Part 1 (1/2)

BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN.

by Wallace Stegner.

For Bernard DeVoto

Dear Benny: This is a book in the area of your vast competence, one that you might have written more appropriately and certainly more authoritatively than I. It is dedicated to you in grat.i.tude for a hundred kindnesses, the latest of which is the present introduction, but the earliest of which goes back nearly twenty years. I could not omit a word of thanks for all this without feeling that I had neglected the most important as well as the most pleasurable step in the making of this biography.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

THIS BOOK is an attempt to write a biography that is the history not of a personality but of a career.

I am not interested in Major Powell's personality, though that is generally considered the excuse for a biography, and though he was a man, by the testimony of those who worked with him and loved him and hated him, electric with energy and ideas. I am interested in him in other ways: As the personification of an ideal of public service that seems peculiarly a product of the American experience. As the source and mouthpiece of ideas three quarters of a century ahead of their possible fulfillment, yet rooted in that same American experience. As the father of government bureaus far-reaching in their own effects and influential in the models they provided for other and later government agencies. Above all, as a champion and an instrument of social understanding and social change. Like Lester Ward, his one-time employee and firm friend, Major Powell repudiated that reading of Darwinism which made man the p.a.w.n of evolutionary forces. In his view, man escaped the prison in which all other life was held, because he could apply intelligence and will to his environment and bend it.

In these pages I have dwelt somewhat long on an early and relatively unimportant, though adventurous, episode: the running of the Colorado River. I have done so because though Powell's later activities were of much greater national importance, the river journey was symptom and symbol. Though some river rats will disagree with me, I have been able to conclude only that Powell's party in 1869 survived by the exercise of observation, caution, intelligence, skill, planning - in a word, Science. A man or a civilization could do the same. Major Powell's attempts to impose order on whatever he touched, and especially on the development of the western states whose problems he knew as no one in his time knew them, are the real subject of this book.

His understanding of the West was not built on a dream or on the characteristic visions of his time, for on one side he was as practical as a plane table. The mythologies of the seventies and eighties had as little hold on him as the mythological tales of Hopi or Paiute: he knew all about the human habit of referring sense impressions to wrong causes and without verification. His faith in science was a faith in the ultimate ability of men to isolate true - that is, verifiable - causes for phenomena. Also, he knew a good deal about the human habit of distorting facts for personal gain, and he fought western land interests and their political hatchet-men for years, out of no motive but to see truth and science triumph and the greatest good come to the greatest number over the greatest period of time, according to the American gospels.

More clearly than most of his contemporaries he demonstrated that fundamental affinity between Democracy and Science that made America after the Civil War, in spite of scandal and graft and unprecedented venality, one of the exciting and climactic chapters of history both intellectual and social. He was one of those who in his education and in his confirmed beliefs seemed the culmination of an American type, though his own family arrived in America barely in time for him to be born here.

Also, he was one of the ill.u.s.trious obscure who within the framework of government science achieved unusual power. He did much solid good because he combined with personal probity an ability to deal with politicians. And if he was more optimistic about the future of America and the world than is now fas.h.i.+onable, a review of his career reveals that a large amount of his work both for science and for democracy has not only lasted but has generated more of the same. We have gone a good long way toward his princ.i.p.al recommendations with regard to the West; three generations after some of those plans were first proposed, they seem of an extraordinary prescience.

All of which is to say that though someone like Clarence King may warrant a biography because of his personality, his wit, the brilliance of his conversation and the glitter of his circle, Powell's effect upon his country was that of an agent, or even of an agency. I have tried to treat him accordingly.

In the preparation of this biography I have benefited from the help and advice of scores of individuals and organizations. Some of the work has been done under grants from the Milton Fund of Harvard University, the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. The American Philosophical Society has kindly helped with microfilm problems. Among librarians I have yet to find a surly or unhelpful individual: I think librarians will inherit the earth. And the list of those to whom I owe a debt of grat.i.tude is appended here, not to form a cordon through which a reader has to break to get at Powell, but as an inducement: If such as these have been interested in him and his work, he must be worthy of attention.

For kindness and a.s.sistance of every sort, I am especially grateful to Bernard DeVoto of Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts; Henry Nash Smith of the University of California; Dale L. Morgan of Salt Lake City; Francis Farquhar, George R. Stewart, Otis Marston, and Paul Taylor of Berkeley, California; William Culp Darrah of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; Lindley Morris of Bloomington, Illinois; Charles Kelly of Fruita, Utah; J. C. Bryant, Superintendent of the Grand Canyon National Park; the late Norman Nevills of Mexican Hat, Utah; Professor Robert Taft of the University of Kansas; Beau mont Newhall of Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Ansel Adams of San Francisco; Paul and Frances Judge of Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming; Struthers and Katherine Burt of Three Rivers Ranch, Moran, Wyoming; Louise Peffer of the Stanford Food Research Inst.i.tute; J. O. Kilmartin, Chief of the Map Information Service of the United States Geological Survey; Matthew Stirling, Paul Oehser, and Miss Mae Tucker of the Bureau of American Ethnology; Professors Ben Page, J. E. Williams, and the late Bailey Willis of Stanford University, and V. L. Vander Hoof, formerly of Stanford; Leroy Hafen of the Colorado Historical Society and Marguerite Sinclair of the Utah State Historical Society; Thomas Manning of Yale University; and by no means least, the staffs of the libraries where I have had the pleasure of working: Widener Library of Harvard University; Bancroft Library, University of California; the Stanford University Library and the Branner Geological Library, Stanford University; the Henry E. Huntington Library; the National Archives, the United States Geological Survey, and the Bureau of American Ethnology in Was.h.i.+ngton; the New York Public Library; and the McClean County Historical Society of Bloomington, Illinois.

Thanks are due to the Pacific Spectator Pacific Spectator for the right to reprint the chapter ”Adding the Stone Age to History” in Part IV, and to the for the right to reprint the chapter ”Adding the Stone Age to History” in Part IV, and to the Western Humanities Review Western Humanities Review for the chapter on ”Names” in Part II. for the chapter on ”Names” in Part II.

ILl.u.s.tRATIONS.

FOLLOWING PAGE 92.

THE CANYON COUNTRY.

The Artists View 1. The popular notion of a canyon. Black Canyon, by Baron F. W. von Egloffstein. 1. The popular notion of a canyon. Black Canyon, by Baron F. W. von Egloffstein.2. The stunned imagination. Egloffstein's ”Big Canyon,” first picture of the Grand Canyon ever made.3. The romantic imagination. Gilbert Munger's chromolith, ”Canyon of Lodore.”4. The footsteps of history in a land of fable. El Vado de Los Padres, by John E. Weyss.5. An able painter meets a great and difficult subject. ”The Transept,” by Thomas Moran.6. Art without metaphor. The Grand Canyon country, by William Henry Holmes.7. ”A great innovation in natural scenery.” Another view of the Grand Canyon country by William Henry Holmes.8. Art and record. Photograph by E. O. Beaman; drawing by Thomas Moran.

THE CANYON COUNTRY.

The Camera's View Camera's View Portraits Portraits 1. Marble Canyon, photographed by J. K. Hillers.2. Grand Canyon above Lava Falls.3. The mirror case. Major Powell and a Ute woman.4. Picturesque America, 1873. Thomas Moran and his writer Colburn, on Moran's first trip to the Grand Canyon country.

INTRODUCTION.

A BOOK called The Growth of American Thought The Growth of American Thought was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1944. At the end of a chapter on ”The Nature of the New Nationalism” the central figure of Mr. Stegner's book makes a momentary appearance. A pa.s.sage which all told is nearly two pages long is discussing ”the discovery of the West by a group of scientists who revealed it to the rest of the country.” (They revealed it, we are to understand, primarily as interesting scenery.) A paragraph pauses to remark that at the time these scientists made their discovery, the frontier was vanis.h.i.+ng but it had ”left distinctive traces on the American mind through its cult of action, rough individualism, physical freedom, and adventurous romance.” Here are four fixed and indestructible stereotypes about the West, all of them meaningless. No wonder that on the way to them Mr. Stegner's subject is dismissed with a sentence which records that ”the ethnologist and geologist, John Powell, who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the Southwest, promoted extremely important geological surveys for the federal government.” In his bibliographical notes the historian of American thought adds, ”Major John Powell's was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1944. At the end of a chapter on ”The Nature of the New Nationalism” the central figure of Mr. Stegner's book makes a momentary appearance. A pa.s.sage which all told is nearly two pages long is discussing ”the discovery of the West by a group of scientists who revealed it to the rest of the country.” (They revealed it, we are to understand, primarily as interesting scenery.) A paragraph pauses to remark that at the time these scientists made their discovery, the frontier was vanis.h.i.+ng but it had ”left distinctive traces on the American mind through its cult of action, rough individualism, physical freedom, and adventurous romance.” Here are four fixed and indestructible stereotypes about the West, all of them meaningless. No wonder that on the way to them Mr. Stegner's subject is dismissed with a sentence which records that ”the ethnologist and geologist, John Powell, who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of Indian tribes of the Southwest, promoted extremely important geological surveys for the federal government.” In his bibliographical notes the historian of American thought adds, ”Major John Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries Exploration of the Colorado River of the West and Its Tributaries is a cla.s.sic.” is a cla.s.sic.”

Thus ”John Powell” was an explorer who embraced the cult of action, whatever that may be, and went down the Colorado and wrote an adventure story. He also had something to do with geological surveys which were ”extremely important” but not important enough to be specified. Our historian perceives in them nothing that bears on the growth of American thought. Nor does he mention the cla.s.sic which Powell wrote, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. Indeed nothing suggests that he has heard of it. It states, and states systematically for the first time, the conditions that control human life and society in forty per cent of the area of the United States. But because the historian of thought approaches the West with a handful of cliches, the conditions of life and society are not important. What counts is the book he names, an ”adventurous romance.” Indeed nothing suggests that he has heard of it. It states, and states systematically for the first time, the conditions that control human life and society in forty per cent of the area of the United States. But because the historian of thought approaches the West with a handful of cliches, the conditions of life and society are not important. What counts is the book he names, an ”adventurous romance.”

Which is fair enough and no doubt inevitable. True, one historian who understood John Wesley Powell and his importance, Mr. Walter Prescott Webb, had discussed him at length before the one I have quoted wrote his book. But most of his colleagues had not even heard of Powell in 1944, and still haven't. This un-awareness represents a serious gap in historical thinking - - which is the only reason for quoting a prizewinning book here. Otherwise it would be enough to say that Powell was one of those powerfully original. and prophetic minds which, like certain streams in a limestone country, sink out of sight for a time to reappear farther on. It will not do to sum up so briefly. For the reason historians have ignored Powell is that the which is the only reason for quoting a prizewinning book here. Otherwise it would be enough to say that Powell was one of those powerfully original. and prophetic minds which, like certain streams in a limestone country, sink out of sight for a time to reappear farther on. It will not do to sum up so briefly. For the reason historians have ignored Powell is that the preconceptions preconceptions with which they have approached the area Powell figures in correspond exactly to the with which they have approached the area Powell figures in correspond exactly to the misconceptions misconceptions with which the American people and their government approached the West. with which the American people and their government approached the West.

Powell's importance is that seventy-five years ago he pierced through those misconceptions to the realities. His career was an indomitable effort to subst.i.tute knowledge for the misconceptions and to get it acted on. He tried to repair the damage they had done to the people and the land and to prevent them from doing further damage. He tried to shape legal and political and social inst.i.tutions so that they would accord with the necessities of the West. He tried to conserve the West's natural wealth so that it could play to the full its potential part in the future of the United States. He tried to dissipate illusions about the West, to sweep mirage away. He was a great man and a prophet. Long ago he accomplished great things and now we are beginning to understand him ... even out west.

That is the burden of Mr. Stegner's memorable book. My part here is to explain why writers of history have for so long failed to understand the ma.s.sive figure of John Wesley Powell and therefore have failed, rather disastrously, to understand the fundamental meaning of the West in American history.

One of the reasons for that failure is beyond explanation: the tacit cla.s.sification, the automatic dismissal, of Western history as merely sectional, not national, history. No such limitation has been placed on the experience of the American people in New England, the South, or the Middle West. These sections are taken to be organic in the United States and cannot safely be separated from their functional and reciprocal relations.h.i.+ps. When you write Southern history in the round you must deal with such matters as, for instance, the cotton economy, the plantation system, slavery, States' rights, the tariff, secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. They are so clearly national as well as Southern in implication that it would be impossible to write about them without treating them in relation to the experience of the nation as a whole. The same statement holds for the historical study of, say, Southern inst.i.tutions, Southern politics, and Southern thinking - to ignore their national context would clearly be absurd. Southerners too are acquainted with ”action” if not a cult of action, and are known to value ”individualism” if not a rough kind of it. We may observe, even, that the South has had some awareness of ”physical freedom” and ”adventurous romance.” But an intellectual historian would not write a summary which implied that history need inquire no further - would not dismiss Jefferson with a sentence about his governors.h.i.+p of Virginia or Calhoun with one about his term in the legislature of South Carolina.

The experience of the West is just as inseparable from the central energies of American history. Any major Western topic, or any commonplace Western phenomenon, involves those energies the moment it is glanced at. Thus a favorite garment in the West (as in rural places throughout the United States) is a s.h.i.+rt whose trade name is Big Yank. It is a cotton s.h.i.+rt - made of a fiber once grown only in the South but now grown compet.i.tively in the West. It is a manufactured article - a product of industry located outside the West. So it cannot safely be dissected out from the national system. And the more you look at it, the more clearly you see that this involvement is complex. You encounter the mercantile-colonial status of the Western economy, the drainage of Western wealth eastward, the compensatory process of federal benefactions, preferential freight rates, and myriad concrete facts related to these - all national in implication. Make the s.h.i.+rt a woolen one and you bring in the tariff, absentee owners.h.i.+p of the West, Eastern control of Western finance, and the stockgrowing portion of Western agriculture. And if you will look at the woolen s.h.i.+rt just a little longer it will lead you straight to the basic conditions of the West.

Unless you are deflected or dazzled by its ”adventurous romance.” Or by your historical preconceptions.

The West was the latest and most adventurously romantic of out frontiers, and its history has been written, mostly, as frontier history. When the word ”frontier” is used in history it has, to begin with, been raised to a tolerably high degree of abstraction. And its inherent abstractness has been almost immeasurably increased by a hypothesis which has dominated much writing about the West and has colored almost all of it, Frederick Jackson Turner's theory about the function of ”the frontier” in American life. That theory has, I suppose, begotten more pages of American history than any other generalization. Till recently no one dreamed of writing about the West without its help. Indeed its postulate of a specific kind of ”frontier” independence, which it derives from the public domain and which it calls the princ.i.p.al energy of American democracy, has heavily b.u.t.tressed our illusions about the West. So our problem here exists in a medium of pure irony. For, to whatever degree the Turner hypothesis may be applicable to American experience east of the 100th meridian, it fails almost altogether when applied to the West. The study of a single water war, in fact of a single irrigation district, should reveal its irrelevance. Indeed as one who has written extensively of our sacred Western symbol, the covered wagon, I have frequently found myself wondering if the study of a single wagon train ought not to suffice.

But two other facts affect our problem more. In general, historians have been content to postulate that American inst.i.tutions, orientations, and habits of thought which developed east of the 100th meridian maintained their form and retained their content after reaching the West, whereas in fact a good many important ones did not. In the second place, historians have generally been ignorant of or incurious about natural conditions that determine life in the West, differentiate it from other sections, and have given it different orientations. Since the importance of John Wesley Powell is entirely related to those differences, historians have naturally had no reason to perceive it. Presumably anyone nowadays is well enough informed to understand that the engaging nonsense of William Gilpin, which Mr. Stegner uses so effectively to illuminate Powell's achievements, is and always was nonsense. But the point is that anyone who is not well grounded in Western geography, topography, and climate could easily be led to dismiss Powell as precisely the kind of eccentric Gilpin was.

Well, there isn't much rain out west. There is not enough rain to grow crops and so additional water has to be brought to them for irrigation. The additional water falls as snow on the mountains, it melts, and it flows down the brooks to the creeks and down them to the rivers. If you build dams, you can hold the runoff for use when and where it is needed. Then if you construct systems of ca.n.a.ls - - increasingly complex systems as you take the melted snow farther - you can bring the water to town mains and to the fields that won't grow crops without it. The historical process which we call the westward movement shattered against these facts. Neither hope nor illusion nor desire nor Act of Congress could change them in the least. But they were even harder for the American people to accept than they have been for historians to understand. increasingly complex systems as you take the melted snow farther - you can bring the water to town mains and to the fields that won't grow crops without it. The historical process which we call the westward movement shattered against these facts. Neither hope nor illusion nor desire nor Act of Congress could change them in the least. But they were even harder for the American people to accept than they have been for historians to understand.

There is no need to describe how the ”quarter-section” acquired mystical significance in American thinking - the idea that 160 acres were the ideal family-sized farm, the basis of a yeoman democracy, the b.u.t.tress of our liberties, and the cornerstone of our economy. It was certainly true, however, that if you owned 160 acres of flat Iowa farmland or rolling Wisconsin prairie, you had, on the average, a farm which would support your family and would require all its exertions to work. So the quarter-section, thought of as the proper homestead unit, became the mystical one. But in the arid regions 160 acres were not a homestead. They were just a mathematical expression whose meanings in relation to agricultural settlement were disastrous.

To begin with, what kind of land? A hundred and sixty acres of redwood or Douglas fir or Western white pine never could be a homestead - but they were a small fortune. Hence the personal and corporate timber frauds which stand high in the record of our national corruption. A hundred and sixty acres of arid range land could not provide forage for enough stock to support a family. Hence two kinds of land fraud, on a large scale by wealthy or corporate stockgrowers to acquire big ranges, on a small scale by poor individuals trying to acquire the self-supporting homesteads that they could not get legally. What about 160 acres of valley farmland with the rich mineral soil of the West and capable of being irrigated? Two considerations: to irrigate so large a tract would usually cost more than an individual owner could afford, and the farming made possible by irrigation would mostly be so intensive that so big a farm could not be worked by a single family.

So the land in the arid country had better be cla.s.sified, and the unit of owners.h.i.+p, the size of the homestead, had better be adjusted to the realities. Our system had always resisted land-cla.s.sification for the public domain - the official ruling that standing timber was not farmland - in the interest of speculation and graft. But in the arid country not to cla.s.sify land would on the one hand facilitate monopolization of land, and on the other hand would perpetuate and inst.i.tutionalize the bankruptcy of Western homesteaders. And unless the unit of owners.h.i.+p was changed there would be no way of squaring either public or private interests with the immutable facts. But both changes would mean fundamental alteration of our legal and land system, and would produce further changes in many inst.i.tutions related to them. The sum of change required was so great that the American mind did not take it in - and went on believing that there must be some way of licking climate or that climate would adapt itself to men's desires. Against this inherited set of mind, the tumultuous and tragic experience of the West could not prevail.

Again, not only what kind of land but whereabouts? A small holding that included a water source could prevent access to the basis of life and so would give its owner the usufructs of a much larger area which he could keep others from owning. Adjoining holdings along a stream could similarly dominate a much larger area. So at small expense (and by fraud) a corporation could keep individual stockgrowers from a really vast area it did not own but could thus make use of. Or a corporation could not only charge its own price for water, that is for life, but could control the terms of settlement with all that settlement implies. Here was another powerful force making for monopoly and speculation. Clearly, that is clearly to us now, the West could exist as a democratic society only if the law relating to the owners.h.i.+p and use of water were changed. The changes required were repugnant to our legal system and our set of mind, and again the experience of the West produced turbulence but not understanding.