The Promise of the Grand Canyon

by John F. Ross

  Within the hour, Powell had fully regained his form, elaborating on how maps could practically aid the common good—touching on the discovery of minerals, how to determine the most efficient road and rail connections, plan sanitary water delivery, and determine which swamplands might be drained to create fertile cropland. Powell may have bristled internally at Herbert’s line of questioning, but it still offered him the stage to speak directly, not only to the importance of his national mapping plan but also to the critical role that federal science could play in America. Had either Hayden or King come under such a grilling, they probably would have fallen back to evoking maps only as tools to exploit mineral resources for the great industrial engines of the Gilded Age. But here Powell shifted the discussion, invoking the need to create an even more informed citizenry. Few scientists of his era, if any, could extol these realities with such specificity, yet while wrapping each one in the noble mantle of science. Clearly frustrated by the end of that day’s hearing, Herbert was reduced to muttering snidely, “That must be very useful to Von Moltke”—referring to Prussia’s top field marshal—when Powell acknowledged that England’s geodetic maps would be as useful to an invading army as to the country’s defenders. On that note, the second day of the Allison Commission ended. But Herbert was not finished with Powell.

  * * *

  On August 6, the special committee unveiled its hard-hitting assessment of Coastal Survey operations. Not only had it lost track of valuable chronometers, but it retained “ladies” on the payroll who never worked. The superintendent frequently drank to excess during the day. The embarrassing revelations caused him to resign the next day. A week later, the federal First Auditor J. Q. Chenoweth of the Treasury Department announced an investigation into the Geological Survey, energized by his belief that it operated without congressional authority in seventeen states. Rumors swirled that Hayden had been sent far afield lest the auditor interrogate him. By the middle of September, the inflammatory abstract of a lengthy report, supposedly from a committee established by Chenoweth, found its way to the New York Times and Boston Daily Advertiser, the former announcing in large headlines “Geological Survey Abuses. A Report Making Charges of Illegal Expenditures and Fraud.” The elaborate document challenged the legality of the survey’s extending into the “old states,” claimed that surveys had been made outside the United States, that fossils collected under the survey’s aegis now fattened private collections, and that salaries grossly exceeded appropriations. Chenoweth drew aside a reporter for the New York Herald to impart a new twist, with the overall judgment that “if these scientific people cannot show that they have performed real work and of a character that ordinary people can understand, they will not be allowed to continue to draw their salaries.” Clarence Dutton wrote a friend that the first auditor had been poking around the survey for the past three months. “The attack arises from a gang of cheap newspaper men backed by a few politicians who want to break down the barrier which keeps the petty patronage of the scientific bureaus from their reach.”

  Powell hit back hard against the charges, providing the interior secretary with a point-by-point refutation of the “baseless and absurd” newspaper allegations of the last four months. He sent copies to the newspapers concerned.

  By late November 1885, a few days before the Allison Commission had returned from a nine-month hiatus, Herbert sought to bring a heavy gun in the scientific community against Powell and the survey. “The time has come when Congress ought to consider seriously whether it ought not to abolish the whole survey,” he wrote to Alexander Agassiz, son of the famous biologist. “To me it is very clear that Major Powell is transcending the rule you lay down, that Government ought not to do scientific work which can be properly accomplished by private effort.” This document, which he would submit to the Allison Commission, ended with the inquiry: “Please tell me also whether you deem it imperative that the Government geologist should do topography.”

  A known conservative who had made his fortune in Michigan copper, Agassiz for the most part believed that science belonged to privately funded academic institutions or simply to rich men. As director of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, Agassiz had had collegial interactions with Powell, but he now replied that he saw no reason why scientists, like others in the pursuit of knowledge, literature, and fine arts, should count on government support. Paleontology should be conducted in universities, in which it could be pursued more efficiently and effectively. States should prosecute topographic work. If the states were not willing to go to the expense of creating topographic maps for themselves, he wrote, then “it seems plain that they don’t wish the Government to go to that expense for them.” The letter delivered to Herbert his next line of attack, the “wasteful and extravagant” expense of publishing so many volumes at government cost. “There is no end to the kind of interesting documents which the heads of Bureaus could get printed at Government expense, and which very few individuals or societies would print, even had they the means at their command.” Agassiz could not abide federal involvement in science, period.

  In late January 1886, Powell countered Agassiz in a detailed letter to the Commission, inquiring as to whether only the wealthy should be employed in matters of science. Here is Powell, the passionate defender of the pursuit of knowledge and its implicit rightness, taking to a national pulpit to expand the place of science in a democracy. Whereas possession of property is exclusive, he wrote, the possession of knowledge is not. The knowledge that science uncovers cannot be owned: “Scholarship breeds scholarship, wisdom breeds wisdom, discovery breeds discovery.” He certainly agreed that all science was not the province of the federal government, but such projects as providing a topographical record of the nation undoubtedly were. Imagine topographical maps sifting into every college, coming to the attention of every student and professor, for every community to make use of.

  For all Powell’s eloquence, Herbert’s well-targeted attacks, and the mounting criticism in the press, appeared to sway the Allison Commission. In early May, the chairman sent Powell a courtesy copy of the Commission’s draft bill, shortly to be submitted to the House, along with Herbert’s summary of the Commission’s year and a half of work. Powell was aghast. The bill proposed to preclude the survey’s spending money on paleontology and work that involved the general discussion of geological theories. The survey could publish nothing more than an annual report. Herbert no longer attacked the survey’s legitimacy, but instead more subtly intended to starve it by severely restricting its ability to publish. On these dry bones, Powell could hardly have felt sanguine about his organization’s ability to survive: Deprived of its ability to publish, his ability to get information out to the public would be critically compromised. “We think it is clear,” Herbert continued in his summary, “that no such ambitious scheme of geology as that we are now pursuing was ever mapped by man.” Once more handicapped by his iritis, Powell still mustered his extraordinary resources and returned to the offensive, writing a detailed response to the proposed bill and distributing it to papers across the nation. He extended his lobbying to scientists and politicians alike, enlisting every ally he had ever had in a last-ditch effort to save the survey.

  Powell’s worst fears came about when the New York Times headlined the Commission’s report the following day: “Astonishing Growth of the Geological Survey Officially Condemned.” Its reporter had gotten matters wrong. The Commission’s full six members had agreed only to the wording of the bill, and certainly not Herbert’s summary, a clearly minority position. Furthermore, the article mistakenly reported that the full Commission believed that the survey’s work on the “elaborate geological map” should be curtailed as well as the “pernicious tendency” of certain bureaus to control the government in the name of science. But the damage was done. Had Powell’s boat finally overturned in the rapids of public opinion?

  Against Herbert’s strong objections—but in acknowledgment of the T
imes’ erroneous claims—Allison gave Powell one last chance to testify, on May 13, although the testimony would come too late to make the official Commission report. Powell argued hard that the survey needed to continue its work in paleontology and general geology, but did agree to some restrictions on printing and engraving. The chairman requested that he limit comments to the content of the bill itself, but the Major could not resist the chance to smite Herbert’s minority report. Herbert left the hearing early, inescapably realizing then or shortly thereafter that he had overplayed his hand.

  On June 8, 1886, nineteen months after the Commission conducted its first hearing, Allison submitted its official report. Signed by four of the six commissioners, the fifty-three-page document revealed a nearly complete reversal of the earlier bill, and a repudiation of Herbert’s accusations. Powell’s last-minute, passionate appeal had yielded rich fruit. The Commission found no misconduct in the survey, instead declaring Powell’s administrative leadership exemplary. The majority reaffirmed the place of topographic mapmaking as a province of the federal government. Not only that, but the report asserted that it was “more than probable that this survey will be continued indefinitely,” as the nation’s population filled up its vast lands and its needs changed. Herbert’s most persistent charge—that the survey’s mapping work would never end—had undergone a transformation in the eyes of the majority from a liability to a valuable feature.

  The commissioners acknowledged the need to constrict the survey’s printing budget, but had wholly revised its opinion upon hearing from Director Powell, and would submit a substitute bill to Congress. This bill would require an itemized budget for all four scientific agencies, which would “exert a restraining influence” on excessive spending, but no specific limits would be entertained. The report and resulting bill marked not just a conclusive victory for Powell, but also solidified indefinitely the federal government’s connection to science. Powell had his national mapping project, built upon years of overreaching appropriations wording, but now the institution he had shepherded through near famine was a powerful, appreciated arm of federal strength. He had made it through whirlpools and giant standing waves even more menacing than those on the Colorado. When Congress enacted the Commission’s bill, it moved the nation far closer to placing federal science in the budget on an ongoing basis, not just in a series of scrambles from project to project. It was the Major’s finest hour.

  “Powell justly feels in very good spirits today,” wrote one of his staff members to Marsh in New Haven, “as he has had a long fight over the matter.” Both must have known how much of an understatement this was. For his part, the director exultantly read parts of the Commission’s report out loud in the Hooe to the Great Basin Mess.

  Later that year, Powell would be one of forty-two dignitaries receiving an honorary degree at Harvard’s 250th anniversary celebration. Few would argue that he ranked among the top of America’s most respected and influential scientists; his USGS reached into virtually every major college and university in the nation, dominating and directing the sciences. He had become a major force in forging Washington’s reputation as a first-class center for science policy, ensuring that science would become a permanent part of the federal bureaucracy. The year that the Allison Commission vindicated the survey’s broad scope of inquiry, Heidelberg University awarded him a PhD in absentia, and he would lend a hand in founding the National Geographic Society. The dynamo so impressive to his Illinois Wesleyan peers long ago had lost little steam, despite the crippling iritis and near-constant pain in his stump. The following year he would become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

  Throughout his life, Powell had embraced—or created—roles necessary to respond to the fast-rising challenges of a breakneck-growing republic: soldier, explorer, geologist, bureaucrat, and institution builder. Now events conspired to move him toward his last, greatest, and perhaps most difficult act.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Tough Opponent

  In the mid-to-late 1880s, the West got hit with a one-two punch—a sockdolager, as Powell himself might have described it. The first, a series of particularly severe blizzards in 1886–1887 slammed across the Great Plains, striking the Dakotas, western Kansas, the Indian Territory (soon to be Oklahoma), and the Texas panhandle. In southwestern Kansas, a man wearing a light linen overcoat froze to death, his pocket stuffed with a flyer advertising Kansas as “the Italy of America.” Some one hundred Kansans died, including entire families trapped in their houses by vast snowdrifts. And the storms savaged the newly booming cattle industry with particular intensity, freezing millions of the animals where they stood. Theodore Roosevelt returned to his Dakota ranch to find half his herd dead, so he sold off his enterprise at a loss and sought a different dream. When the snow finally melted, farmers found the bodies of steers suspended in tree branches, their last desperate act having been to climb snowdrifts after the last green leaves.

  A cruel, multiyear drought followed directly upon the snow. “The sky began to scare us with its light,” remarked Hamlin Garland, invoking the desolation settling over the dry-as-a-bone prairie. By 1890, the drought’s third year, between a quarter and a half of the once-hopeful settlers of Kansas and Nebraska had gone, some of them nailing the iconic sign to their wagons, “In God we trusted. In Kansas we busted.” Drought struck hardest just east of “Powell’s line,” reaching from Kansas to the Dakotas where farmers could just get by without irrigation. Families had withstood waves of grasshoppers desolating their crops and myriad other agricultural misfortunes, but no degree of perseverance or courage could overcome persistent drought. The mild weather following the Civil War had encouraged the populations of Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado to double or triple, all founded on the idea that such favorable conditions would continue indefinitely. They did not. The droughts and national economic setbacks of the 1880s and early 1890s brought social unrest, starvation, and widespread destitution, driving upward of 300,000 people from the arid lands—a drop of 50 to 75 percent—their dreams dashed.

  The realities of arid land settled in: Hundreds of irrigation companies founded in the 1870s and 1880s, financed largely by eastern capital, did not survive the decade. The regular mechanisms of American capitalism—private equity, the resilience of the individual—even when injected with healthy doses of Manifest Destiny and the nation’s eternal optimism, could not override the challenges of the arid West.

  For Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada, the West’s least populous state, this added up to calamity. The silver boom of the Comstock Lode, America’s first great discovery of silver ore, had tailed off in recent years; many miners and those supporting that industry had left the state. Stewart increasingly felt heat from the Southern Pacific Railroad, Nevada’s most extensive private land owner, which feared that drought and the declines in mining would kill the land development upon which it counted. Stewart took his case to the Senate, convinced that the federal government should take part in the irrigation business.

  On March 20, 1888, Stewart helped push through a joint resolution directing the secretary of the interior to “make an examination” of the advantages of storing water for the irrigable lands—including the assessment of stream capacity, and the practicability and costs of building reservoirs. The inquiry’s objective rested squarely on the arid region’s being “capable of supporting a large population thereby adding to the national wealth and prosperity.” In so doing, Stewart launched a train of events that would lead him into a bitter confrontation with Powell. Stewart would prove the most formidable opponent that Powell had ever encountered.

  * * *

  A week later, again at Stewart’s urging, the Senate asked Powell for his estimate of the costs associated with running an irrigation survey that would examine the practicability of water storage in the arid region, determine what lands could be reasonably irrigated, and identify locations for reservoirs, canals, and dams. In
a consequent hearing, the director replied that he would need $250,000 for the first year, but that a careful, responsible evaluation of possibly reclaimable lands would require upward of $5.5 million, most of it for topographical mapping to reveal the drainage system. Such knowledge could then help uncover the most effective means of distributing the limited water available.

  During discussion on the floor of the Senate, Stewart reassured his colleagues that the irrigation survey would only identify reservoir and canal sites, not build them. Stewart had long believed that the federal government needed to cede all public lands to the states; the sale of these tracts would finance the irrigation works. Stewart praised Powell as the person to get the survey done, calling him “a very competent and enthusiastic man.” While the senator might have initiated the irrigation survey, it had been Powell’s Arid Lands report that brought the issue of irrigation to the general public consciousness, and paved the way for this new effort.

  Six months later, Powell had $100,000 in hand. The bill creating the new irrigation survey included a badly written clause, inserted by a Colorado congressman to prevent speculators from trailing after surveyors and buying up prime land. It authorized the secretary of the interior, at the request of the president, to pull “all lands made susceptible of irrigation” from public entry: or, in other words, take them off the market. A prudent caution certainly, but interpretations of the wording would come to bedevil the whole process. In December, Stewart urged the Senate to create a Select Committee on Irrigation and Reclamation of Arid Lands under the Public Lands Committee. The Senate agreed, naming Stewart its chairman, and appropriating $80,000 for a congressional fact-finding trip out West.