John Wesley Powell

His father preached his way west from Shrewsbury, England, and the family followed the circuit from Mount Morris, New York, to Ohio, then Wisconsin, then rural Boone County, Illinois. Joseph Powell wanted a minister for a son and got a naturalist instead. Powell spent seven years cycling through Illinois College, the Illinois Institute and Oberlin, teaching to pay for it, and left all three without a degree, carrying Greek and Latin. What he did instead was travel. He walked across Wisconsin in four months in 1855, rowed the Mississippi from St. Anthony to the sea in 1856, the Ohio from Pittsburgh in 1857, the Illinois and the Des Moines in 1858. The Illinois Natural History Society elected him at 25.

He enlisted as a private at Hennepin, Illinois, on May 8, 1861, and married Emma Dean on a short leave that November. He came out of the war a brevet lieutenant colonel who insisted on being called major, after studying rocks in the trenches at Vicksburg. Then Illinois Wesleyan, a Rocky Mountain expedition in 1867, and after that the river, the surveys and two federal bureaus. BriefHistory has the canyons and the water report. What is left is the argument he lost and the people he studied.

The nerve endings in what was left of his right arm hurt him for the rest of his life. The record he built at the Bureau of American Ethnology preserved languages that were about to vanish, and it was gathered inside a theory that ranked the people who spoke them. Powell followed Lewis Henry Morgan up a ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilization and believed the climb was universal and inevitable. The 1873 report he wrote with George Ingalls proposed sorting Western nations by language group onto four reservations, using persuasion and the withholding of annuities to move them, and named the aim as converting them from vicious, dangerous savages to civilized people. In the same document he argued against stationing troops near Native communities.

He resigned from the Geological Survey in 1894, after Congress gutted his Irrigation Survey and then the Survey's budget, and died on September 23, 1902, at a summer colony in Brooklin, Maine. He lies at Arlington with Emma, who followed in 1924. The reputation then moved twice. His crewmen's diaries, published between 1908 and 1947, showed that his own account smoothed things, folded events from the second river trip into the first, and omitted that he alone wore a life jacket. Then the West ran short of water, and his 1893 warning about a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights stopped sounding like a crank's.

John Wesley Powell's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Powell Geographic Expedition mission
  Green River Station to the Virgin River, May to August 1869 1869
• Second Colorado River expedition mission
  Better boats, a photographer, and the maps that came out of it 1871
• The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons book
  Revised and reissued in 1895 as Canyons of the Colorado 1875
• Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States book
  Settle the West by watershed. Congress declined. 1878
• Bureau of American Ethnology company
  Founded at the Smithsonian with Powell as its first director 1879
• Acculturation discovery
  He is credited with coining the word in a Bureau report 1880

• 1855 aged ~21 Walks across Wisconsin over four months
• 1859 aged ~25 Elected to the Illinois Natural History Society at 25
• May 8, 1861 aged 27 Enlists as a private in the 20th Illinois Infantry at Hennepin
• November 28, 1861 aged 27 Marries Emma Dean at Cape Girardeau, Missouri He took a brief leave from the artillery battery he had recruited.
• April 1862 aged 28 Loses most of his right arm at Shiloh He was giving the order to fire. He returned to the army and fought at Vicksburg and Atlanta.
• May 24, 1869 aged 35 Leaves Green River Station with nine men and four boats
• 1879 aged ~45 Becomes founding director of the Bureau of American Ethnology
• 1893 aged ~59 Tells an irrigation congress there is not sufficient water to supply the land He was hissed. He was right.
• 1894 aged ~60 Resigns from the Geological Survey Congress had cut the Irrigation Survey and then the agency's budget.

• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. fought the same fight
• James A. Garfield 1831–1881
  Twentieth president assassinated months into office prompting federal civil service reform. appointed him to the Geological Survey
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. inherited the argument
• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. built the agency he wanted
• Meriwether Lewis 1774–1809
  Co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which mapped the American West to the Pacific Ocean. predecessor in federal exploration
• Aldo Leopold 1887–1948
  Ecologist whose “land ethic” became foundational to modern environmental thought. successor movement