Powell, John Wesley (1834–1902)

A CHILD OF America's mid-19th century western agricultural frontier and a celebrated explorer of the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell devoted his remarkable career as a scientist and, for a time, powerful U.S. bureaucrat, to the expansion of scientific work in the federal government. He focused on the survey and mapping sciences of geology, geography, and ethnology (i.e., the study of American Indian language and culture). Powell was director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881–94), founding director of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology (1879–1902), and earlier, leader of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region (∼1869–79), known as the Powell Survey. In each of these offices, Powell expanded the reach of government-supported survey, mapping, and research projects, and in doing so, sought to bring scientific knowledge to bear, both directly and indirectly, on problems of environmental and resource governance, particularly those associated with American agricultural expansion and settlement in the arid West during the late 19th century.

Though he became a keen spokesman for Washington's emerging scientific community in the 1870s and 1880s, Powell's own expertise was initially built on the success of his Colorado River expeditions and he had a limited formal scientific education. A native of central Illinois, he undertook these expeditions while still a geology professor and museum [Page 1412]curator. That Powell piloted the voyages, despite having lost much of his right arm in the U.S. Civil War, remains an astonishing feat. But Powell's contributions to the earth sciences, including his development of general concepts of baselevel of erosion, antecedent and subsequent rivers, and runoff, were also built on skillful synthesis and analysis of observations in the West, including subsequent survey work on the Colorado Plateau in southern Utah.

Operating under the Smithsonian Institution and U.S. Department of the Interior, the Powell Survey joined three other federally sponsored surveys in the West. Some of this work Powell managed from Washington, where he garnered Congressional appropriations in support of ongoing triangulation surveys, topographical mapping, and geological and ethnological studies. Key works produced during this period include Powell's Explorations of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875), which blended geological observations with exploration narrative, the Report on the Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Uinta Mountains (1876), and the collaborative Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878).

In the latter volume, in which the Utah Territory served as a model for U.S. arid lands as a whole, Powell introduced a land use classification system delineating land as (potentially) irrigable, pasturage, or timber regions, based on topographical, geographical, and geological characteristics. While the book intended to “set forth the characteristics of these lands and the conditions under which they can be most profitably utilized,” it insisted that these conditions were circumscribed by the limits of irrigation technology and of nature itself in the arid West.

The report called for sweeping reforms of the Homestead, Desert Land, and Timber Cultures Acts, arguing that government distribution and regulation of public lands must better reflect the physical conditions of the region. In his advocacy of more efficient land and resource usage, Powell also criticized Native American land use practices, especially the use of fire to drive game, and he called for the removal of the tribes to federal Indian reservations as a solution to the problems of resource conflict and violence between the white miners and settlers and Native Americans.

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