CHAPTER 11

A Tough Opponent

In the mid-to-late 1880s, the West got hit with a one-two punch—a sockdolager, as Powell himself might have described it. The first, a series of particularly severe blizzards in 1886–1887 slammed across the Great Plains, striking the Dakotas, western Kansas, the Indian Territory (soon to be Oklahoma), and the Texas panhandle. In southwestern Kansas, a man wearing a light linen overcoat froze to death, his pocket stuffed with a flyer advertising Kansas as “the Italy of America.” Some one hundred Kansans died, including entire families trapped in their houses by vast snowdrifts. And the storms savaged the newly booming cattle industry with particular intensity, freezing millions of the animals where they stood. Theodore Roosevelt returned to his Dakota ranch to find half his herd dead, so he sold off his enterprise at a loss and sought a different dream. When the snow finally melted, farmers found the bodies of steers suspended in tree branches, their last desperate act having been to climb snowdrifts after the last green leaves.

A cruel, multiyear drought followed directly upon the snow. “The sky began to scare us with its light,” remarked Hamlin Garland, invoking the desolation settling over the dry-as-a-bone prairie. By 1890, the drought’s third year, between a quarter and a half of the once-hopeful settlers of Kansas and Nebraska had gone, some of them nailing the iconic sign to their wagons, “In God we trusted. In Kansas we busted.” Drought struck hardest just east of “Powell’s line,” reaching from Kansas to the Dakotas where farmers could just get by without irrigation. Families had withstood waves of grasshoppers desolating their crops and myriad other agricultural misfortunes, but no degree of perseverance or courage could overcome persistent drought. The mild weather following the Civil War had encouraged the populations of Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado to double or triple, all founded on the idea that such favorable conditions would continue indefinitely. They did not. The droughts and national economic setbacks of the 1880s and early 1890s brought social unrest, starvation, and widespread destitution, driving upward of 300,000 people from the arid lands—a drop of 50 to 75 percent—their dreams dashed.

The realities of arid land settled in: Hundreds of irrigation companies founded in the 1870s and 1880s, financed largely by eastern capital, did not survive the decade. The regular mechanisms of American capitalism—private equity, the resilience of the individual—even when injected with healthy doses of Manifest Destiny and the nation’s eternal optimism, could not override the challenges of the arid West.

For Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, the West’s least populous state, this added up to calamity. The silver boom of the Comstock Lode, America’s first great discovery of silver ore, had tailed off in recent years; many miners and those supporting that industry had left the state. Stewart increasingly felt heat from the Southern Pacific Railroad, Nevada’s most extensive private land owner, which feared that drought and the declines in mining would kill the land development upon which it counted. Stewart took his case to the Senate, convinced that the federal government should take part in the irrigation business.

On March 20, 1888, Stewart helped push through a joint resolution directing the secretary of the interior to “make an examination” of the advantages of storing water for the irrigable lands—including the assessment of stream capacity, and the practicability and costs of building reservoirs. The inquiry’s objective rested squarely on the arid region’s being “capable of supporting a large population thereby adding to the national wealth and prosperity.” In so doing, Stewart launched a train of events that would lead him into a bitter confrontation with Powell. Stewart would prove the most formidable opponent that Powell had ever encountered.


A week later, again at Stewart’s urging, the Senate asked Powell for his estimate of the costs associated with running an irrigation survey that would examine the practicability of water storage in the arid region, determine what lands could be reasonably irrigated, and identify locations for reservoirs, canals, and dams. In a consequent hearing, the director replied that he would need $250,000 for the first year, but that a careful, responsible evaluation of possibly reclaimable lands would require upward of $5.5 million, most of it for topographical mapping to reveal the drainage system. Such knowledge could then help uncover the most effective means of distributing the limited water available.

During discussion on the floor of the Senate, Stewart reassured his colleagues that the irrigation survey would only identify reservoir and canal sites, not build them. Stewart had long believed that the federal government needed to cede all public lands to the states; the sale of these tracts would finance the irrigation works. Stewart praised Powell as the person to get the survey done, calling him “a very competent and enthusiastic man.” While the senator might have initiated the irrigation survey, it had been Powell’s Arid Lands report that brought the issue of irrigation to the general public consciousness, and paved the way for this new effort.

Six months later, Powell had $100,000 in hand. The bill creating the new irrigation survey included a badly written clause, inserted by a Colorado congressman to prevent speculators from trailing after surveyors and buying up prime land. It authorized the secretary of the interior, at the request of the president, to pull “all lands made susceptible of irrigation” from public entry: or, in other words, take them off the market. A prudent caution certainly, but interpretations of the wording would come to bedevil the whole process. In December, Stewart urged the Senate to create a Select Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation of Arid Lands under the Public Lands Committee. The Senate agreed, naming Stewart its chairman, and appropriating $80,000 for a congressional fact-finding trip out West.

That month, President Cleveland spoke directly to irrigation issues in the last annual congressional address of his first four-year term. Republican Benjamin Harrison had just narrowly beaten him, losing the popular vote but taking the electoral college with wins in New York and Indiana. “I can not but think it perilous to suffer either these lands or the sources of their irrigation to fall into the hands of monopolies . . . ,” said Cleveland, “and the public good presents no demand for hasty dispossession of national ownership and control.” Harrison harbored no such burning passion and would prove overall a charming but weak executive, whom Cleveland would convincingly defeat in four years, garnering a second term. Two weeks after his inauguration, Harrison issued a proclamation opening the Cherokee Strip to homesteaders as of April 22 at noon. “Sooners” claimed upward of two million acres over a matter of hours in what would be dubbed the Great Land Rush of 1889.


Even before Congress officially appropriated the funds, Powell had already kicked the irrigation survey into high gear, tasking Prof Thompson to handle mapping and Clarence Dutton to head up engineering and hydrographic work. Every unused corner of the Hooe filled with new hires. An annex across the street, plus offices at the Smithsonian and regional locations, just about accommodated the rest. Besides the USGS and the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell now had another entire agency to run, but no other career official was better positioned to launch so ambitious a program. His organization had experience juggling multiple complex operations, and G. K. Gilbert stepped in to help run things. By the summer of 1889, Powell’s men had set up stream-gauge stations on the Arkansas, Rio Grande, Carson, Truckee, Gila, and Snake rivers. By the end of the following June, they had surveyed and identified 147 reservoir sites: 33 in California, 46 in Colorado, 27 in Montana, 39 in New Mexico, and 2 in Nevada. The reservoir sites themselves covered 165,932 acres, which Powell projected might irrigate nearly two million acres of dry land, only a fraction of the 30 million acres that the irrigation survey had designated as irrigable, but still more extensive than all the currently irrigated land in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Nevada combined. The survey coined the terms “runoff” and “flyoff,” still in use today. Powell agreed with Stewart that the federal government should provide only planning and estimates. He imagined a series of small dams, rarely more than several feet high, each on a tributary of a major river, which would provide water for local communities. Congress found him $250,000 for the second year, and would have considered more, but Powell said he was not yet ready.

On August 1, 1889, Stewart’s entourage left from St. Paul, Minnesota, traveling in style in a Pullman train car. At Stewart’s invitation, Powell joined the party, which would travel to the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Nevada, California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, covering 14,000 miles and conducting hundreds of interviews. The Major and the white-haired six-foot-tall senator made an odd couple. Stewart had made his mark in Virginia City, earning huge fees litigating the tangled claims of Nevada’s (then the Utah Territories’) Comstock Lode. An implacable mercenary for mining companies, he had no peer at intimidating, bribing, and cajoling judges, juries, and witnesses. At one point, the blue-eyed pit bull had forced the resignation of the Nevada Territory’s entire judiciary. Several of his most questionable mining deals would dog him for the rest of his life. He came to Washington in 1865, briefly hiring the young Samuel Clemens as a clerk. Clemens, whose pen name was becoming Mark Twain, would later lampoon his former boss in Roughing It with a caricature of the senator snarling behind a piratical eye patch. On what would become Dupont Circle, Stewart soon raised a five-story, Second Empire mansion, which boasted a palatial ballroom and room after room crowded with massive Chinese teak furniture and gilded chairs upholstered with Aubusson tapestry. One reporter claimed that “Stewart’s Castle” attracted more curiosity seekers than the White House. Stewart, a strong free-silver advocate, reflected his epoch, helping to write the National Mining Law of 1866, which to this day still affords mining interests startlingly favorable terms for developing public lands.

Somewhere along these 14,000 miles, Stewart and Powell’s friendly relationship deteriorated. Washington’s Daily Critic surmised that the senator “grew jealous of the attentions paid the geologic director.” These two men made strange bedfellows indeed, drawn together by their agreement that irrigating the west required federal assistance. But as Stewart had begun to realize, they came at this great issue from different universes. The two bull-headed men, each accustomed to getting his own way, proved as compatible as oil and water.

The Dakota Territory delegates at their first constitutional convention wanted to hear from the grizzled USGS director, not from the booming gentleman from Nevada. Powell urged them to keep state control of water rights. Far from extolling western corporate boosterism, Powell preached a solidly populist message: “Fix it in your constitution that no corporation—no body of men—no capital can get possession of the right of your waters. Hold the waters in the hands of the people.” That summer, while the committee’s train chugged through the West, events in the field would accelerate the coming Washington showdown between the two men.


Other problems rose up to bedevil the survey. Land speculators hired their own surveyors to follow Powell’s men, then filed on land and the water rights along the streams and gulches. “Such monopoly by the speculators promises to defeat the plans of the government,” reported the Cheyenne Daily Leader. Shortly after the irrigation survey designated southern Idaho’s Bear Lake as its first reservoir site, the Bear Lake and River Water Works and Irrigation Company filed for all the land and water rights throughout the basin—not only the lake, but also Bear River and all its tributaries—set on diverting the water south to irrigate 200,000 acres of the Salt Lake Basin. The governor of Idaho telegraphed the secretary of the interior in alarm, demanding that he forestall, in the newspaper’s words, “this great wrong to Idaho.”

In August, after checking with the attorney general and the president, Interior Secretary John Noble invoked the anti-speculation amendment in the irrigation survey’s appropriation bill, but, instead of merely closing off potential reservoir sites, the secretary removed all public lands nationwide from entry, shuttered the land offices, and suspended all claims retroactively to October 2, 1888, when the bill had been signed. With one flourish of his pen, Noble had closed off hundreds of millions of acres to settlement and suspended 134,000 filings and entries on nine million acres. Legislators had never meant to concede such sweeping authority as to seal off the entire public heritage, although the amendment’s muddy wording could indeed be so interpreted. “The segregation of irrigable lands provided for by the law,” explained the Rocky Mountain News, “is not intended in any way as a bar to their acquirement under the land laws. . . . The only reservation to be made is in the case of the sites for storage reservoirs. These are to be withdrawn from public entry to prevent their monopoly by speculators.” Soon the fury of politicians, railroad interests, and land grabbers exploded into a wildfire, most of it pointed toward the director of the USGS. “It is doubtful that any modern controversy among men of learning,” wrote Wallace Stegner in 1954, “has generated more venom than this one did.”

Though Powell had nothing to do with this draconian measure, powerful forces understood that he—and he alone—would be the person to judge for the secretary of the interior when the public lands would again be open. By the look of it, the president and a land-hungry nation waited upon Powell’s judgment on the matter. Seldom has so wide ranging a power been dropped into the lap of a single individual. Asked whether he agreed with Noble’s decision, Powell said that he did. He had always been upfront that the irrigation survey would take several—or more—years to complete.

As the seismic rumblings over Noble’s decision began to amplify ominously, an old enemy surfaced to blindside Powell. The paleontologist E. D. Cope had never forgotten the Major’s siding with Marsh long ago. For his part, Powell had met with Cope in 1888, agreeing to put him on the USGS payroll so that he might finish his book, already more than a decade old. In return, Cope agreed to turn some of the fossils in his collections over to the Smithsonian. “I feel much relieved,” wrote Cope. A year later, no fossils—or manuscript—was forthcoming, so Secretary Noble demanded that either he surrender the fossils or forgo salary and publication.

Cope blew up, livid that he had no say in the disposition of the fossils in which he had personally sunk $75,000 of his shrinking fortune. Detecting Powell’s hand behind the secretary’s threat, Cope rushed to scandal writer W. H. Ballou, a stringer for the New York Herald. The Herald’s competition that January was enjoying a sensational run as their star writer, Nellie Bly, had decided to challenge the central conceit of Jules Verne’s hugely successful novel Around the World in Eighty Days. Traveling by ship, train, and burro, the charismatic thirty-year-old finished in 72 days, 6 hours, and 11 minutes, steaming into New York Harbor late that month to become a huge star. Tweaked by his competitor’s success, the Herald’s James Gordon Bennett, Jr., sponsor of such publicity stunts as sending Stanley to find Livingstone in the African jungle, was not about to be bested. When Ballou came to him with Cope’s accusations, Bennett went big, publishing a huge headline, “Scientists Wage Bitter Warfare . . . Red Hot Denials Put Forth.” The article quoted Cope as alleging that the survey had become a politico-scientific monopoly that operated like a political machine. Ballou claimed that a steaming volcano lay underneath the survey and would soon erupt. Powell responded with a masterful dissection of Cope’s character, praising him as a fair systematist who could still do great work, but was unable to see that “the enemy which he sees forever haunting him as a ghost is himself.” The headlines died down, but then Marsh reinvigorated them with his own attack on Cope, dredging up a twenty-year-old claim that Cope had placed the skull at the wrong end of a dinosaur skeleton.

The same week that the Herald article broke, Powell appeared before Stewart’s Senate Select Committee, attending six of its ten hearings between January 17 and March 28, 1890. The Major unpacked his ideas once more, perhaps the most innovative of which was integrating water rights with claims to the land that the water flowed through. Here he displayed a map of the arid lands, separated into colorful circles of various sizes, designating watersheds. He also introduced the idea of irrigation districts, which would manage their own water, neither sending it out of their own watershed nor importing any from another. These communities, established on parcels of the land for settlers at eighty acres, cut in half from the traditional quarter section, would own the water communally, each having an equal voice in its use. Each district would make its own rules and raise capital for building its system of irrigation; the federal government would help only in the fundamental organization and nothing more—whether the construction of reservoirs, dams, or canals. Powell offered an unparalleled understanding of watersheds, rivers and their tributaries, the history of irrigation, artesian water, storm water, and reservoir capacities.

Again and again, Chairman Stewart and his fellow Republicans questioned the extraordinary expense of creating the topographical atlas. Powell never shied from his belief that the correct siting of hydrologic works necessitated such a broad undertaking. Mapping offered the cheapest, quickest, and most efficient means of carrying out this task. Such mapping made it possible to identify the potentially irrigable land at the outset. But why, asked Stewart, could not an engineer simply climb a mountain and eyeball a reservoir or dam site without the benefit of topographic data?

Powell explained the need for exact information, perhaps thinking about the article he had written for The North American Review about the recent catastrophic Johnstown Flood. Under heavy rain, the earthen South Fork Dam on the little Conemaugh River had collapsed, releasing a thirty-foot wall of water onto Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and killing 2,200 people. The worst failure of American engineering had shaken the public’s faith in dams. Powell had stepped in to reassure. By all accounts, he acknowledged, the engineers had built a sound dam, but had neglected to consider “the duty the dam was required to perform.” The engineers had not built the dam to accommodate what nature could deliver under maximum rainfall or snow-melt conditions into that gentle valley. Quite simply, the engineers had failed to reckon the capacity of the entire drainage basin and the slopes and declivities that hemmed the dam in. Establish that body of knowledge, combine it with annual precipitation data, and an engineer could accurately calculate the maximum amount of floodwater—and design a structure capable of containing it. A topographical mapping lay central to such calculations.

This was the linchpin of Powell’s argument to the senators: The irrigation survey might certainly designate reservoir sites without the benefit of exact mapping, but many would not be scientifically sited and thus be prone to disasters. So, too, topographical work would help determine the location of underground water, obviating the wasteful need to drill at random. But said Senator Gideon Moody of South Dakota about experimental well drilling, “what these people want is . . . the courage of conviction.” Give them money to dig wells and “they will take care of the rest.” Powell would not budge: “I do not wish to give the people courage to lead them on to failure, to waste their energies in seeking disaster.”

Over days of testimony, Stewart turned his legendary powers of advocacy toward strong-arming Powell into submission or finding a crack in his argument. Again and again he attacked Powell. Back and forth they went like two exhausted prizefighters in late rounds. The Major never lost his cool, adopting the demeanor of a patient teacher with a somewhat dim student, explaining things over and over again, invoking an example every time. The senator had come up against Powell’s legendarily steely resolve.

On January 31, the fourth day, Stewart understood that he had drawn to a stalemate. Calling the committee to order, he acknowledged that much valuable general material had been collected. “What we want now is to hear from any person present who has practical ideas as to what can and ought to be done to facilitate irrigation; how it can be directly got at; what aid the Government can give most advantageously and with the least expense to make a profitable development of the arid regions.” Stewart, like any western senator, wanted answers right away, not to wait for some bureaucrat driven by righteous philosophical generalities and taste for larger payrolls to take as many years as he pleased. Powell saw the immense costs to the farmer—and American democracy—by a reckless, ill-considered development of the West. Both Powell and Stewart agreed that irrigation of the arid lands remained a national priority—and that the federal government needed to aid that process but should not be involved in the actual building of the infrastructure. Yet at the root, they held diametrically opposed perspectives on how to get irrigation done. Any chance of their working together had now passed. Over the last days of testimony, Stewart’s antagonism toward Powell had grown deeply and visibly personal.

Political expediency would have suggested that Powell back down and live to fight another battle, or approach Stewart with a compromise, although by then Stewart would have probably rejected anything that Powell advanced. Anyhow, compromise would not have crossed Powell’s mind. Not only did his tenacity kick in, but his deep convictions on these matters would never have let him budge. He felt himself fighting for the very future of the American republic.

In mid-March, the senator would try a new tack to best Powell, finding a weakness not in Powell’s arguments, but in one of his subordinates.


By all accounts, Clarence Dutton, the bright Army Ordnance Corps captain for the past fifteen years on permanent seasonal loan to the USGS, had served faithfully as one of Powell’s most trusted lieutenants. Dutton, sporting a trimmed Van Dyke and an always-burning cigar, his carriage more soldierly than scientific, brought an unassuming manner but a trenchant intellect to Powell’s innermost circle. Powell regarded him as his heir to the survey’s preeminent geology department. Along with Gilbert, Dutton had instituted rigorous bookkeeping protocols, which kept the survey out of trouble under repeated congressional inquiries.

Unlike Gilbert, who viewed the Major as something of a father figure, Dutton called his boss “Powell,” perhaps a natural result of their common war experience, during which both had served as artillery officers and had suffered severe wounds. Where Powell enjoyed immersing himself in Scott and Longfellow, Dutton tended toward Twain and the humorous aphorisms of Josh Billings—his joke-and-riddle-telling softening Powell’s often overtaxed countenance. The Major might be interested, Dutton once wrote from the field, that he had solved a vexing problem, namely “how high and steep and rough a hill a mule can roll down without getting killed.” Or he might write to Clarence King how he had found earth faults in flagrante delicto. Later, when the naturalists John Muir and John Burroughs encountered the baffling immensities of the Grand Canyon, they would turn to the surprisingly lyrical exposition of Dutton’s Tertiary History.

But Powell particularly counted on Dutton’s eclectic curiosity, much like the Major’s, which always took him off on interesting tangents, whether in studying the volcanoes of Hawaii or the earthquake that battered Charleston in 1886. The same year of the Stewart hearings, Dutton had brought boats to Oregon’s Crater Lake—a startlingly difficult feat in those days—to survey it and plumb its depths for the first time. With those data, he theorized about the crater’s origin, coming up with an explanation that still stands today.

When the irrigation survey work fell on him rather suddenly, Powell tasked Dutton to run the hydrographic engineering division. Although reluctant to leave the studies he loved, the dutiful captain agreed. This inveterate chess player, capable of playing seven simultaneous games blindfolded, understood that stakes in this particular inquiry had grown steadily higher, so confronted Powell about the propriety of spending irrigation survey appropriations on topographic mapping, when the USGS had already dedicated federal dollars to that purpose. Powell might all-too-convincingly be charged with soaking up irrigation survey funds to water his larger mapping agenda. Powell did not see how these could be separated. The national topographic mapping project remained critical to his current mission—and the success of the irrigation survey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

The Major had become a lightning rod, the perfect scapegoat for all that stood in the way of Stewart’s vision for a prosperous American future.


The full Senate and House took up the Sundry Civil Expenses Bill in mid-July, but not before Moody got in a few more licks on the Senate floor, dubbing Powell a “tycoon of many tails,” then confiding much less wittily to the Evening Star that Powell “knew as much about the arid lands of the west as he did about the mountains of the moon, and not one whit more.” Powell appeared to get blamed almost entirely for western development’s shutting down by the dramatic closure of the public lands. The western senators, who united against Powell, found support from eastern senators reluctant to pour money into expensive western irrigation projects. Powell had finally paddled into a wave he could not negotiate, no matter his prodigious skill and determination.

The Senate cut off funding for the irrigation survey. In late August, Congress as a whole repealed the provision closing all public lands, limiting closure to reservoir sites only. The General Land Office, with all its warts and transgressions and briberies, opened again for its publicly scandalous business. The federal government would not return to classifying lands until the Dust Bowl and farm-surplus crises forced its hand in the 1930s. For Powell, even though the USGS received a record appropriation that year, the closure of the irrigation survey came as the biggest loss of his career. Gone were two years of toil, and his prime opportunity to cast his ideas into the future of western development.

Powell reluctantly discharged dozens of employees. In large part, he was one more victim of the times. The Republicans were undergoing a generational change, virtually trading off its fading patronage of southern blacks and coming to comfortable terms with the powers of the Gilded Age. Even as industry inexorably expanded, workers and farmers saw little increase in prosperity, and those hard times spurred alliances and organizations that mobilized into clamorous political movements pressing for radical economic reform. But Powell had also underestimated the storm of anger breaking over Stewart and pretty much the entire western congressional presence as the whole region underwent one blow after another.

In turn, Stewart won an empty victory: Federal irrigation did transfer over to the Department of Agriculture, but Congress would not fund the effort for another dozen years. In the meantime, a host of private water companies failed. Stewart had let his personal animosity for Powell doom the very goals he and his people sought to attain.

Even with tactical victory in hand, Stewart still spat venom at Powell, spreading malicious rumors in a letter to John Conness, lately a California senator: “Since the receipt of your letter I have made some inquiry and find that his habits with women are scandalous.” He would—or could—never substantiate these accusations. Once Stewart felt he had finished with Powell, he went after the Major’s brother Bram, who had come to town as superintendent of schools, and eventually hounded him out of office.


Powell’s relationship with Dutton became yet another casualty of the hearings. In his treasured associate’s entangled testimony, Powell found a deep, unforgivable betrayal. Dutton certainly had not intended to derail the irrigation survey. Nothing suggested that he felt any remotely unusual antagonism toward his boss, although he and others of the Great Basin Mess certainly felt the sometimes-overwhelming presence of the Major, his larger-than-life personality and roster of exploits seeming to reach into every aspect of their work and personal lives. Unlike the Howlands and Dunn, Dutton did not actively decide to walk off the job and crack the continental undertaking. Powell’s rebuke must have devastated him.

Another of Powell’s protégés, Charles Walcott, who would go on to succeed Powell as head of the survey, and eventually to head the Smithsonian, quietly commented that Powell “likes strong loyalty from those nearest to him.” The other side of that cult of loyalty was pride; and once Dutton had crossed the line—on the record in a Senate hearing no less—their collegial relationship ended. In July, Dutton requested full transfer back to the army and was obliged. His superiors dispatched this great talent to anonymity at the San Antonio arsenal. No record exists that he and Powell ever spoke again, although other members of the survey kept in touch.

Powell had lost not only a close friend but a valued professional colleague. These two—more than anyone else—had brought the Grand Canyon in all its splendor before the nation, revising it from a place of horrors and awe into one of spectacular beauty and exceptional presence in the American nation. If Powell had been the protagonist in the Grand Canyon epic, then Dutton was its muse. In his Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District, he described how the individual’s perceptions of the great gorge can grow and change—an observation that could well be extended to America’s shifting views of the West overall: “Whatsoever might be bold or striking would at first seem only grotesque. The colors would be the very ones he had learned to shun as tawdry and bizarre. The tones and shades, modest and tender, subdued yet rich, in which his fancy had always taken special delight, would be the ones which are conspicuously absent. But time would bring a gradual change. Some day he would suddenly become conscious that outlines which at first seemed harsh and trivial have grace and meaning; that forms which seemed grotesque are full of dignity; that magnitudes which had added enormity to coarseness have come replete with strength and even majesty. . . . Great innovations, whether in art or literature, in science or in nature . . . must be understood before they can be estimated, and must be cultivated before they can be understood.”

Yet even Dutton, a colleague and deep friend who had shared so many experiences of the American West, did not ultimately possess the imagination to encompass the future shape of the American West as did Powell.

The most essential element of the man and his successes lay in his forward-going energy, his chessmaster ability to see three or four moves ahead. The West had brought some great changes to America—and far more rapidly than anyone had anticipated; Powell could never cease to feel the land shifting beneath his feet. The charging, sudden continentalization of American power energized Powell into thinking forever bigger, sometimes almost violently forcing upon him a larger sense of the world that was coming to be. This did not dizzy him; it just lifted him from one challenge to the next greater one. At least two generations would pass before others could grasp his ideas. Over the next several years, his voice would resound, lonely but undimmed and defiant.