John Wesley Powell was born in New York in 1834, the son of a poor itinerant Methodist preacher who moved the family through Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois. He attended several colleges without finishing a degree and taught himself through solo rowing trips on the Mississippi, Ohio, and Illinois rivers and a walk across Wisconsin. A Union artillery captain, he lost his right arm below the elbow after a minie ball shattered it at Shiloh in 1862, then returned to fight at Vicksburg, where he studied the rock layers of the trench walls. In May 1869 he launched from Wyoming with ten men in four heavy Whitehall rowboats to run the Green and Colorado rivers through the Grand Canyon. At Separation Canyon the Howland brothers and William Dunn hiked out and were never seen again, two days before the rest emerged safely.
Later journals showed Powell blended events from a second expedition into his account of the first, and that he alone wore a life jacket in the worst rapids. As director of the Bureau of Ethnology he backed Cyrus Thomas’s excavations proving Native American ancestors built the eastern mounds, yet he pushed forced assimilation as a special Indian commissioner. As second director of the USGS he warned that land west of the 100th meridian got under 20 inches of rain and that only about 2 percent of the arid West could be farmed. His 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region proposed organizing settlement by watershed. Congress rejected it, and he was forced out in 1894.
- His wife, Emma, climbed Pikes Peak with him during his early Rocky Mountain expeditions.
- The crew often had to line empty boats down rapids with ropes or carry them over boulders.
- He adopted Lewis Henry Morgan’s ladder of savagery, barbarism, and civilization.
- At an 1893 irrigation conference in Los Angeles he told developers they were piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights.
- Lake Powell, a reservoir created by damming the Colorado River, bears his name.
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