Arid Ambition - Part 1: John Wesley Powell and the Folly of Settlement

The American West often appears as a land of limitless possibility. This vision, fueled by relentless optimism, masked an intractable truth: the West is a semidesert with a desert heart. This region cannot be remade into the image of the wet eastern United States. It requires manipulation of water, capturing it behind dams, storing it, and rerouting it over hundreds of miles in concrete channels. Ignoring this environmental reality led directly to disaster, political conflict, and the rise of a pervasive welfare state disguised as rugged individualism.

The dividing line for the continent’s climate is the hundredth meridian, which bisects the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. East of this line, the land typically receives at least 20 inches of precipitation annually. West of it, rainfall generally falls below this crucial farming threshold. Places like Phoenix, El Paso, and Reno routinely receive 7 inches (18 cm) or less of annual rainfall. Sustaining a civilization in such terrain fundamentally depends on managing water scarcity.

The Explorers Who Understood the Desert

Centuries before American settlers flooded the plains, early explorers grasped the West’s fundamental emptiness. In 1539, Spanish nobleman Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado set out from Mexico obsessed with finding cities veneered with gold and silver. His fruitless expedition traversed modern Arizona, Oklahoma, and Kansas. Coronado lost half his men and reported the land was unsuitable for colonizing, noting its extreme cold and lack of firewood. Later, frontiersman Jedediah Smith crossed the Great Basin in the 1820s, encountering desolate terrain. Smith’s party crossed the horrifyingly barren Bonneville Salt Flats, traveling 600 miles while encountering only three small, inconstant streams. These early journeys underscored the region’s hostility, a landscape marked by pitifully scarce game, rattlesnakes, and human inhabitants who reflected the barrenness.

Yet, the definitive statement on the limits of the arid West came from a one-armed Civil War veteran and scientist, John Wesley Powell. Powell, compulsively drawn to the frontier, recognized that a substantial area of the West remained unmapped and marked as “unexplored” in 1869. On May 24, 1869, the Powell Geographic Expedition launched on the Green River, Wyoming. Powell led a scientific expedition of eleven men in four wooden dories: the Maid of the Canyon, the Kitty Clyde’s Sister, the Emma Dean, and the No Name.

The journey was harrowing, an immediate confrontation with the raw power of the region’s great rivers. In Cataract Canyon, the river plunged violently, tossing their boats eight feet (2.4 m) into the air with waves like “mud huts”. Powell recorded that in a single day, his party advanced only three-quarters of a mile (1.2 km). Eventually, the landscape opened into Glen Canyon, a place of astounding beauty with pink-and-salmon-colored sandstone and arcadian glens. But the dangers never fully disappeared. Near the Grand Canyon, three men decided to abandon the boats, believing the danger ahead was too great. Powell decided to continue, determined not to leave the exploration unfinished.

The Inviolable Law of Scarcity

Powell’s extensive explorations gave him the facts to crush the national optimism surrounding western expansion. He correctly concluded that the overwhelming portion of the West could never be transformed through irrigation. He calculated that if one evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, the land would still be an almost indistinguishable desert. For Powell, water in rivers was phenomenally expensive to move, and fundamentally insufficient for making over the entire region. The only way to inhabit such a country was to establish an uneasy truce, rather than attempt conquest.

His contemporaries, however, wanted to believe otherwise. They ignored Powell’s sober facts. They were guided instead by salesmanship, wishful thinking, and natural caprice. After 1865, a long humid cycle brought uninterrupted above-average rainfall to the plains, encouraging settlement. Guides reported western Nebraska turning opalescent green. The boundary of the Great American Desert seemed to retreat westward across the Rockies.

This perceived climatic transformation was seized upon by settlers who believed they were chosen by God to occupy the continent. A new, optimistic school of meteorology formed with a motto of “Rain Follows the Plow”. Proponents claimed that plowing exposed the soil’s moisture, newly planted trees enhanced rainfall, or smoke from trains caused clouds to form. Professor Cyrus Thomas, a noted climatologist, announced his firm conviction that the increase in moisture was permanent and connected to settlement. This dogma resonated strongly with subsistence farmers from the East, who were tired of clearing trees and rocks from their small, hilly tracts.

The Catastrophe of the Great Illusion

The enormous push of humanity into the lands beyond the hundredth meridian was encouraged most effectively by railroad companies. Seeking to rapidly expand markets and sell off huge tracts of land granted by the government, railroads published their own newspapers and pamphlets full of fake testimonials. A publicist for the Rio Grande and Western Railroad even called the Territory of Deseret (Utah) the “Promised Land”. Railroad circulars proclaimed places like the Laramie Plains of Wyoming, which are 5,000 feet (1,524 m) higher than Illinois, as being “as ready today for the plow and spade as the fertile prairies of Illinois”.

The fundamental legal underpinning of this settlement boom was the Homestead Act of 1862. This law decreed 160 acres (65 ha)—a quarter section—as the ideal acreage for a small farmer. This allotment proved disastrous when applied blindly to the arid West. In fertile river valleys, where irrigation was possible, 160 acres was actually too large for one family to work efficiently, with some families able to subsist on 80 irrigated acres (32 ha) or less. Conversely, where dryland ranching was the only option, 160 acres was catastrophically small. Powell estimated that sustaining a living through dryland ranching required no fewer than 2,560 acres (1,036 ha)—four full sections.

The inevitable results were speculation, corruption, and monopoly. Homesteads that fronted on streams were immediately snapped up. The importation of riparian rights law from the East made it possible for a few landowners to monopolize the few manageable rivers, often by controlling upstream diversion points. When neighbors sold out in the face of water deprivation, these large owners also monopolized the best land.

The great illusion met a catastrophic end. The Great White Winter of 1886 brought bottomless cold, trapping thousands of pioneers in frozen, treeless prairie. Many families were found dead when the spring thaw finally arrived. The decade following this winter was marked by severe drought. The sun became a “despotic orb,” and in July 1888, the temperature in Bennett, Colorado, soared to a record 118 degrees. By 1890, the theory that rain followed the plow was exposed as a “preposterous fraud”. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska subsequently declined by between one-quarter and one-half. The great cattle freeze had protected the prairie grasses; had millions more cows been grazing, the devastating Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have arrived a half-century early.

Powell’s Radical Blueprint

Witnessing this folly, John Wesley Powell created a revolutionary plan for western land and water policy, attempting to avert catastrophic mistakes. By 1881, Powell was one of the most powerful scientists in America, heading both the Bureau of Ethnology and the Geologic Survey. His 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States urged the abandonment of the 160-acre quarter section.

Powell proposed a system based entirely on water availability. Since riparian water law was incompatible with equitable water distribution, property boundaries should be “gerrymandered” to ensure every pasturage farm had water rights sufficient to irrigate about 20 acres during emergencies. Furthermore, Powell championed appropriative rights—the concept that an unused water right should revert to the public trust after, say, five years. This “use-it-or-lose-it” approach aimed to prevent speculation.

His most radical suggestion involved community organization. He argued that settlement should be managed through cooperative irrigation districts, similar to New England barn-raisings but organized and legalized. Communal pasturelands, though an affront to America’s preoccupation with private property rights, were necessary. For Powell, the truly revolutionary act was attempting to graft wet-zone agriculture laws onto a desert landscape.

When Powell testified before Congress about his plan, the reception from the West was “icily hostile”. Western politicians and boosters resisted the idea that they could not master the landscape using traditional American solutions like private capital and individual initiative. They preferred “wishful thinking, willfulness, and lousy science” over his “austere, uncompromising monument of facts”.

The Rise of the Federal Solution

The immediate consequence of rejecting Powell’s vision was the collapse of private and state-backed irrigation efforts. By the late 1880s, the easily accessible dam sites and stream diversion opportunities were gone. Groundwater was inadequate; a single windmill could not lift enough water to irrigate a quarter section of land, requiring 30 or 40 windmills and reliable wind.

California, seeking a remedy, passed the Wright Act. This law created self-governing irrigation districts, attempting to apply eastern township government models to western hydrology. The districts failed, issuing unpayable bonds, building reservoirs that remained empty, and distributing water unfairly. Colorado adopted its own version, adding modest subsidies, but also failing. Of five substantial storage reservoirs built under Colorado’s program by 1894, three stored no water at all, and one was too far from the irrigated land, losing most of its water to the ground.

As these efforts lay in shambles, western advocates shifted blame to the East for failing to help. Despite their fervent belief in private enterprise, they had encountered a problem only the national government could master. Theodore Roosevelt, an easterner who admired Powell, recognized that “vast areas” could only be settled by building reservoirs and canals “impractical for private enterprise”.

The convergence of overawing natural catastrophes (the white winter and drought) and the failure of private ventures finally led to the embrace of Powell’s core idea—federal irrigation. This resulted in the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902. Historians debate whether this represented America’s first flirtation with socialism or a conservative measure to ease eastern urban crowding. Regardless, the law created the Reclamation Service (later the Bureau of Reclamation). This act stipulated that projects were to be financed by the Reclamation Fund, generated by federal land sales, and repaid through water sales, exempting farmers from paying interest on repayment obligations. This interest exemption alone often amounted to a subsidy of 90 cents on the dollar.

The Reclamation Act was passed after Senator Francis Warren’s absence allowed Theodore Roosevelt to maneuver Francis Newlands’s version through Congress, disguised as Warren’s own bill. Thus, the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state. Powell’s insistence on federal aid was finally embraced, but his principles of sustainable, limited development were soon ignored. Greening the desert became a kind of Christian ideal, pursued fanatically, leading to dams built on minuscule foundations of economic rationality and need. The irrigation program Powell wanted became a monster, increasing its economic and natural wreckage. This triumph over nature was, at best, a beachhead whose sustainability remains low. Utah, where large-scale irrigation began earliest, still has only 3 percent of its land under cultivation.

A Beachhead Against the Desert

The initial disaster Powell predicted—a catastrophic return to drought—did occur, not once but twice, in the late 1800s and again in the 1930s. When federal help arrived, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer persisted, even as that farmer became reliant on massive public works. The century-long effort to moisten the arid West created a “civilization” built on manipulation of water, but this civilization’s future remains fragile and dependent on resources rapidly being squandered. The odds that the West can sustain this beachhead are regarded as low. The massive engineering effort, driven by the desire to build rather than a limited natural capacity, ultimately set the stage for the massive water wars to come. The focus shifted from living within natural limits to conquering them through sheer engineering will.