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The True Legacy of John Wesley Powell
The Explorer Sounded Early Warnings about Water in the West
 William deBuys tells the story of Powell bluntly confronting the International Irrigation Congress on water use.
 Listen to the story.
John Wesley Powell circa 1896.
Photo: courtesy Smithsonian Institution
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A map of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado showing the route traveled by Powell, 1875.
Image: courtesy Fondren Library, Southern Methodist University
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The forest lands of the arid region, 1890.
Image: courtesy Fondren Library, Southern Methodist University
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Linguistic stocks of American Indians north of Mexico, 1891.
Image: courtesy DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University
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Arid region of the United States showing drainage districts, 1890-91.
Image: courtesy Dan Flores
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Historian William deBuys at the river gauge station in New Mexico established by John Wesley Powell.
Photo: Howard Berkes, NPR
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Sept. 22, 2002 -- A century-and-a-half ago, government surveyors explored the unmapped wilderness of the American West. Few places stopped them. But in the northwestern corner of Arizona, Lt. Joseph Ives encountered the deep, steep and narrow gorges of the Colorado River. As he wrote to Congress in 1861, the gorges looked "like the Gates of Hell... It seems intended by nature that the Colorado River along the greater portion of its lonely and majestic way, shall
be forever unvisited and undisturbed."
The Colorado River canyons weren't even named, let alone explored. They engendered fear -- of monster whitewater smashing boats to splinters, of whirlpools sucking boats to unknown depths, of slow and lonely deaths trapped by impassable waterfalls and unclimbable cliffs. Yet as NPR's Howard Berkes reports for All Things Considered, barely 12 years passed before someone was brave enough -- or fool enough -- to explore the canyons.
Major John Wesley Powell wrote this on Aug. 13, 1869, as he approached the last big blank on frontier maps:
We are ready to start our way down the great unknown... We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above... We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not. What rocks beset the channel, we know not. What walls rise over the river, we know not.
Monday marks a century since Powell's death, 30 years after two pioneering trips down the gorges he named Grand Canyon. He returned with one of the nation's greatest stories of science, adventure and survival, then or since. He was a national hero.
For some, the Powell legend continues to grow. In the last two years, at least eight new and reprinted books have appeared, each exploring Powell's history. Some assert a lesser-known legacy that is still resonant today. Powell led the nation's irrigation and geological surveys, and tried to assess the natural limits of the settlement of the West.
"The second half of Powell's professional life was about inventorying the resources of the western United States," says historian William deBuys. "It was not about running rivers, it was about measuring them."
Powell established a river gauge station along a broad but shallow stretch of the Rio Grande near Embudo, N.M., in 1889, the first of its kind in the nation. It's still there, in the form of a wooden rowboat and a cable stretched taut across the river. An army of water engineers trained here, before fanning out across the West.
"The very term 'runoff,' the term 'acre-foot,' -- these are inventions of Powell and his people in these early efforts to figure out how to assess how much water we have in the West," says deBuys.
"Runoff" describes the flow of water out of the mountains during rain or spring snowmelt. An acre-foot is water a foot deep on an acre of land, enough for a family of four for a year. Both concepts are critical to life in the arid West, a region of perpetual drought. Powell knew there wasn't enough rain to sustain the kind of family farms common back east. That didn't stop speculators or Congress from enticing settlers westward, with homesteads too big to water and farm.
"It was a bitter doublecross on those hopeful people, and Powell saw that," says deBuys. "And he argued vehemently against the continuation of that kind of nasty charade."
DeBuys chronicles that effort in his new collection of Powell's writings, called Seeing Things Whole. He describes Powell's obsessive attempts to stop western expansion in its dusty tracks. Powell wanted time to assess the water supply and the natural limits to settling on the land. He wanted to rearrange western boundaries, setting up government by watershed. He envisioned local committees of competing interests, including ranchers, farmers, loggers, miners and townspeople. They and they alone would decide, how land, forests, and water would be used.
"He believed it was the role of government to hire and train the experts who could come to the West, inventory the resources, set up the laws and the framework and so forth within which settlement could take place, and then get out of the way," says deBuys. "And that's where he became pretty cross-threaded with a lot of the Western settlement development booster interests. They said, 'there's money to be made here and we want to make it.'"
It must have been like trying to stop a flash flood with a cork. Powell was hounded out of Washington. His health began to fail. He gave up the fight and retired.
Why is it that Powell's ideas resonate today? Why does deBuys keep going back to the writings of a man whom some people probably considered a lunatic at the time for having the audacity to suggest these kinds of controls over Western lands?
"Probably the most fundamental reason," he says, "is that the
settlement of the West is still going on. We're still settling both the lands of the West and the issues that attend our use of them. Anybody who reads a western newspaper knows that there are arguments continuously over the use of forest land, over grazing on public lands, over apportionment of water."
There were some successes, including the establishment of irrigation and grazing districts. But the nation wasn't quite ready for Powell's holistic view.
Other Resources
 The John Wesley Powell Memorial Museum in Page, Ariz.
The John Wesley Powell River History Museum in Green River, Utah.
Links to some of John Wesley Powell's reports.
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