CHAPTER 12

Last Stand

In 1891, the Fifth International Geological Congress, the first of its kind held in the United States, convened in Washington. By clever politicking, Powell had shifted the original location from Philadelphia to the nation’s capital, a change that made sense as 42 of the 173 American attendees belonged to the United States Geological Survey. Foreign participants came from fifteen nations, for the most part western European, although members from Russia, Peru, and Chile attended. After days spent discussing such weighty topics as the chronological correlation of clastic rocks and the standardization of colors, symbols, and names on geological maps, the well-dined members had a chance to take several tours, the highlight being a twenty-five-day “grand excursion” for ninety guests by rail and stage across the Great Plains to the Rockies, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon. American geologists could proudly boast not just about the spectacular formations of the West, but also show off the pioneering mapwork undertaken by the USGS, the largest scientific organization in the world. In Salt Lake City, the entourage enjoyed a banquet attended by many luminaries, not least Senator William Stewart.

Dutton’s abrupt departure from the survey left no one but Powell to meet up with thirty-six visitors in Flagstaff in late September for a trip into the Grand Canyon. The promised tents never materialized, so the group weathered wind, rain, and hail for ten demanding days. By all accounts, Powell appeared to relish the chance of submitting the distinguished visitors to truly western conditions—and they did not seem to mind either, the Chilean mining geologist Francisco San Román recording that “good humor prevailed.” On day two they reached the South Rim, descending into the Canyon to examine Precambrian and Permian rocks. Of all Powell’s many descents through or down the Canyon—this would be his last—this distinguished visitation must have struck him with particular resonance. Only two decades earlier, he and his ragged band of adventurers had pushed their way through the unknown Canyon; now he was lecturing eminent foreign geologists on American geology as mapped by American scientists on an unprecedented scale. How much he must have wanted to share this moment with Clarence Dutton as he and his guests gazed out from Point Sublime. American geology, as it became clear to everyone at the Congress—had they not sensed it before—had attained star status.

Another participant, the geographer Emmanuel de Margerie of Paris, delighted in more than the spectacle: “We have nothing comparable to that wonderful display of labor in every direction of geological science; the union of topography and of geology seems specially wise and expedient.” He was speaking directly to Powell’s transcendent vision for the USGS and the survey’s patrons. Three months later, Powell accepted the Cuvier Prize from the Academy of Sciences of the Institute of France on behalf of the survey for its superb mapping and interpretation of the great American West.


The year 1892 did not smile on the survey—or on other federal scientific endeavors. An election year in which Democrat Grover Cleveland returned to office, it came fogged with continuing economic uncertainty, which in a year pushed the nation into the worst recession of its first one hundred years. The western senators, still brooding over Powell’s resistance in the irrigation survey business, joined with Cleveland Democrats eager to show their cost-cutting bona fides, and took another hard look at the USGS. Not surprisingly, change of administration or not, Stewart led the charge, railing at the survey as “a mockery of science.” Marsh’s paleontological work came under fire, particularly his book on the extinct Odontornithes. The catchphrase “birds with teeth” became a favorite rallying cry of those bent on eliminating alleged government waste. Surprisingly, many in Congress stood up for Powell, but the fiscal climate and lack of a standard bearer capable of checking Stewart did not bode well. The Senate cut the survey’s budget from $800,000 to $400,000.

When that ominous news hit in July, Powell discharged a volley of telegrams, the one to Marsh reading curtly: “Appropriations cut off. Please send your resignation at once.”


In 1893, a full-blown economic crisis overran the United States, its root causes international and complex. By July, 560 state and private banks, as well as 155 national banks, had closed their doors. Factories shuttered and unemployment soared, while export markets foundered. A continuing western drought compounded the troubles of states beyond the Mississippi, smashing farm prices and causing a rash of mortgage foreclosures. Silver prices declined. In this tense environment, the West’s demand for federal help in promoting irrigation projects came roaring back to life. While the Stewart-Powell deadlock had stalled irrigation policy for some time, the economic and ecological disasters awakened new voices. William Smythe, an Omaha newspaperman turned champion of headlong irrigation in the “conquest of arid America,” launched Irrigation Age, one of several such publications that had sprung into creation. He swung high the torch of William Gilpin, but in a different arc. Aridity was no curse, he argued, but an actual blessing, because it required the civilizing power of irrigation. His new movement was “not merely a matter of ditches and acres, but a philosophy, a religion, and a programme of practical statesmanship rolled into one.” The target of irrigating 572 million acres of public land west of the 97th parallel intoxicated a new generation of boosters. He declaimed that he had science, not bromides, at his back. The answer to the nation’s ills lay in the latest modern technologies that would bring abundant grain and blooming fruit trees to the conquered desert, offering prosperity and opportunity to millions in dirty, overcrowded cities. The San Francisco Chronicle enthusiastically opined that a comparatively small investment could bring millions to the nation and create thousands of happy homes “where now is but a sterile wilderness.”

As economy and environment visibly withered, Smythe organized a national irrigation congress in Los Angeles in October 1893. The Los Angeles Times applauded the choice of venue—after all, had not Major Powell, “the well-known specialist on this subject,” declared that California boasted the world’s finest example of the benefits of irrigation in fostering horticulture and agriculture?

Befitting the importance of the gathering, President Cleveland extended invitations to most major foreign governments. Some seven hundred delegates, including Powell at the head of a delegation from the survey, turned up for the five days’ proceedings, the main events held downtown in the cavernous, boomtown Grand Opera House. Across the street, a vacant lot exhibited examples of modern technology. While the first practical internal-combustion-powered car lay two years in the future, the newly reconfigured—smaller and more efficient—gasoline-powered engine promised the capacity to pump groundwater in great volumes that windmills could not. The delegates gawked at gas engines, graders, ditchers, duplex pumps, pipes, special drainage tile, and new water-tank designs. The new-fangled Hellemotor featured large reflecting surfaces that caught the sun’s rays to power a pump. Executives of water companies and speculation-hungry capitalists enjoyed free California wines and fruit, cigars, and sandwiches.

Inside the opera house, amidst a riot of bunting and flags, one speaker after another mounted a stage crowded with tropical plants and flowers to speak to the wonders of irrigation. Above their heads hung a streamer bearing the congress’s motto: “Irrigation: Science, Not Chance.” A festive, celebratory mood prevailed, undergirded by the body’s commitment to its keynote promise that homes for “millions of free men could be made on the arid public domain.” One evening, in a talk sponsored by the Los Angeles Science Association, Powell lectured about his 1869 voyage. Just after lunch on October 13, Powell climbed the stairs to address the entire congress. Delegates were limited to five minutes, but no one dared constrain the Major, who would speak for three-quarters of an hour.

Pale and gray, the Major no longer radiated the vigorous health of his prime. The long train ride from Chicago had worn him considerably. His stump burned. Yet, looking out over all the adoring faces raised expectantly beneath him, Powell laid aside his prepared remarks, announcing to more applause that they could read his technical paper on water supply later. The Major’s gray eyes flamed. Perhaps he knew that the end of his career approached. And then he delivered the most eloquent, impassioned speech of his life.

He outlined his pride in his great nation’s enterprise, then confirmed his populist bona fides: “I am more interested in the home and the cradle than I am in the bank counter.” But he felt obliged to remind those convened of the West’s blunt environmental realities. He was going to make himself absolutely clear: “When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in all this arid region,” he gravely proclaimed, “there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all the land.” All this effort, he continued, could only reclaim a small fraction of the West. The crowd rustled in their chairs, now thoroughly confused.

That no misapprehension should linger, he explained it again. Take all the waters in the arid region, devoting not one drop of it to the public lands, and there would still not be enough water even to moisten all the vast stretches in private hands. With this statement, Powell undercut the Congress’s entire platform. The mutterings grew louder. “Not one more acre of land should be granted to individuals for irrigation purposes; there is not water enough.” A scattering of boos now met him, sounds the proud Major had never heard before. Yet he plowed on. “There is no more land, owned by the Government in the arid regions, that ought to be used for irrigation, except in about half a dozen little places.” Federal land should be used for mining and stock raising. Incredulous, some of the delegates broke in with a storm of questions. Very heated remarks were made, reported an Albuquerque paper. If what you say is true, said one, then “we are here upon a useless mission.” Smythe would report that the “first sensation of the delegates was one of amazement, the second one of anger, and the third one of contempt.” Powell was sinning against the central American idol of optimism.

Powell explained matter-of-factly that he was not calling the platform a lie; millions more could indeed settle: “I believe that the irrigable land that can be redeemed by waters of the arid region is very great.” But still the waters were limited. This is a “simple statement in mathematics, that every man of intelligence will at once see that it must be true.” It was simple, but not a single delegate dared accept it.

In the face of a crowd now openly hostile, Powell marched on determinedly, but now venturing into new territory. These issues he had always felt were extremely important to him, but never personal. He got personal now. “What matters it whether I am popular or unpopular? I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands”—a stunning statement by the first and long-standing dean of irrigation, the hero of the Colorado, and the patriarchal director of the USGS.

Prominent delegates countered by citing the power of seasonal floods. Certainly by capturing such tumultuous volumes of water in reservoirs, the desert could be won. But Powell’s words, distilled by more experience that anyone in the country, hung like a menacing cloud above the congress. One delegate burst out that not all knowledge belongs to any one man, even if he belonged to many learned societies. Smythe moved to expunge the Major’s entire address from the record, lest it discourage settlers. The assembly compromised by allowing speakers to go home and revise their comments before submitting them for publication. Perhaps the Major would come to his senses. But for him, his message made the plainest sense. Like his father ringingly denouncing slavery on the steps of the Jackson County Courthouse, Powell felt constitutionally responsible to speak the truth, no matter the consequences. It was his duty as a patriotic American and a scientist on the cutting edge of his discipline. Nothing could shake him from such obligations.

The Major believed as firmly as anyone that America had a shining future, and that it lay in bending nature to the will of an advancing humanity. “[T]he powers of nature are his servants,” he told the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1883, “and the granite earth his throne.” He was a man of his times; and yet his vision enabled him to peer far into the future, seeing how the new birth of a nation would be endangered if her citizens did not listen with a scientific ear to what was revealed by ecology, geography, and geology. The Union had nearly fractured during the war. A future that did not contemplate reasonable limits would be lured into swamps of unsustainability: shortages, endless litigation, the demands of infrastructure, feuding water politics—each one a threat to a democratic society the likes of which had never been attempted on so grand a scale. While others saw him as a crank, Powell felt the heat of urgency to speak out: Here the patriarch corrected his children’s temptations toward selfish aggrandizement. But this was not a message for which his children were ready. At the end of the Irrigation Age article in which he denounced Powell’s “sensational” speech to the congress, Smythe simply burst into bold, final capitals: ARID AMERICA IS FIGHTING FOR ITS FUTURE. WHOEVER STANDS IN ITS WAY WILL BE CRUSHED. No reader could doubt at whom the threat was directed. And the San Francisco Chronicle concurred, writing that Major Powell and his geological survey have not been in the best of odor for some time. This latest iteration of America’s unbridled belief in its unprecedented future would roll over data and reasoning.

In retrospect, Powell would stumble over some hard facts. He deeply underestimated the resources of the western aquifers. Conversely, he would also severely underestimate the amount of water necessary to irrigate arid land. He also believed too optimistically that repeated applications of such water would flush away crop-killing alkalis and other impurities. The opposite has proven true. And his ideas that watershed commonwealths could wrest water control from state and national entities have proven—so far—to be economic and political non-starters.

Yet, in his most basic assumptions, Powell has proven eerily accurate. With Francis H. Newell, he estimated that little more than 40 million arid acres could be recovered—very close to the total under cultivation today, including deep-well irrigation on the Great Plains. And Powell, though wrong about the overall quantity of the fossil water, at least fully grasped how it had taken millions of years—Ice Ages and all—to accumulate. Still, so much of what he preached—of limited water, of the threat of monopolies, of the importance of steady measurement and analysis, of the critical importance of topographical mapping and the indispensable role of federal science, and perhaps most broadly, of the necessity of ecological stewardship, remains presciently to the point, clearing the way for debates to the present day.

In the congress’ audience sat the architects of future western water strategy. Among them, the Irish-born engineer William Mulholland, who would design and oversee the construction of the 233-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, which carried water from the rural Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley. Finished in 1913, the aqueduct became an essential agent of Los Angeles becoming one of America’s largest cities, but it also let loose the California Water Wars. Mulholland’s career ended suddenly in March 1928 when the St. Francis Dam, a concrete gravity dam containing a major reservoir for the aqueduct system supplying Los Angeles, failed catastrophically only a dozen hours after he had inspected it.

Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada was a presence also. In 1902, he spearheaded the creation of the United States Reclamation Service, later the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal organization that would launch a fever of dam-building across the West. Powell more than anyone else had laid the foundation for the bureau, yet even he could have never imagined what it would bring. Eventually some 75,000 dams more than six feet high would harness the power of nearly every major western river, culminating in the 726-foot tall Hoover Dam. The dams blocking the western rivers, observed one team of geologists, have become “America’s version of the Egyptian pyramids.”

Powell’s assistant N. K. Newell, a hydraulic engineer good at designing solid dams, became the Reclamation Service’s first director. Although the federal government would exert a fundamental influence on western society through the management of water, it never crystallized coherent western water or land development policies. In the final analysis, the Newland Reclamation Act, which created the Reclamation Service, gave legal form to the western boosters’ dreams of an essentially limitless western water supply. Powell’s careful projection of sustainable management of a limited resource had been dismissed as cowardly and irrelevant.

By 1894, it had become clear to Powell that his continued presence as director might wreck the agency he had worked so hard to create and grow. In the spring he resigned, and immediately underwent an operation on his stump at Johns Hopkins. He remained the head of the Bureau of Ethnology, while his protégé Charles Walcott took over the survey. In one of the USGS reports his quiet successor wrote about Powell’s legacy, citing his Arid Lands report and ideas as creating a storm center of agitation that served to stimulate public interest in the matter. And, as if he was remembering sitting there in the Great Basin Mess with Powell, Walcott would say that the Major always stressed the great importance of the arid lands in the ultimate development of the country—“and by sheer force of character kept the subject alive.”


Four months before Sumner yielded to the ghosts of his past on the bank of the Green, the Major suffered a severe stroke, which prevented him from attending the fortieth Shiloh anniversary that April. But Powell would not be stopped. He struggled mightily to walk again, even if only on the arm of a helper. During his last years, while still nominally head of the Bureau of Ethnology, he had written a philosophical tract that set out to establish a grand theory—a new science of intellection—that would explain how all things are connected to one another. It was a natural conclusion of a lifetime of faith in the bright promise of science to explain everything in the world around him. “Every body, whether it be a stellar system or an atom of hydrogen, has certain fundamental characteristics found in all,” he wrote. “These are number, space, motion, and time, and if it be an animate body, judgment.” At more than four hundred pages, Truth and Error, or the Science of Intellection, published in 1898, is an unwieldy and virtually unreadable tome. Ever the quick study—whether as to Civil War fortifications or the hydraulics of whitewater—Powell had finally stepped into the province of Kant and Hegel, where he floundered. His driving nature demanded that he take ever greater challenges, each bigger than the last, but this was too large for him—or probably for anyone for that matter.

That spring, the writer Hamlin Garland encountered him on a Washington street, gray and feeble, shuffling along on the arm of a black attendant—most likely Tolly Spriggs, a former Maryland slave and now the Major’s companion. Garland watched as this once prodigy of vitality struggled to recall his name, although he remembered the face. “I’ve lost my memory,” said the Major. Their encounter prompted Garland to write “The Stricken Pioneer,” a romantic ode to that whole generation of westgoing men, now fading as fast as the setting sun.

By the turn of the century, the old American West that Powell had known had vanished. A decade earlier, the University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner had famously declared the West’s frontier dead. The Indian Wars had ended, now William “Buffalo Bill” Cody and his Wild West Show toured the East and even Europe, thrilling audiences with reenacted Indian battles and staged Pony Express rides, the sharpshooting of Annie Oakley, and the solemn pronouncements of the real Sitting Bull. A psychopathic serial killer, William Bonney, was on his way to fond immortalization as Billy the Kid. The new myths of the Old West would soon enough become rich fodder for John Ford’s westerns and Zane Grey’s novels. America’s Manifest Destiny for a while turned from the continent to overseas, first in Cuba, then to the Philippines. Theodore Roosevelt, passed into the White House upon McKinley’s assassination, was soon to exercise his muscular brand of conservation on the western lands.

That September of 1902, John Wesley Powell died in Haven, Maine, at age sixty-eight, with Emma and their daughter by his side.

During his life, Powell had refused to regard the West through rose-colored glasses—and that remains one of his greatest legacies. That did not mean he had no wonder for the West’s rich gifts, for he stood in amazement at Indian cultures, the extraordinary geography, and the rich promise that the land offered. But as a consummate reader of the landscape, combined with the geologist’s long view, he understood that the interplay between the Earth and humanity was indeed a complex, ever-changing, and delicate dance. This battler and risk taker, this scientist and visionary, ultimately asked Americans to temper their desires with a practical understanding of what the land and its climate was capable of—how far it could be pushed and how much it could be used. He did not ask for reverence for the land, but rather—more significantly—he asked for humility when regarding it. It was not then, and not today, an easy message for Americans to hear.