Review by Ed Quillen
History – August 2004 – Colorado Central Magazine
Seeing Things Whole – The Essential John Wesley Powell
Edited by William deBuys
Published in 2001 by Island Press
ISBN 1559638737
EVERY SO OFTEN, I think it would be fun to write a speech that would examine western water; not as hydrology or climatology or litigation, but as a religion. Some of the vocabulary is present, as in the Colorado Doctrine of Prior Appropriation, or in how a century ago, they spoke of redeeming arid ground, as though the ground itself had sinned and was in need of salvation.
This religion would have its own charismatic prophet: John Wesley Powell, the polymath one-armed Civil War veteran who led the 1869 expedition down the Grand Canyon of the Colorado and the founder of the U.S. Irrigation Service.
One reason I never wrote that talk is that I couldn’t find much of Powell’s actual writing — just lots of writing about Powell’s writing. Some chunks appear in Wallace Stegner’s biography of Powell’s public career (Beyond the 100th Meridian, published in 1953), and there’s a decent explanation of Powell’s plans for settling the West in Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains.
And of course, Edward Abbey quotes Powell often in his essay “Down the River with Major Powell.” But the quotes come from the only one of Powell’s works that has been easy to find, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons.
For me, it was an unsuccessful struggle to find Powell’s famous Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, let alone the articles he wrote about our region for Century Magazine. Thus frustrated, I never got around to developing my thesis of a western water religion with Powell as its prophet.
Then I saw that Greg Hobbs, a Colorado supreme court justice who knows more about our water history and law than any three other people combined, would be speaking about Powell at this year’s Western Water Conference in Gunnison. I emailed him, asking if there was a Powell collection somewhere, and he recommended Seeing Things Whole. His endorsement should be enough, but I’ll heartily add mine.
AS HIS GIVEN NAMES would indicate, Powell came from a Methodist family. Born in 1834, he grew up in the Midwest — Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois. He had little formal learning, but an abiding curiosity about the natural world as he wandered about collecting plants, animals, and rocks. In 1858, he started teaching school in Hennipen, Ill.
A fervent abolitionist, Powell quickly enlisted in the Union Army when the Civil War erupted. His intelligence and energy quickly gained him a commission, and then a friendly relationship with a then-obscure general named Ulysses S. Grant. It was under Grant’s command, at Shiloh, that Powell lost his right arm to a Confederate bullet in 1862.
After the war, Powell returned to teaching natural sciences at Illinois Wesleyan University, and managed to raise funds for two summer collecting expeditions to Colorado. In 1867, his wife, Emma Dean, may have been the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak, and in 1868, Powell and others (among them William M. Byers, founder of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver) made the first recorded climb of Long’s Peak.
Then came the famous trips down the Colorado River, along with explorations of the Colorado Plateau. Powell’s reports fascinated the country, and he became something of a celebrity. His fame, and his connection to President U.S. Grant, put him in charge of the U.S. Geological Survey. It also led to a collision.
Powell believed in irrigation, but knew it wouldn’t work everywhere in the West — there was a lot more land than there was water for it. He wanted the entire territory to be surveyed to determine which lands were irrigable and which should be reserved for pasturage. Reservoirs and canals would be laid out, settlers could then come, and eventually organize themselves into political units based on watersheds.
Powell wanted Western settlement to wait for the survey. He was about the only one. Against Powell was an immense political force that wanted the West developed as quickly as possible — and he lost the political battle.
Even though his Report on the Arid Region (much of which is in this collection) did not have the effect he wanted, it remains an influential work, and it’s great to have it available in a convenient way. This collection also includes related articles that Powell wrote for Century Magazine in 1890.
POWELL WROTE FOR A VARIETY of 19th century audiences. As a federal bureaucrat, he produced reports. As a scientist, he issued papers. And as a man with a mission, he wrote for the general public. Most of that public was in the East, so he had to describe and explain our territory to people who were totally unfamiliar with it.
In all cases, he was clear, though his writing carries more adornment than what we’re accustomed to today, as in this from his Report on the Arid Region:
“In central Colorado the ‘Continental Divide’ is a wilderness of desolate peaks that rise far above the timber line into regions of rime and naked rock. Here, with other rivers, springs the Arkansas, in deep cañons and narrow rocky valleys. Many silver creeks, with water flashing in cascades, unite to form a river which plunges down a steep mountain valley until it passes the foothills and spreads in a broad, turbid stream at the head of the great valley of the Arkansas. Then it creeps over the sands in tawny ripples, down the incline of the plains, becoming less in volume by evaporation and the absorption of the waters in the sands, but growing in size from the accession of smaller tributaries that come from distant mountains on either hand.”
Those advocates of “free-flowing rivers” who cite Powell as a fellow white-water adventurer don’t see the whole Powell, who proposed that “all the perennial waters of springs, brooks, creeks and rivers” should be “used by canals and reservoirs.”
Powell clearly foresaw some of the water issues that we face today: “Who owns the water? Shall the men of Colorado take all that falls in their State? And if so, shall the settlements in the valley of the Rio Grande be destroyed by the new settlements on the tributaries?”
Powell spent as much time and energy thinking about our high deserts, and how they might fit into the rest of the United States, as any man ever did. For that reason alone he’s well worth reading, and the comments by editor William deBuys are pertinent and illuminating: “If Powell’s plan had been implemented, the tenor of life in the West would be different. Among other things, westerners would have to find something else to complain about besides the federal government. That in itself might have unleashed a welcome flood of otherwise untapped human creativity.”
