, and librarians. Far from wrapping up raw field research, he sent men out west to collect new material.

  Nor did he waste time implementing his systematic plan in which he would not only hire scholars and trained men to do research, but persuade academics around the country, as well as promising amateurs, to conduct research under his overall guidance. These “collaborators” would greatly extend the Bureau’s reach—for often these men, and some women, did not need full salaries, only an element of financial support and a place to publish. As with the Colorado expeditions, he ran operations on a shoestring. He convinced the U.S. Census, which had once asked him to help classify American Indians by language, to pay the salaries of several anthropologists. The War Department detailed army personnel to the Bureau, notably Washington Matthews, who would conduct studies on the Navajo. The Interior Department gave him much administrative support.

  Had any congressman deigned to read Powell’s introduction to his six-hundred-page First Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, he would have found the Major’s ambitions as clear as a winter sky over the Grand Canyon: “It is the purpose of the Bureau of Ethnology to organize anthropologic research in America.” Powell’s fait accompli came off. The following year, the Bureau received a whopping annual increase to $50,000. With rare exceptions, Congress would raise the Bureau’s appropriation by 10 to 20 percent per year all through Powell’s nearly quarter-century directorship, which ended only with his death in 1902. Remarkably, Powell built upon this slim justification to create America’s foremost anthropological organization, train the next generation of the country’s anthropologists, and spin off many satellite organizations. At its center, directing the complicated endeavor, would always be the Major, set upon remaking the study of American anthropology.

  Powell might have been happy just to direct the Bureau, but the gales of political change soon blew him right back into public life.

  * * *

  Clarence King quickly discovered his temperament ill-suited for the political machinations necessary to keep a Washington bureaucracy functioning. He did get off to a solid start by hiring real talent and focusing the survey on his true love, economic geology. But his attention soon wandered. He spent long trips at government expense roaming Sierra Madre gold and silver mines, searching for that one score that would set him up for life. The heady promise of the West dispensing overnight riches still held him in its thrall—as it did so many others—but such interests did not bode well for someone seeking to establish the authority of a newly formed federal bureaucracy.

  Just a year into his tenure, King started to look for a way out—and the upcoming change of administrations would give him just the chance. Under President Hayes, King had enjoyed the support of his friend and boss, Carl Schurz, secretary of the interior. But Hayes, who had agreed to serve only one term in the wake of Grant’s unsettling administration, prepared to leave office in 1881, and Schurz most likely would go with him. King drafted his resignation letter.

  Grant’s triumphal return from a two-year world tour had thrown the Republicans into disarray. His hero’s welcome deluded him into running for a third term, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York building a nostalgic coalition, known as the Stalwarts, to reinstall him. Maine senator James Blaine and former Ohio senator John Sherman, brother of William Tecumseh, challenged Grant, splitting the party into factions. During the Republican Convention in Chicago, congressman James Garfield of Ohio served as Sherman’s floor representative. When Grant, Blaine, and Sherman did not each garner enough votes for the nomination, the delegates coalesced around Garfield as a compromise candidate, despite his own efforts to remove his name from contention. Garfield won the nomination on the thirty-sixth vote in a deal sealed by the addition to the ticket of the Stalwart Chester Arthur as vice president. Garfield then narrowly beat the Democratic candidate, fellow Civil War general Winfield Scott Hancock, by less than two thousand recorded popular votes.

  “I congratulate you and myself on our great Republican victory,” the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan wrote Powell. “It will give four years of steady encouragement to your work, and enable you to get it upon a solid foundation.” Powell and the president-elect had become fast friends and allies over the past decade, the latter as the powerful chairman of the Appropriations Committee who played a major role in consolidating the surveys. Over six feet tall, the warmhearted trustee of the Smithsonian had championed geology as far back as 1860, when as a state senator he introduced a bill to bring back the state’s discontinued survey. Garfield shared with Lincoln and Powell the credentials of self-made, frontier intellectuals of strong Whig and Protestant sensibilities bent upon reform. Like Powell, Garfield had worked America’s interior waterways—a Horatio Alger book celebrating his life was called From Canal Boy to President—and also served at Shiloh.

  Amid the whirlwind brought by the federal survey consolidation, Powell had lent Garfield his aid, Joseph Stanley-Brown, on Sundays and holidays to help with the congressman’s overwhelming correspondence. When Garfield became the Republican nominee, Powell graciously acceded to Garfield’s wish to make Stanley-Brown his personal secretary. “Without my knowledge,” wrote Stanley-Brown, “the General had again arranged matters with the Major.” Stanley-Brown would become one of the Garfield family, eventually marrying the president’s only daughter, Mollie.

  A week after Garfield took the oath to become the twentieth president in March 1881, King and Powell met with him at the White House, the president at once accepting King’s resignation from the USGS and appointing Powell as his replacement. With “great pleasure,” Stanley-Brown sent off the president’s letter of nomination to the Senate within half an hour of Powell’s leaving the White House. The Senate quickly approved the appointment. Hayden only learned about the transition afterward.

  For all his harsh words about Hayden, Powell would maintain King’s appointments, including a $4,000 salary for Hayden to finish up his work. The already ailing geologist wrote to Newberry that year that Powell had “been far more than just and magnanimous toward me, and I wish it were in my power to make some adequate returns.”

  Once King left the USGS, his life shuffled toward a long, disappointing end. None of his mining deals panned out, and his credit and reputation with investors exhausted all but his firmest friendships. Only when he died, broke, from tuberculosis in an Arizona hotel in 1901 did his friends learn of his long-secret marriage to an African American nursemaid from Brooklyn. Ada Copeland had borne him five children, and would be as shocked as King’s friends when she learned the details of his life. In a story worthy of his best high-Sierra tall tales, the rather swarthy King had represented himself to Copeland as James Todd, a light-skinned Pullman porter, frequently absent on long railway excursions. The charismatic maverick had done fine work, but ultimately fell cruelly before too-tall expectations of Gilded America’s boom and bust mentality. The American West—so infinite in its possibilities, so grand in the wild dreams it nurtured—had chewed him up.

  Powell now added a more-than-full-time job atop that of his more-than-full-time job at the Bureau of Ethnology. Certainly Garfield knew that far better credentialed geologists could have taken the reins. But the president, a gifted amateur mathematician and a strong proponent of federal science, understood that his friend
would be ideal to build this fledgling organization into a powerhouse. Powell would not let him down, although the president would not live to see it. Four months after Garfield assumed the highest office, the deranged Charles J. Guiteau fired his .44 caliber English Bulldog pistol into Garfield’s back as the president entered a Washington train station on his way to his twenty-fifth college reunion. “I did it,” Guiteau reputedly said as policemen dragged him away. “I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”

  “The surprise this morning is overpowering,” Powell wrote Stanley-Brown. One of the bullets broke a rib and lodged in the president’s abdomen, physicians unable to locate and remove it. The president clung to life, suffering terribly in his White House sickroom from the humid ninety-degree heat of the Washington summer, which no fans could moderate. In desperation, Garfield’s physicians approached Powell about cooling the room. On the Saturday night a week after the shooting, Powell enlisted the aid of his friend, the astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb. The two graybeards hurried into discussion, agreeing that an electric fan forcing air through cheesecloth dampened with ice water might work. Figuring that they needed to supply 12,000 cubic feet of cool air per hour, they calculated that it would require “the condensation of some 10 pounds per hour,” which would require melting 70 pounds of ice. They finished their experiments and calculations by 1 p.m. that Sunday, turning next to devising an icebox capable of holding six tons of ice. This they decided to connect to a coffin-shaped iron box devised by a Baltimore inventor, which held many thin cotton screens, and placed this in the president’s office adjacent to the sickroom.

  By Monday, the apparatus pumped “cool, dry, and ample” air into the president’s sickroom, but the clatter of air forced through tin pipes caused the president great distress. By replacing the metal conduit with pipes made from canvas-covered wire, they quieted the racket. The air in the room settled to a cool fifty-five degrees. Newcomb and Powell’s system remains one of the first active, effective air conditioners in history.

  Garfield may well have survived the assassin’s bullets, but physicians’ continued probing of the wound in search of the bullet with unwashed fingers—this in the days before germ theory—introduced infections that led to a fatal aneurysm on September 19, 1881. Powell took it hard; the news, on top of his new responsibilities, conspired to compromise his own health. In early October, inflammation of his iris sent the Major into a dark room, where he lay until late November, his doctor warning that to do otherwise might cost him an eye.

  * * *

  The loss of this most powerful friend and supporter was profound. Chester Arthur immediately fired all of Garfield’s cabinet appointments except Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln. But Powell did not lie idle in his darkened room, instead working out the details of his ambitious plans for entirely reshaping the consolidated survey. He began with a structural overhaul, replacing King’s decentralized organization of largely independent regional offices with a highly centralized bureau formed around topical divisions. He planned even more sweeping changes on top of that.

  After assuming the directorship, King had addressed Congress about the future of the USGS, telling the legislators how the nation’s great destiny was tied inextricably to its ability to extract its mineral resources and convert that into wealth. “In the industrial conquest of a continent the tide of victory has never ebbed,” he exulted, revving the engines of Manifest Destiny in a gilded age. The survey’s purpose, he argued, centered on identifying the nation’s mineral wealth “with the highest technical skill and with the utmost scientific economy.” King’s emphasis on geology for mining reflected not just his own interests but the growing needs of the iron and steel industries, now pinched by an acute shortage of raw materials. King had planned to dedicate the whole survey to mining geology—limiting general geology, topographic mapping, and hydrology to satellite supporting roles; thus the USGS’s pursuit of paleontology would be limited to identifying strata containing coal or minerals. While Powell did not doubt that practical geology would unlock wealth, he determined that the USGS’s mission must entertain far wider ambitions than simply locating coal beds or other precious commodities. No longer would the survey devote itself to identifying mining centers and developing theories of ore formation.

  Right away, Powell committed the survey to focus on paleontology by hiring Othniel Marsh, Lester Ward, and Charles Walcott. Invertebrate paleontology gave indispensable assistance to that generation’s geologists in sequencing rock layers and comparing them with similar deposits across the land. King, the man of mountains, was replaced by Powell, the lover of rivers. The Major set up chemical and physical laboratories, built a library and publication program, undertook a thesaurus of American geologic formations, and started a bibliography of North American geology.

  When Congress created the USGS in 1879, the bill contained vague language as to the full scope of its assigned mission. The statute defined the survey’s province as the “national domain,” an unclear term that could either encompass the entire United States or only the states and territories containing publicly owned lands. Then, the federal government owned more than 1.2 billion acres of land, the greater part west of the Mississippi. Of that, only one-sixth had been surveyed.

  As director, Clarence King had asked Congress to clarify its intent, believing that a broader interpretation would give him a better chance to develop national mineral resources. But Congress dithered and made no decision. Fear of legal entanglements and hampered by a relatively small budget—only $106,000 despite a request for $500,000—persuaded King to drop the matter and focus entirely on public lands. He clearly did not have the stomach for an extended congressional fight.

  Powell had no such reservations. In his first survey budget, submitted in April 1882, he asked for an increase of $100,000 for western work and an additional $100,000 to extend the survey into the Mississippi Valley and the Appalachians. Powell’s ally, the recently displaced House Appropriations chair John Atkins, who proved so critical to creating the USGS, had attached an amendment to the bill as it emerged from his committee the year before, which directed the survey “to continue the preparation of a geological map of the United States.” Other congressmen objected to its continental sweep, changing the amendment to read “of the national domain of the United States.” But by August 7, 1882, when the Sundry Civil Expenses Bill passed, the amendment to the amendment had lost that added phrasing. That the commission’s mapping amendment stayed in at all spoke to the promise that such mapmaking could uncover vast wealth. Powell appeared so certain of this outcome that five weeks before the bill passed, he appointed Henry Gannett as chief geographer to direct the topographic mapping project. Nowhere yet had Powell secured authorization to print the maps.

  In the USGS’s fourth annual report, he announced with no trace of irony that “prior to the beginning of the present fiscal year it was doubted whether the Geological Survey was authorized by law to extend its operations into the eastern portion for the United States.” Congress resolved that issue, he continued, because it required the survey to create a geologic map of the United States. “Authority, therefore, was given to extend the operations of the Survey over the entire country to the extent necessary for that purpose.” Powell had again built out one of his greatest ambitions on the merest sliver of questionable authority. By then, the survey had already spread into Massachusetts, Texas, and New Jersey.

  The creation of a geologic map requires the prior creation of a topographic survey map, which acts as a template. The most prominent features of a topographic map, of course, are its contour lines, which bunch tightly to indicate a cliff face or stream embankment, but spread apart over the likes of the Nebraska prairie, while some human landmarks—towns, cities, roads—may appear. It is a picture of the Earth’s surface. In contrast, a geologic map defies a pictorial conception, noted Earth scientist Preston Cloud, serving as “more of
a three- or even four-dimensional conceptual model of the underlying geologic structure and history.” Vast amounts of analysis and interpretation go into identifying different rock compositions, their relative ages, and relationships to other strata that may be faulted, twisted, fractured, or eroded around or into them. Brightly colored geologic maps often include many vertical cross-sections of the surface strata.

  In relatively short order, the Major had masterminded the first continental federal science project—both the geological and topographical mappings of the entire contiguous United States. Nowhere had Congress explicitly authorized so monumental a project. The 2,600-sheet topographic atlas, drawn to three different scales depending on level of state support and population density, would be engraved on copper with three impressions per plate: relief lines in brown, hydrologic features in blue, man-made features and lettering in black. By the time Powell left the survey after a dozen years, federal surveyors had entered every state and territory, topographically mapping 600,000 square miles, or about 20 percent of continental America. He rightly anticipated that future generations would require a much more detailed scale than the 1:250,000—or about four miles to the inch—that he proposed. When the USGS tackled the mapping of the contiguous United States on a 1:24,000 scale, it took from the 1930s to 1991 to complete the 55,000 quadrangle maps, employing 33 million person-hours at a cost of about $1.6 billion. Powell had described many of the techniques used to print the modern quad maps in 1885.

  The economic value of geologic and topographic mapping is immeasurable as it affects countless areas of human activity—from urban and other land-use planning, highway construction, and oil and natural gas exploration to assessing environmental impacts and assisting national security agencies to planning against terrorist attacks on the nation’s infrastructure. Powell succinctly claimed that “a Government cannot do any scientific work of more value to the people at large than by causing the construction of proper topographic maps of the country.” He had correctly understood that without maps, a nation could not truly know itself. Without maps, America could not reach its potential.