CHAPTER 8
Fighting the National Surveys
Ever since Congress had created the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers in 1813, the military had conducted the young nation’s official business of exploration and surveying. After Polk appropriated Mexican territory, the army naturally stepped in to help redraw new national borders. It made sense: During peacetime, the army directed much of its effort toward surveying army roads west, siting forts, and determining reliable supply routes. When the transcontinental railroad gelled into an important national priority in the 1850s, the army only naturally undertook five large-scale expeditions to evaluate the best path west. Their Pacific Railroad Surveys produced thirteen quarto volumes weighing some eighty-three pounds, more than seven thousand pages long, not including maps and hundreds of full-page lithographs. Much natural history found its way inside these tomes, but only as an afterthought to the main purpose. Before the war, civilian-led explorations had been limited to the state level.
But in late 1866, when Powell the Illinois schoolteacher had only begun to contemplate a field trip west with his students, the military dominance in national surveying would be challenged by a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate, who walked into the halls of Congress with a bold, unprecedented plan for a large-scale geological survey of the American West. Clarence King laid before the congressmen a proposal to survey eight hundred miles between the Rockies and the Sierras, a hundred-mile-wide swath along the Union Pacific transcontinental railroad now being built. He seductively dangled in front of legislators the promise that these lands contained coal, oil, and precious metals. Should not the nation know what it possessed? King argued convincingly that only an experienced civilian geologist could properly accomplish this kind of work. King would later boast that the year 1867 marked a turning point in the history of national geological work “when the science ceased to be dragged in the dust of rapid exploration and took a commanding position in the professional work of the country.”
The short, dapper Clarence King represented everything that Powell was not. While Powell had wandered from college to college across the Midwest, searching for mentors who might slake his intense thirst to understand the natural world, King had matriculated at “The Sheff,” Yale’s new school of science, which would award the nation’s first PhDs in geology and engineering. King studied under James Dwight Dana, listening raptly to America’s foremost geologist tell stories of his travels with Charles Wilkes’s world-circling United States Exploring Expedition in the 1830s. King learned firsthand about the latest European topographical mapping techniques.
Whereas Powell often appeared more detached, King commanded a room when he entered, not only by his fine dress, which often included silk gloves and colorful polka-dot ties, but with his captivating stories. In drawing rooms, or around cards and a bottle of whiskey, men and women gravitated to him naturally, delighting in his tales of evading Mexican bandits, surviving a lightning strike that left half his body brown for a week, or crawling into a grizzly’s den. Somehow his stories of sexual conquests of dark-skinned women did not come off as boasting, perhaps because his jokes were usually at his own expense. Bouts of recited Romantic poetry also seemed to offset any vulgarity. Writer Henry Adams recognized in his great friend so many of the manly attributes in which he felt himself lacking. “He had in him,” wrote Adams, “something of the Greek—a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander.” Indeed, King personified the grandest ambitions of a nation pressing into new lands rife with promise and unlimited possibility, and embracing these with gusto, unbounded confidence, and largesse of spirit. “I regarded the brilliant and beaming creature before me,” wrote William Dean Howells, “simply as a promise of more and more literature of the vivid and graphic kind.”
King’s survey request fell at a propitious time. Congress eagerly wanted to get back to business after the war. He solicited support from the pioneering economic geologist Joseph Whitney, on whose California survey King had cut his teeth, Spencer Baird at the Smithsonian, and scientific notables from Yale to send letters to key senators and Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war. On the last day of its second session, March 2, 1867, the outgoing 39th Congress authorized King as the U.S. Geologist of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, under the supervision of General Andrew A. Humphreys of the Corps of Engineers. King could expect to receive $100,000 to finance the work over three years, and engage two assistant geologists, three topographic aides, two specimen collectors, a photographer, and needed camp assistants. King’s directions, which he drew up himself, included a dizzying list of activities that included the examination of all rock formations, mountain ranges, detrital plains, coal deposits, soils, minerals, ores, and saline and alkaline deposits. His team would make barometric and thermometric observations, collect plant and animal specimens, and establish the necessary data points for a topographic map.
“Now, Mr. King,” the secretary of war told him, “the sooner you get out of Washington, the better—you are too young a man to be seen about town with this appointment in your pocket—there are four major-generals who want your place.” Powell would be a beneficiary of King’s precedent-setting work when he received an appropriation of $10,000 in July 1870 for his second Colorado trip. Civilian geologist Ferdinand Hayden would also vie for congressional dollars to survey the West. The army’s topographical corps was not about to abandon its long exploring traditions either. Lieutenant George Montague Wheeler of the Corps of Engineers would also enter the fray. These four charismatic men would clash and compete, setting off a fierce, sometimes vituperative arms race for the chance to direct scientific surveying after the war. Their personalities and passions would deeply shape American science as it emerged after the war, and their competition would turn cutthroat: They would badmouth one another, steal one another’s talent, and compete for limited appropriations. Much lay on the line. The high stakes would soon put the four on a dangerous collision course.
Officially, the federal government had given the four authority for the rather straightforward task of exploring and surveying the West. Congressmen viewed them as little more than instruments of plain aggrandizement who served as the cutting-edge truth seekers of Manifest Destiny. The mountain men, railroad captains, westward-traveling journalists and editors, and politicians each had a self-interested take on the still little known West. But the surveyors would serve as far more than mere wayfinders across a largely still alien landscape. They would become explainers and interpreters of lands that defied easy understanding, and had yet to find purchase in the American imagination. In every report, map drawn, or photograph framed and captioned, they shared their vision of the West, how best it could fit into the larger emerging consciousness of a truly continental nation. Their findings might launch new gold rushes, stimulate entire new economies, and open new frontiers of wealth and prosperity.
The search for scientific fame and fortune certainly motivated these four players, but, more important, their main competition revolved around an argument that would form one of the most significant struggles in America for the three decades after the Civil War, a contest over the nation’s very soul. Would America develop her rich, promising western lands with the public interest in mind or hand development over to selected, well-connected, and wealthy individuals to exploit, and worry about the consequences later? How would the federal surveys choose to assess the economic value of public lands larger than European empires? And how would that influence the General Land Office, the bureau in which America distributed its land to its citizens?
Powell came late to the game, after the other three had already secured large annual appropriations, an underfunded dark horse who at first glimpse did not stand a chance of surviving against the others. Although famous for his river trip, he had published nothing from his expedition aside from some letters to newspapers. But the Major had been underestimated before. The new competition would stoke the furnace in which Powell would hone and develop new keen ideas. He had something the others did not: a developing large-scale vision of what exactly was at stake.
In 1869, when Powell and his nine men started down the Colorado for the first time—and as King prosecuted his survey west into Utah—the geologist Ferdinand Hayden received a large appropriation and leadership of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, the next great federal survey after King’s. Hayden’s star had risen two years earlier as Nebraska had gained statehood. Funds designated for the now-defunct territorial legislature lay unspent, prompting Congress to decide that these $5,000 might best be used for a survey of the state. When the Smithsonian’s Spencer Baird learned this, he contacted Hayden, then a professor of mineralogy and geology at the Medical Department of the University of Pennsylvania, who had served as a Civil War surgeon. Baird had known him before the war when the ambitious medical student had devoted summers to collecting fossils out west. Hayden took his degree, but never seriously considered going into practice, spending the next seven years privately exploring the geology and geography of the upper plains, cleverly winning patronage from the American Fur Company, the Smithsonian, and the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. “I feel as though I could endure cheerfully any amount of toil, hardship and self-denial provided I could gratify my strong desire to labor in the field as a naturalist,” explained the excited twenty-three-year-old.
He often traveled alone through dangerous Sioux lands collecting fossils. The Indians left this strange figure alone, naming him “He Who Picks Up Stones Running.” Hayden wandered beyond the Dakota Badlands and the Black Hills to explore the Yellowstone River and the Missouri’s major tributaries in Montana. Hayden sent natural history specimens back east to Baird, as well as fossils to academies in St. Louis and Philadelphia, particularly to his mentor, the University of Pennsylvania’s Joseph Leidy. The soft-spoken Leidy had shocked scientific circles in 1847 by uncovering evidence that the horse had once thrived in prehistoric North America before going extinct.
The Late Cretaceous dinosaur teeth and bones that Hayden sent from Montana enabled Leidy to identify many new species, notably the duck-billed dinosaur and armored ankylosaur, firmly establishing dinosaur paleontology in America. Recognizing raw talent, Baird set Hayden up in a Smithsonian Castle office during the off season, and secured him positions on two military explorations of the upper Missouri just before the war broke out. Hayden’s impatient, confrontational style, however, had already begun to grate on other scientists. He made no friends when he waged a bitter war of words and influence over rather obscure boasting rights about who first discovered Permian rocks in America.
Born out of wedlock to an alcoholic father, Hayden grew up poor and suffered frequent humiliations, developing within him a ruthless ambition and unsleeping restlessness. The notorious womanizer exhibited impatience bordering on rudeness, his self-promotion at times embarrassing to those around him. Nonetheless many admired him for his energetic and consuming curiosity, which left few others better able to communicate the sheer excitement of the western lands.
With Baird’s support, Hayden became head geologist of the Geological Survey of Nebraska, during which he exhibited a striking ability to win over powerful men. He would grow into the job, and expand his survey into the largest, most famous of the postwar years, eclipsing even King’s. Like Powell, Hayden excelled at cobbling funds and patronage into ever larger projects.
In the spring of 1871, Hayden attended a lecture in Washington by a Montanan who had explored the upper Yellowstone the year before, returning with breathtaking accounts of bizarre geothermal features. The speaker urged that this strange area become a park of some kind. Hayden was intrigued. In 1860, Hayden had traveled with Jim Bridger, the legendary mountain man, who told him wild stories of Yellowstone’s exploding mudholes, boiling springs, and a mountain of yellow rock and glass. Few had believed him, so wild were his descriptions. But with the recent story appearing in Scribner’s Monthly and Congress now starting to pay attention, Hayden saw a ripe opportunity. It was time for a formal federal survey to visit Yellowstone—and, of course, he should lead it. Relying on his already strong congressional connections, he pressed the idea and Congress bit, increasing his appropriation from $25,000 to $40,000. Congress would not be disappointed with this outlay.
In the summer of 1871, Hayden enlisted a highly talented retinue—the photographer William H. Jackson and the topographical artist William H. Holmes, and painter Henry W. Elliott, who was the private secretary of the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry. Then a piece of luck fell into Hayden’s lap. The thirty-four-year-old landscape artist Thomas Moran was also desperate to get out to see Yellowstone for himself. The painter borrowed funds from railroad financier Jay Cooke as well as the editor of Scribner’s, the latter in return for a pledge to deliver watercolors. An agent of Cooke’s asked Hayden whether Moran might accompany him. With the painter’s expenses already covered, Hayden agreed. The cadaverous artist, weighing only 110 pounds, had never ridden a horse before, but his oils of Yellowstone’s odd features would create a sensation back East and vault Hayden into star status.
During that summer of 1871, Hayden conducted a first mapping of the Upper Yellowstone. But it would be Jackson’s stunning photographs, along with a satchel full of Moran’s work, published in Scribner’s and passed around to congressmen, which, with Hayden’s strong lobbying efforts and support from well-placed friends, would move Congress to enact a bill making Yellowstone America’s first national park. President Grant signed the bill into law on March 2, 1872. In later years, Hayden would claim near sole credit for the park’s creation—a huge overstatement, yet it is unlikely that without Hayden’s work that this unprecedented initiative would have passed through the Congress that spring. Moran worked up a monumental 7-by-12-foot canvas of Yellowstone Canyon, which Congress would buy for $10,000—the entire amount that the body had voted Powell for his surveying activities in 1870.
In 1872 Hayden was back in Yellowstone for a second season, the same year that King had completed his field survey work along the 40th parallel. But Hayden had no intention of wrapping up his survey, cleverly defining his objectives only in the widest possible terms as parts of a “Survey of the Territories.” By 1872, ten western territories still remained unsurveyed. “General Garfield told Governor Potts and other citizens of the West that my exploration would be continued as long as there was any of the public domain to be explored, so we might as well strike out as free as we can,” wrote Hayden.
The third entrant into the federal survey contest, the twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Wheeler of the Corps of Engineers, had graduated from West Point in 1866. The world’s best-trained army had demobilized quickly, its million soldiers melting away to barely twenty-five thousand regulars by 1867. Few academy graduates chose an army career, their chances for advancement and glory limited in the Reconstruction era to Indian fighting and enforcement duty in the South. But Wheeler, who graduated sixth in his class, decided to stay on anyway, becoming an assistant engineer on the Point Lobos survey around San Francisco Bay.
In 1869, Wheeler, while not yet in command of his own survey, rode twenty-four thousand miles throughout southeastern Nevada and western Utah to find an efficient route for moving troops from the northwest to the Arizona Territory. He did so, and his report included the suggestion for a general military survey of the western territories. The civilian scientists’ maps, he argued, were “controlled by the theoretical considerations of the geologists.” Army maps would provide only practical information. Geologic and natural history would be treated as “incidental to the main purpose.” Wheeler would become the U.S. Army’s champion against the civilian savants now inflexibly asserting their rights to survey and map the west.
The Corps of Engineers approved a $50,000 budget for Wheeler in 1871, with the authority to hire ten assistants, and further employees not to exceed thirty. The authorization unleashed a whirling dervish: That year, Wheeler and his teams would cover an astounding 72,250 square miles across southern and central Nevada, eastern California, southwestern Utah, and much of Arizona. Wheeler raced across Death Valley, even though the Briers Party had explored it as far back as 1849, driving his men to exhaustion, he himself admitting that marches had often “extended from fifty to sixty or even eighty hours, with scarcely a single halt.” He did not hesitate to invoke the strict articles of war to enforce discipline. Stories emerged in the press of Wheeler’s leaning hard on the Indians, including a report that he tied four Native American guides to the ground so they would lower their demands. When one got loose under the sweltering sun, Wheeler’s men just shot him. Other stories whispered of men gone mysteriously missing, perhaps murdered by an unknown hand, and of a young Indian boy strung up by the thumbs. Perhaps some of these tales were told by someone with an ax to grind—and certainly fewer enterprises ranked tougher that running a survey in the American West, but such charges of bad management and racism boiled up everywhere Wheeler led his men. In October 1871, he left the surveys for two days with two prospectors, visiting thirty mining locations and staking his own claims.
After his race through the Mojave desert, Wheeler turned to challenge Powell directly by pushing up the Colorado. Powell had yet to publish the results of his 1869 trip, and so perhaps Wheeler felt the region fair game. Three flat-bottomed boats arrived at Camp Mojave from San Francisco close to the point where the Colorado passes into California. Thirty-five men, including geologist G. K. Gilbert, the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, whom Wheeler had borrowed from Hayden, and a number of Mojave Indians started out on September 16, 1871, intending to work their way up into the Grand Canyon as far as Diamond Creek. Powell had already covered this stretch going downstream, and Lieutenant Ives had already bulled his way upriver. Perhaps Wheeler feigned ignorance that Powell’s second expedition would row downriver again that season. He may have placed too much stock in James White’s story of washing downriver—and that determined upstream boaters could make their way. He may have dismissed Ives’s and Powell’s stories of rough water, feeling that a strictly disciplined enterprise could complete the task. More darkly, he probably intended to usurp Powell’s work. Wheeler simply wanted to crush the competition.
The river quickly beat any exultation right out of Wheeler and his men. Weary and demoralized, they reached Diamond Creek thirty-three days after starting out, having rowed, but more often dragged and shoved, their boats two hundred miles upstream. A little over a week before they finished, one of the boats swamped in a rapid. Wheeler lost the stout case in which he kept all his personal papers, including the expedition’s astronomical and meteorological observations. Only Wheeler’s threats and Gilbert’s persistence kept the expedition pressing on overland, and now on reduced rations.
Once back at Camp Mojave, Wheeler sent O’Sullivan to Washington with his glass plates to show the politicians about their trip. But nearly all three hundred of them broke in transit. Despite his negligible success, Wheeler brashly reported to Congress that “the exploration of the Colorado River may now be considered complete,” an odd statement considering Ives’s and Powell’s efforts—but he directed a growing army, intent on recovering what the army claimed by right.
In America, the Gilded Age was blossoming. In an 1871 newspaper essay, Mark Twain satirically proposed that the chief end of man was in getting rich. What’s the best way? he quipped. “Dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.” Few examples better illustrate the Gilded Age’s hunger for quick, fabulous wealth that the West appeared to offer than the Great Diamond Hoax. In 1871, two Kentucky hucksters walked into the office of a prominent San Francisco businessman carrying a bag of diamonds, which they claimed to have found in Colorado. They swore him to silence, but the secret, just as the two men planned, lasted only seconds after they left. Selling interests in the diamond fields, the pair themselves bought more rough-cut diamonds and rubies, then salted a remote, unnamed Colorado field. Smelling chicanery, Clarence King carefully read a report about the so-called discovery by mineralogist Henry Janin, deducing that “there was only one place . . . which answered to the description,” and it lay within the confines of his 40th parallel survey. King located the spot with several of his men, discovering that some of the jewels were in anthills and that they carried cut marks on them. King brought his findings to San Francisco. “We have escaped, thanks to GOD and CLARENCE KING, a great financial calamity,” crowed the San Francisco Morning Bulletin on November 27, 1872. Had the hoax gone undiscovered, the paper continued, no less than 12 million dollars’ worth of stock would have gone on the market.
In the early summer of 1872, Congress appropriated $75,000 to fund the U.S. Geographical Survey West of the 100th Meridian, under Lieutenant Wheeler. Four national surveys now operated in the western lands. And many people were paying attention to what they were finding.
That spring, in the wake of the landmark Yellowstone legislation, but before heading west for the second leg of the river trip, Powell had set his sights on luring Moran away from Hayden. It had not taken long for the national surveyors to realize the importance of taking artists and photographers along with them. As Powell had discovered with his stereographs, visuals could turn congressmen into supporters far faster than written reports. Visual documentation also served a greater function in educating the public about these exotic lands. Based only on scattered accounts of explorers and a handful of illustrations, long before the photography of Ansel Adams, the filmmaking of John Ford, the stories of Zane Grey, or the frontier thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, Americans to the east and south had virtually nothing by which to comprehend the scope, detail, and raw intensity of the American West. For most it remained vaguely alien and dangerous, perhaps unable to be assimilated into the national story. Americans needed someone to explain the West to them, not only to discern more clearly what it contained but to interpret its very significance.
The American public hungered to learn more. By the 1870s, more than four thousand inexpensive weekly magazines had appeared, the beneficiary of railroad delivery, cheap postal routes, availability of the cylinder printing press, and rising literacy rates. The first illustrated story from the great surveys came out several weeks after Powell completed his first voyage. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine published “Photographs from the High Rockies”—thirteen wooden engravings describing the travels of John Samson—the pen name of Timothy O’Sullivan—with King’s 40th Parallel Survey since 1867.
Powell had watched Hayden’s annual appropriation increase and Wheeler poach on his territory. He needed to move boldly. On May 22, 1872, he offered Moran the chance to join him out west so that he might create a fitting painting of the Grand Canyon. Powell could pay $500 for a trip to last four months and cover his railroad ticket from Chicago to Salt Lake City. Wheeler also approached Moran with an offer.
The following month Moran sent a note declining Powell’s invitation. He had already committed to illustrating a chapter of the book Picturesque America. He also turned down Wheeler, as well as Hayden’s invitation to the Grand Tetons. But he did keep Hayden apprised of his interest in joining him the following summer. Like a good negotiator, he dropped the hint that Powell tried to lure him away with “great inducements.” But Hayden did not yet consider Powell a threat. His play for Moran seemed the work of an ill-funded wannabe.
Tensions ratcheted up in early 1873. After spending several hours with Hayden in January, Garfield wrote in his diary: “I am troubled to know what to do with the large number of exploring expeditions Congress has on hand.” He mused that “there should be a consolidation of all the geological and geographical expedition[s] in their work under one head.” Hayden understood that events pointed toward a showdown—and only one surveyor would come out on top. “The Engineer Bureau is the only real foe we have,” he wrote to a recent survey recruit in February 1873. With King’s present work closing, he and Wheeler were in head-to-head competition to determine whether the War Department or the Department of the Interior would control the federal surveys. Eight days after Garfield’s worried diary entry, Hayden wrote his boss, Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano, formally requesting $100,000 for the 1874 field season, unilaterally switching his efforts from the sources of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to Colorado. He knew Wheeler had shifted his survey into southern Colorado—and wanted to get there first. In the letter, he attributed the change of plans to the large expense of working in an area without railroad transportation. He also complained about the hostility of the Indians, who had attacked one of his survey divisions the past season in Wyoming, although no lives or property had been lost. The bold letter glossed over far more significant strategic reasons for the realignment. He must confront Wheeler, he felt, or his congressional funding might dry up. The maw he must feed annually demanded that he deliver new, colorful discoveries, and he had already plucked the ripest fruit from his seasons surveying Yellowstone. Colorado would give him new fields of discovery. If he played it right, Colorado would extend his survey and guarantee him continued support for years to come.
As Hayden planned for the summer of 1873, he decided to send one of his surveying divisions, accompanied by Jackson the photographer, down the Green and Colorado to the Grand Canyon, yet another challenge to Powell. He mentioned the idea of visiting the Grand Canyon to Moran, which thrilled the painter. Moran could use Jackson’s images to create drawings, or they could serve as research toward perhaps a new large oil to rival the Yellowstone painting. “I saw Wheeler’s photos from the Grand Cañon of the Colorado today,” Moran wrote Hayden in May. “They are poor and Jackson will knock spots out of them.”
That spring, Hayden abruptly pulled Jackson and a team from visiting the Grand Canyon, sending them instead to Colorado’s high peaks, part of his strategy to beat out Wheeler. He told the acting assistant surgeon general of the United States to pass along a curt message: “You can tell Wheeler that if he stirs a finger, or attempts to interfere with me or my survey in any way, I will utterly crush him—as I have enough congressional influence to do so, and will bring it all to bear.” That summer, Hayden’s and Wheeler’s men literally came to blows. In Colorado’s South Park on July 9, a Wheeler survey team headed by Lieutenant William Marshall encountered one led by Hayden’s men. According to Marshall, the parties agreed to operate on opposite sides of the upper Arkansas River. But he claimed Hayden’s men had ignored the agreement. The two parties closed upon one another and fists flew.
When he had raced out of town in June to resume his survey, Hayden neglected to bid farewell to a now thoroughly miffed Moran. “Under the impression that you would go [to the Grand Canyon],” wrote the painter, “I made a number of contracts to furnish pictures of the region. . . .” Hayden had left him in an embarrassing predicament. With regret, he wrote, though his tone does not suggest it, he would instead accompany Major Powell. Even though Powell had left long ago for the West, his offer to Moran remained open; he may even have upped the inducements.
This good turn of events for Powell came just in time. While peddling a book about the 1869 expedition, Powell had received an editor’s note that such a manuscript would need full-page engravings and vignettes to make the book more publishable. The Riverside Press editors looked nervously on Powell’s thick prose and heavy emphasis on geology. Moran’s sketches would change that. When the painter went west, he did so with a passel of commissions: “70 drawings for Powell, 40 for Appleton, 4 for Aldine, 20 for Scribner’s . . .”
Two months after Dellenbaugh sent the map back east in February 1873, Powell traveled west to Salt Lake City to set up the next phase of his survey. On the way he received a telegram from Secretary Delano that would significantly alter the summer’s survey plans. Delano had appointed him a special Indian commissioner, and charged him, along with southern Nevada Indian agent George Ingalls, with evaluating the “conditions and wants” of the Utah and Nevada Indians and making recommendations on reservation policy. President Grant’s Peace Policy had fallen apart after Modoc Indians had murdered a U.S. general in southeastern Oregon. Delano feared that the violence would spread into the southwest. In Washington Powell had reassured him that the Pauite and Ute were unlikely to mobilize in force against the whites, but the secretary remained unconvinced.
From the outset, Delano’s task proved a tall order. Assembling a formal census of the southwestern Indians was daunting enough, but putting together a coherent legal and humane policy for settling the Utes (Utah), Paiutes (Utah, northern Arizona, southern Nevada), Shoshones (Idaho and Utah), and western Shoshones (Nevada) into reservations verged on the impossible. But Ingalls and Powell turned to their task with energy, traveling throughout Utah in May and June to many places without railroad or stage lines. The commissioners divided up in September, Powell to Las Vegas, Ingalls to southern Nevada. All told, they identified more than one hundred tribes, each independently governed and named, counting 10,437 individuals, half already living on reservations. Powell took along photographer Jack Hillers. Although later criticized for questionable practices—Hillers and Powell were not averse to providing some of the poorer Paiute with colorful headdresses and clothing for their portraits—the images form an important documentation of the southwestern Indians on the cusp of tumultuous change. Powell also amassed considerable ethnographic and linguistic material. If he worried that his work for the commission would subtract from his survey efforts while Hayden and Wheeler furiously prosecuted their own, he never showed it. Increasingly Powell had been drawn to ethnology—and this opportunity gave him an ideal chance to put that interest to practice.
Although tired from the hard travel and countless councils required of his commission work that spring and summer, Powell met Moran and New York Times reporter Justin Colburn at Salt Lake City in July. After securing interviews with Brigham Young and a number of elders, the small party set out south along the Wasatch range. The skinny but wiry Moran, in a full blond beard and wearing his trademark black felt bowler, took cheerfully to the hard life on horseback or in a Mormon farm wagon behind two mules. After a grueling climb up Mount Nebo—then considered the Utah Territory’s highest peak—from which they could almost see the Grand Canyon’s rim, Moran reported, “It was the most magnificent sight of my life,” strong words indeed for someone who had seen Yellowstone and Yosemite. After returning to base camp, all but the painter got sick and vomited from the exertion and altitude. Moran pointed out with satisfaction that even Powell himself had retched.
Powell sent Moran and Colburn on ahead with teamsters bringing supplies to Kanab, telegraphing to Thompson and Hillers to take the painter and correspondent to the next Mormon town of Grafton, to see the great West Temple of the Virgin, an immense natural edifice of naked rock, which shimmered in the summer sun. They rode up the Virgin River and thence to Mu-koon-tu-weap, more commonly known by the Mormons as Little Zion. Moran’s sketches, soon after to appear in The Aldine magazine, became the first published images of what would become Zion National Park nearly a half century later.
Powell broke away from his work—this time with the Pahvant Ute—to rejoin Moran in Kanab, intent on guiding the painter to the Major’s favorite distant prospect of the Canyon. On August 14, they headed south across the desert into the Arizona Strip, then climbed into the high forest of the Kaibab Plateau, which Powell knew well, then toward a small plateau connected to the north rim by a narrow isthmus known as Muab Saddle. After negotiating this, the team climbed up Powell Plateau, an eight-square-mile thumb of mesa jutting out into the Canyon, a veritable sky island of Ponderosa pine. A mile below curves the river, a seeming afterthought in this grandly sculpted landscape. On the Canyon’s far side rises the San Francisco range, while a twenty- to thirty-mile view stretches both up and down the Canyon. “The whole gorge for miles lay beneath us,” wrote Moran to his wife, “and it was by far the most awfully grand and impressive scene that I have ever yet seen.”
Colburn declared himself equally awestruck, then wrote, clearly prompted by Powell’s eloquent characterizations of what they were seeing: “And yet the force that has wrought so wonderfully through periods unknown, unmeasured, and unmeasurable, is a river 3000 feet below.” Ever the teacher, Powell explained and analyzed, offering his observations and singling out features far in the distance with his good arm, and describing how erosion over millions of years had shaped this impossible landscape. Moran hurried home eager to get to work on his commissions, declining Powell’s offer to take him into the Canyon for a water’s-edge vantage.
That fall, Powell returned to Washington to complete the commission report, which he submitted on December 1, 1873, to the secretary of the interior. A thoughtful, reasoned document, the report argued against the military policing of Indians, recommending instead that committed civilians protect and oversee the reservations—which should not be “looked upon in the light of a pen where a horde of savages are to be fed with flour and beef, to be supplied with blankets from the Government bounty, and to be furnished with paint and gewgaws by the greed of traders, but that a reservation should be a school of industry and a home for these unfortunate people.” Here the practical reformer shines through, Powell arguing that the government should provide conditions under which Indians could learn to live productive lives. A man of his Victorian times, Powell regarded their customs as barbaric. Indians could move toward civilization and enlightenment only by forsaking their hunter-gatherer traditions and becoming self-sustaining farmers. Paternalistic to be sure, yet his views encompassed a genuine concern for these uprooted people and revealed a sympathy often seriously lacking in that day. To attain such Indian independence, he argued, the federal government must go beyond giving out blankets. It must buy out white settlers who squatted on prime cropland and controlled critical water supplies. The commission’s report advocated enlarging some of the reservations so that some tribes long hostile to one another would not have to live in proximity.
But the reservations never saw the commission’s recommended compensation. The white men would not leave the lawfully designated Indian reservation land, nor did the Indians come. Powell would reveal some of his anger and frustration in a letter in the summer of 1878 to the commissioner of Indian affairs: “The promises made by Mr. Ingalls and myself have not been fulfilled . . . I am constrained to protest against their neglect and against a course which must sooner or later result in serious trouble.” Solving the so-called Indian Question remained out of reach by any single person, even for someone such as Powell, whom the Smithsonian’s Spencer Baird described as knowing “more about the live Indian than any live man.”
While the commission work may not have spurred much federal action, it had a bracing effect on Powell’s interest in ethnology. Whereas before he had concentrated on collecting, whether of stone axes or words, he now worked on knitting together the relationships of Indian words, and furthermore generally assembling their “systems of consanguinity,” a term very recently coined by another pioneering ethnologist. Powell also began to discern the lines of evolution of Indian myth, poetry, art, language, and religion. The following year, Powell would request—for the first time—a specific congressional appropriation to prepare an ethnological report. Although only $3,000, it would mark a personal commitment to so recently an invisible science, which would only continue to grow, until he founded the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology in 1879. He would turn this tiny initiative into one of the world’s premier anthropological organizations.
On April 30, 1874, Thomas Moran’s huge painting of the Grand Canyon went on public display in Newark, New Jersey. The contrast between this and his equally large oil of Yellowstone could not be more distinct. In the Yellowstone work, blue skies shine brightly above sunlit rocks; in the foreground, two human figures view Yellowstone’s Lower Falls and blue-watered river. Conversely, few would call Moran’s Grand Canyon scene beautiful: A dark abyss drops away just feet from where the painter has situated the viewer. Stunted dead trees, cacti, and shrublike plants cling to a rocky ledge. A small snake writhes on the rock, while the tiny shadow of a bird appears faintly in the far distance. Life is peripheral here, brushed off to the side and permanently insignificant. Immense rock pillars, buttes, boulders, and sheer rock faces dominate every prospect. In the mid-ground, storm clouds unleash torrents of rain that lash the rock and throw up vaporous clouds. Boulders in the foreground appear ready at any moment to topple into the chasm. Although this rockscape has an eternal quality, the landscape appears dynamic, a patch of blue sky in the upper right corner suggests the passing of the storm. While not beautiful, the scene, like the Canyon itself, inspires awe. The Irish intellectual Edmund Burke once drew a distinction between beauty and sublimity—and few other vistas illustrate his point better than the Grand Canyon. Beauty delivers thoughts of wonder and joy, while sublimity brings unsettling, often frightening, emotions. And yet, as Burke pointed out, contemplating the sublime can awaken deep joys beyond reason.
Of all of America’s natural spectacles, from the sweep of the mile-wide Mississippi and Denali’s peak cutting the heavens to the thunderous roar of Niagara Falls and California’s groves of towering redwoods, nothing but the ocean itself matches the Grand Canyon in its sheer, incomprehensible power and scale. A mountain range becomes visible long before a visitor reaches its base, but the Canyon confronts its visitor abruptly. One can stroll to within ten yards of its lip and still not know it is there. A newcomer experiences the Canyon’s gaping absence and dizzying drop-off like a slap in the face—no poetry comes to mind, but rather one feels an overwhelming sense of the raw, primeval, and vertiginous—as if one is a voyeur peeking at some unfinished handiwork of God. Only after some minutes does the Canyon’s true scope force itself upon the visitor with a sort of mild horror. By 1874, still only a handful of Americans had experienced the Canyon in person, but now, for the first time, a talented artist had brought the Canyon to life in brilliant color on canvas.
Early critical comments of Moran’s painting were mixed. Clarence Cook in the Atlantic Monthly repeatedly compared the painting with Dante’s portrayal of hell, observing that “here, there is no loveliness for hundreds of miles, nor anything on which the healthy human eye can bear to look (the scientific eye excepted), and this scene is only the concentrated ghastliness of a ghastly region.” Yet something did touch Cook deeply enough to acknowledge the Canyon’s grandeur in a scene appearing as if the “raging ocean had suddenly turned to stone.” With Moran’s painting, so deeply influenced by Powell’s thinking, ideas about the Grand Canyon’s worth would begin to change.
White men, from the conquistador Don García López de Cárdenas, who stared down into the Grand Canyon in 1540 and rapidly looked away, to the West Point surveyors who did so just before the Civil War, all deemed the Canyon worthless—hostile even—and to be avoided at all costs. Powell would claim and unveil the Grand Canyon as a national treasure through his tireless advocacy in his writings, his congressional lobbying, and as a result of his hiring renowned painters, photographers, and illustrators. He would give the nation what it needed to “see” this New World’s new world. “It seems as if a thousand battles had been fought on the plains below,” he wrote, “and on every field the giant heroes had built a monument compared with which the pillar on Bunker Hill is but a mile stone. But no human hand has placed a block in all those wonderful treasures. The rain drops of unreckoned ages have cut them all from the solid rock.”
Indeed Powell gave Americans a way of coming to terms with this frightening chasm, a way to understand it—and begin not only to appreciate it, but come to regard it as one of nature’s most stupendous displays. Only then could it become “our” Grand Canyon, and perhaps America’s most iconic natural feature. Only a man of outsized imagination, immense powers of communication, and burning curiosity could spread the word about this nearly incomprehensible, gigantic feature into American visual consciousness—something that all could wrap their heads around, and embrace as their own. This former vision of desolation now emerged as a distinctive, American landscape, which reflected a further sense of the nation’s growing understanding of itself as exceptional.
When the organizers of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia requested that the Capitol loan them Moran’s two great canvases, they wrote, “[W]e do not know of any paintings about this Capitol which are more characteristic, which are more strictly national, which would be more interesting or more instructive to submit to foreigners visiting this country than those pictures of Moran.” The Chasm would hang in the Senate for years, then eventually make its way to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where it is today.
Yet even so, the passage that the Grand Canyon would undergo to become one of the most-visited and iconic of America’s national parks would take time. Whereas Yellowstone became a park only a few years after Hayden’s visit and survey, the Grand Canyon would not become a national park until 1919, fifty years after Powell’s first visit. Part of this had to do with the Canyon’s sublimity.
Powell returned that fall of 1873 to find a subdued capital. The postwar boom had finally crashed in September, setting off the Panic of 1873. Between 1866 and 1873, the nation had seen 35,000 miles of new track built, railroads becoming the nation’s second-largest employer, only after agriculture. This new business required high levels of risk taking, not just in laying rails over insufficiently known terrain, but in building a massive national infrastructure, so large as to require federal government intervention in the form of liberal land grants and subsidies. In modern parlance, the railroad sector had become a “bubble,” which burst when the banking firm of Jay Cooke and Company, a federal agent in the government financing of railroad construction, declared bankruptcy in September. Other overextended banks and companies collapsed: 89 of the 364 railroads failed, as did 18,000 other businesses, within two years. By 1876, unemployment had soared to 14 percent. The depression, exacerbated by European monetary policies, would extend through 1880.
The often overlapping work of the three remaining federal surveys still in the field—King had wrapped up his fieldwork by 1872—could not help but come under congressional scrutiny in these increasingly lean times. In May 1874, the House Committee on Public Lands launched an inquiry, known as the Townsend Hearings, into the duplication of federal surveying. The details of the Wheeler-Hayden feud now became public. Hayden came out swinging: “. . . as far as my own party was concerned, it was generally rumored and believed that the avowed purpose of Lieutenant Wheeler in coming into Colorado was to precipitate a conflict which had been hanging over us for three years.” The two prideful principals would stain the hearings with name calling, Wheeler attacking Hayden as “unable to perform, or intelligently direct” the data gathering necessary, while Hayden charged back that it had not been “the love of science, but of power, that has induced [Wheeler] to precipitate this conflict.” The proceedings quickly turned into a referendum on whether military engineers or civilian scientists could more effectively manage a consolidated survey. Powell quietly stepped into the proceedings, and began methodically to undermine the army’s case,
Wheeler, Hayden, and the army’s chief of engineers, General Andrew A. Humphreys, underwent a full week of contentious testimony, the record revealing a growing confusion among the congressmen about the details of surveying, which they had earlier regarded as a simple process. Wheeler’s testimony came off as angry and belligerent, dismissive of any congressmen’s interest in matters of which they knew little. He flat-out refused to even outline War Department policy. When Powell took the stand one Monday morning, he extended a guiding hand to the committee: “I have therefore brought a blackboard for the purpose of drawing diagrams for illustration.” The congressmen watched as Powell fell comfortably into his role of intense but dispassionate professor, his chalk clacking and flying across the board, dust settling over his wool suit.
He lucidly explained Wheeler’s archaic technique of “meandering,” which relied on rolling an odometer or simply counting the steps of a horse, and compared it with the highly exact modern method of triangulation, perfected by Clarence King, and now adopted by him and Hayden. The War Department, including Wheeler’s survey, had simply not embraced modern surveying techniques and technology. Wheeler’s astronomic work, Powell conceded, “ranks with the best that has ever been done in this country . . .” but then he inquired whether he might show the bemused committee “why his map is so inaccurate as not to be available for geological purposes.” On the blackboard there appeared a cross-section of the Pangwitch Canyon, a river gorge cutting through volcanic rock, which showed economically why Wheeler’s technique could not describe it accurately. He also illustrated a plain to the southwest, reputed to contain rich coal beds. Wheeler’s map, Powell calmly demonstrated, displaced the location of the beds, thus giving the impression that the coal lay under 2,500 feet of sandstone, limestone, and shale. In reality, the beds lay on the hillsides, many of them already claimed and opened by settlers. Powell backed off slightly, adding that Wheeler had probably not intended to create an accurate topographic representation of the country, but rather a general sense that the country was broken and mountainous.
During the previous field season, Wheeler had covered a prodigious 72,500 square miles in four states and territories. A geologist who would quit Wheeler’s survey to join Powell’s a month later would complain about the speed of his old chief’s surveying. “To study the structure of a region under such circumstances was to read a book while its pages were quickly turned by another, and the result was a larger collection of impressions than of facts,” G. K. Gilbert wrote. In Wheeler’s surveys, the business of surveying roads and finding clear routes for supply trains trumped all else.
Powell argued that no great unexplored region remained in the United States, so such exploring surveying expeditions were no longer necessary. Powell implied that the army-surveying era had ended. “A more thorough method, or a survey proper, is now demanded,” he added in case the congressmen had missed it. The growing nation needed tools that the army could no longer provide.
The Townsend Hearings censured Wheeler and Hayden for bad manners, but declined to recommend any wholesale changes or consolidation. Competition among various surveys—as long as it remained civil—encouraged good work, the committee stated; and more survey teams could cover greater swaths of ground more quickly. President Grant’s support of Wheeler and the army’s role in surveying probably shielded this officer for the short term. However, the days of army participation in surveying and mapmaking neared an end. Congress shifted Powell’s survey from the Smithsonian to the Interior Department, ostensibly under Hayden’s auspices, although Powell did not report to him directly.
But Hayden would soon recognize with a growing sense of alarm that Powell, not Wheeler, stood as the biggest obstacle to his securing the job of running a consolidated survey.
In this competitive environment, the pressure to publish grew extreme. Hayden’s office would push out hundreds of volumes in the 1870s. Before the Townsend Hearings in 1873, James Garfield, now the House Appropriations Committee chair, asked Powell why he had not published a history of the original exploration of the Grand Canyon. The Major answered that he had no interest in publishing it as a work of adventure, but rather as a work of science. Garfield gently chastised him, saying that he must either submit a report or lose funding altogether.
Powell believed somewhat naively that all interest in his 1869 expedition had faded after the explosion of daily press articles. Unlike Clarence King, who missed no opportunity to weave his personal experiences into a clear, powerful western epic, Powell rarely sought to write—or speak—about himself. Even given a healthy ego and strong if rather impersonal ambitions, Powell unemotionally let science override any desire to put him at the center of a story. Indeed, he had never felt comfortable in the media-bestowed guise of a hero, even though his fame enabled him to conduct further scientific investigations. This, along with his intensely private temperament—he rarely, if ever, gave others any chance to gain purchase on his inner life—misled many, who came then to regard him as a wooden titan or haughty patrician. Such two-dimensional sketches obstruct any full understanding of Powell to this day.
The pressure for Powell to publish his account grew even more intense in mid-April 1874 when Appleton’s printed the photographer E. O. Beaman’s account of the second river expedition. No one else from Powell’s first or second river ventures had yet published accounts besides letters. Even though the prickly photographer had only accompanied the first leg of the second expedition, entirely missing the Grand Canyon, publication in such a popular venue finally moved Powell to pursue a publisher more aggressively. Riverside Press, Harper Brothers, and Ticknor & Fields had all turned the project down, objecting to the author’s devotion to impersonal science and far too few details of the journey itself. The publication of Beaman’s nine-part series—“The Cañon of the Colorado, and the Moquis Pueblos: A Wild Boat-Ride Through the Cañons and Rapids—a Visit to the Seven Cities of the Desert—Glimpses of Mormon Life”—coincided with the Townsend Hearings. Beaman’s account included not only the river but also the same Hopi villages visited by Powell. In a real way, Beaman challenged Powell more than Wheeler by threatening to steal the thunder he needed to keep up appropriations in the face of steep competition from Hayden.
By July, Powell had finally worked out a deal with Scribner’s Monthly for a three-part series of his own, one installment on the 1869 river journey, a second on his travels in the Arizona Strip and the Mormon settlements of southern Utah, and a third section on the Hopi, whose lifestyles appeared particularly interesting to eastern audiences.
“Please send one or two more incidents of the expedition of a bloodcurdling nature,” Powell’s editor pleaded. The Major no doubt bit his lip but complied. The moment when Bradley rescued him from the cliff face with his dangling long underwear—an insignificant event in Powell’s eyes and one that he would prefer to forget—proved one of those sensational moments the editors craved. In Powell’s and Bradley’s journals, the event received only the briefest mention, but most definitely grew far more lurid on the editorial desk. Scribner’s commissioned a woodcut of the very moment when Powell hung from Bradley’s drawers. The image came entirely from the artist’s imagination of things western, but with an eastern propriety: Bradley somehow remained fully clothed even after pulling off his underwear. This deeply powerful combination of courage and indignity could easily have graced the cover of a best-selling dime novel.
Even so, Powell did not buckle entirely to his editors, his mode of telling stories retaining much of his characteristic focus on task, not on personality and emotion. He certainly waxed clumsily about the beauty of the land through which he passed, but little of it could be described as personal. “You do not once (if I recollect aright),” recalled his friend Thomas Moran, “give your sensations even in the most dangerous passages, nor even hint at the terrible & sublime feelings that are stirred within one, as he feels himself in the strong jaws of the monstrous chasms.” Yet the understatement in Powell’s narrative gives the story a riveting power absent in Beaman’s overwrought prose.
After the hearings, Wheeler and Hayden redoubled their efforts, covering more miles and collecting yet more samples, while building ever more complex organizations. In 1874, Wheeler oversaw nine surveying parties ranging across Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico; his complement, only down slightly from 1873, totaled eighty-nine officers and assistants. Hayden mounted much the same. As their surveys expanded, Powell made no attempt to match them, choosing instead to keep his survey small, inexpensive, but of high quality, never operating with more than six to eight professional men and a few field assistants. He restricted his survey to geology and ethnology, eschewing the expensive collecting and transportation costs associated with botany, zoology, ornithology, and paleontology. Neither did he investigate mining opportunities, or like King experiment in metallurgy or chemistry. He did not request that the government pay for the costs of transporting his men, instead still relying on the railroad’s free or discounted passes. Neither did he require military escorts. For many years, Powell operated the survey out of the cramped but inexpensive confines of his M Street home.
Powell’s no-nonsense focus both on physical and social science started attracting first-class talent. Tired of Wheeler’s disregard for geology, G. K. Gilbert quit his survey in 1874 to sign up promptly with Powell, beginning a productive, almost brotherlike friendship that would last to the end of their lives. In 1875, Powell persuaded his old friend Ulysses S. Grant to assign him the geologist Captain Clarence Dutton, a polymath cigar-smoking lover of Macaulay and Twain. Dutton, Gilbert, and Powell would become fast friends, putting out some of the finest geological work of the late nineteenth century. One of Powell’s greatest strengths lay in identifying talent that would complement his own, then giving them the widest latitude possible. Whereas Powell drew bold, intuitive geological ideas, Gilbert came up with a brilliant, if less colorful, systematization. And so, too, with Dutton, whose evocations of the geology of the Grand Canyon will never be surpassed in the minds of many.
Dutton would later recall the bond of affection and mutual confidence that connected the three men, describing their work as a labor of love. “[T]his geological wonderland was the never-ending theme of discussion; all observations and experiences were commonstock, and ideas were interchanged, amplified, and developed by mutual criticism and suggestion.” These three, aided by the visual genius of Moran, and later by the illustrator William Holmes, would begin to make the Grand Canyon’s deep rifts and alien landforms more and more comprehensible.
The year 1875 would prove a watershed for the Powell survey, the Major able to rely on a cadre of professional scientists for the first time. While Prof Thompson certainly understated his proper pride for his men after completing the map in 1873, writing to Powell that “we done middling for greenhorns,” Powell from the early days in Colorado had drawn upon amateur talent. Now he assigned Thompson, Gilbert, and Dutton each to lead a team to the Colorado Plateau. While Wheeler’s teams ranged far, wide, and thinly, and Hayden moved out of Colorado to skim other fertile fields, Powell continued to center his survey work on the plateau.
Such talent offered the added benefit of enabling Powell to focus on Washington’s always uncertain politics and devote himself to getting his survey work ready for publication. In mid-June of 1875, Congress published Powell’s “Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872.” The original 1869 trip took up half of the book, while the rest offered chapters by Thompson on searching for the mouth of Dirty Devil, two by Powell on Colorado River Valley topography, and a third section on fauna, by scientists not part of either team. The report proved a near-instant success, the Government Printing Office going back to press almost immediately after the first three thousand copies ran out quickly. In 1895, Powell would publish the report in book form—with some changes and packed with Hillers’s photographs and woodcuts of Moran’s illustrations. The book would never go out of print and has become one of American history’s most enduring stories of exploration.
The report, and book in some eyes, however, contains a damning flaw. Although the title mentions that the explorations took place in 1869 through 1872, the text, aside from Thompson’s chapter, makes no mention of the hard work performed by those in the second expedition—indeed no direct mention of that effort at all. The omission provoked a deep bitterness, Thompson describing Powell as not “a fair and generous man—to put it mildly.” In a letter to Dellenbaugh years later, he asserted that Powell “was generous, sympathetic, and possessed all the estimable qualities you and I assign him but you will notice neither you nor I speak of his justice or loyalty.” This omission feeds the notion among some that Powell had little appreciation for those who worked for him.
But again, the story is more complicated. Pulling both trips into a single narrative, especially when one soared with the drama of a virgin descent while the other crawled sleepily under the methodical demands of scientific measurement, would have required more writing skills than Powell possessed. Garfield wanted details of the first expedition—as had the Scribner’s editors—so he delivered that story.
Yet the omission does reveal elements of Powell’s character, particularly his lack of interest in assigning or taking credit. Gilbert described the Major as “phenomenally fertile in ideas . . . absolutely free in their communication, with the result that many of his suggestions—a number which never can be known—were unconsciously appropriated by his associates and incorporated in their published results.” In Powell’s mind, everyone worked in subservience to far more powerful masters than mere ego: the greatest of them all, science and the nation. Therefore, Powell did not undertake the account to mete out credit. It simply did not occur to him to do so. His undoubted generosity in some ways was matched by a blunt indifference in others. It would have cost him nothing to acknowledge the men of the second expedition. If someone had queried him about their work, he would have responded with praise for their dedication. Nonetheless, this omission remains a black mark, a failure ultimately in leadership.
But Powell was not one to dwell in the past. While Wheeler and Hayden traded insults in front of the Townsend committee, Powell set about hijacking the agenda and taking the reins of the conversation. Just as he could see landforms where others only saw one more range of hills, Powell had begun to think far beyond what pure surveying might mean, far beyond a mere surveyor’s interest in laying out roads or railroad paths, finding extractable coal or gold. His dawning realization appeared here nationally for the first time: The key to developing the West centered not so much on what evanescent treasures it contained, but rather on what it did not—water.