The post-Civil War years saw the four multi-year "great surveys" of the western U.S., all sponsored or funded at least to some extent by the U.S. government and led, respectively, by John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Ferdinand V. Hayden and George Wheeler. These surveys, while in no way having a conservation angle, nevertheless had myriad impacts on the development of the movement. In sum, they:
1) Represented the genesis of the first major foray of the federal government into scientific research for its own sake, paving the way for active federal involvement in science and research generally, and the conservation actions of the turn of the century and beyond specifically;
2) The reports of Powell in particular were prescient in their policy proposals which, had they been enacted at the time, would have resulted in a much different pattern of settlement and exploitation of the West, and likely would have prevented both much needless suffering of settlers and the subsequent environmental catastrophes such as the dust bowl of the 1930s; and
3) The survey reports were popular and relatively widely read - they often had considerable literary and artistic merit, and they introduced the public to a geography unlike any they had ever seen. They ultimately helped drive federal protection of some of the first conservation areas, such as Yellowstone as the first National Park.
For purposes of this post, the granular details of the surveys themselves are less important than the implications - the details of each are easily researched (see for example pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1050/surveys). (There is also a longer and more complete discussion of the surveys in the EC History Chapter 1855-1890. This post focuses more specifically on Powell.) Suffice to note that the survey led by Wheeler, who was a West Point grad and commissioned officer, was undertaken by the U.S. Army/War Department. The other three were under the civilian control of various agencies and legislative authorizations. Incidentally, the tension between civilian and military control over such work remained a contentious issue for decades to come.
Although they varied in emphasis, the surveys focused primarily on geology, topography and mapping, identification of natural resources generally and mineral resources specifically, and investigation of the native peoples of the areas. It is fair to say that the idea of conservation did not enter into the thinking.
In 1879, in order to achieve efficiency and economy and after much politicking, Congress discontinued the Powell, King and Wheeler surveys and established the U.S. Geological Survey to classify the public lands. King was appointed the first director of the USGS, with the understanding that he would serve for a limited period of time. Powell replaced him in 1881 and served for 13 years. Unsurprisingly, Hayden and Wheeler were vexed and Wheeler in particular became an ongoing critic of Powell's policies and scientific work.
At the time the "public domain," lands owned by the federal government, constituted 1.2 billion acres, nearly all west of the Mississippi, only 200 million acres of which had been surveyed. The western edge of settlement at the time was at approximately 102 degrees West, a line which in the U.S. stretches north-south through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
The land west of the 100th meridian is semi-arid or arid however, and most is unsuited for agriculture at all, with the rest requiring irrigation, a fact recognized by Powell and set forth in his seminal Report on the Lands of the Arid Region (1878). In that report, and in his subsequent career at the head of the USGS, he proposed and fought for a system of political and economic organization around watersheds - cooperative districts which would share water resources for the common good, instead of the system of private control of key resources which had been the traditional pattern in the U.S. His proposals were sound, prescient, revolutionary, ultimately influential, and entirely ignored at the time.
The country in general and western politicians in particular were rabidly expansionist. They wanted the settlement patterns of the eastern U.S. extended, allowing private, speculative, often monopolistic control of land and water resources, with no federal governmental oversight or control. There was wide-spread belief in the adage that "rain followed the plow" - in other words, that cultivation actually increased rainfall. [The joys of laissez faire economics and anti-science public policies.] Powell's proposals were anathema, particularly when he succeeded in getting Congress to suspend further private claims on public lands for a time in order to undertake a comprehensive reservoir and hydrological survey.
Stegner writes in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) that Powell's proposals in Lands of the Arid Region were "a complete revolution in the system of land surveys, land policy, land tenure, and farming methods in the West, and a denial of almost every cherished fantasy and myth associated with the Westward migration and the American dream of the Garden of the World." (p. 212). Stegner observes that Powell's proposals were an alternative approach to the some of the same populistic issues addressed by Henry George (1871).
More broadly, all of the surveyors, and Powell in particular, both as a survey leader and as head of the USGS, were effectively promoting federal sponsorship of basic science - primarily geography and geology - as being in the long-term best interests of the nation. Stegner again: "If he had any single ambition it was the remarkable one of being of service to science, and through science to mankind." (p. 249).
"The concept of the welfare state edged into the American consciousness and into American institutions more through the scientific bureaus of government than by any other way, and more through the problems raised by the public domain than through any other problems, and more through the labors of John Wesley Powell than through other man," Stegner adds (p. 334). Unsurprisingly, Powell had his wings clipped severely, and was forced out as head of the USGS in 1894. But in my opinion, Powell and his approach was a necessary prerequisite to the passage of the Forest Management Act of 1897, the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, and ultimately the conservation work of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, et al.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of Powell (further discussed in the relevant Catalogue entry) which I found to be fascinating. Stegner mercifully foregoes the traditional lengthy description of the subject's ancestry, childhood, and upbringing. Instead, the first half focuses on Powell's trips exploring the Colorado River and Grand Canyon, for which he is best known today, and the second half covers his career as a federal official, when the battles over the approach to western expansion and federal involvement in scientific research played out. It is fair to say Powell rivals Gifford Pinchot in his extraordinary effectiveness as an administrator - his legacy, like Pinchot's, remains visible to this day. As compelling as the first half of the book is, the second half was even more interesting to me. [Stegner was an environmentalist in his own right but the book itself is pretty objective in its approach. The primary purpose of the surveys and subsequent federal agency work was to pave the way for settlement and resource exploitation. This fact, and the impacts on the Native Americans of the region, are acknowledged largely without judgement. It is clear, however, that Stegner did not have any inkling of the effects that dam construction would have on the region.]
This post is getting a bit long, so I will briefly summarize the third point above by noting that the surveys employed a number of extremely talented artists and photographers, most notably the artists Thomas Moran and W.H. Holmes and the photographer William H. Jackson. The artistry of the Moran and the precision of Holmes in particular are breathtaking. Both men's work illustrates many of the reports listed below, including Clarence Dutton's Tertiary History of the Grand Canyon District (1882), considered by many to be the finest work ever published on the Grand Canyon. Hayden's report on Yellowstone (1883) in particular is profusely and beautifully illustrated, by Holmes and Jackson.
The Collection contains copies of many of the key relevant governmental publications of this period (which are, unsurprisingly, Government Publications section of the Master List and Catalogue):
Powell
Exploration of the Colorado River of the West (1875) - First
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region (1878) - Second printing of 1879
King
First Annual Report of the USGS (1880) - First
Report of the Director of the USGS (1881) - First
Dutton
Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District (1882) - First
Hayden
Twelfth Annual Report...for the Year 1878 (1883) - First in two volumes, the second being on Yellowstone exclusively
[The governmental reports in the Collection from that period which focus specifically on forestry and timber reserves are discussed in a separate blog piece posted on 12/29/23.]
Some of the related works in the Collection include King's classic Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872), William H. Brewer's Up and Down California in 1860-4 (published 1930 but Catalogued 1860), and Henry George's Our Land and Land Policy (1871), all Catalogued under the author's names (i.e. not under Government Publications).
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