POWELL, JOHN WESLEY

(b. Mount Morris, New York, 24 March 1834; d. Haven, Maine, 23 September 1902), geology, ethnology, federal science and mapping administration. For the original article on Powell see DSB, vol. 11.

In 1889 John Powell reached the apex of his power and influence as the manager of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), its Irrigation Survey (IS), and the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of Ethnology (BE), but his nadir followed in less than five years. Since 1950 evaluations in three significant book-length biographies, sections in related volumes, many articles, several film and television presentations, and an on-stage impersonator’s portrayal ascribe the causes for and results of Powell’s rapid decline to persons and circumstances beyond his control.

Expeditions Powell served as an officer of Union artillery in combat during the Civil War and led a daring exploration of the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Then he made significant contributions to geology and ethnology as he managed the organization that became the Interior Department’s U.S. Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region. In partnership with Clarence Dutton and G. K. Gilbert, Powell advanced the understanding of how uplift and running water shape mountain and valley landforms. Powell also urged a more rational use of the West’s arid lands and limited waters and a wiser, more humane policy toward its native peoples.

Powell, who insisted on being called “Major,” proved himself brave, intelligent, and resourceful, but he also was aggressive, egotistical, and obstinate. During the 1869 voyage three men died after Powell failed to prevent their

quiet mutiny and departure from the river. In later years he ignored the expedition’s other participants, one of whom had saved his life in the Grand Canyon.

In the effort to reform federal mapping and science surveys during 1878 to 1879 Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, and Powell favored consolidating survey functions under civilian control within the Interior Department. King, not Powell, helped to write the plan presented by Yale’s O. C. Marsh and his National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committee. When, at Interior Secretary Carl Schurz’s request, Powell drafted unacceptable legislation from the NAS plan, Schurz asked King to co-write a new and the enacted version.

Powell, not yet in the NAS, co-founded with Dutton and others Washington’s Cosmos Club to expand his social-scientific circle in the capital and also to support his brief quest to lead the new USGS. To defeat Hayden, Powell then backed King’s stronger and successful candidacy for USGS director. Powell also knew that King intended (for reasons personal and professional) to remain with the USGS only long enough to get the fledgling agency up and running. When the reform-minded Schurz left office in 1881, King resigned and recommended Powell as his replacement to manage the mission-oriented USGS.

Director of the USGS As USGS director Powell blended the staffs and work of the USGS and the BE. Powell’s goals and methods in science and its administration, however, differed widely from those of the Yale-trained King. Powell represented an older, less-specialized, and often self-taught tradition in science in America. Everything possible, Powell believed, must be learned about a subject before applying the information gained to solving problems. His looser managerial style often allowed the USGS staff to choose their own subjects for study. Dutton and others in the USGS respected Powell as they had King, but Powell, unlike King, did not earn their affection.

By 1882 Congress had not yet founded the separate agency for surveys of measurement and position that King sought to secure a more reliable national geological map and to advance other USGS work. King and Powell’s friends in Congress convinced their colleagues and President Chester Arthur to authorize the USGS to continue that map’s preparation, by which Powell officially extended agency activities nationwide. To King’s dismay Powell quickly remade the USGS into a national bureau for topographic mapping and basic geology but at the expense of the agency’s mandated studies in mineral resources and other applied geology vital to the nation’s economic health.

Under Powell’s leadership USGS direct appropriations increased steadily through the 1880s and the agency’s staff and activities grew proportionally to include, as full- or part-time employees, NAS president Marsh and almost all of Powell’s other actual or potential critics. Congress, however, grew increasingly dissatisfied with the agency’s paucity of products useful to meeting national needs, its unauthorized investigations and publications, and its alleged mismanagement. In 1886 Powell emerged relatively unscathed from hearings by the joint congressional commission headed by Senator William Allison and held to improve economy and efficiency in federal science bureaus. After the minority report trumpeted some of Powell’s shortcomings, Congress asked the USGS to specify the funds it required for publications and then required the agency to itemize its entire budget.

Faced with the results of arid summers and harsh winters in the West, Congress and President Grover Cleveland enabled Powell to pursue his long-standing goal of improving the region’s land- and water-use practices. In 1888 they authorized and funded the IS within the USGS to help redeem arid lands in the West by irrigation. Powell merged USGS and IS topographic work to advance the former’s ongoing small-scale mapping of the West. Dutton, who led the IS engineers and hydrographers, told Powell that the combination was illegal and then testified before Congress that his work required larger-scale maps of specific areas for which the smaller-scale regional maps were useless.

The attorney general’s ruling on the 1888 statute closed the public lands to entry until the IS segregated the lands and locations for the dams, reservoirs, and canals required for successful irrigation, flood-control, and reclamation. When Powell refused to recommend promptly all the sites whose selection would have reopened the public lands and released federal dowry lands to the six states admitted to the Union during 1889 to 1890, Congress turned hostile and some members (especially in the Senate) grilled Powell severely (and a few even savagely). In 1890 Congress and President Benjamin Harrison repealed the land restrictions and terminated the IS. After a fifteen-year detail to Interior’s surveys Dutton returned at his request to the Army Ordnance Corps. Congress turned to the Agriculture Department for aid in reaching a better understanding of the West’s surface and underground water supplies.

When a new national monetary crisis began in 1890, Powell and the USGS did not respond as effectively during the next two years as King and the agency had done in 1879. In 1892 Congress and Harrison carefully and selectively slashed the agency’s statutory staff (by fifty percent) and its operating expenses (by thirty-three percent), keeping the vital work on mineral resources and their statistics but eliminating unauthorized efforts and the general investigations in geology and paleontology they felt were less useful. Powell had to live within the new law but he responded to it by dismissing, transferring, or retiring fifteen percent of the agency’s whole staff. His cuts, however, fell most heavily on the USGS geologic unit, which lost seventy percent of its funds and some of its staff. Powell fired Marsh, economic geologists Franklin Emmons and George Becker (the latter almost Gilbert’s equal in geophysics), and other staffers. Emmons and Becker already had demonstrated to the mining industry the value of geology in discovering and developing mineral districts.

Powell also failed to heed useful advice from King, other scientists, and politicians concerned about the welfare of the USGS and the quality of its public service. Ignoring a new congressional investigation Powell refused to reform or resign, instead heeding those in his internal clique who advised him to die in office. Powell then spent most of his time away from Washington, continuing to promote before national, state, and territorial organizations his agrarian-populist ideas for public ownership of water supplies and organizing new states’ counties by drainage-basin boundaries. In 1893 interior secretary Hoke Smith, advised by King, advanced chief paleontologist Charles Walcott (King’s appointee in 1879) to replace Gilbert as geologist-in-charge of Geology and Paleontology. Walcott rehired Emmons and Becker, restored much of the USGS efforts in economic geology, and returned Gilbert to field work.

When Powell schemed to have the USGS transferred to the Smithsonian (to join the BE) or to the Department of Agriculture (to emphasize USGS work on soils and surficial geology), Congress, Smith, and President Cleveland rang a decisive alarm bell. In 1894, adopting a time-honored method, they reduced Powell’s salary by $1,000, to take effect when the new fiscal year began on 1 July. Powell resigned as director in May and underwent a needed operation on the stump of the arm he lost at Shiloh.

King could not, as many wished, resume the director-ship. Instead he recommended Walcott to Smith and Cleveland. Director Walcott promptly returned the USGS to its earlier efforts on behalf of the country’s significant economic and educational interests. From 1894 to 1896 Walcott began continuously funded and successful national studies of water resources (including artesian sources, whose importance Powell had decried), sent Becker and William Dall to study Alaska’s gold and coal resources, and professionalized topographic mapping by introducing improved field procedures and records and placing topographers under civil-service rules.

As a measure of Walcott’s success Powell’s principal critics in Congress, especially those in the Senate, changed their opinion about the USGS. Those legislators supported the USGS strongly—increasing the agency’s funding (including restoring the director’s salary) and gave it new missions in topographic surveys (forest reserves, Indian reservations, and other federal lands), reclamation, and fuels and structural-materials testing. USGS direct and transferred appropriations quickly climbed to totals beyond any reached during Powell’s years. They topped one million dollars in fiscal 1898 and rose steadily above that total after fiscal 1900.

Past views of Powell as victim are false. Powell, like all managers, was responsible for his actions and their results. Concluding otherwise absolves Powell of accountability. Some historians see Powell as the conservationists’ Cassandra. Unfortunately he did not have all the answers to the West’s problems in the 1880s and 1890s. To suggest that if congresses and presidents had merely followed Powell’s policies all would have been well then (and now) in land and water issues in the West is historically untenable. Many in Congress and industry opposed Powell and his ideas, most of these persons with good reasons although some did so with ill grace. Powell’s hubris and his unwillingness to compromise or to consider conflicting opinion or advice largely contributed to his failures.

Powell, as explorer and scholar, significantly advanced mapping and science during America’s Gilded Age. As USGS director, however, he also had opportunities, made choices, received repeated warnings, refused to change, and nearly brought the agency down with him. The principal managerial lesson from Powell’s USGS directorate, especially after 1886, is how not to run a federal agency.

SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY POWELL

Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Boston: Harvard Common Press, 1983. Facsimile of the second (1879) edition, with an introduction by T. H. Watkins.

The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002. Reprint of the 1895 edition of Canyons of the Colorado, with an introduction by Anthony Brandt.

OTHER SOURCES

Bartlett, Richard. Great Surveys of the American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.

———. “Scientific Exploration of the American West, 1865–1900.” In American Exploration, vol. 3, A Continent Comprehended, edited by John Allen. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Chapter 22 summarizes the section on Powell’s pre-USGS organization in Bartlett’s 1962 volume.

Darrah, William. Powell of the Colorado. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951.

DeBuys, William. Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell. Washington, DC: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2001. DeBuys reprints and comments on a number of Powell’s publications.

Dolnick, Edward. Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s Journey of Discovery and Tragedy through the Grand Canyon. New York: HarperCollins, 2001.

Flack, James. Desideratum in Washington: The Intellectual Community in the Capital City, 1870–1900. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing, 1975. Flack emphasizes the social context of Powell’s work during these years.

Fowler, Don. “Powell, John Wesley.” In American National Biography, edited by John Garrity and Mark Carnes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Hinsley, Curtis. Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846–1910. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981. Hinsley assesses Powell’s contributions to ethnology as a scientist-manager.

Lee, Lawrence. “Powell, John Wesley.” In Biographical Dictionary of American and Canadian Naturalists and Environmentalists, edited by Kier Sterling. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Nelson, Clifford. “Toward a Reliable Geologic Map of the United States, 1803–1893.” In “Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930,” edited by Edward Carter II. American Philosophical Society Memoir 231 (1999): 51–74. Nelson evaluates Powell’s contributions to this improving cartography.

———. “Powell, John Wesley.” In The Development of the Industrial United States, 1870–1899, edited by Ari Hoogenboom. New York: Facts on File, 2003.

Pisani, Donald. To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Pisani’s evaluation of Powell’s role in the development of land- and water-use policies and practices in the American West is the best of several assessments to date.

Rabbitt, Mary. “John Wesley Powell: Pioneer Statesman of Federal Science.” In The Colorado River Region and John Wesley Powell: A Collection of Papers Honoring Powell on the 100th Anniversary of His Exploration of the Colorado River, 1869–1969. Washington, DC: USGS Professional Paper 669, 1969. Rabbitt revised this earlier and far less critical work in three later works.

———. Minerals, Lands, and Geology for the Common Defense and General Welfare: A History of Public Lands, Federal Science and Mapping Policy, and Development of Mineral Resources in the United States, vol. 1, Before 1879. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1979. Vol. 2, 1879–1904. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1980. Rabbitt appraises Powell’s role as a participant in and leader of federal mapping and science agencies.

———. The United States Geological Survey 1879–1989. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey, 1989. Available from the Publications Warehouse at www.usgs.gov. Rabbitt briefly summarizes her two volumes cited above. Vol. 3 (1904-1939) appeared in 1986; Nelson is completing Vol. 4 (1939–1979).

Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New York: Viking, 1986.

Stegner, Wallace. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1954.

Worster, Donald. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity and the Growth of the American West. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985.

———. “The Legacy of John Wesley Powell.” In An Unsettled Country: Changing Landscapes of the American West, edited by Donald Worster. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

———. A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. The first chapter extends the portrayals of Powell in William Darrah and Wallace Stegner. Like Darrah and Stegner, however, Worster does not adequately explain the cartographic, economic, engineering, managerial, political, and scientific reasons for the failure of the IS and Powell’s demise as head of the USGS.

Zernel, John. “Powell, John Wesley.” In The History of Science in the United States: An Encyclopedia, edited by Marc Rothenberg. New York: Garland Publishing, 2001.

Clifford M. Nelson