by John F. Ross
Powell explained matter-of-factly that he was not calling the platform a lie; millions more could indeed settle: “I believe that the irrigable land that can be redeemed by waters of the arid region is very great.” But still the waters were limited. This is a “simple statement in mathematics, that every man of intelligence will at once see that it must be true.” It was simple, but not a single delegate dared accept it.
In the face of a crowd now openly hostile, Powell marched on determinedly, but now venturing into new territory. These issues he had always felt were extremely important to him, but never personal. He got personal now. “What matters it whether I am popular or unpopular? I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands”—a stunning statement by the first and long-standing dean of irrigation, the hero of the Colorado, and the patriarchal director of the USGS.
Prominent delegates countered by citing the power of seasonal floods. Certainly by capturing such tumultuous volumes of water in reservoirs, the desert could be won. But Powell’s words, distilled by more experience that anyone in the country, hung like a menacing cloud above the congress. One delegate burst out that not all knowledge belongs to any one man, even if he belonged to many learned societies. Smythe moved to expunge the Major’s entire address from the record, lest it discourage settlers. The assembly compromised by allowing speakers to go home and revise their comments before submitting them for publication. Perhaps the Major would come to his senses. But for him, his message made the plainest sense. Like his father ringingly denouncing slavery on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse, Powell felt constitutionally responsible to speak the truth, no matter the consequences. It was his duty as a patriotic American and a scientist on the cutting edge of his discipline. Nothing could shake him from such obligations.
The Major believed as firmly as anyone that America had a shining future, and that it lay in bending nature to the will of an advancing humanity. “[T]he powers of nature are his servants,” he told the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1883, “and the granite earth his throne.” He was a man of his times; and yet his vision enabled him to peer far into the future, seeing how the new birth of a nation would be endangered if her citizens did not listen with a scientific ear to what was revealed by ecology, geography, and geology. The Union had nearly fractured during the war. A future that did not contemplate reasonable limits would be lured into swamps of unsustainability: shortages, endless litigation, the demands of infrastructure, feuding water politics—each one a threat to a democratic society the likes of which had never been attempted on so grand a scale. While others saw him as a crank, Powell felt the heat of urgency to speak out: Here the patriarch corrected his children’s temptations toward selfish aggrandizement. But this was not a message for which his children were ready. At the end of the Irrigation Age article in which he denounced Powell’s “sensational” speech to the congress, Smythe simply burst into bold, final capitals: ARID AMERICA IS FIGHTING FOR ITS FUTURE. WHOEVER STANDS IN ITS WAY WILL BE CRUSHED. No reader could doubt at whom the threat was directed. And the San Francisco Chronicle concurred, writing that Major Powell and his geological survey have not been in the best of odor for some time. This latest iteration of America’s unbridled belief in its unprecedented future would roll over data and reasoning.
In retrospect, Powell would stumble over some hard facts. He deeply underestimated the resources of the western aquifers. Conversely, he would also severely underestimate the amount of water necessary to irrigate arid land. He also believed too optimistically that repeated applications of such water would flush away crop-killing alkalis and other impurities. The opposite has proven true. And his ideas that watershed commonwealths could wrest water control from state and national entities have proven—so far—to be economic and political non-starters.
Yet, in his most basic assumptions, Powell has proven eerily accurate. With Francis H. Newell, he estimated that little more than 40 million arid acres could be recovered—very close to the total under cultivation today, including deep-well irrigation on the Great Plains. And Powell, though wrong about the overall quantity of the fossil water, at least fully grasped how it had taken millions of years—Ice Ages and all—to accumulate. Still, so much of what he preached—of limited water, of the threat of monopolies, of the importance of steady measurement and analysis, of the critical importance of topographical mapping and the indispensable role of federal science, and perhaps most broadly, of the necessity of ecological stewardship, remains presciently to the point, clearing the way for debates to the present day.
In the congress’ audience sat the architects of future western water strategy. Among them, the Irish-born engineer William Mulholland, who would design and oversee the construction of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carried water from the rural Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley. Finished in 1913, the aqueduct became an essential agent of Los Angeles becoming one of America’s largest cities, but it also let loose the California Water Wars. Mulholland’s career ended suddenly in March 1928 when the St. Francis Dam, a concrete gravity dam containing a major reservoir for the aqueduct system supplying Los Angeles, failed catastrophically only a dozen hours after he had inspected it.
Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada was a presence also. In 1902, he spearheaded the creation of the United States Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal organization that would launch a fever of dam-building across the West. Powell more than anyone else had laid the foundation for the bureau, yet even he could have never imagined what it would bring. Eventually some 75,000 dams more than six feet high would harness the power of nearly every major western river, culminating in the 726-foot tall Hoover Dam. The dams blocking the western rivers, observed one team of geologists, have become “America’s version of the Egyptian pyramids.”
Powell’s assistant N. K. Newell, a hydraulic engineer good at designing solid dams, became the Reclamation Service’s first director. Although the federal government would exert a fundamental influence on western society through the management of water, it never crystallized coherent western water or land development policies. In the final analysis, the Newland Reclamation Act, which created the Reclamation Service, gave legal form to the western boosters’ dreams of an essentially limitless western water supply. Powell’s careful projection of sustainable management of a limited resource had been dismissed as cowardly and irrelevant.
By 1894, it had become clear to Powell that his continued presence as director might wreck the agency he had worked so hard to create and grow. In the spring he resigned, and immediately underwent an operation on his stump at Johns Hopkins. He remained the head of the Bureau of Ethnology, while his protégé Charles Walcott took over the survey. In one of the USGS reports his quiet successor wrote about Powell’s legacy, citing his Arid Lands report and ideas as creating a storm center of agitation that served to stimulate public interest in the matter. And, as if he was remembering sitting there in the Great Basin Mess with Powell, Walcott would say that the Major always stressed the great importance of the arid lands in the ultimate development of the country—“and by sheer force of character kept the subject alive.”
* * *
Four months before Sumner yielded to the ghosts of his past on the bank of the Green, the Major suffered a severe stroke, which prevented him from attending the fortieth Shiloh anniversary that April. But Powell would not be stopped. He struggled mightily to walk again, even if only on the arm of a helper. During his last years, while still nominally head of the Bureau of Ethnology, he had written a philosophical tract that set out to establish a grand theory—a new science of intellection—that would explain how all things are connected to one another. It was a natural conclusion of a lifetime of faith in the bright promise of science to explain everything in the world around him. “Every body, whether it be a stellar system or an at
om of hydrogen, has certain fundamental characteristics found in all,” he wrote. “These are number, space, motion, and time, and if it be an animate body, judgment.” At more than four hundred pages, Truth and Error, or the Science of Intellection, published in 1898, is an unwieldy and virtually unreadable tome. Ever the quick study—whether as to Civil War fortifications or the hydraulics of whitewater—Powell had finally stepped into the province of Kant and Hegel, where he floundered. His driving nature demanded that he take ever greater challenges, each bigger than the last, but this was too large for him—or probably for anyone for that matter.
That spring, the writer Hamlin Garland encountered him on a Washington street, gray and feeble, shuffling along on the arm of a black attendant—most likely Tolly Spriggs, a former Maryland slave and now the Major’s companion. Garland watched as this once prodigy of vitality struggled to recall his name, although he remembered the face. “I’ve lost my memory,” said the Major. Their encounter prompted Garland to write “The Stricken Pioneer,” a romantic ode to that whole generation of westgoing men, now fading as fast as the setting sun.
By the turn of the century, the old American West that Powell had known had vanished. A decade earlier, the University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner had famously declared the West’s frontier dead. The Indian Wars had ended, now William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show toured the East and even Europe, thrilling audiences with reenacted Indian battles and staged Pony Express rides, the sharpshooting of Annie Oakley, and the solemn pronouncements of the real Sitting Bull. A psychopathic serial killer, William Bonney, was on his way to fond immortalization as Billy the Kid. The new myths of the Old West would soon enough become rich fodder for John Ford’s westerns and Zane Grey’s novels. America’s Manifest Destiny for a while turned from the continent to overseas, first in Cuba, then to the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt, passed into the White House upon McKinley’s assassination, was soon to exercise his muscular brand of conservation on the western lands.
That September of 1902, John Wesley Powell died in Haven, Maine, at age sixty-eight, with Emma and their daughter by his side.
During his life, Powell had refused to regard the West through rose-colored glasses—and that remains one of his greatest legacies. That did not mean he had no wonder for the West’s rich gifts, for he stood in amazement at Indian cultures, the extraordinary geography, and the rich promise that the land offered. But as a consummate reader of the landscape, combined with the geologist’s long view, he understood that the interplay between the Earth and humanity was indeed a complex, ever-changing, and delicate dance. This battler and risk taker, this scientist and visionary, ultimately asked Americans to temper their desires with a practical understanding of what the land and its climate was capable of—how far it could be pushed and how much it could be used. He did not ask for reverence for the land, but rather—more significantly—he asked for humility when regarding it. It was not then, and not today, an easy message for Americans to hear.
Epilogue
Even the Major would have found it ironic that Lake Powell bears his name. No tree-hugging conservationist—he saw western rivers as a huge plumbing system ready to help build the glorious American future, yet he still would have found Lake Powell a caricature of the ideas he had sown, a monstrosity defying his hard-learned assumptions of a sustainable West and localized control of water. The lake now known as Powell was created by the last of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation mega-dams, the 710-foot Glen Canyon Dam, which rose on the Colorado fifteen miles above Lees Ferry in 1963. The immense reservoir of Lake Powell that grew behind it became one of the world’s largest human-made lakes, stretching 186 miles upriver and flooding the quiet beautiful red rock chasms of Glen Canyon. Drowned now were the heady rush of rapids down Cataract Canyon, and the influx of that Dirty Devil River that Powell had been so determined to locate. Gone, too, were innumerable petroglyphs, grottoes, side canyons, and rock faces. It proved a devil’s bargain: The Glen Canyon Dam got passed after David Brower and fellow environmentalists had stopped another dam project on the Green River. The outrageous trade-off sparked the environmental movement and rang the death knell of the mega-dam.
Three hundred miles downriver from Lake Powell lies Hoover Dam. Thus bracketed, the Colorado through the Grand Canyon has become little more than a canal between these two mammoth hydroelectric centers. Glen Canyon engineers release cold water from the depths of Lake Powell into the Canyon for rafters and boaters, this icy water replacing the warm, muddy river down which Powell ventured. The Colorado has become America’s—and likely the world’s—most contested and controlled river, every single drop of it allocated to serve more than 36 million people in seven states—more than the nation’s population when Powell served at Shiloh—mostly gathered in massive, often desert cities of Los Angeles, Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, Denver, San Diego, and Mexicali, and to irrigate nearly six million acres of farmland. In 1922, Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, traveled to a Santa Fe lodge to allocate the Colorado’s water among the seven riverine states. The resulting Colorado River Compact did just that. (Mexico objected, a treaty two decades later yielded it 10 percent of the river’s flow.)
This heavy-handed, central settlement was exactly what Powell had for so long argued against. The Compact set off a binge of dam-building by the Bureau of Reclamation. The small-dam system that Powell had cautiously imagined on the tributaries of western rivers now looked to dam every major watercourse. Political expediency now had more weight than environmental or ultimately economic costs: While engineers put up 85 dams between 1902 and 1930, the number jumped to 203 during the following 40 years. Bureau staff soared from a few thousand employees in the 1920s to 20,000 in the 1940s. Every locality wanted a dam project, whether it made sense or not. Somewhere along the line the dams got even larger, and, as Powell would have predicted, things got truly out of hand. The states started canal projects to distribute that water, often lifting it across absurd distances and over mountains. The Central Arizona Project, completed in 1993 at a cost of $5 billion, diverts Colorado River water through a 336-mile canal system to Phoenix and Tucson. Southwestern cities grew faster than any other region in the United States, putting even greater strains on the water infrastructure.
Today, there is not enough river water for everyone to take their legal allotment. The Colorado has not much more to give, yet dependence on its waters keeps growing. Recent droughts have pushed farmers to tap deeper and deeper into the aquifers, some “water mining” now drills 3,000 feet to reach the precious commodity in the vanishing Ogalla Aquifer. The fossil water deep under the ground, which took millions of years to collect, is being withdrawn rapidly—and largely not being replaced.
In 1935, when one of humanity’s more remarkable engineering feats—Hoover Dam—was completed, a curious omen befell Washington, D.C. A dust cloud reaching 10,000 feet in the sky blew into town—remarkably consisting of the aerated soil from Nebraska and Oklahoma 1,000 miles to the west—just as the Senate debated the government’s responsibility in mitigating the great Dust Bowl. A severe drought across the West had created a new form of weather, the “black duster,” facilitated by the indiscriminate plowing of the prairies. The topsoil on more than a million acres simply blew away. Congress and the secretary of the interior were slowly moving to address the degradation with the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 and a bill establishing the Soil Conservation Service the next year, whose measures, such as planting windbreaks and seeding grasses, did much to head off future black dusters. On that early spring day, the nation’s capital became a city on the prairies, infiltrated by great filth that begrimed the windows of federal office buildings. It was the most tragic and most impressive lobbyist to visit those early discussions of climatic disaster.
More recently, a combination of droughts and overdemand has swallowed much of lakes Powell and Mead. A good snowpack one year revives the reservoirs somewhat, but
then again Powell would have made clear that such variability is normal, and that one must certainly not hope to escape long droughts. Intensifying the mounting crisis in the West are rapid population growth and global climate change, the latter of which a recent National Climate Assessment report concludes will likely make devastating dryness an ongoing condition.
From the Arid Lands controversy of Powell’s day can be drawn important parallels—and a still unique perspective—for the current climate debates. The genius of John Wesley Powell—for which his times were not ready—was his sense that sustaining development in the arid lands rested on a broad-front integration of human and physical factors under a so-often-variable climate. It was not enough merely to acknowledge that the land was desperately dry or to seed it with irrigation works; it was also necessary to establish the legal frameworks to tie the water to the land, to design watershed communities, to inform Congress in a way that would keep its usual interventions modest, and to establish mechanisms for monitoring meteorological and ecological factors. At the heart of such large-scale assessments lay Powell’s far-reaching programs in topographic and geological mapping, the classification of land, the establishment of regular data monitoring with such instruments as permanent stream and rain gauges, and the ongoing assessments of the land’s resources. He could have written the playbook for today’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-authorized body set out to gather and integrate scientific and economic data on global climate change.
Powell’s 1869 river voyage had bestowed on him a geologist’s deep understanding of Earth’s history—that forces operating on the landscape were destined to shift radically in the face of climatic change. These lessons raised serious doubts about relying too heavily on the stability of climatic conditions. It was not a far step for him to sense the dynamism between earth, climate, and human activities. What Stewart, Herbert, and others missed was that Powell did not look to these efforts as either a bureaucratic power play or simply an obsessive collection for science, but as a serious human commitment to managing the future—an acknowledgment that no future would be entirely friendly to human interests. Indeed, the responses to Powell’s ideas in that debate sound much as they do today. C. D. Wilber, first secretary of the Illinois Natural History Society, whom Powell most certainly knew, accused him of producing scientific information that “is consistent only with the all too common practice of public fraud.”
