John Wesley Powell

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. As a young man he undertook a series of adventures through the Mississippi River valley. In 1855, he spent four months walking across Wisconsin. During 1856, he rowed the Mississippi from St. Anthony, Minnesota, to the sea. In 1857, he rowed down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi River, traveling north to reach St. Louis. In 1858, he rowed down the Illinois River, then up the Mississippi and the Des Moines River to central Iowa. In 1859, at age 25, he was elected to the Illinois Natural History Society. Powell studied at Illinois College, Illinois Institute (which would later become Wheaton College), and Oberlin College, over a period of seven years while teaching, but was unable to attain his degree. While at Illinois College, he was a member of Sigma Pi Literary Society. 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. ==Civil War and aftermath==

Powell's loyalties remained with the Union and the cause of abolishing slavery. On May 8, 1861, he enlisted at Hennepin, Illinois, as a private in the 20th Illinois Infantry. He was elected sergeant-major of the regiment, and when the 20th Illinois was mustered into the Federal service a month later, Powell was commissioned a second lieutenant. While stationed at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he recruited an artillery company that became Battery 'F' of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery, with Powell as captain. On November 28, 1861, Powell took a brief leave to marry Emma Dean. ==Surveying the West==

Early expeditions John Wesley Powell led an expedition into the Rocky Mountains of the Colorado Territory in 1867. An expedition party of 11 men and one woman arrived in Denver on July 6 of that year. Among the men were five students (or recent graduates) from Illinois. The woman was Emma Dean Powell, wife of John Wesley Powell. Eight members of the party (including both Powells) made an ascent of Pikes Peak in the summer of 1867. After further explorations, the expedition party disbanded in September but the Powells remained in the Rockies for two additional months before returning to Illinois in December. Powell organized and led a second expedition to the Colorado Territory in 1868. In that year, Powell, William Byers, and five other men became the first white explorers to climb Longs Peak. By December 1868, most of the expedition party had returned to Illinois but the Powells spent the winter camped on the White River, a tributary of the Green River. During that winter, Powell made excursions down both rivers. He also traveled south to the Grand River (now known as the Colorado River), north to the Yampa River, and around the Uinta Mountains. Preparations were made for a now historic voyage through the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River in 1869. The Colorado River In 1869, John Wesley Powell set out to explore the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. 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. , a Southern Paiute, 1871–1872. 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. 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. This trip resulted in photographs, a map, and various papers (at least one Powell scholar, Otis R. Marston, has opined that the maps produced from the survey were impressionistic rather than precise). The second expedition was cut short at Kanab Creek in September of '72 when word reached the party that "the whole Shivwits band was in turmoil over several killings of their people near Mount Trumbull and in St. George" and were threatening revenge against the whites. They had traveled approximately 164 miles with 114 left to go. In 1875, Powell published a book based on his explorations of the Colorado, originally titled Report of the Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries. It was revised and reissued in 1895 as The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. 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' 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. Director of the USGS , a post he held from 1881 to 1894. This photograph dates from early in his term of office. In 1881, Powell was appointed the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey, a post he held until his resignation in 1894, being replaced by Charles Walcott. ==Anthropological research==

basketry bread tray, donated to the U.S. National Museum of Natural History by J.W. Powell in 1876. Powell spent time among the Native Peoples of the Colorado Plateau and wrote an influential classification of North American Indian languages. He became the director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution in 1879 and remained so until his death. From 1894 to 1899, Powell held a post as lecturer on the History of Culture in the Political Science department at the Columbian University in Washington, D.C. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1898. During the winter of 1868, while preparing for his journey down the Colorado, Powell "spent days and nights in the adjacent camp of the Utes, making a vocabulary of their language at 'the request of the Smithsonian.'" 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." Although, as Wallace Stegner observes in Beyond the 100th Meridian, by 1869 many Native American tribes had been pushed to extinction, and many of those who survived had experienced significant intercultural exchange. Indeed, the study of ethnology was often a way for scientists to demarcate social categories in order to justify government-sponsored programs that exploited newly appropriated land and its inhabitants. Believing that "progress" was linear and inevitable, Powell advocated for government funding to be used to 'civilize' Native American populations, pushing for the teaching of English as well as Western methods of farming and manufacture. However, Powell was not a Social Darwinist. Nor did Powell consider race a more important factor than culture for explaining differences between human groups. Powell is credited with coining the word "acculturation", first using it in an 1880 report by the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnography. In 1883, Powell defined "acculturation" as psychological changes induced by cross-cultural imitation. ==Indian policy==

Powell's anthropological research often coincided with political advocacy as he sought to advise federal agencies, Native peoples, and politicians about how best to manage the influx of white settlers to the West. In 1873, in response to tensions surrounding the Modoc War, Powell temporarily left his directorship of the Powell Survey to serve as a special commissioner for the Department of the Interior. He and co-commissioner George Ingalls delivered a report in December of that year recommending a program to relocate members of the Ute, Paiute, Shoshone, and Western Shoshone peoples to reservations where, Powell and Ingalls hoped, they would practice Western-style agriculture and be insulated from further conflicts with white settlers. "Savagery is not inchoate civilization," Powell wrote; "it is a distinct status of society, with its own institutions, customs, philosophy, and religion; and all these must necessarily be overthrown before new institutions, customs, philosophy, and religion can be introduced." Attorney and historian Charles Wilkinson calls this letter "treacherous" and "the darkest episode" of Powell's career." 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 "[t]he fires can, then, be very greatly curtailed by the removal of the Indians." William deBuys notes that Powell's claims about the extent of the fires is "surprising" and that Powell himself later blamed such fires on white settlers. == Environmentalism ==

In Cadillac Desert, Powell is portrayed as a champion of land preservation and conservation. Powell's expeditions led to his belief that the arid West was not suitable for agricultural development, except for about 2% of the lands that were near water sources. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Regions of the United States proposed reforming the system by which the government distributed land to settlers by taking into account topography and access to water in determining the shape and size of parcels. "Irrigable lands" would be organized into self-regulating irrigation districts to prevent the monopolization of water by those lucky enough to acquire riparian parcels. For the remaining lands, he proposed conservation and low-density, open grazing. , Utah. The railroad companies owned – vast tracts of lands granted in return for building the railways – and did not agree with Powell's views on land conservation. They aggressively lobbied Congress to reject Powell's policy proposals and to encourage farming instead, as they wanted to cash in on their lands. The U.S. Congress went along and developed legislation that encouraged pioneer settlement of the American West based on agricultural use of land. Politicians based their decisions on a theory of Professor Cyrus Thomas, a protegé of Horace Greeley. Thomas suggested that agricultural development of land would change climate and increase precipitation, claiming that "rain follows the plow", a theory which has since been largely discredited. At an 1893 irrigation conference, Powell would prophetically remark: "Gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land." 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. ==Legacy, honors, and namesakes==

in 1969. , niece of John Wesley Powell, photographed at his monument, Grand Canyon, Arizona, 1918 In 1889, intellectual gatherings Powell hosted in his home in Washington, D.C., were formalized as the Cosmos Club. 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, he was inducted into the Hall of Great Westerners of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. 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. Awards An article in Scientific American notes the following awards: • 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. == Personal life ==

On November 28, 1861, while serving as captain of Battery 'F' of the 2nd Illinois Light Artillery at Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he took a brief leave to marry Emma Dean. She was active in the Wimodaughsis, a national women's club in Washington, D.C., started by Anna Howard Shaw and Susan B. Anthony. Emma Dean Powell died on March 13, 1924, in Washington, D.C. She is buried along with her husband in Arlington National Cemetery. ==Notes==