To the Territories

Beyond the Plateau

In 1867, while in Washington, Powell had sought help from the War Department and the Smithsonian for an expedition into the Rocky Mountains. Henry and Baird offered him advice and instruments, including a barometer that was crucial in determining elevation. Powell completed that trip, and then decided to attempt a reconnaissance of the Colorado River country; Henry was more enthusiastic this time, but still didn't under-write the trip.

Powell planned an unprecedented descent of the Colorado River. The idea that a physically impaired man--Powell had lost his right arm as a Union artillery captain at the battle of Shiloh--and nine companions could survive 1,500 miles of uncharted cataracts in four wooden boats no doubt seemed unlikely. So Powell cobbled together contributions from the Illinois Natural History Society and Illinois Industrial University, instruments from the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Smithsonian, and government rations.

In the spring of 1869, the expedition set out from Green River, Wyoming Territory. It soon caught the public's fancy; for a time during the 99-day ordeal, the party was feared lost. Powell and his men endured hunger and deprivation, and three who left the expedition prematurely were murdered by Shivwit Indians. Powell's emergence from the Grand Canyon, in that forbidding landscape described by John Strong Newberry a dozen years before, made him a national hero, and riveted public attention. Powell's first river-running party had survived, as Stegner wrote, by "observation, caution, intelligence, skill, planning—in a word, Science."

Powell returned to Washington in glory, and met with, among many others, Joseph Henry, who was pleased with the expedition's geological specimens. Powell wished to map and collect extensively in the plateau country, and Henry recommended appropriate from Congress.

In 1871, the one-armed river-runner received $10,000 for what was officially named the "Geographic and Topographical Survey of the Colorado River of the West." Over the next decade, Powell would formalize he theories about the slow uplift of land masses and the effects on them of water, the element that shaped the West and remained a crucial factor in its divination and development. He would also seek to preserve the essen of Indian cultures on the brink of extinction, and to maintain a cautionary view of Western settlement.

That same year--1871--Powell undertook another descent of the Colorado, with a chair lashed to the deck of the Emma Dean, named for his wife, and a copy of Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake for reading aloud. He had the most serious intentions, among them mapping the entire Colorado Plateau.

Powell left the expedition to cross from the Colorado to Salt Lake City, observing the country firsthand, and traveled to Washington to consolidate his power base while his men continued the expedition. He answered only to the Smithsonian now, which had enfolded him in the scientific community that dominated research in the West and protected him from government bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, Powell's surrogates on the river, a. later in the Plateau Province, served him and science well. They included his brother-in-law, Almon H. Thompson who became an expert topographer; a young artist, Frederick Dellenbaugh, who produced the first sketches of the interior of the Grand Canyon; and teamster-turned-photographer John K. Hillers. Powell returned to complete the second descent, which stopped short of Black Canyon.

In the summer of 1872, Thompson and his party discovered the last unknown river in the continental United States, the Escalante, named for the first white man to pass through the area almost a century before, and the last unknown mountain range, which Powell later named for his friend Joseph Henry. Powell was in Washington again in 1873, arranging more backing, when the first map of the Grand Canyon arrived from his party, now in Utah, delivered in a homemade tin tube and sent east by railway.

Powell's expeditions neglected botany, zoology, and minable minerals in the interests of geology, mapping, and environmental research, all of which informed his very important publications, Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries (1875) and Report on the Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Uinta Mountains ( 1876). He became convinced that techniques of farming and general livelihood developed in the humid Eastern United States were ill suited to the arid West, and that Indian lore, including myths, language, and other cultural manifestations, should be preserved and studied to best understand Native Americans.

Somewhat religious, Powell believed that humans had evolved separately from other animals. He embraced the popular thesis put forward by Lewis Henry Morgan, the American evolutionist who attempted to systemize the sciences into a coherent whole, that human evolution involved three distinct stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization.

Archaeology had come of age in Europe in the 1860s. Joseph Henry had foreseen its applications in North America, and recognized its considerable popularity, although he doubted the probability of tracing human origins on this continent. Baird, a true Baconian, believed that "general truths in science would surface of themselves from the comparative study of many specimens," according to his biographers, E.F. Rivinus and E.M. Youssef. This would soon lead to a conflict between Baird's emphasis on archaeological collections--and his consequent transfer to the National Museum of funds that Powell felt were rightfully his--and Powell's insistence upon cultural analysis through primary study of language, myths, and so on.

Only about a quarter of the archaeological specimens at the Castle prior to the Civil War came from North America, and the emphasis among those was on cultures east of the Mississippi. The gradual shift to peoples in the West was hampered by ongoing warfare with the Indians and by the politically expedient notion that they were rootless and unworthy of scholarly attention. Powell was one of the people who worked to change this attitude, and with it the course of the Smithsonian.

To the Territories

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