by John F. Ross
Hayden’s brilliance in public relations, however, would prove his Achilles heel in the long run, as he returned year after year to the Hill to ask for larger appropriations to match his increasingly unrealistic promises. Despite recruiting some good talent, he started turning out reports so furiously that the science and accuracy suffered considerably. Even his large field parties had grown unwieldy, forcing him to split them into as many as five divisions. Duplication and inefficiency flourished. Even so, his appropriations grew. By 1879, Congress had cumulatively appropriated $690,000 for Hayden, $368,000 for King, and $449,000 for Wheeler. Powell had received only $259,000 to date. Powell oversaw the fewest staff and could offer only a relatively modest list of publications—three short reports and two books, The Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and one on the Uinta Mountains’ geology. Despite surveying almost six million acres and making a reconnaissance of twenty million more, he still had published few maps.
In early 1877, as Powell prepared one more request to Congress, he heard disturbing news of an initiative that might end his survey. Columbia geologist John Strong Newberry told him that a member of the appropriations committee, W. S. Holman of Indiana, would move to defund all but Hayden’s survey. Holman’s son had joined one of Hayden’s field parties. Little stood in the way of Hayden’s rolling effortlessly over Powell’s small outfit. “I fear that it will be a tight squeeze for us this year,” he wrote Newberry two days later. Whatever animosity that Newberry harbored about Powell had been long forgotten as they joined together to fight for the place of geology in the surveys.
Powell dived into the political fray, turning to Clarence King, whose timely exit from the national survey horse race had shielded him against much of the mudslinging. King had met Powell in 1870, when the Major lectured in Washington on his river trip the year before. (On that same occasion, King met Henry Adams, who would soon become another lifelong friend.) “I beg of you to come and help me pull through this year,” wrote Powell. “You can do me great good in exactly the direction in which I am needing assistance.” The two would form a rewarding bond—one that would yield fruit for both in their coming skirmishes against Hayden. Whether bidden by Powell or otherwise, Newberry wrote letters sharply disparaging Hayden to key members of the appropriations committee, Abram Hewitt and Garfield. Hayden had disrespected his former mentor, and so Newberry’s words rang with particular animosity: “Hayden has come to be so much of a fraud that he has lost the sympathy and respect of the scientific men of the country and it may well be questioned whether he and his enterprises should be generously assisted as they have been.” Newberry further charged Hayden not only with being a “political manager” but “giving employment to the relatives of those by whose influence he was assisted.” He then leveled the most damning accusation: Hayden’s work had “deteriorated.” Powell’s work, on the other hand, was high quality, inspired by true scientific enthusiasm and honesty.
On March 3, 1877, the last full day of Congress, the Powell survey found its appropriation doubled, to $50,000, but even so his future was far from certain. That spring President Rutherford B. Hayes appointed the strongly reform-minded former senator Carl Schurz to head the Interior Department. The German-born Schurz had escaped his country during the 1848 revolution, settled in Wisconsin, and gone on to serve as a general in the war, then becoming a senator and leader of the Liberal Republicans and a fierce critic of the Grant administration. No government agency had suffered the black curse of scandal during Grant’s tenure more than the Interior Department, under which both the Powell and Hayden surveys worked. Grant’s much-touted Peace Policy, which concentrated on moving American Indians to reservations—the moral underpinning of much of his administration—came crashing down in part with revelations of widespread graft throughout the Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Indian agents, who drew their appointments often with slight experience and even fewer ethics, viewed their jobs fundamentally as a license for self-enrichment at the expense of their charges.
In the summer of 1875, the Yale paleontologist O. C. Marsh stumbled on such self-dealing in the Black Hills. Ogalala Sioux chief Red Cloud showed Marsh the spoiled supplies and shoddy goods coming from the Indian agent. Upon returning east that spring, Marsh found a letter from Red Cloud saying that the Ogalala Sioux had received no supplies at all. Articles in the New York Herald exposed this and a rat’s nest of other widespread Indian Bureau fraud. An outraged nation forced Grant to accept the resignations of Interior Secretary Columbus Delano and Indian Commissioner John Q. Smith.
Things began to heat up between Hayden and Powell. On April 26, 1877, Hayden asked the incoming secretary to give his survey funds from the Indian Bureau to support what he called “the most valuable and important collection of this character in this country.” While Hayden had certainly done important ethnological work—consider Jackson’s photographs of the pueblos alone—Powell had made such work a centerpiece of his survey. Hayden had a right to ask for the funds, but the timing suggested that he was moving in on Powell, just as he had earlier on Wheeler.
A month later, Powell responded with a letter to Schurz suggesting a compromise between the two surveys. It caught Hayden by surprise. Both he and Hayden, Powell wrote, should keep at work on geology, but one should focus on ethnology, the other on all other fields of natural history. Powell had little interest in pursuing zoology, paleontology, and the other natural history disciplines, but wanted to keep a bulldog grip on ethnology. He had already worked out a deal with the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry to turn over the institution’s ethnographic material to him.
Seeing no need to compromise and sensing an opportunity to destroy Powell, Hayden reiterated his need for ethnologic funding because his collection was “unique in importance as well as in extent,” claiming to have 1,500 negatives depicting 75 to 80 tribes, as well as other material. Schurz did not buy Hayden’s appeal, reminding him sharply in August that he had yet to respond to the secretary’s presentation of Powell’s compromise. By late September, Hayden grudgingly conceded the ethnological sphere to Powell, while reserving “the right to elaborate what matter I have already in hand.”
Clearly stung even by this small concession, Hayden spent two months brooding and repeatedly drafting a letter to Schurz. By November he had the epistle he desired. In it, he submitted to the need for economy and reform among the surveys, proposing that only one Interior survey should perform all the geology and non-ethnographic work. “I would therefore respectfully suggest that Major Powell be desired to devote himself exclusively to Ethnographic work and its cognate branches after the present year . . . and that all geological and geographical work may be assigned exclusively to the survey under my charge.” But before Hayden’s countermove could come into play, other matters intervened.
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In April 1877, the normally staid proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ annual meeting in Washington took a dramatic turn. For two weeks, members had listened to the nation’s most distinguished scientists speak on topics ranging from lunar theory to the structures of organic acids. Members enjoyed “Results of Deep Sea Dredging,” by the son of the recently deceased scientist Louis Agassiz. The Academy had invited G. K. Gilbert to deliver a paper, “On the Structure of the Henry Mountains,” so named in honor of the Academy’s president by Powell’s survey. On the final day, the geologists took the floor, whereupon erupted a furious discussion of the American West. The rub lay between those who studied the fossils and those who examined the rock strata, each drawing wildly different conclusions about the age of their subjects.
Such was the fervor of the discussion that the geologists soon jumped to their feet in animation and anger. “[W]hat they might do if they once went fairly on the rampage, it is impossible to say,” wrote one correspondent. Hayden rose to argue that no great degree of difference existed between the two sides, but others immediately shouted him down.
Ye
t while the rather scholarly debates over dating and provenance might animate the geologists, that day would be remembered not for these petty theatrics, but for an address Powell delivered. In it, the Major stepped away from the fields of geology and out of academic realms to address a topic that pressed right to the heart of American democracy. During the Townsend Hearings three years earlier, he had raised the issue of the West’s extreme aridity and the difficulty of irrigating much of it—but he had thought a lot more about it since then, and the map he now unrolled in front of America’s top scientists carried startling implications. He had bisected the map of the nation from Mexico to Canada with a vertical line rising from central Texas up through Kansas, east of Nebraska, and through Minnesota, roughly approximating the 100th meridian. At this line the arid West begins with startling consistency, the tall prairie grass cedes to short grass and less fertile soils. Trees appear rarely west of the line, except at high altitudes and in the Pacific Northwest, while forests dominate the east: The 100th meridian elegantly divides two separate lands, one composed of wide horizontal vistas, so much of the other defined by its vertical prospects.
The land west of the 100th meridian, Powell announced, could not support conventional agriculture. Surprise met this bold statement, for the line clearly indicated that much of the great plains—including all of Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho, plus Arizona and New Mexico—was essentially unfarmable. Here was the professor at his best: clear, authoritative, dramatic. He had everyone’s attention.
Powell had drawn an isohyet, a line connecting areas that experience equal volumes of annual rainfall. The relatively humid lands to the east of this line experience twenty or more inches of annual rainfall, the unquestionably arid lands to the west receiving less than that, except some narrow strips on the Pacific coast. The twenty-inch isohyet offered a valuable generalization—conventional agriculture simply could not work without twenty or more inches a year, unless supplemented by irrigation. Except for some lands offering timber or pasturage, the far greater part of the land west of the line was by itself essentially not farmable. Access to the transformative powers of water, not the availability of plots of land, proved a far more valuable commodity. By now, any land through which streams passed had all been acquired, some of these owners charging those less fortunate for irrigation water. “All the good public lands fit for settlement are sold,” Powell warned. “There is not left unsold in the whole United States land which a poor man could turn into a farm enough to make one average county in Wisconsin.”
Much of what Powell reported was not exactly new, but no one had presented the data so comprehensively and convincingly—and not anyone so famous as the Major. Few, of course, doubted the region’s aridity. But in one powerful moment, Powell had claimed that the nation’s traditional system of land use and development—and thus America’s present push west—simply would not work. The debate that Powell provoked that late April day drew immediate and blistering response. The land agent for the Northern Pacific Railway, itself the beneficiary of a government grant of nearly four million acres, hammered back at Powell’s “grave errors.” “[P]ractical farmers, by actual occupancy and cultivation, have demonstrated that a very considerable part of this ‘arid’ region, declared by Major Powell as ‘entirely unfit for use as farming lands,’ is in fact unexcelled for agricultural purposes.” Others responded similarly. Powell clearly had touched a raw nerve. Over the next several years, he would have much more to say on the matter, igniting a veritable firestorm. While the other surveyors limited themselves to covering as much ground as possible, Powell now wrestled with the startling implications for the ongoing development of the West—and what that meant for the American democracy he had fought so hard to save.
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For most of the first half of the nineteenth century, eastern America’s conception of the western portion of North America could be spelled out in three words: Great American Desert. That originated during the Long Expedition of 1819, when President James Monroe directed his secretary of war to send Stephen H. Long of the U.S. Army Corps of Topographical Engineers with a small complement of soldiers and civilian scientists on a western reconnaissance. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had just negotiated a treaty with Spain that ceded Florida to the United States and drew a border between the two countries running across the Sabine River in Texas, west along the Red and Arkansas rivers, and all the way to the Pacific. Eager to know more about the border and the new western territory, Monroe had the secretary of war direct Long to follow the Platte River up to the Rocky Mountains, then trace south and back east along the new border.
The energetic New Hampshire–born West Pointer envisioned himself the successor to Meriwether Lewis and William Clark—indeed, over the course of five expeditions, he would cover twenty-six thousand miles, and mount the first steamboat exploration up the Missouri into Louisiana Purchase territory. His name would grace the peak that Powell was first to climb. On this expedition, Long split his group into two, sending one party along the Arkansas while he with the rest headed south to chart the Red River. Long’s men, often parched and starving, battled a violent hailstorm, sometimes resorted to eating their horses, and negotiated their way past a band of Kiowa-Apaches. But the maps they carried were so atrociously inaccurate that the river they followed for weeks was not the Red at all.
Three years after Long’s party returned home, expedition member Edwin James published the three-volume Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains. Long’s ordeal imbued him with little affection for the “dreary plains” they had traversed. The Great Plains from Nebraska to Oklahoma he found were “wholly unfit for cultivation and of course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture.” He added: “The traveller who shall at any time have traversed its desolate sands, will, we think, join us in the wish that this region may forever remain the unmolested haunt of the native hunter, the bison, the jackall.” The accompanying map labeled the area a “Great Desert,” terminology that soon fully flowered into the “Great American Desert,” a colorful appellation that would stick to the indefinable sections of the West for the next generation. Long believed that this desert wilderness served as a natural limitation on American western settlement, acting as an important buffer against the Mexican, British, and Russians, who claimed the western lands beyond. That compelling assertion seemed to resonate in the public imagination, locking into place the notion of a vast desert dominating the nation’s western midsection. “When I was a schoolboy,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge in 1877, “my map of the United States showed between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains a long and broad white blotch, upon which was printed in small capitals “THE GREAT AMERICAN DESERT—UNEXPLORED.”
Even though some early trappers and mountain men had brought back word of a land often far from desertlike, the idea persisted. In 1844, when U.S. naval officer Charles Wilkes published his five-volume Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition, it included a map of upper California. Inland from the well-detailed Pacific coast lay the Sierra Nevada, while the front range of the Rockies marked the map’s eastward extension. In between the ranges lay a vast, wedge-shaped blank space, without a single physical feature delineated. Unable to leave such a realm blank without remark, Wilkes had inserted a simple paragraph reading “This Plain is a waste of Sand. . . .” Like the sea monsters inhabiting the unknown sections of medieval maps, he—like Long—had condemned the entire region, the dead space not even worthy of a second look. Eleven years later, a Corps of Topographical Engineers map had sought to add additional detail, but could only insert a tenuous dotted line that indicated some cartographer’s wild guess about the Colorado River’s course.
Cracks started appearing in the notion of a Great American Desert during the early 1840s expeditions of Charles Frémont, son-in-law of that powerful advocate of Manifest Destiny, Senator Thomas Benton. With his backing, Frémont led both a four-mont
h survey of the newly blazed Oregon Trail in 1841 and an audacious fourteen-month, 6,475-mile circuit of the West, beginning in 1843. Frémont’s subsequent reports combined a deft mix of hair-raising adventure with scientific discovery, thrilling its readers with images of guide Kit Carson and the so-called Pathfinder himself running up a flag atop a vertiginous Rocky Mountain peak. The maps accompanying the reports furnished emigrants with an accurate road map for the journeys that thousands would take west in the 1840s and 1850s. Frémont’s reports indicated that the intercontinental west certainly contained stretches of truly arid land, but that it was no unbroken Sahara. Yet even so, the pioneers and gold seekers understood that great opportunities lay not in this parched region, but beyond, at the end of the trails, in Oregon and California. Most of the West still remained no more than a place to get across.
In the late 1850s, a rather startling shift had turned the idea of the Great American Desert on its head. “These great Plains are not deserts,” wrote William Gilpin in a late 1857 edition of the National Intelligencer, “but the opposite, and are the cardinal basis of the future empire of commerce and industry now erecting itself upon the North American Continent.” Gilpin, the electric-tongued son of a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker paper merchant, would do more than any other single individual to persuade his fellow citizens that America’s great midsection was a garden only waiting to be plowed. Whereas the term Manifest Destiny had been coined as a justification for conquering great swaths of the continent at gunpoint, Gilpin transformed it into a more wholesome interpretation that pulled peoples across the nation. It also had the weight of the Enlightenment’s commandment, articulated by philosopher John Locke that God and reason commanded humans to subdue the earth and improve it. As Civil War soldiers returned home, all America could climb on board with Gilpin’s fantastical promises, any threatening idea of a great desert now disregarded. He had given America what it most wanted to hear: the promise that its growth was unlimited, its western lands a never-ending buffet of opportunity and growth, limited only by a lack of imagination and courage.