Europe, in order that they could become the emperors of Wyoming. They didn’t want the federal government parceling out water and otherwise meddling in their affairs; that was another European tradition they had left an ocean away. Agricultural fortunes were being made in California by rampant capitalists like Henry Miller, acreages the size of European principalities were being amassed in Texas, in Montana. If the federal government controlled the water, it could also control the land, and then the United States might become a nation of small farmers after all—which was exactly what most Americans didn’t want. For this was the late nineteenth century, when, as Henry Adams wrote, “the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery ... the whole mechanical consolidation of force ... ruthlessly ... created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.”
It was bad enough for Powell that he was pulling against such a social tide. He also had to deal with the likes of William Gilpin, who had traded his soapbox for the governor’s mansion in Denver; he had to fight with the provincial newspapers, the railroads, and all the others who were already there and had a proprietary interest in banishing the Great American Desert; he had to deal with western members of Congress who could not abide anyone calling their states arid (although a hundred years later, when the Bureau of Reclamation had become their prime benefactor, members of Congress from these same states would argue at length over whose state was the more arid and hostile).
Powell seemed at first to have everything going in his favor. The West was coming hard up against reality, as more hundreds of thousands of settlers ventured each year into the land of little rain. His exploits on the Colorado River had made him a national hero, the most celebrated adventurer since Lewis and Clark. He was on friendly if not intimate terms with a wide cross-section of the nation’s elite—everyone from Henry Adams to Othniel C. Marsh, the great paleontologist, to Carl Schurz, the Interior Secretary, to Clarence King, the country’s foremost geologist, to numerous strategically placed members of Congress. By 1881, he was head of both the Bureau of Ethnology and the Geologic Survey, two prestigious appointments that made him probably the most powerful, if not the most influential, scientist in America. But none of this prestige and power, none of these connections, was a match for ignorance, nonsense, and the nineteenth century’s fulsome, quixotic optimism. When he testified before Congress about his report and his irrigation plan, the reception from the West—the region with which he was passionately involved, the region he wanted to help —was icily hostile. In his biography of Powell, Wallace Stegner nicely characterized the frame of mind of the typical western booster-politician when he surveyed Powell’s austere, uncompromising monument of facts:
What, they asked, did he know about the West? What did he know about South Dakota? Had he ever been there? When? Where? For how long? Did he know the average rainfall of the James River Valley? Or the Black Hills? ... [Did he] really know anything about the irrigable lands in the Three Forks country in Montana? They refused to understand his distinction between arid and subhumid, they clamored to know how their states had got labelled “arid” and thus been closed to settlement.... [W]hat about the artesian basin in the Dakotas? What about irrigation from that source? So he gave it to them: artesian wells were and always would be a minor source of water as compared to the rivers and the storm-water reservoirs. He had had his men studying artesian wells since 1882.... If all the wells in the Dakotas could be gathered into one county they would not irrigate that county.
Senator Moody [of South Dakota] thereupon
It was bad enough for Powell that he was pulling against such a social tide. He also had to deal with the likes of William Gilpin, who had traded his soapbox for the governor’s mansion in Denver; he had to fight with the provincial newspapers, the railroads, and all the others who were already there and had a proprietary interest in banishing the Great American Desert; he had to deal with western members of Congress who could not abide anyone calling their states arid (although a hundred years later, when the Bureau of Reclamation had become their prime benefactor, members of Congress from these same states would argue at length over whose state was the more arid and hostile).
Powell seemed at first to have everything going in his favor. The West was coming hard up against reality, as more hundreds of thousands of settlers ventured each year into the land of little rain. His exploits on the Colorado River had made him a national hero, the most celebrated adventurer since Lewis and Clark. He was on friendly if not intimate terms with a wide cross-section of the nation’s elite—everyone from Henry Adams to Othniel C. Marsh, the great paleontologist, to Carl Schurz, the Interior Secretary, to Clarence King, the country’s foremost geologist, to numerous strategically placed members of Congress. By 1881, he was head of both the Bureau of Ethnology and the Geologic Survey, two prestigious appointments that made him probably the most powerful, if not the most influential, scientist in America. But none of this prestige and power, none of these connections, was a match for ignorance, nonsense, and the nineteenth century’s fulsome, quixotic optimism. When he testified before Congress about his report and his irrigation plan, the reception from the West—the region with which he was passionately involved, the region he wanted to help —was icily hostile. In his biography of Powell, Wallace Stegner nicely characterized the frame of mind of the typical western booster-politician when he surveyed Powell’s austere, uncompromising monument of facts:
What, they asked, did he know about the West? What did he know about South Dakota? Had he ever been there? When? Where? For how long? Did he know the average rainfall of the James River Valley? Or the Black Hills? ... [Did he] really know anything about the irrigable lands in the Three Forks country in Montana? They refused to understand his distinction between arid and subhumid, they clamored to know how their states had got labelled “arid” and thus been closed to settlement.... [W]hat about the artesian basin in the Dakotas? What about irrigation from that source? So he gave it to them: artesian wells were and always would be a minor source of water as compared to the rivers and the storm-water reservoirs. He had had his men studying artesian wells since 1882.... If all the wells in the Dakotas could be gathered into one county they would not irrigate that county.
Senator Moody [of South Dakota] thereupon
Similar Books
