A MAN, A RIVER, a legacy
John Wesley Powell rafted into history — and the future — with his 1869 expedition into the unknown
In May 1869, a one-armed explorer named John Wesley Powell set off on an expedition to explore the Colorado River. Powell, who lost an arm during the Civil War, began the journey with a crew of nine men in four wooden boats crammed with supplies.
Most of the crew, Edward Dolnick writes in “Down the Great Unknown,” was a bit bleary.
“As a farewell to civilization,” they had “done their best to drink Green River Station’s only saloon dry,” and they departed with “foggy ideas and snarly hair.”
Their plan was to float the Green River to the Colorado River, one of the country’s last unmapped places.
Although the expedition began quietly, the dangers became apparent as the river picked up speed. When the men lost a boat and some of their supplies in a rapid, the tone of the expedition changed.
Today’s expeditions use specialized gear, and river runners have maps and years of experience. The Powell expedition had none of these things.
“Nobody knew how to make a boat that would run that kind of water,” said Don Fowler, author of “The Glen Canyon Country.” Their boats were designed for lakes or flatwater rivers, with the oarsman putting his back into his work, unable to see the best line on a rapid.
“They really didn’t have full water-tight compartments,” Fowler said. “That was another problem. And they really didn’t have any white-water experience.”
One member of the expedition left at the Uinta Indian Agency, downstream from what would become Dinosaur National Monument in northwestern Colorado.
“They were wet all the time. They were short on rations. They really didn’t know how far they had to go. By the time they got to Glen Canyon, things were pretty desperate,” Fowler said.
In spite of the hardships, Powell noted the canyon’s red cliffs, naked sandstone, monumentshaped buttes, arches, alcoves and oak glens. Later, he would name it Glen Canyon.
The most difficult part of the expedition was still ahead. Three more men would leave, just two days before the journey ended, never to be heard from again. By the time Powell and the five remaining members of his party reached the Virgin River on Aug. 30, they had gathered extensive information about a region few had seen. Another expedition was later launched to fill in the gaps.
A guiding force
The experience launched Powell’s career. He became director of the Bureau of Ethnology and, later, the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey. Congress appreciated the fact that, although he served in both posts, he drew only one salary. Powell’s experiences in the West led him to write the “Arid Lands Report,” in which he gave recommendations for managing the land.
“The Mormons were already there, and they already had their irrigation systems going,” Fowler said. The Pueblo, Hohokam, Mogollon, Fremont and other early peoples had irrigated the land for centuries, which Powell knew from his ethnographic studies.
Even so, farming was a precarious prospect. But Congress believed in the Jeffersonian idea of the American farmer. In Eastern states, this gave rise to communities built around farming. Reports that the West was too dry to farm had been waved away with a slogan, “Rain follows the plow.”
As it turned out, it did not.
Most early attempts to settle the West did not result in neat grids of farmland, but in land speculation, fraud, wealthy land barons, failed crops Glen Canyon Dam was finished in 1963 and is celebrating its 50th anniversary. Lake Powell is now a popular recreation spot, with about 2,000 miles of shoreline. ROB SCHUMACHER/THE REPUBLIC and empty homesteads.
Powell recommended modifying the Homestead Act by forming irrigation districts rather than promoting individual homesteads. But much of the water in the West had already been claimed, and Congress was reluctant to challenge the status quo. It certainly did not want to fund large irrigation projects.
“Powell did his best: Here’s a rational plan for managing the water. Here’s a rational plan for managing the forests,” Fowler said.
“He ultimately got ran out of the USGS because of what he was trying to do. They cut his budget until he resigned.”
Powell left the Geological Survey in 1894, though he stayed with the Bureau of Ethnology until he died in 1902.
By that time Congress had begun to think differently about water-reclamation projects. New technology made it easier to build big dams, Fowler said, and it was possible for them to generate alternating-current electricity that could be transmitted long distances. That would pay for the projects, and “that was how they sold it to Congress,” Fowler said.
Earlier inhabitants
Powell’s party was not the first to see Glen Canyon, of course.
People have traveled the region for thousands of years. Hunter-gathers left little evidence of their existence but stone points. Spanish conquistadors and friars came searching for gold, which they did not find. River rafters floated the Colorado River; miners probed its canyons.
Perhaps the most permanent residents were Pueblo Indians, who built small villages and planted crops. When work began on Glen Canyon Dam, archaeologists began to search the area for artifacts from these early residents. Fowler was among those scientists.
“I was there the day they started pouring the concrete.”
He got to Glen Canyon in fall 1957, when the blasting began. He watched the dam grow, and saw Page, which did not exist prior to the construction, slowly take form.
Bill Lipe, professor emeritus of anthropology at Washington State University, was a crew chief for the University of Utah from 1958 through August 1960, and came back to work in the summer of 1961.
“It was very hot,” Lipe said. The crews spent their summers digging and their winters writing reports.
“It was a logistically difficult place to work in, because of the lack of roads. ... We spent a lot of time just getting around and surviving,” Lipe said.
The work was the largest salvage-archaeology project of its time, Fowler said.
Lipe said studies have been done on artifacts the crews found, and more probably will follow. The remoteness of the region had kept pot hunters and looters out of the area, and “the sites were fairly well preserved,” Lipe said. “Some of the sites were quite undisturbed.”
They saved what they could, but much was left behind.
“There were some wonderful panels of rock art,” Lipe said.
The Pueblo people never built big villages in Glen Canyon. They built small settlements, farmed here and there, passed through the canyons of high red walls.
“They’re wonderful walls to make rock art on,” Lipe said. “It was kind of a boundary area ... people moved through there all the time. And they often left their calling card.”