The Promise of the Grand Canyon
Page 37
Powell’s emphasis on watershed commonwealths and local responsibility for water use seems far from crazy after all. “Irrigation emerged as an individual and collective effort at the watershed level,” reads New Era for Irrigation, a National Academy of Sciences report, “and in many important respects its future will be determined in the watershed. The growth of locally driven watershed activities reflects a promising trend in water management.” Indeed, a Bureau of Reclamation report found that western-water stakeholders largely favored decisions made at the local level on issues of water policy.
As in Powell’s day, sociocultural beliefs about American enterprise and its golden future can still trample over the dawning realizations of what science is revealing. It took severe drought in his day for the irrigation debate to come onstage—and later for the Dust Bowl to savage great tracts of topsoil to force Congress into taking a more rational view of full-tilt exploitation of the land. It took a good many more years for Powell’s ideas to sink in and blossom. The debate over global climate change will also take time—filled as it had been in Powell’s day with vituperative national debates clouded by misinformation, the terrors of economic recessions, and unsettling climate fluctuations.
If Powell was here today, he would be at the forefront of climate change, working to inform the public about the relationship of a warming climate and flooding, drought, rising sea levels, and bad storms. The connection would be all too clear for him. But so, too, would his optimism that Americans and the rest of the world can adapt and work to mitigate these challenging conditions. He would—as he had always been—be there to serve his country.
John Wesley Powell at age thirty-five in 1869, the year that he made his famous descent down the Green and Colorado rivers. (National Park Service)
A Harper’s Monthly Magazine engraving depicts Powell’s battery during the Vicksburg Campaign, Mississippi, in 1863. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
John Wesley Powell’s wife, Emma Dean Powell. (Bill and Wendy Krag)
Lieutenant Joseph Ives’s 1858 exploration up the Colorado River ended when his 54-foot steamboat Explorer violently struck submerged rocks. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
Powell filled his 1868 collecting expedition to the Colorado Rockies with eager college students, including Lewis Keplinger (back row, left), who would help the Major make the first ascent of Longs Peak. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
Jack Sumner at about age twenty, circa 1860. (Raymond V. Sumner family collection)
Jack Sumner and Powell first discussed running the Green and Colorado at Sumner’s trading post near Hot Sulphur Springs in Colorado’s Middle Park in 1867. (Denver Public Library)
Powell’s brother Walter (left) and cook Billy Hawkins pose in Green River, Wyoming Territory, before the Colorado River Exploring Expedition set off in May 1869. (Nolan Reed)
Shortly after the Union Pacific Railroad completed its trestle bridge over the Green River in Wyoming Territory in 1869, Powell shipped four rowboats there to begin the one-thousand-mile river journey that would lead through the Grand Canyon. (author collection)
An ember from the cook fire ignited dry vegetation on the banks of the Green River during the 1869 river trip, causing near disaster for the expedition, as illustrated in a January 1875 issue of Scribner’s Monthly. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
Scribner’s Monthly immortalized George Bradley’s daring rescue of the one-armed Powell as they “geologized” after a long day on the river. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
Oramel Howland, whose decision to abandon Powell’s 1869 river expedition and cross the desert led to his death and that of two others. (Kenneth Barrows)
Seneca Howland, Oramel’s younger half-brother and veteran of Gettysburg. (Kenneth Barrows)
Only two weeks into the 1869 expedition, Oramel Howland’s carelessness led to the loss of the freight boat No Name and a third of their supplies, depicted here in a Scribner’s Monthly article. (Illinois Wesleyan University)
Powell with a Paiute Indian on the Kaibab Plateau near the Grand Canyon. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, #2002-10682)
Powell and Jacob Hamblin meet with Paiute Indians on the Kaibab Plateau in the Arizona Strip, circa 1873. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
Photographer E. O. Beaman captures Powell’s second Colorado expedition just before they departed from Green River City, Wyoming, in May 1871. Powell stands above the others on the deck of the center boat. (National Archives)
For the second expedition, Powell had an armchair attached to the deck of Emma Dean. (National Archives)
William Henry Holmes’s Panorama from Point Sublime appeared in Clarence Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District in 1882. (Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division)
An illustration of canyon creation on the Colorado Plateau: 1. A river flows over the landscape. 2. As geologic forces uplift the plateau, the river cuts into the landscape. 3. Differential uplift causes the center of the landscape to rise faster, but the river’s incision keeps pace. (Grand Canyon Association, Carving Grand Canyon: Evidence, Theories, and Mystery, 2nd edition by Wayne Ranney)
Federal surveyor and geologist Clarence King. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, #SA-859)
Lieutenant George Wheeler (seated at center) at Diamond Creek on the southern end of the Grand Canyon in 1871. (Library of Congress)
Geologist Ferdinand Hayden (left) on his survey of the Colorado, 1873. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, #MAH-37799)
Although he retired at sixty-two in 1896, Powell still ran the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology and wrote a 400-page tome on the philosophy of science. (Smithsonian Institution Archives, #94-12600)
Jack Hillers organizes his wet-plate photographic equipment in south-central Utah in 1872. (National Archives)
E. O. Beaman took this photograph of Fred Dellenbaugh on the Green River in Lodore Canyon while on the second Powell expedition in 1871. (National Archives)
John Wesley Powell (far left) and Thomas Moran (with hand on face) in the field in the summer 1873. (National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution)
Thomas Moran’s The Chasm of the Colorado, 1873–1874. (Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC/Art Resource, NY)
Charles Schott’s map “Rain Chart of the United States” shows how rainfall dramatically trails off near the 100th meridian, which influenced Powell’s thinking about the limits of non-irrigation farming in the West. (author collection)
Senator William Stewart of Nevada clashed bitterly with Powell over land development issues in the West, finally persuading Congress to cut off funding for Powell’s irrigation survey in 1890. (Library of Congress)
Members of the Great Basin Mess celebrate the Major’s retirement from the U.S. Geological Survey in 1894, including Charles Walcott and William Henry Holmes (seated behind Powell on the right), W. J. McGee and G. K. Gilbert (across from him). (Smithsonian Institution Archives, #75-5228)
Geologist Clarence E. Dutton served as one of Powell’s closest associates until they parted ways after Dutton’s damaging Senate testimony in the irrigation survey hearings of 1890. (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/Department of Commerce)
Powell’s map of the “Arid Region of the United States,” which he presented to the U.S. Senate in 1890, offered a radical new vision of the American West centered on watersheds rather than on traditional political boundaries. (author collection)
Notes
CHAPTER 1: INTO THE CAULDRON
permanently frost the banks: Robert Edgar Ervin, Jackson County: Its History and Its People (Jackson, OH: Sheridan Books, 2006
), 5.
Jackson also boasted: William Bramwell Powell letter, Jackson Standard Journal, January 14, 1903.
whose men worked blast furnaces: William E. Van Vugt, Britain to America: Mid-Nineteenth-Century Immigrants to the United States (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 98.
this “magic line”: Sarah Hopkins Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People (New York: Geo. R. Lockwood & Son, 1897), 30.
frontier of 1800: Kim Heacox, John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America (Lyons, NY: Lyons Press, 2014), 91.
Few other periods of sectarian: Sam Haselby, The Origins of American Religious Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 120.
newsbearers and moral purveyors: Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 31; Donald G. Mathews, “The Methodist Schism of 1844 and the Popularization of Antislavery Sentiment,” Mid-America: An Historical Review 5, no. 1 (January 1968): 9.
“crows and Methodist preachers”: Peter Feinman, “Itinerant Circuit-Riding Minister: Warrior of Light in a Wilderness of Chaos,” Methodist History 45, no. 1 (October 2006): 47.
“reform the continent”: Haselby, 126, 157.
“Beware of clownishness”: Robert Emory, History of the Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church (New York: Carlton & Porter, 1845), 53.
a veritable Samuel Johnson: Eugene B. Willard, ed., A Standard History of the Hanging Rock Region of Ohio (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1916), 370.
General Conference of 1836: Mathews, 13.
Crookham traveled the countryside: Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 8.
proximity to Berlin X-Roads: Colored American, July 28, 1838.
Berlin X-Roads came into being: LaRoche, 79.
owned 150 hogs: Ronald Shannon, Profiles in Ohio History: A Legacy of African American Achievement (iUniverse, 2008), 55–56; The Philanthropist (June 29, 1842).
carts full of concealed fugitives: Entry under “Judge J. A. L. Crookham,” Portrait and Biographical Sketch of Mahaska County, Iowa (Chicago: Chapman Brother’s, 1887).
Joshua Giddings, who was censured: Mrs. M. D. Lincoln, “John Wesley Powell: Part 1: Boyhood and Youth,” Open Court 16 (1902): 706.
men emboldened by cheap whiskey: Willard, 369; William Culp Darrah, Powell of the Colorado (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 14.
jeers soon boiled: Ibid., 11; Lincoln, “Powell: Part I,” 706.
educate his sixteen children: Agricultural record, 1850 Federal Census, Crookham, Lick Township, Jackson County, Ohio.
most engaging student: Lincoln, “Powell: Part I,” 707.
poured brine into long lines: Ervin, 4; J. Michael Stroth, Salt in Our Blood: The Story of the Scioto Salt Works, 1795–1827 (Privately published by author, 2014); Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Division of Geological Survey, GeoFacts, No. 7, “The Scioto Saline—Ohio’s Salt Industry,” www.OhioGeology.com.
eleven-foot-long mammoth tusk: W. W. Mather, First Annual Report of the Geological Survey of the State of Ohio, 1837 (General Assembly of the State of Ohio, Doc. 26), 97.
five hundred ancient earthworks: D. W. Williams, A History of Jackson County, Ohio (Jackson, OH: n.p., 1900), 22.
a rectangular earthen enclosure: Ervin, 9.
extensive mineral collection: “Sketch of William Williams Mather,” Popular Science Monthly 49 (August 1896): 550–55.
badly beaten body: LaRoche, 80.
eighth and final child: 1850 United States Federal Census, Sharon Township, Walworth County, Wisconsin.
a series of willed battles: “In Memory of John Wesley Powell,” Science 16, no. 411 (November 14, 1902): 788.
CHAPTER 2: OSAGE ORANGES AND PINK MUCKETS
first plank road companies: M. G. Davis, A History of Wisconsin Highway Development, 1835–1945 (Madison: State Highway Commission, 1947), 17; Carl Abbott, “Plank Roads and Wood-Block Pavements,” Journal of Forest History 25, no. 4 (October 1981): 216; Carrie Cropley, “When Railroads Came to Kenosha,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 33, no. 2 (December 1949): 188.
“jirk and jolt”: Sarah Foote, A journal Kept by Miss Sarah Foote (Mrs. Sarah Foote Smith) while Journeying with her People from Wellington, Ohio, to Footeville, Town of Nepeuskun, Winnebago County, Wisconsin, April 15 to May 10, 1846 (Kilbourn, WI: n.p., 1905), April 28th entry.
“I have often perplexed myself”: Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1914), 9–10.
still lay up for grabs: Bernard Devoto, The Year of Decision 1846 (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 9.
“nervous, rocky west”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 216.
soon swelled to 140 acres: “Productions of Agriculture in District No. 33 Town of Sharon, July 1850,” 1850 U.S. Census.
nut-laden trees delivered bagloads: W. A. Titus, “The Westward Trail,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 19, no. 4 (June 1936): 411.
Territory’s grain production: Louise Phelps Kellogg, “The Story of Wisconsin, 1634–1848,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 3, no. 2 (December 1919): 200.
nearby Methodist community: Frank H. Lyman, The City of Kenosha and Kenosha County Wisconsin: A Record of Settlement, Organization, Progress and Achievement, Vol. 1 (Chicago: The S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1916), 120.
Venomous massasauga rattlesnakes: A. W. Schorger, “Rattlesnakes in Early Wisconsin,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 56 (1967–68), 29–48.
“had been their rabbit preserve”: John Wesley Powell, “Proper Training and the Future of the Indians,” Forum 18 (1895): 622.
“shelling corn, fanning wheat”: John Muir, Selected Writings (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), 89.
six-day roundtrip journey: Lincoln, “Powell: Part 1,” 709.
crossed Pike Creek: “Southport—1847,” painting by George Robertson in the Kenosha History Center’s C. E. Dewey Lantern Slide Collection; Communication with Cynthia Nelson, Kenosha History Center, July 16, 2015.
the longest pier: David Vaught, After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 18.
series of droughts: Western Historical Co., History of Walworth County Wisconsin (Chicago: Western Historical Company, 1882), 202; “Injury to the Wheat,” Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, September 5, 1850, 3.
a storm sank: Lyman, 129.
two hundred angry farmers: Carrie Cropley, Kenosha: From Pioneer Village to Modern City, 1835–1935 (Kenosha, WI: Kenosha Country Historical Society, 1958), 23.
“Riot in Southport!”: “By Telegraph. Riot in Southport!,” Milwaukee Sentinel and Gazette, April 9, 1850, 2.
Walking with hickory canes: Lyman, 134.
had been “egregiously swindled”: John C. Rives, Congressional Globe, Vol. XXI, Part II (Washington: 1850), August 7, 1850, 10.
“Having died with his harness on”: “A Well-Known Pioneer,” Sacramento Daily Union, September 26, 1884.
“toiled and sweated”: John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1913), 220.
Wesleyan Methodist camp meetings: “Camp Meeting,” The Belvidere Standard (Belvidere, IL), August 16, 1853, 3.
large eastern rattlesnake: Lincoln, “Powell: Part I,” 714.
led them in singing: Peter Ellertsen, “The untaught melody of grateful hearts in Southern Appalachian Folk Hymnody in Illinois, 1800–1850,” Journal of Illinois History 5 (Winter 2002): 274.
“better than highway robbery�
��: Worster, A River Running West, 69.
called upon Turner: Mary Turner Carriel, The Life of Jonathan Baldwin Turner (Published by Mary T. Carriel, 1911), 63.
“horse-high, bull-strong”: Ibid., 65.
three great races: Linda Jeanne Evans, “Abolitionism in the Illinois Churches, 1830–1865” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1981), 48–49.