Powell Did Not Give Up

Nine years after that expedition, in 1878, and exactly 100 years after David Ramsey's

Fourth of July oration, Powell published his "Report on the Arid Lands of the United States." He had continued exploring and mapping across the Colorado Plateau and was now prepared to issue a well-informed warning to the nation: the western side of the continent was mighty dry and would impose limits on national expansion. Developing the West, Powell pointed out, would require the techniques of irrigated farming, but less than 3% of the region could ever MBT Shoe be irrigated because the supply of surface water was so scarce. Here was an obstacle to greatness that the Founding Fathers never anticipated.

A familiar document to most western historians, the Report's chief recommendations were that the nation's land laws should be reformed; settlers should not continue to carve up the public domain into standardized 160-acre squares of private property, a land pattern that was ill-suited to the West. Powell recommended two alternatives for land privatization: small irrigated farms organized into irrigation districts; and large "pasturage farms," or livestock ranches, organized into grazing districts. None of the water should be privatized; it should belong as common property shared by everyone who owned land. "The eastern portion of the United States," Powell wrote, "is supplied with abundant rainfall for agricultural purposes, but westward the amount of precipitation diminishes until at last a region is reached where the climate is so arid that agriculture is not successful without irrigation". Powell based this generalization not only on his own experience years spent in boats, in saddles, and on foot but also on a Smithsonian Institution's rain chart that showed that, aside from a humid coastal strip running north of San Francisco toward Seattle and a few well watered mountain slopes, the West received less than 20 inches of rainfall per year on average (Figure 3). Twenty inches of rainfall is the minimum amount needed for raising the major grains, fruits, and MBT Chapa vegetables on which Americans fed. When annual precipitation falls below that level, none of those domesticates can flourish except with the aid of artificial irrigation and then only in a few places.

Congress mainly ignored Powell's proposals, and nothing came of them. The typical homestead remained the standardized 160 acre parcel, though eventually Congress doubled and then quadrupled the standardized allotment to cope with aridity. Following his failure to get his reforms adopted, Powell did not give up. During the decade of the 1880s he worked them over into an even more radical vision a master plan for the West that was breathtaking in its boldness. It was a response not only to the aridity of the West but also to the post-Civil War economic forces that were sweeping into the region, as they were sweeping across the nation. Enterprising citizens were everywhere looking for resources to exploit, stuffing into their pockets as much wealth as they could grasp. The challenge, as Powell saw it, was to save the West for the mass of people before it was permanently lost to the aggressive few.

by: Water Henry

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