Almost anyone interested in the West has heard of John Wesley Powell. He was the one-armed Civil War veteran who ran the Grand Canyon for the first time in 1869. His ninety-day-plus trip made history, not only because he and his comrades nearly died in the violent rapids or that part of the group left and was killed by Natives, but because Powell used the trip to boost his reputation as one of the most important geographers in Western history.
Powell’s larger-than-life place in American history primarily focuses on his work telling Americans how arid the West is. Powell was a big booster of irrigation in the West, even though he insisted that people recognize the tiny amount of water available for agriculture relative to the vast desert land in the West.
Powell’s obsession with irrigation, called “reclamation,” led him to strange ideas. He wanted to clear the forests off the mountains of Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states so that the bare ground would yield more water for irrigation systems in the valleys below. He bragged to a group of high-level Interior officials in 1890 that he had started a fire that burned over a thousand square miles. He thought that was good because he believed that forests took water from farms and fire could kill the forest. His colleagues at the Interior meeting were not pleased with his fire setting.
At the time, few people understood how watersheds worked and how forests either increased the runoff from a watershed or absorbed water in the watershed. We have plenty of watersheds in 2024 that have been denuded by high-severity fire. Once trees burn off, the soil dries in unrelenting sun. Evaporation increases with solar energy. Rain hitting dry soils often runs off rather than soaking in. By contrast, forests shade the soil and lower the air temperature below the canopy. Even though trees use water, they also create conditions where the soil can hold water and allow it to soak to the water table.
In line with his singular focus on water for farms and towns, Powell opposed the creation of the forest reserves, the precursors to the national forests. He worried that a Forest Service would compete for money with his US Geologic Survey and didn’t want the Forest Reserve designation to prevent dams from being built to feed farms water.
Ultimately, Powell’s anti-forest crusade was overwhelmed by foresters who argued that trees shade soils, collect moisture from rain and snow, and release water gradually into streams. Yet we can marvel that a person who advocated killing millions of acres of wild forest was taken seriously. Powell was a single-resource guy, and his focus was water for farms.
After emerging from the Grand Canyon, Powell explained to the optimistic land developers, railroad moguls, and agriculturalists that most of the West is too dry for agriculture. Even if people were able to dam the rivers and distribute the water with irrigation works, there is far too little water and too much land to make the desert bloom as many easterners believed it could. Powell was roundly condemned for his pessimism, which was based in actual climate science primarily done by the Smithsonian Institution.
Powell’s famous publication, the 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, began a period of intense focus on irrigating the desert in the dry areas of the West. With the science of forestry, fire, and hydrology in their infancy, those who wanted to make agriculture and irrigation the primary purposes of the public domain confronted those who tried to create forest reserves for other purposes.
Under Powell, the United States Geologic Survey was born. The agency surveyed the public lands extensively, including a famous 1923 survey of the Grand Canyon. They created topographic maps of the US and ultimately became the main scientific research agency of the Department of the Interior.
The late 1800s were a pivotal time for the large wild land areas in the Western US. With much focus on irrigation and agriculture in the lowlands, people who advocated for forest reserves that later became the national forests had to compete with the irrigation and reclamation crowd for money and land. In 1891, the first “forest reserves” were set aside to protect public lands as federal lands. The set aside by President Benjamin Harrison disappointed John Wesley Powell, who continued to hope for local control of forest lands with a focus on irrigation and dam building.
Ultimately, the US ended up with national forests and plenty of dams built for irrigation, many surrounded by national forests. Today, there are 84,000 dams in the US. The US Bureau of Reclamation and the US Army Corps of Engineers built many of these, mainly for holding water for farms and ranches and, in some cases, to generate hydropower and flood control.
