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= John_Wesley_Powell =
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Introduction
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John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 - September 23, 1902) was an
American geologist, U.S. Army soldier, explorer of the American West,
professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major
scientific and cultural institutions. He is famous for his 1869
geographic expedition, a three-month river trip down the Green and
Colorado rivers, including the first official U.S.
government-sponsored passage through the Grand Canyon.
Powell was appointed by US President James A. Garfield to serve as the
second director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881-1894) and
proposed, for development of the arid West, policies that were
prescient for his accurate evaluation of conditions. Two years prior
to his service as director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Major Powell
had become the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the
Smithsonian Institution where he supported linguistic and sociological
research and publications.
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.
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.
Education
===========
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
there, 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
1861 when Powell was on a lecture tour he decided that a civil war was
inevitable; he decided to study military science and engineering to
prepare himself for the imminent conflict.
Civil War and aftermath
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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. He enlisted in the Union Army as a cartographer,
topographer and military engineer.
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. At the Battle of Shiloh, he lost most of his
right arm when struck by a Minié ball while in the process of giving
the order to fire. The raw nerve endings in his arm caused him pain
for the rest of his life.
Despite the loss of an arm, he returned to the Army and was present at
the battles of Champion Hill, Big Black River Bridge, and in the siege
of Vicksburg. Always the geologist, he took to studying rocks while in
the trenches at Vicksburg. He was made a major and commanded an
artillery brigade with the 17th Army Corps during the Atlanta
campaign. After the fall of Atlanta he was transferred to George H.
Thomas' army and participated in the battle of Nashville. At the end
of the war he was made a brevet lieutenant colonel but preferred to
use the title of "major".
After leaving the Army, Powell took the post of professor of geology
at Illinois Wesleyan University. He also lectured at Illinois State
Normal University for most of his career. Powell helped expand the
collections of the Museum of the Illinois State Natural History
Society, where he served as curator. He declined a permanent
appointment in favor of exploration of the American West.
Colorado 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. Emma Dean Powell did not accompany her husband
down 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.
The members of the first Powell expedition were:
* John Wesley Powell, trip organizer and leader, major in the Civil
War
* John Colton "Jack" Sumner, hunter, trapper, soldier in the Civil War
* William H. Dunn, hunter, trapper from Colorado
* Walter H. Powell, captain in the Civil War, John's brother
* George Y. Bradley, lieutenant in the Civil War, expedition
chronicler
* Oramel G. Howland, printer, editor, hunter
* Seneca Howland, soldier who was wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg
* Frank Goodman, Englishman, adventurer
* W.R. Hawkins, cook, soldier in Civil War
* Andrew Hall, Scotsman, the youngest of the expedition
The expedition's route traveled through the Utah canyons of the
Colorado River, which Powell described in his published diary as
having
Frank Goodman quit after the first month, and Dunn and the Howland
brothers left at Separation Canyon in the third month. This was just
two days before the group reached the mouth of the Virgin River on
August 30, after traversing almost 930 mi. The three disappeared; some
historians have speculated they were killed by the Shivwits Band of
Paiutes or by Mormons in the town of Toquerville.
Powell retraced part of the 1869 route in 1871-72 with another
expedition that traveled the Colorado River from Green River, Wyoming
to Kanab Creek in the Grand Canyon. Powell used three photographers on
this expedition; Elias Olcott Beaman, James Fennemore, and John K.
Hillers. This trip resulted in photographs (by John K. Hillers), an
accurate map and various papers. At least one Powell scholar, Otis R.
Marston, noted the maps produced from the survey were impressionistic
rather than precise. In planning this expedition, he employed the
services of Jacob Hamblin, a Mormon missionary in southern Utah who
had cultivated relationships with Native Americans. Before setting
out, Powell used Hamblin as a negotiator to ensure the safety of his
expedition from local Indian groups.
After the Colorado
====================
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. 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 1889, the intellectual gatherings Powell
hosted in his home were formalized as the Cosmos Club. The club has
continued, with members elected to the club for their contributions to
scholarship and civic activism.
In the early 1900s the journals of the 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.
Anthropological research
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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. He
was also the first president of the Anthropological Society of
Washington, founded in 1879. 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.
Many of Powell's anthropological writings draw upon his interactions
with Native Americans during the 1870s as director of the Powell
Survey. These include his studies of Indian languages which are based
in part on vocabulary lists he compiled during this period.
After Powell assumed near-permanent residency in Washington, D.C. as
director of the Bureau of Ethnology and the U.S. Geological Survey,
his contributions to anthropology consisted increasingly of hiring
others to conduct field research and abstract theorizing. 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
this course of development was linear and universal.
As many scholars have noted, Morgan's hierarchical schema was often
used to justify the dispossession of Native peoples and to support
theories of racial difference. 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, Christianity, and Western methods of farming and
manufacture. However, Powell was not a Social Darwinist; his schemes
for cultural assimilation and resource sharing in the Arid Region
called for complex government intervention, a far cry from the
libertarianism advocated by people like Herbert Spencer. 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.
Powell's interest in anthropology may have begun during his
apprenticeship to George Crookham, an amateur naturalist whose
residence in Jackson, Ohio, coincided with that of the Powell family.
Crookham maintained a "museum of natural curiosities" that included
artifacts of the recently displaced Shawnee People. As an adult,
Powell seems to have believed (in line with Morgan's theory of social
development) that Native Americans embodied a more "primitive" phase
of human society than that of their white European counterparts. 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." And in 1939, Julian Steward, an anthropologist
compiling photographs from Powell's 1873 expedition, wrote,
"[f]ascinated at finding Native Americans nearly untouched by
civilization, he [Powell] developed a deep interest in ethnology."
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. It was partially in reference to this ongoing destruction
and transformation of Native societies that Powell, in an 1878 report
to the Secretary of the Interior, pleaded for government investments
in ethnography, while also arguing that such investments would improve
the government's efforts at assimilation.
Powell's contribution to anthropology and scientific racism is not
well known in the geosciences, however a recent article revisited
Powell's legacy in terms of his social and political impact on Native
Americans.
Indian policy
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In order to secure government funding for anthropological research,
Powell argued that such research was necessary to support federal
Indian policy. Powell's scientific work 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 general, Powell supported the government's goal of
assimilation while declaring those who expected it to occur "in the
twinkling of an eye" unrealistic.
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. Despite their
efforts, "[n]either the whites nor the Indians followed the
commission's recommendations in the next few years."
In his 1878 Report on the Methods of Surveying the Public Domain,
Powell criticized previous efforts at assimilation for not recognizing
the structure and complexity of Native societies. "Savagery is not
inchoate civilization," he 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." The report called for
respecting the democratic nature of tribal decision-making and
understanding Native aversion to the idea of land ownership by
individuals.
Some of Powell's most dismissive remarks about Native society are
recorded in an 1880 letter to Senator H.M. Teller of Utah, in which
Powell states that the removal of Indians from their ancestral lands
"is the first step to be taken in their civilization." Attorney and
historian Charles Wilkinson calls this letter "cynical" and
"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
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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.
The railroad companies owned 183000000 acre - 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 who was a protege of Horace Greeley. Thomas suggested that
agricultural development of land would change climate and cause higher
amounts of precipitations, 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 recognition of his national service, Powell was buried in Arlington
National Cemetery, Virginia. The John D. Dingell Jr. Conservation,
Management, and Recreation Act, signed 12 March 2019, authorizes the
establishment of the "John Wesley Powell National Conservation Area",
consisting of approximately 29,868 acres of land in Utah. 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
* president of Anthropological Society of Washington 1879-1888
* 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.
On September 10, 1871, Emma Dean gave birth to the Powells' only
child, Mary Dean Powell in Salt Lake City, Utah. 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.
References
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* Powell, J.W. (1875). 'The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its
Canyons'. New York: Dover Press (reprint) .
* Ross, John F. (2018). 'The Promise of the Grand Canyon: John Wesley
Powell's perilous journey and his vision for the American West'.
Viking. .
* Aton, James M. (2010). 'John Wesley Powell: His life and legacy'.
* Boas, F.; Powell, J.W. (1991) 'Introduction to Handbook of American
Indian Languages' plus 'Indian Linguistic Families of America North of
Mexico'. University of Nebraska Press, (double book volume).
* Darrah, William Culp, Ralph V. Chamberlin, and Charles Kelly.
(2009). 'The Exploration of the Colorado River in 1869 and 1871-1872:
Biographical Sketches and Original Documents of the First Powell
Expedition of 1869 and the Second Powell Expedition of 1871-1872'.
University of Utah Press. .
* Dolnick, Edward (2002). 'Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley
Powell's 1869 journey of discovery and tragedy through the Grand
Canyon'. Harper Perennial (paperback) .
* Dolnick, Edward (2001). 'Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley
Powell's 1869 journey of discovery and tragedy through the Grand
Canyon'. (hardcover) HarperCollins Publishers .
* Ghiglieri, Michael P.; Bradley, George Y. (2003). 'First Through
Grand Canyon: The secret journals & letters of the 1869 crew who
explored the Green and Colorado Rivers'. Puma Press (paperback) .
* Judd, Neil Merton (1967). 'The Bureau of American Ethnology: A
partial history'. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
* Marston, Otis R. (2014). 'From Powell to Power: A recounting of the
first one hundred river runners through the Grand Canyon', pp.
111-114. Flagstaff, Arizona: Vishnu Temple Press .
* Heacox, Kim; Kostyal, K.M.; Walker, Paul Robert (1 September 1999).
'Exploring the Great Rivers of North America'. National Geographic
Society (first ed.) , .
* Reisner, Marc (1993). 'Cadillac Desert: The American West and its
disappearing water'. Penguin Books (paperback) .
* Stegner, Wallace (1954). 'Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley
Powell and the second opening of the West'. University of Nebraska
Press (and other reprint editions) .
*
*
* Reisner, Marc (1986). "Cadillac Desert: the American West and its
Disappearing Water".
* Powell, J.W. (1876). 'A Report on the Arid Regions of the United
States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah'
*
*
*
*
External links
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*
[
https://archive.today/20070103200349/http://www.nps.gov/archive/grca/photos/powell/pages/career.htm
Biographical sketch (1903)] by Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
*
[
https://archive.today/20070109174219/http://www.nps.gov/archive/grca/photos/powell/index.htm]
NPS John Wesley Powell Photograph Index
*
*
*
* [
http://www2.iwu.edu/jwprc/ John Wesley Powell Student Research
Conference] at Illinois Wesleyan University
*
[
http://collections.carli.illinois.edu/cdm4/index_iwu_enthno.php?CISOROOT=/iwu_enthno
John Wesley Powell Collection of Pueblo Pottery] at Illinois Wesleyan
University Ames Library
*
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20070814074932/http://www.powellmuseum.org/MajorPowell.html
Powell Museum], Page, Arizona
* [
http://johnwesleypowell.com/ John Wesley Powell River History
Museum], Green River, Utah
* [
http://digital.boisestate.edu/u?/western,25 "John Wesley Powell"]
by James M. Aton in the
[
https://web.archive.org/web/20160303172645/http://library.boisestate.edu/westernwriters/
Western Writers Series Digital Editions] at Boise State University
* [
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20667 "A Canyon Voyage, The
Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition down the Green-Colorado
River from Wyoming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871
and 1872"] (1908) by Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh at Project
Gutenberg.
*
* [
http://hdl.handle.net/10088/1329 Powell, J. W., In Fowler, D. D.,
& In Fowler, C. S. (1971). Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley
Powell's manuscripts on the Numic peoples of Western North America,
1868-1880. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press; for sale by the
Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off..]
* [
http://hdl.handle.net/10088/1336 Fowler, D. D., Matley, J. F.,
& National Museum of Natural History (U.S.). (1979). Material
culture of the Numa: The John Wesley Powell Collection, 1867-1880.
Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.]
*
[
https://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?fq=data_source%3A%22NMNH+-+Anthropology+Dept.%22&q=powell%2C+john+w
John Wesley Powell artifact collections] in the
[
http://anthropology.si.edu/cm/ Department of Anthropology, National
Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution].
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=========
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