# John Wesley Powell

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.

## Biography
### 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.$^{:3–51}$
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

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.$^{:89}$ 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.

## Geologic research
### Expeditions

After 1867, Powell led a series of expeditions into the Rocky Mountains and around the Green and Colorado rivers. One of these expeditions was with his students and his wife, to collect specimens all over Colorado. Powell, William Byers, and five other men were the first white men to climb Longs Peak in 1868.
In 1869, he 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
   ... wonderful features—carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon.
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 (1,500 km). The three disappeared; some historians have speculated they were killed by the Shivwits Band of Paiutes or by Mormons in the town of Toquerville.$^{:131–2}$
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.$^{:111–114}$ 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,$^{:394,534}$ 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.$^{:437–439}$ 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.$^{:48,50–51,53,55,57,59,63,93,107}$

## Anthropological research

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.$^{:239–40}$ He was also the first president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, founded in 1879.$^{:340}$ 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.$^{:451–55}$$^{:107–10}$
As many scholars have noted, Morgan's hierarchical schema was often used to justify the dispossession of Native peoples and to support theories of racial difference. Indeed, the study of ethnology was often a way for scientists to demarcate social categories in order to justify government-sponsored programs that exploited newly appropriated land and its inhabitants. Believing that "progress" was linear and inevitable, Powell advocated for government funding to be used to 'civilize' Native American populations, pushing for the teaching of English, Christianity, and Western methods of farming and manufacture. However, Powell was not a Social Darwinist; his schemes for cultural assimilation and resource sharing in the Arid Region called for complex government intervention, a far cry from the libertarianism advocated by people like Herbert Spencer.$^{:462–3}$$^{:321–4}$$^{:122}$ Nor did Powell consider race a more important factor than culture for explaining differences between human groups.$^{:455}$
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.$^{:29}$ 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."$^{:318}$ 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.$^{:257}$ 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

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.$^{:272–86}$ Despite their efforts, "[n]either the whites nor the Indians followed the commission's recommendations in the next few years."$^{:285}$
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."$^{:15}$ 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."$^{:220}$
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."$^{:18}$ 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.$^{:174–76,290–91}$

## Environmentalism

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 183,000,000 acres (740,000 km$^2$) – 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,$^{:570}$ 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.$^{:89}$
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.