John Wesley Powell

Early life Powell was born in Mount Morris, New York, in 1834, the son of Joseph and Mary Powell. His father, a poor itinerant preacher, had emigrated to the U.S. from Shrewsbury, England, in 1831. His family moved westward to Jackson, Ohio, then to Walworth County, Wisconsin, before settling in rural Boone County, Illinois.

During his studies Powell acquired a knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin. Powell had a restless nature and a deep interest in the natural sciences. This desire to learn about natural sciences was against the wishes of his father, yet Powell was still determined to do so. In 1860, when Powell was on a lecture tour, he began to feel that a civil war was inevitable; after enlisting, he decided to study military science and engineering to prepare himself for the conflict. Gathering ten men, four boats and food for 10 months, he set out from Green River, Wyoming, on May 24. Passing through dangerous rapids, the group passed down the Green River to its confluence with the Colorado River (then also known as the Grand River upriver from the junction), near present-day Moab, Utah, and completed the journey on August 30, 1869.

The Powell Survey After his 1869 navigation of the Colorado, Powell was awarded $12,000 from Congress to "[complete] the survey of the Colorado of the West and its tributaries." The Powell Survey operated alongside three other surveys of the western territories that were active at the time: the Hayden survey, the King survey, and the Wheeler survey. Powell's appropriation was renewed annually until 1879 when these four surveys were consolidated into the United States Geological Survey.

Second Colorado River expedition First camp of the John Wesley Powell expedition [second Colorado River expedition], in the willows, Green River, Wyoming, 1871. In 1870, Powell scouted for locations to resupply a second river expedition. He employed the services of Jacob Hamblin, a Mormon missionary in southern Utah who had cultivated relationships with Native Americans. Hamblin introduced Powell to Chuarumpeak, a leader of the Kaibab band of Paiutes, who in turn led Powell and Hamblin from the headwaters of the Sevier River to a potential access point. Chuarumpeak also facilitated a meeting between Powell and the Shivwits Band of Paiutes, who had been accused of killing the Howlands and Dunn the year before.

The Office of Indian Affairs authorized Powell and Ingalls to carry out this plan of action, and Powell returned to Salt Lake City. The commissioners then traveled south to promulgate the government's orders. They first contacted the Seuvarits Utes and the Pahvant, meeting with the Pahvant leader Kanosh. Following this, they met with the Southern Paiute leader Tau-gu. Speaking for his people, Tau-gu related their unwillingness to go to the Uintah reservation. At this point, Powell and Ingalls changed tack to "make a thorough examination as to the condition of affairs in the Muddy reservation."

They traveled with a group of delegates from the Paiutes to the Moapa Indian reservation, arriving there on 10 September and staying for 14 days. While they were there, Powell worked up a monetary estimate of the claims by white settlers in the Moapa valley in the hope that the government would buy them out.

Powell and Ingalls then split up. Powell continued to confer with the Southern Paiutes before returning north for another conference with Kanosh, while Ingalls headed into northern Nevada to meet with several groups of Western Shoshone.

The commissioners rejoined one another in Corinne, Utah where they met with two groups of Northwestern Shoshone who did not want to go to the Fort Hall reservation. Shortly thereafter, they returned to Washington.

In their final report to Congress, delivered on 18 December 1873, Powell and Ingalls claim to have met with 5,522 Indian people. The report notes that the Grant administration had previously estimated that there were 27,000 Native Americans living in the entire region that Powell and Ingalls attempted to canvas but that the actual number was closer to 9,659.

The report also expanded on the commissioners' initial set of recommendations: It recommended that the government remove the white settlers from the Moapa valley and extend the boundaries of the Moapa Indian reservation. "Altogether the circumstances are very favorable to the project of making farmers of the Pai Utes, and thus enabling them to become self-sustaining, and converting them from vicious, dangerous savages to civilized people," the commissioners wrote. It further detailed measures that the government should take to enable residents of the Uintah reservation to begin farming, and it asserted that all of the Northwestern Shoshone met with by the commissioners had, in the end, agreed to go to the Fort Hall reservation. Regarding the Western Shoshone, only some of whom had signed a treaty with the U.S. government, Powell and Ingalls suggested that " little more time and more thorough explanation is needed to induce the southern tribes to consent to a removal." Powell and Ingalls also claimed that the "Pa-vi-o-tsos or Pah-Utes of western Nevada" were already practicing agriculture but that they lacked sufficient land on their two existing reservations (Walker River and Pyramid Lake) and that their land base was likely to be further reduced by concessions to the Central Pacific Railroad. The commissioners therefore recommended their removal to the Malheur Reservation. It concludes with several pages reflecting on the general situation of the Indians west of the Rocky Mountains.

Powell and Ingalls testified before Congress the following January. Powell's biographer Donald Worster notes that despite their efforts, "either the whites nor the Indians followed the commission's recommendations in the next few years."

Work for popular consumption

Under the advice of James Garfield, then chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Powell published a book based on his explorations of the Colorado in 1875 titled Report of the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872. Some members of the second river expedition, including Fred Dellenbaugh and Almon Thompson, felt that their names had been unfairly omitted from the account.

The book was revised and republished by Flood & Vincent in 1895 as Canyons of the Colorado.

In the early 1900s the journals of the 71-72 expedition crew began to be published starting with Dellenbaugh's A Canyon Voyage in 1908, followed in 1939 by the diary of Almon Harris Thompson, who was married to Powell's sister, Ellen Powell Thompson. Bishop, Steward, W.C. Powell, and Jones's diaries were all published in 1947. These diaries made it clear Powell's writings contained some exaggerations and recounted activities that occurred on the second river trip as if they occurred on the first. They also revealed that Powell, who had only one arm, wore a life jacket, though the other men did not have them. Despite these efforts, Garfield passed away on 19 September and was succeeded by his vice-president, Chester A. Arthur.

Bureau of Ethnology As director of the Bureau of Ethnology, Powell gave up fieldwork to coordinate the research efforts of others. His Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages offered a methodology for one of the bureau's primary tasks: cataloguing the languages spoken by Native Americans and mapping out the relationships among them. Worster finds this to be the only instance in which Powell allowed the bureau to address the topic of the Indians' territorial dispossession.

Second director of the USGS The legislation that created the Geological Survey did not define its responsibilities in detail, and its first director Clarence King chose to allocate most of the organization's resources to economic geology. Powell maintained King's appointments, but he also grew the agency and broadened the scope of its research, allowing its employees more freedom to pursue basic science. Or, as a 1989 USGS circular put it, King had given the work of the Geological Survey a mission orientation, planned the goals, and selected the staff, but given them freedom to choose their methods of work in order to achieve the goals. Powell allowed the staff to choose not only their methods of work but the subjects they would investigate as well. Powell's longtime colleagues, Gilbert and Dutton, hired by King to coordinate research on the Great Basin and the Plateau Province respectively, were allowed to continue their inquiries into geologic history; and, Powell increased funding for a paleontology division headed by Othniel C. Marsh (who had also been hired by King) that produced a report on the Dinocerata.

However, Powell's most significant act as director of the Survey was arguably to initiate the creation of a national topographic map. During his second year in office, his budget request included an amendment that would allow the agency "to continue the preparation of a geological map of the United States." This "geological map" would in fact be a topographic map, as he later explained: Without a good topographic map geology cannot even be thoroughly studied, and the publication of the results of geologic investigation is very imperfect without a good map; but with a good map thorough investigation and simple, intelligible publication becomes possible. Powell placed Henry Gannett in charge of the mapping division which quickly grew to become "the largest part of the Geological Survey program."

"A war upon science" By 1884, the Geological Survey and other government agencies tasked with conducting scientific research had grown considerably. A joint committee chaired by William Boyd Allison was convened to audit expenditures and eliminate redundancies. Powell testified before the committee (known as the "Allison Commission") in December of 1884, explaining technical aspects of the Survey's work and arguing for the utility of publicly-funded research: It would be a grave mistake should the Government organizations seek to absorb or in any way control the whole body of scientific research in the country, or to do any scientific work that could and would probably be done by other organizations or by private enterprise. But there are certain classes of scientific work that can only be prosecuted by great Governments, and that are so intimately related to the industries of the country that there is an absolute demand for the same. The member of the Allison Commission most skeptical of Powell's arguments was Hilary Herbert, a Democrat from Alabama. Herbert corresponded with the Harvard scientist Alexander Agassiz whose friend, Julius Erasmus Hilgard of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, was also being subjected to questioning. In letters submitted during the Commission's second round of meetings, Herbert wrote to Agassiz: "I beg to inquire whether in your opinion the work of the Geological Bureau could profitablv be brought within proper bounds. . . . Please tell me also whether you deem it imperative that the Government geologist should do topography?" Agassiz replied, It is an impossible thing to make a good geological map of the country without having as a groundwork a good topographical map of the country. If the States are not willing to go to that expense, it seems plain that they do not wish the Government to go to that expense for them. Agassiz also criticized the mining studies and paleontology that had been carried out by the Geological Survey and defended the work of the Coast Survey.

Charles Sanders Pierce, who also worked at the Coast Survey, found Agassiz's comments to be "abominable" and called them "the first brush of a war upon science." Despite Pierce's concerns, the Allison Commission vindicated Powell, reporting in June of 1886 that the Geological Survey was "well conducted" and stating that they had "no doubt of the wisdom of a geological survey of the whole country" or "the propriety of its being done by the General Government as settled by existing legislation." However, Powell's ideas went generally disregarded with the Homestead Act, large-scale damming projects by the United States Bureau of Reclamation, and water rights untethered to the land being norms throughout the West in the years following. Powell's recommendations for development of the West were largely ignored until after the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s, resulting in untold suffering associated with pioneer subsistence farms that failed because of insufficient rain and irrigation water.

Late anthropology and philosophy Synthesis of the BAE's linguistic research, displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Powell carried on his directorship of the Bureau of Ethnology through the 1880s and into the 1890s, although an operation in 1894 to relieve the pain where his arm had been amputated left him debilitated, after which he delegated many of his responsibilities to William John McGee. In 1891, a culmination of the Bureau's linguistic research appeared: Indian Linguistic Families of America North of Mexico.

Powell and Native Americans Hopi basketry bread tray, donated to the U.S. National Museum of Natural History by J.W. Powell in 1876.

Personal views Powell was a friend and follower of Lewis Henry Morgan whose 1877 book Ancient Society argued that all human societies progressed from "savagery" to "barbarism" and finally "civilization." These classifications were based on factors such as technology, family and social organization, property relations, and religion. Powell, like Morgan, believed that the course of human development was linear and universal. For example, in The Exploration of the Canyons of the Colorado, he describes the subsistence practices of a group of Indians "more nearly in their primitive condition than any others on the continent with whom I am acquainted." Attorney and historian Charles Wilkinson calls this letter "treacherous" and "the darkest episode" of Powell's career." Historian Frederick E. Hoxie further notes that in the same letter Powell calls for the introduction of private property and citizenship for Native people, characterizing it as "a chilling condensation of the social evolutionist blueprint."

Powell's descriptions of Native land-use practices were sometimes inaccurate and served to advance settler colonial goals. For example, in his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, Powell attributes widespread forest fires to Native agency and concludes "he fires can, then, be very greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians." Green River, Wyoming, the embarkation site of both Powell expeditions, commissioned a statue depicting Powell holding an oar in front of the Sweetwater County History Museum. In Powell's honor, the USGS National Center in Reston, Virginia, was dedicated as the "John Wesley Powell Federal Building" in 1974. In addition, the highest award presented by the USGS to persons outside the federal government is named the John Wesley Powell Award. In 1984, Powell was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

In 1889, intellectual gatherings Powell hosted in his home in Washington, D.C., were formalized as the Cosmos Club. 1880 – Elected to National Academy of Sciences 1886 – Honorary Ph.D. from University of Heidelberg on 500th anniversary 1886 – Honorary LL.D. from Harvard University on 230th anniversary 1879–1888 – president of Anthropological Society of Washington 1884 – president of Philosophical Society of Washington 1874 – elected member and fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 1875 – vice president of AAAS Powell was also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

Namesakes John Wesley Powell was honored on a U.S. commemorative stamp in 1969. The following were named after Powell: The rare mineral powellite. Lake Powell, a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River. Mount Powell, a summit in the Sierra Nevada of California. Powell Peak. Powell Plateau, near Steamboat Mountain on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. Powell, Wyoming, and the Powell Flats area. The residential building of the Criminal Justice Services Department of Mesa County in Grand Junction, Colorado. John Wesley Powell Middle School in Littleton, Colorado. Powell Junior High School in Mesa, Arizona.