The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  But Hayden would soon recognize with a growing sense of alarm that Powell, not Wheeler, stood as the biggest obstacle to his securing the job of running a consolidated survey.

  * * *

  In this competitive environment, the pressure to publish grew extreme. Hayden’s office would push out hundreds of volumes in the 1870s. Before the Townsend Hearings in 1873, James Garfield, now the House Appropriations Committee chair, asked Powell why he had not published a history of the original exploration of the Grand Canyon. The Major answered that he had no interest in publishing it as a work of adventure, but rather as a work of science. Garfield gently chastised him, saying that he must either submit a report or lose funding altogether.

  Powell believed somewhat naively that all interest in his 1869 expedition had faded after the explosion of daily press articles. Unlike Clarence King, who missed no opportunity to weave his personal experiences into a clear, powerful western epic, Powell rarely sought to write—or speak—about himself. Even given a healthy ego and strong if rather impersonal ambitions, Powell unemotionally let science override any desire to put him at the center of a story. Indeed, he had never felt comfortable in the media-bestowed guise of a hero, even though his fame enabled him to conduct further scientific investigations. This, along with his intensely private temperament—he rarely, if ever, gave others any chance to gain purchase on his inner life—misled many, who came then to regard him as a wooden titan or haughty patrician. Such two-dimensional sketches obstruct any full understanding of Powell to this day.

  The pressure for Powell to publish his account grew even more intense in mid-April 1874 when Appleton’s printed the photographer E. O. Beaman’s account of the second river expedition. No one else from Powell’s first or second river ventures had yet published accounts besides letters. Even though the prickly photographer had only accompanied the first leg of the second expedition, entirely missing the Grand Canyon, publication in such a popular venue finally moved Powell to pursue a publisher more aggressively. Riverside Press, Harper Brothers, and Ticknor & Fields had all turned the project down, objecting to the author’s devotion to impersonal science and far too few details of the journey itself. The publication of Beaman’s nine-part series—“The Cañon of the Colorado, and the Moquis Pueblos: A Wild Boat-Ride Through the Cañons and Rapids—a Visit to the Seven Cities of the Desert—Glimpses of Mormon Life”—coincided with the Townsend Hearings. Beaman’s account included not only the river but also the same Hopi villages visited by Powell. In a real way, Beaman challenged Powell more than Wheeler by threatening to steal the thunder he needed to keep up appropriations in the face of steep competition from Hayden.

  By July, Powell had finally worked out a deal with Scribner’s Monthly for a three-part series of his own, one installment on the 1869 river journey, a second on his travels in the Arizona Strip and the Mormon settlements of southern Utah, and a third section on the Hopi, whose lifestyles appeared particularly interesting to eastern audiences.

  “Please send one or two more incidents of the expedition of a bloodcurdling nature,” Powell’s editor pleaded. The Major no doubt bit his lip but complied. The moment when Bradley rescued him from the cliff face with his dangling long underwear—an insignificant event in Powell’s eyes and one that he would prefer to forget—proved one of those sensational moments the editors craved. In Powell’s and Bradley’s journals, the event received only the briefest mention, but most definitely grew far more lurid on the editorial desk. Scribner’s commissioned a woodcut of the very moment when Powell hung from Bradley’s drawers. The image came entirely from the artist’s imagination of things western, but with an eastern propriety: Bradley somehow remained fully clothed even after pulling off his underwear. This deeply powerful combination of courage and indignity could easily have graced the cover of a best-selling dime novel.

  Even so, Powell did not buckle entirely to his editors, his mode of telling stories retaining much of his characteristic focus on task, not on personality and emotion. He certainly waxed clumsily about the beauty of the land through which he passed, but little of it could be described as personal. “You do not once (if I recollect aright),” recalled his friend Thomas Moran, “give your sensations even in the most dangerous passages, nor even hint at the terrible & sublime feelings that are stirred within one, as he feels himself in the strong jaws of the monstrous chasms.” Yet the understatement in Powell’s narrative gives the story a riveting power absent in Beaman’s overwrought prose.

  * * *

  After the hearings, Wheeler and Hayden redoubled their efforts, covering more miles and collecting yet more samples, while building ever more complex organizations. In 1874, Wheeler oversaw nine surveying parties ranging across Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico; his complement, only down slightly from 1873, totaled eighty-nine officers and assistants. Hayden mounted much the same. As their surveys expanded, Powell made no attempt to match them, choosing instead to keep his survey small, inexpensive, but of high quality, never operating with more than six to eight professional men and a few field assistants. He restricted his survey to geology and ethnology, eschewing the expensive collecting and transportation costs associated with botany, zoology, ornithology, and paleontology. Neither did he investigate mining opportunities, or like King experiment in metallurgy or chemistry. He did not request that the government pay for the costs of transporting his men, instead still relying on the railroad’s free or discounted passes. Neither did he require military escorts. For many years, Powell operated the survey out of the cramped but inexpensive confines of his M Street home.

  Powell’s no-nonsense focus both on physical and social science started attracting first-class talent. Tired of Wheeler’s disregard for geology, G. K. Gilbert quit his survey in 1874 to sign up promptly with Powell, beginning a productive, almost brotherlike friendship that would last to the end of their lives. In 1875, Powell persuaded his old friend Ulysses S. Grant to assign him the geologist Captain Clarence Dutton, a polymath cigar-smoking lover of Macaulay and Twain. Dutton, Gilbert, and Powell would become fast friends, putting out some of the finest geological work of the late nineteenth century. One of Powell’s greatest strengths lay in identifying talent that would complement his own, then giving them the widest latitude possible. Whereas Powell drew bold, intuitive geological ideas, Gilbert came up with a brilliant, if less colorful, systematization. And so, too, with Dutton, whose evocations of the geology of the Grand Canyon will never be surpassed in the minds of many.

  Dutton would later recall the bond of affection and mutual confidence that connected the three men, describing their work as a labor of love. “[T]his geological wonderland was the never-ending theme of discussion; all observations and experiences were commonstock, and ideas were interchanged, amplified, and developed by mutual criticism and suggestion.” These three, aided by the visual genius of Moran, and later by the illustrator William Holmes, would begin to make the Grand Canyon’s deep rifts and alien landforms more and more comprehensible.

  The year 1875 would prove a watershed for the Powell survey, the Major able to rely on a cadre of professional scientists for the first time. While Prof Thompson certainly understated his proper pride for his men after completing the map in 1873, writing to Powell that “we done middling for greenhorns,” Powell from the early days in Colorado had drawn upon amateur talent. Now he assigned Thompson, Gilbert, and Dutton each to lead a team to the Colorado Plateau. While Wheeler’s teams ranged far, wide, and thinly, and Hayden moved out of Colorado to skim other fertile fields, Powell continued to center his survey work on the plateau.

  Such talent offered the added benefit of enabling Powell to focus on Washington’s always uncertain politics and devote himself to getting his survey work ready for publication. In mid-June of 1875, Congress published Powell’s “Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries, Explored in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872.” The original 1869 trip took up ha
lf of the book, while the rest offered chapters by Thompson on searching for the mouth of Dirty Devil, two by Powell on Colorado River Valley topography, and a third section on fauna, by scientists not part of either team. The report proved a near-instant success, the Government Printing Office going back to press almost immediately after the first three thousand copies ran out quickly. In 1895, Powell would publish the report in book form—with some changes and packed with Hillers’s photographs and woodcuts of Moran’s illustrations. The book would never go out of print and has become one of American history’s most enduring stories of exploration.

  The report, and book in some eyes, however, contains a damning flaw. Although the title mentions that the explorations took place in 1869 through 1872, the text, aside from Thompson’s chapter, makes no mention of the hard work performed by those in the second expedition—indeed no direct mention of that effort at all. The omission provoked a deep bitterness, Thompson describing Powell as not “a fair and generous man—to put it mildly.” In a letter to Dellenbaugh years later, he asserted that Powell “was generous, sympathetic, and possessed all the estimable qualities you and I assign him but you will notice neither you nor I speak of his justice or loyalty.” This omission feeds the notion among some that Powell had little appreciation for those who worked for him.

  But again, the story is more complicated. Pulling both trips into a single narrative, especially when one soared with the drama of a virgin descent while the other crawled sleepily under the methodical demands of scientific measurement, would have required more writing skills than Powell possessed. Garfield wanted details of the first expedition—as had the Scribner’s editors—so he delivered that story.

  Yet the omission does reveal elements of Powell’s character, particularly his lack of interest in assigning or taking credit. Gilbert described the Major as “phenomenally fertile in ideas . . . absolutely free in their communication, with the result that many of his suggestions—a number which never can be known—were unconsciously appropriated by his associates and incorporated in their published results.” In Powell’s mind, everyone worked in subservience to far more powerful masters than mere ego: the greatest of them all, science and the nation. Therefore, Powell did not undertake the account to mete out credit. It simply did not occur to him to do so. His undoubted generosity in some ways was matched by a blunt indifference in others. It would have cost him nothing to acknowledge the men of the second expedition. If someone had queried him about their work, he would have responded with praise for their dedication. Nonetheless, this omission remains a black mark, a failure ultimately in leadership.

  But Powell was not one to dwell in the past. While Wheeler and Hayden traded insults in front of the Townsend committee, Powell set about hijacking the agenda and taking the reins of the conversation. Just as he could see landforms where others only saw one more range of hills, Powell had begun to think far beyond what pure surveying might mean, far beyond a mere surveyor’s interest in laying out roads or railroad paths, finding extractable coal or gold. His dawning realization appeared here nationally for the first time: The key to developing the West centered not so much on what evanescent treasures it contained, but rather on what it did not—water.

  CHAPTER 9

  A Radical Idea

  When the International Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia opened its gates on the overcast day of May 10, 1876, to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence, nearly 200,000 visitors poured into the fairgrounds by the Schuylkill to commence the showiest national birthday celebration in American history. Although earlier heavy rains had turned much of the grounds into a muddy mess, it had not slowed the huge crowds flocking to the southern edge of Fairmount Park to see the Main Building—the world’s largest wood, iron, and glass structure—which stretched for more than six football fields. The entire 190-building complex sported 5 main exhibition buildings and many pavilions, each of the latter devoted to such topics as women, Turkish coffee, the Bible, and cigars—in all some 30,000 exhibits. Nine foreign governments had erected structures, along with seventeen American states. Visitors could see a Nevada quartz mill and New England log house. Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his newly patented telephone, in its first public appearance, while a young Thomas Edison exhibited an “automatic telegraph system” and “electric pen.”

  That first day, an engineer switched on the 1,400-horsepower Corliss steam engine, the largest ever built, its surprisingly quiet mechanism powering every exhibit in Machinery Hall, all turning on in a chorus of metallic sighs, groans, and swishes. The poet Walt Whitman stopped speechless for half an hour in front of the Corliss, bewitched by the engine’s two enormous walking beams moving in quiet, perfect rhythm. Over five months, nearly ten million national and international visitors—this in a nation numbering forty-eight million souls—came to gawk at the Corliss and numerous other examples of America’s muscular engineering and inventive prowess. The press of visitors so overwhelmed the whole city that one company even bought Oak Cemetery, transforming it into a campground after hastily carting away the headstones.

  A modest, cross-shaped United States Government Building, while far smaller than the Main and Machinery Hall buildings, offered some of the fair’s most popular exhibits. Visitors encountered a vast window composed of William Henry Jackson’s photographs taken on the Hayden survey, printed on panes-of-glass positives. An Atlantic Monthly correspondent wrote that the “geological outlines are formidable, redoubtable, in their fantastic forms; there are horrible crags which look like fossil fungi or groups of petrified penguins of gigantic size.” The West’s alien outlines still confounded this viewer: “[B]eauty is overpowered by more stupendous forces, which make it a relief to return to the machines and maps to see what man can do.” The integration of the West into the American consciousness had begun but was far from complete.

  Hayden’s survey exhibit drew the most attention of the three existing federal surveys, which all had displays at the fair. The publicity-minded Hayden had detailed Jackson to work full time on the grandly entitled United States Geological Survey exhibition. The photographer turned to the task with gusto, lining up a rich display of maps, publications, water colors, chromolithographs, and artifacts. In addition to the windows, photographs adorned the walls, and visitors could pore through albums. Jackson took great pride in his plaster models of the southern Colorado cliff dwellings he had created from photographs taken over the previous two years.

  Powell devoted little effort to representing his pure survey work, although a journalist noted that silver-print photographs taken on his expeditions hung on the walls. Powell gave his energies mostly to the Smithsonian Institution section, laying out southwestern Indian artifacts, clothing, baskets, and beadwork. A contemporary guide breathlessly urged its readers to see the display in the Interior Department section, which included famous—and infamous—representations of such Indians as Captain Jack, Split Oak, Dull Hatchet, Clumsy Moccasin, “in all the glory of life-size papier-mâché and stuffing, streaked on the face with red paint. . . .” The Indian displays proved among the exposition’s most popular, but evoked bitter feelings among many. The United States still had a fighting frontier.

  While the exposition welcomed record crowds, events out west took a chilling turn when Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne killed Lieutenant Colonel George Custer and his main command at the Little Bighorn. That lopsided Indian victory perhaps explains some, but certainly not all, of the fury of the Atlantic Monthly editor W. D. Howells’s comment that the Indian as represented at the exposition “is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence.” Howells advocated the immediate extermination of the native American so that the “peaceful and industrious” Americans could get on with their nation building. Indeed, the counterpoint between the stone axes and moccasins of the American Indian and the powerful machinery of industry in Philadelphia that year left little doubt wh
ere the future of American progress lay.

  * * *

  While the Centennial Exhibition proved an unparalleled success, tonic for a nation still reeling from the Panic of 1873 and the consequent economic depression, the federal surveys locked ever more intensely into a struggle for survival. Talk of consolidating these three remarkably different entities into one had only grown louder since the 1874 Townsend Hearings. In these financially pressed times, Congress lacked the appetite to devote taxpayer money to support not just the four large enterprises—King still received funds to finish his publications—but also smaller autonomous surveys of the General Land Office under the Interior Department, as well as the Treasury Department’s Coast and Geodetic Survey. In 1876, the House had cut funding for Wheeler’s survey entirely, probably because of Hayden’s lobbying, only to find the Senate restoring it. One scientist assembled a list of Colorado mountains, each bearing two separate names given by Wheeler and Hayden, respectively. That year, Congress had clipped the Powell appropriation.

  But the Hayden juggernaut rolled on. The Centennial Exhibition revealed the extent to which Ferdinand Hayden outclassed Powell as publicist and raconteur. Congress simply adored Hayden, unanimously voting the funds to print his annual and final reports in ever larger numbers. His handsome Atlas of Colorado had appeared to a storm of positive reviews. Powell had profited out of selling Beaman’s stereoscopic photographs, but this amounted to peanuts compared with the products that Hayden’s machine regularly pushed out by the truckful. Hayden worked with the publisher Louis Prang to package fifteen chromolithographic prints of Moran’s Yellowstone watercolors into a portfolio for sale at the Centennial. The expensive set, which included an introduction by the survey leader, won a medal. In the chute for that summer, Hayden had arranged for two of the world’s most eminent botanists to accompany him on a western tour, informing all major media outlets, of course, well ahead of time. The well-respected paleontologist Charles White, who had made known his disdain for Hayden while working for Powell, joined Hayden by the promise of more funding. Hayden also started a new entomological commission.