The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  That month, President Cleveland spoke directly to irrigation issues in the last annual congressional address of his first four-year term. Republican Benjamin Harrison had just narrowly beaten him, losing the popular vote but taking the electoral college with wins in New York and Indiana. “I can not but think it perilous to suffer either these lands or the sources of their irrigation to fall into the hands of monopolies . . . ,” said Cleveland, “and the public good presents no demand for hasty dispossession of national ownership and control.” Harrison harbored no such burning passion and would prove overall a charming but weak executive, whom Cleveland would convincingly defeat in four years, garnering a second term. Two weeks after his inauguration, Harrison issued a proclamation opening the Cherokee Strip to homesteaders as of April 22 at noon. “Sooners” claimed upward of two million acres over a matter of hours in what would be dubbed the Great Land Rush of 1889.

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  Even before Congress officially appropriated the funds, Powell had already kicked the irrigation survey into high gear, tasking Prof Thompson to handle mapping and Clarence Dutton to head up engineering and hydrographic work. Every unused corner of the Hooe filled with new hires. An annex across the street, plus offices at the Smithsonian and regional locations, just about accommodated the rest. Besides the USGS and the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell now had another entire agency to run, but no other career official was better positioned to launch so ambitious a program. His organization had experience juggling multiple complex operations, and G. K. Gilbert stepped in to help run things. By the summer of 1889, Powell’s men had set up stream-gauge stations on the Arkansas, Rio Grande, Carson, Truckee, Gila, and Snake rivers. By the end of the following June, they had surveyed and identified 147 reservoir sites: 33 in California, 46 in Colorado, 27 in Montana, 39 in New Mexico, and 2 in Nevada. The reservoir sites themselves covered 165,932 acres, which Powell projected might irrigate nearly two million acres of dry land, only a fraction of the 30 million acres that the irrigation survey had designated as irrigable, but still more extensive than all the currently irrigated land in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Nevada combined. The survey coined the terms “runoff” and “flyoff,” still in use today. Powell agreed with Stewart that the federal government should provide only planning and estimates. He imagined a series of small dams, rarely more than several feet high, each on a tributary of a major river, which would provide water for local communities. Congress found him $250,000 for the second year, and would have considered more, but Powell said he was not yet ready.

  On August 1, 1889, Stewart’s entourage left from St. Paul, Minnesota, traveling in style in a Pullman train car. At Stewart’s invitation, Powell joined the party, which would travel to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, covering 14,000 miles and conducting hundreds of interviews. The Major and the white-haired six-foot-tall senator made an odd couple. Stewart had made his mark in Virginia City, earning huge fees litigating the tangled claims of Nevada’s (then the Utah Territories’) Comstock Lode. An implacable mercenary for mining companies, he had no peer at intimidating, bribing, and cajoling judges, juries, and witnesses. At one point, the blue-eyed pit bull had forced the resignation of the Nevada Territory’s entire judiciary. Several of his most questionable mining deals would dog him for the rest of his life. He came to Washington in 1865, briefly hiring the young Samuel Clemens as a clerk. Clemens, whose pen name was becoming Mark Twain, would later lampoon his former boss in Roughing It with a caricature of the senator snarling behind a piratical eye patch. On what would become Dupont Circle, Stewart soon raised a five-story, Second Empire mansion, which boasted a palatial ballroom and room after room crowded with massive Chinese teak furniture and gilded chairs upholstered with Aubusson tapestry. One reporter claimed that “Stewart’s Castle” attracted more curiosity seekers than the White House. Stewart, a strong free-silver advocate, reflected his epoch, helping to write the National Mining Law of 1866, which to this day still affords mining interests startlingly favorable terms for developing public lands.

  Somewhere along these 14,000 miles, Stewart and Powell’s friendly relationship deteriorated. Washington’s Daily Critic surmised that the senator “grew jealous of the attentions paid the geologic director.” These two men made strange bedfellows indeed, drawn together by their agreement that irrigating the west required federal assistance. But as Stewart had begun to realize, they came at this great issue from different universes. The two bull-headed men, each accustomed to getting his own way, proved as compatible as oil and water.

  The Dakota Territory delegates at their first constitutional convention wanted to hear from the grizzled USGS director, not from the booming gentleman from Nevada. Powell urged them to keep state control of water rights. Far from extolling western corporate boosterism, Powell preached a solidly populist message: “Fix it in your constitution that no corporation—no body of men—no capital can get possession of the right of your waters. Hold the waters in the hands of the people.” That summer, while the committee’s train chugged through the West, events in the field would accelerate the coming Washington showdown between the two men.

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  Other problems rose up to bedevil the survey. Land speculators hired their own surveyors to follow Powell’s men, then filed on land and the water rights along the streams and gulches. “Such monopoly by the speculators promises to defeat the plans of the government,” reported the Cheyenne Daily Leader. Shortly after the irrigation survey designated southern Idaho’s Bear Lake as its first reservoir site, the Bear Lake and River Water Works and Irrigation Company filed for all the land and water rights throughout the basin—not only the lake, but also Bear River and all its tributaries—set on diverting the water south to irrigate 200,000 acres of the Salt Lake Basin. The governor of Idaho telegraphed the secretary of the interior in alarm, demanding that he forestall, in the newspaper’s words, “this great wrong to Idaho.”

  In August, after checking with the attorney general and the president, Interior Secretary John Noble invoked the anti-speculation amendment in the irrigation survey’s appropriation bill, but, instead of merely closing off potential reservoir sites, the secretary removed all public lands nationwide from entry, shuttered the land offices, and suspended all claims retroactively to October 2, 1888, when the bill had been signed. With one flourish of his pen, Noble had closed off hundreds of millions of acres to settlement and suspended 134,000 filings and entries on nine million acres. Legislators had never meant to concede such sweeping authority as to seal off the entire public heritage, although the amendment’s muddy wording could indeed be so interpreted. “The segregation of irrigable lands provided for by the law,” explained the Rocky Mountain News, “is not intended in any way as a bar to their acquirement under the land laws. . . . The only reservation to be made is in the case of the sites for storage reservoirs. These are to be withdrawn from public entry to prevent their monopoly by speculators.” Soon the fury of politicians, railroad interests, and land grabbers exploded into a wildfire, most of it pointed toward the director of the USGS. “It is doubtful that any modern controversy among men of learning,” wrote Wallace Stegner in 1954, “has generated more venom than this one did.”

  Though Powell had nothing to do with this draconian measure, powerful forces understood that he—and he alone—would be the person to judge for the secretary of the interior when the public lands would again be open. By the look of it, the president and a land-hungry nation waited upon Powell’s judgment on the matter. Seldom has so wide ranging a power been dropped into the lap of a single individual. Asked whether he agreed with Noble’s decision, Powell said that he did. He had always been upfront that the irrigation survey would take several—or more—years to complete.

  As the seismic rumblings over Noble’s decision began to amplify ominously, an old enemy surfaced to blindside Powell. The paleontologist E.
D. Cope had never forgotten the Major’s siding with Marsh long ago. For his part, Powell had met with Cope in 1888, agreeing to put him on the USGS payroll so that he might finish his book, already more than a decade old. In return, Cope agreed to turn some of the fossils in his collections over to the Smithsonian. “I feel much relieved,” wrote Cope. A year later, no fossils—or manuscript—was forthcoming, so Secretary Noble demanded that either he surrender the fossils or forgo salary and publication.

  Cope blew up, livid that he had no say in the disposition of the fossils in which he had personally sunk $75,000 of his shrinking fortune. Detecting Powell’s hand behind the secretary’s threat, Cope rushed to scandal writer W. H. Ballou, a stringer for the New York Herald. The Herald’s competition that January was enjoying a sensational run as their star writer, Nellie Bly, had decided to challenge the central conceit of Jules Verne’s hugely successful novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Traveling by ship, train, and burro, the charismatic thirty-year-old finished in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, steaming into New York Harbor late that month to become a huge star. Tweaked by his competitor’s success, the Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Jr., sponsor of such publicity stunts as sending Stanley to find Livingstone in the African jungle, was not about to be bested. When Ballou came to him with Cope’s accusations, Bennett went big, publishing a huge headline, “Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare . . . Red Hot Denials Put Forth.” The article quoted Cope as alleging that the survey had become a politico-scientific monopoly that operated like a political machine. Ballou claimed that a steaming volcano lay underneath the survey and would soon erupt. Powell responded with a masterful dissection of Cope’s character, praising him as a fair systematist who could still do great work, but was unable to see that “the enemy which he sees forever haunting him as a ghost is himself.” The headlines died down, but then Marsh reinvigorated them with his own attack on Cope, dredging up a twenty-year-old claim that Cope had placed the skull at the wrong end of a dinosaur skeleton.

  The same week that the Herald article broke, Powell appeared before Stewart’s Senate Select Committee, attending six of its ten hearings between January 17 and March 28, 1890. The Major unpacked his ideas once more, perhaps the most innovative of which was integrating water rights with claims to the land that the water flowed through. Here he displayed a map of the arid lands, separated into colorful circles of various sizes, designating watersheds. He also introduced the idea of irrigation districts, which would manage their own water, neither sending it out of their own watershed nor importing any from another. These communities, established on parcels of the land for settlers at eighty acres, cut in half from the traditional quarter section, would own the water communally, each having an equal voice in its use. Each district would make its own rules and raise capital for building its system of irrigation; the federal government would help only in the fundamental organization and nothing more—whether the construction of reservoirs, dams, or canals. Powell offered an unparalleled understanding of watersheds, rivers and their tributaries, the history of irrigation, artesian water, storm water, and reservoir capacities.

  Again and again, Chairman Stewart and his fellow Republicans questioned the extraordinary expense of creating the topographical atlas. Powell never shied from his belief that the correct siting of hydrologic works necessitated such a broad undertaking. Mapping offered the cheapest, quickest, and most efficient means of carrying out this task. Such mapping made it possible to identify the potentially irrigable land at the outset. But why, asked Stewart, could not an engineer simply climb a mountain and eyeball a reservoir or dam site without the benefit of topographic data?

  Powell explained the need for exact information, perhaps thinking about the article he had written for The North American Review about the recent catastrophic Johnstown Flood. Under heavy rain, the earthen South Fork Dam on the little Conemaugh River had collapsed, releasing a thirty-foot wall of water onto Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and killing 2,200 people. The worst failure of American engineering had shaken the public’s faith in dams. Powell had stepped in to reassure. By all accounts, he acknowledged, the engineers had built a sound dam, but had neglected to consider “the duty the dam was required to perform.” The engineers had not built the dam to accommodate what nature could deliver under maximum rainfall or snow-melt conditions into that gentle valley. Quite simply, the engineers had failed to reckon the capacity of the entire drainage basin and the slopes and declivities that hemmed the dam in. Establish that body of knowledge, combine it with annual precipitation data, and an engineer could accurately calculate the maximum amount of floodwater—and design a structure capable of containing it. A topographical mapping lay central to such calculations.

  This was the linchpin of Powell’s argument to the senators: The irrigation survey might certainly designate reservoir sites without the benefit of exact mapping, but many would not be scientifically sited and thus be prone to disasters. So, too, topographical work would help determine the location of underground water, obviating the wasteful need to drill at random. But said Senator Gideon Moody of South Dakota about experimental well drilling, “what these people want is . . . the courage of conviction.” Give them money to dig wells and “they will take care of the rest.” Powell would not budge: “I do not wish to give the people courage to lead them on to failure, to waste their energies in seeking disaster.”

  Over days of testimony, Stewart turned his legendary powers of advocacy toward strong-arming Powell into submission or finding a crack in his argument. Again and again he attacked Powell. Back and forth they went like two exhausted prizefighters in late rounds. The Major never lost his cool, adopting the demeanor of a patient teacher with a somewhat dim student, explaining things over and over again, invoking an example every time. The senator had come up against Powell’s legendarily steely resolve.

  On January 31, the fourth day, Stewart understood that he had drawn to a stalemate. Calling the committee to order, he acknowledged that much valuable general material had been collected. “What we want now is to hear from any person present who has practical ideas as to what can and ought to be done to facilitate irrigation; how it can be directly got at; what aid the Government can give most advantageously and with the least expense to make a profitable development of the arid regions.” Stewart, like any western senator, wanted answers right away, not to wait for some bureaucrat driven by righteous philosophical generalities and taste for larger payrolls to take as many years as he pleased. Powell saw the immense costs to the farmer—and American democracy—by a reckless, ill-considered development of the West. Both Powell and Stewart agreed that irrigation of the arid lands remained a national priority—and that the federal government needed to aid that process but should not be involved in the actual building of the infrastructure. Yet at the root, they held diametrically opposed perspectives on how to get irrigation done. Any chance of their working together had now passed. Over the last days of testimony, Stewart’s antagonism toward Powell had grown deeply and visibly personal.

  Political expediency would have suggested that Powell back down and live to fight another battle, or approach Stewart with a compromise, although by then Stewart would have probably rejected anything that Powell advanced. Anyhow, compromise would not have crossed Powell’s mind. Not only did his tenacity kick in, but his deep convictions on these matters would never have let him budge. He felt himself fighting for the very future of the American republic.

  In mid-March, the senator would try a new tack to best Powell, finding a weakness not in Powell’s arguments, but in one of his subordinates.

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  By all accounts, Clarence Dutton, the bright Army Ordnance Corps captain for the past fifteen years on permanent seasonal loan to the USGS, had served faithfully as one of Powell’s most trusted lieutenants. Dutton, sporting a trimmed Van Dyke and an always-burning cigar, his carriage more soldierly than scientific, brought an unassuming manner but a trench
ant intellect to Powell’s innermost circle. Powell regarded him as his heir to the survey’s preeminent geology department. Along with Gilbert, Dutton had instituted rigorous bookkeeping protocols, which kept the survey out of trouble under repeated congressional inquiries.

  Unlike Gilbert, who viewed the Major as something of a father figure, Dutton called his boss “Powell,” perhaps a natural result of their common war experience, during which both had served as artillery officers and had suffered severe wounds. Where Powell enjoyed immersing himself in Scott and Longfellow, Dutton tended toward Twain and the humorous aphorisms of Josh Billings—his joke-and-riddle-telling softening Powell’s often overtaxed countenance. The Major might be interested, Dutton once wrote from the field, that he had solved a vexing problem, namely “how high and steep and rough a hill a mule can roll down without getting killed.” Or he might write to Clarence King how he had found earth faults in flagrante delicto. Later, when the naturalists John Muir and John Burroughs encountered the baffling immensities of the Grand Canyon, they would turn to the surprisingly lyrical exposition of Dutton’s Tertiary History.

  But Powell particularly counted on Dutton’s eclectic curiosity, much like the Major’s, which always took him off on interesting tangents, whether in studying the volcanoes of Hawaii or the earthquake that battered Charleston in 1886. The same year of the Stewart hearings, Dutton had brought boats to Oregon’s Crater Lake—a startlingly difficult feat in those days—to survey it and plumb its depths for the first time. With those data, he theorized about the crater’s origin, coming up with an explanation that still stands today.

  When the irrigation survey work fell on him rather suddenly, Powell tasked Dutton to run the hydrographic engineering division. Although reluctant to leave the studies he loved, the dutiful captain agreed. This inveterate chess player, capable of playing seven simultaneous games blindfolded, understood that stakes in this particular inquiry had grown steadily higher, so confronted Powell about the propriety of spending irrigation survey appropriations on topographic mapping, when the USGS had already dedicated federal dollars to that purpose. Powell might all-too-convincingly be charged with soaking up irrigation survey funds to water his larger mapping agenda. Powell did not see how these could be separated. The national topographic mapping project remained critical to his current mission—and the success of the irrigation survey.