The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  For all Dutton’s abilities, he would prove no match for Stewart’s deft cross-examination on March 13. Ever the responsible military man responding candidly to his commanding officer, Dutton acknowledged that his engineering and hydrographic section received less than half the irrigation survey appropriations assigned to the topographical division. Stewart then unwound a long array of pointed questions centering on whether an engineer needed a topographic map to locate a reservoir site. Dutton explained and explained, but Stewart battered away. Finally, the cornered Dutton conceded that mapping was not strictly necessary. Stewart now had what he needed and moved to close the session.

  Just before adjournment, Senator James K. Jones from Arkansas stepped in to make sure he had heard right:

  Senator Jones: “You say a topographic map is of very little value to the engineer in locating irrigating works?”

  Captain Dutton: “I think they are of only general value.”

  Senator Jones: “And are by no means necessary?”

  Captain Dutton: “I do not think they are necessary within the meaning of the law . . .”

  At that moment, the extent of his concession dawned on Dutton, the direct contradiction of his boss’s outspoken stance. One feels Dutton jarring under the Major’s boney left elbow in his ribs even though Powell was not in attendance that day. Dutton unraveled. “The term ‘necessary’ has a practical interpretation,” he stammered, “which is not easy to define.” He was no longer making sense. “We are every day certifying that certain things are necessary on our bills and on our vouchers. While in a certain sense and in the ordinary acceptation of the term they are necessary, in an absolute sense they are not.”

  Senator Reagan ended that day’s session by clearly throwing the obviously demoralized Dutton a lifeline: Had the government made a mistake in authorizing “these topographic surveys”?

  Dutton vigorously clutched the offering: “No, sir, I think not. I think no money has been better spent.” With this last line, he made clear that he believed in the broad mapping project, but that did not matter to Stewart. He now had the apparent defection of a Powell loyalist on the record.

  When Powell next appeared before the committee just five days later, he explained “the error which I think Captain Dutton has committed.” Each of those subordinates tasked with a given branch of work often overestimated the importance of their responsibilities. It was for him, not Dutton, to coordinate the overall effort. When the Major suggested that committee call upon the actual mapmakers to testify, Chairman Stewart agreed, but requested their testimony come only in writing. Stewart’s undisguised venom proved too much for Senator Jones, who dismissed this approach as a “one-sided affair,” asserting that it was “not right” for the committee to only question witnesses, such as Dutton, who fell on one side of the issue. Stewart was forced to yield the point.

  Several days later, the committee heard from Thompson, Gilbert, and a USGS topographer, Willard Johnson. The latter recorded that the engineering surveyors’ calls upon him for map data were “continuous, urgent, and annoyingly persistent.” Mapping was indeed an “indispensible and unerring guide” to determining long-term reservoir sites and the paths of irrigation canals. As Powell had testified, the engineers could locate valuable reservoir sites, but their efforts were not systematic and “great blunders . . . involving the expenditure of vast sums” could be “avoided by the early expenditure of a very small, relatively insignificant, sum.” Do the job right from the start, argued this loyal and well-coached lieutenant, and avoid potentially catastrophic consequences. But Powell and all his subordinates could have submitted to weeks more of inquisition without altering Stewart’s mind.

  Powell had seriously miscalculated the depth of Stewart’s personal animus. He realized too late that Stewart was playing for high stakes. “In the conflict,” as Stewart wrote a friend, “there is great danger that the whole matter of irrigation will be defeated altogether. But I would rather be defeated than have the whole country tied up under Powell.”

  * * *

  On May 8, the Select Committee issued its report; the majority opinion, written by Stewart with the consent of his Republican colleagues, strongly advocated that irrigation matters transfer from the USGS to the recently created Department of Agriculture. Much of the report centered on Powell’s allegedly illegal transfer of funds appropriated for the irrigation survey on topographical work. This report cited expert testimony about the wastefulness of mapping. The minority opinion—from the Democrats Reagan, Gorman, and Jones—fully supported Powell’s recommendations, lest lands and waters fall into “the hands of the wealthy few and the farmers themselves will be but hired laborers.”

  Two weeks later, Stewart pushed a resolution through the Senate requiring the secretary of the interior to document how much of the irrigation survey budget had been diverted to topographical surveying. Despite Powell’s firm declaration from the start that topographical mapping remained critical to locating reservoir sites, Stewart clearly prepared to hang him for it.

  Powell took his case before the public, telling Washington’s Evening Star that he was fighting to prevent “a sort of hydraulic feudal system,” which would undoubtedly emerge should speculation and “moneyed sharks” gobble up the irrigable lands and waters in the West. Furthermore, he was at a loss to understand how the survey might put together a successful plan for irrigation without preliminary mapping of the region.

  The next morning Stewart excoriated Powell on the Senate floor, asserting that his survey had misallocated more than half its appropriation on “vast and expensive surveys of no practical use,” not to mention hiring scores of congressmen’s sons to exert an enormous, invisible lobby in Washington. Powell’s survey amounted to no more than “a mass of humbug and foolishness” and “a great lying-in hospital for lame ducks.” And from then on nothing could curb his vitriol. “I have never met so unscrupulous and extraordinary a man,” he wrote an influential friend, “ambitious to the last degree, and the most artful, insinuating, and persevering lobbyist known in the annals of this country.” To another, he railed that Powell was “ruining the West.” And to one more that the Major was “drunk with power and deaf to reason.” Nor did he stop there, becoming “a frequent, almost daily visitor to the secretary of the Interior and the president demanding the summary removal of Director Powell,” reported The Daily Critic. On June 4, Secretary of the Interior Noble categorically denied that any Geological Survey money had been defrayed to the irrigation survey, or vice versa.

  Harsh words flew between Stewart and Reagan in a Senate cloakroom one afternoon in mid-June. As he passed the other, an angry Stewart “charged Reagan with falsehood,” whereupon the 250-pound, seventy-two-year-old Texan swung a roundhouse at the Nevadan but missed. “[F]or a moment it looked as if the two antiques would indulge in an old-fashioned fist fight of the date of 1800,” wrote an eyewitness. Before Stewart could retaliate, bystanders pulled them apart, ushering them to sofas on opposite sides of the room like prizefighters broken in the clutch. Later that afternoon, Stewart visited Reagan to apologize, but the still-smoldering Texan refused to see him.

  By July 2, when Senator Allison convened the Appropriations Committee, he mustered a cadre of heavy-hitting western colleagues. Stewart was there, of course, along with Moody (South Dakota), Allen (Washington), Carey (Wyoming), Paddock (Nebraska), Power and Sanders (Montana), and Reagan (Texas). When Powell came in as a witness, even that formidable fighting man and explorer must have recoiled slightly from the hostile atmosphere. Five of the eight senators came from four brand-new western states—North and South Dakota, Washington, Montana—each enclosing great tracts of arid public land. All Republicans, these five senators from rapidly growing states had been alarmed at the closure of public lands. Without sales to homesteaders, these newcomer commonwealths stood to lose considerable tax revenue.

  Powell stuck bluntly to his guns, stating th
at “I think it would be almost a criminal act to go on as we are doing now, and allow thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to establish homes where they can not maintain themselves.” Stewart and Moody led a blistering interrogation, repeatedly breaking in on the Major’s responses. At one point, Powell told Stewart to either stop interrupting or forgo his questioning.

  Director Powell: “Senator, in the first place, you make a statement which you do not mean to make to me—that I have got the whole country reserved. No word was ever said to me about that reservation; that was put in by Congress; nobody consulted me about that in any way. I have not done it. I never advocated it. That reservation was put into the law independently of me. Yet you affirm here and put it in the record that I had it done. What had I to do with it? Nothing.”

  Even Chairman Allison felt some sympathy for Powell, interrupting his “Brother Stewart” to remind him that he had questioned Powell for nearly an hour to the frustration of his “brethren.” Later, in some exasperation Allison told Stewart that Powell had clearly answered that he could not bring off his irrigation surveying job unless he did the appropriate topographic mapping. Stewart shot back that “then we would rather have no appropriation, because we do not want the money spent in that way. The engineers say that this topographic survey is not necessary.” Allison asked incredulously, “You do not want the appropriation of $720,000?” Retorted Stewart: “Not if it involves the tying up of the country by topographic surveys. . . . We would rather have nothing than have that plan carried out.”

  Senator Moody carried on the questioning, shotgunning inquiries about rainfall, locations of tributary outlets, names of rail lines—all designed to stretch Powell to a snapping point. He only grew more frustrated when Powell did not bend, pulling out arcane answers to geographical questions as if from the air. Only Reagan offered support. The rest of the senators of both parties acted as though Powell was a recalcitrant hooligan brought in before a magistrate. They had covered this harsh terrain time and again.

  * * *

  In the spring of 1890, as the hearings ground on, Powell again took his arguments before a larger audience, writing a series of articles for Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, then the most respected, widely read “genteel” magazine of the day. Over the past five years, Century had excerpted Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Henry James’s The Bostonians, Grant’s memoirs, and Theodore Roosevelt on ranching. Century’s editor, Richard Watson Gilder, offered Powell an extraordinary soapbox, three articles to run in three consecutive issues, a testament to Powell’s intellectual standing. No outlet would bring him a more influential readership. And Gilder assured, with the three articles, that few of those who counted could miss Powell’s implications. Only excerpts from the vast, masterful biography of Abraham Lincoln, written by his personal secretaries John Hay and John G. Nicolay, also earned three installments, but those spread across three years. Over twenty-five crowded Victorian pages, beginning in March, Powell unleashed “The Irrigable Lands of the Arid Regions,” “The Non-Irrigable Lands of the Arid Region,” and finally “Institutions for the Arid Lands.”

  Uninterrupted by rapid fire congressional interrogation, Powell could muse and proclaim, warn and inspire, never once referring to the irrigation survey or the passions it aroused. The articles smacked of vintage Powell: clips of badly translated Indian poetry and wandering asides but also stretches of breathtakingly novel ideas, forcefully delivered. In the dozen years since he published the Arid Lands report, Powell had further refined his vision. No longer content only to recommend grazing cooperatives and tracts of forestland overseen by lumbermen, the Major now confidently proposed a plan “to establish local self-government by hydrographic basins.” The boldly colorful map of the arid West broken up into some 140 watersheds indicated the purview of each proposed commonwealth, each responsible for the water within it. “All the waters are common property until they reach the main canal, where they are to be distributed among the people.” The commonwealths would also contain shared grazing and pasture, held in trust by the federal government, but their use dictated by the locals. Inspired by the Mormon achievements across the Utah desert, Powell proclaimed: “The people in such a district have common interests, common rights, and common duties, and must necessarily work together for common purposes.” Self-interest would ensure that local owners, for instance, would tread carefully about clear-cutting mountain forests on the slopes of their watersheds, because such activity would not only constrict their water supply but also extinguish steady timber values.

  Thus Powell anticipated “the tragedy of the commons,” an economic theory coined nearly eighty years later. When a group wins access to a resource held in common—pasture, for instance, fish in the sea, or water in arid lands—a distinct pattern emerges: The overall effect of individuals left free to act independently leads to overexploitation and often the destruction of the entire resource. Without malice or intention, individuals naturally so often work against the common, long-term good of all users. Thus fishermen may overfish their waters, crash fish populations, and end up jobless near a barren sea. Powell structured the commonwealth watershed model to avoid such outcomes, in a belief that “a body of interdependent and unified interests and values, all collected in one hydrographic basin” would achieve a self-controlling mechanism for long-term sustainability. He pressed emphatically that the federal government would not be a major participant: “So dreamers may dream, and so ambition may dictate, but in the name of the men who labor I demand that the laborers shall employ themselves; that the enterprise shall be controlled by the men who have the genius to organize, and whose homes are in the lands developed, and that the money shall be furnished by the people; and I say to the Government: Hands off!” Here he tied land sustainability into a grand American tradition of believing that a local body of people can bring forward the talent to create a just and forward-looking community.

  Of all his writings, this presents Powell at his clearest and most passionate, yet ever the clear-eyed, detached scientist reflecting that the complex dance between human beings and their environment did not defer to political boundaries and was always changing. But here, too, is the Manifest Destiny Powell, gung-ho for opening the gates to America’s glorious future. The arid country, he urged, contains “the best agricultural lands of the continent,” and must be “redeemed because they are our best lands.” Remember, the preacher in Powell exhorted, “conquered rivers are better servants than wild clouds.” Speaking about putting the Colorado River to human use, he said that “great works must be constructed costing millions of dollars, and then ultimately a region of the country can be irrigated larger than was ever cultivated along the Nile, and all the product of Egypt will flourish therein.”

  Again and again, Powell drew the reader’s attention to the deep differences between East and West. The East had been won by the work of individuals and families on 160-acre parcels of land—the hallowed quarter section—not that far removed from the European ideals of a near feudal yeomanry. Powell understood, as few did, that the quarter section would not repay its owners in the West; but, more important, that individualism, hard work, and private enterprise alone could not overcome the challenge of the arid lands. In perhaps his most important bid to introduce the West to the East, Powell explained how communalism alone made possible democratic success. As the Reno Gazette favorably opined about western senators’ criticism of the irrigation survey, they believed “that the powers of the National Government are limited and restrained; that they extend only to matters relating to war, to commerce, and to police protection; that the Government is in no sense a paternal one, and that it has nothing whatever to do with the fostering of the great enterprises upon which the prosperity, the wealth and the progress of the country depend.” But Powell could see—by the very forces of nature that made it compelling—that right then the West required more federal involvement, albeit that it must be shouldere
d aside once the commonwealths became self-sufficient. But the mythology of the West, already deeply ingrained, celebrated that fierce individualism more than any other area in the nation: a paradox, because, as Powell foretold, this land would become the most dependent on federal nation-making support—land reclaimed by water stored and dispersed from federally funded hydro projects, the beginning of a colossal system of federal subsidies of agriculture. The scrappy cowboy would not often find himself an independent worker, but more likely a small employee of a huge ranching effort. Other small businesses found themselves dependent on large agribusiness. The fast-rising western cities would become utterly beholden to federal-built dams for their drinking water and energy.

  While Stewart deserves sharp criticism, especially for his venal attacks and reflexively self-interested behavior, in other regards he does not. He passionately represented his Nevada constituency, men and women who wanted their shot at a new start and the riches that were promised them for hard work, ingenuity, and initiative. He—and many of those coming into the Silver State—were swept up in a classic boom mentality: This time will be different, the notion that populations and demand for product would rise indefinitely, and that a player can achieve anything beyond his wildest dreams. Simply standing still was the greatest sin of all for them. They just needed one good shot at it—and the senator would help them get their inheritance. Stewart, and so many others, saw the West as the next stage of American ascendency: its fertile, vast, largely empty, and rich lands so endlessly full of promise and possibility. Powell, this righteous bureaucrat from the East, did not deny the West’s bright future, but his optimism embraced caution and clear-eyed understanding of consequences. Every answer that Powell gave always seemed to be qualified by “yes, but.” And surely this was a direct affront to the American Dream itself. Hearts ached to believe Stewart—that the desert could be redeemed, tender rains would follow the plow, and the fields would bloom like a rose. Powell’s long-term practicality and Cassandra-like warnings plucked no such heartstrings. Like the American Indians, he seemed to stand simply in the way of progress. Stewart knew all about the power of shaping nature to newcomers’ desires, but paid no heed to the unintended consequences of headlong advance; it was not his concern. For Powell, the fulfillment of the American promise had to include a future-looking stewardship of people and land.