Powell used to attend classes for short periods at Illinois Institute (now Wheaton College), Illinois College.
Gallery of John Powell
Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, United States
Powell used to attend classes for short periods at Oberlin College.
Career
Gallery of John Powell
1872
Photograph of Taw-gu, Great Chief of the Paiutes, with John Wesley Powell, as featured in the new book “The People: The Missing Piece of John Wesley Powell’s Expedition.”
Gallery of John Powell
1872
Major John Wesley Powell
Gallery of John Powell
1891
Flagstaff, Arisona, United States
John Wesley Powell
Gallery of John Powell
1897
Charles Doolittle Walcott, John Wesley Powell, and Sir Archibald Geikie on a geological field excursion to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.
Gallery of John Powell
1900
Topeka, Kansas, United States
Handwritten notes on the back of photograph: The last Powell family group photo taken in Topeka, Kansas on November 10, 1900, after the funeral of sister, Martha Powell Davis (wife of Congressman, John Davis). Back row, left to right: Ellen Powell Thompson, William Bramwell Powell, William (Billy) P. Powell, Almon Harris Thompson. Front row, left to right: John Wesley Powell and Mary Powell Wheeler. Topeka, Kansas. 1900.
Gallery of John Powell
1969
John Wesley Powell was honored on a United States commemorative stamp.
Gallery of John Powell
John Wesley Powell, American explorer, geologist, and ethnologist, best known for his exploration of the upper portion of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.
Gallery of John Powell
John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 – September 23, 1902) was a United States soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions.
Gallery of John Powell
Powell is talking to a native American Indian.
Gallery of John Powell
John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) was historic and heroic for being first to lead a daring expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. Ninety-nine days later, he emerged from the Grand Canyon to acclaim.
Gallery of John Powell
Powell was a scientific frontiersman, but he was also a soldier, an academic, an anthropologist, an ethnologist, a linguist, a sociologist and an explorer of the American West. His most famous adventure was his involvement in the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, which is especially notable for the first known passage by non-Natives to be descended into the Grand Canyon.
This photo is from the collection of the History and Archives Division, Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records. Copyright and/or Publication rights for all images in this collection are retained by this institution.
Gallery of John Powell
Sweetwater County Historical Museum, Green River, Wyoming, United States
This portrait monument is 9 1/2 Feet tall, excluding oar. Installed in front of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, in Green River, Wyoming. (Powell lost his lower right arm in the Civil War.)
Gallery of John Powell
John Wesley Powell (far left) poses with a group of fellow explorers. Credit: Getty Images.
Gallery of John Powell
Major John Wesley Powell
Achievements
Grand Canyon, Arizona, United States
Powell Memorial
Membership
American Antiquarian Society
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, United States
Powell was a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Photograph of Taw-gu, Great Chief of the Paiutes, with John Wesley Powell, as featured in the new book “The People: The Missing Piece of John Wesley Powell’s Expedition.”
Handwritten notes on the back of photograph: The last Powell family group photo taken in Topeka, Kansas on November 10, 1900, after the funeral of sister, Martha Powell Davis (wife of Congressman, John Davis). Back row, left to right: Ellen Powell Thompson, William Bramwell Powell, William (Billy) P. Powell, Almon Harris Thompson. Front row, left to right: John Wesley Powell and Mary Powell Wheeler. Topeka, Kansas. 1900.
John Wesley Powell, American explorer, geologist, and ethnologist, best known for his exploration of the upper portion of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon.
John Wesley Powell (March 24, 1834 – September 23, 1902) was a United States soldier, geologist, explorer of the American West, professor at Illinois Wesleyan University, and director of major scientific and cultural institutions.
John Wesley Powell (1834-1902) was historic and heroic for being first to lead a daring expedition down the Colorado River in 1869. Ninety-nine days later, he emerged from the Grand Canyon to acclaim.
Powell was a scientific frontiersman, but he was also a soldier, an academic, an anthropologist, an ethnologist, a linguist, a sociologist and an explorer of the American West. His most famous adventure was his involvement in the 1869 Powell Geographic Expedition, which is especially notable for the first known passage by non-Natives to be descended into the Grand Canyon.
This photo is from the collection of the History and Archives Division, Arizona State Library, Archives, and Public Records. Copyright and/or Publication rights for all images in this collection are retained by this institution.
Sweetwater County Historical Museum, Green River, Wyoming, United States
This portrait monument is 9 1/2 Feet tall, excluding oar. Installed in front of the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, in Green River, Wyoming. (Powell lost his lower right arm in the Civil War.)
Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution
John Wesley "Wes" Powell was a prominent American geologist, ethnologist, soldier, and explorer of the American W. Powell was one of the founders and systematizers of government science in the United States, who is best known for his exploration of the upper portion of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. His life was dedicated to exploring and conserving the natural resources-scientific, scenic, economic, and human-of the American W.
Background
Ethnicity:
Powell’s parents were Methodist immigrants from England bent upon carrying the Gospel to border cabins.
John Wesley Powell was born on March 24, 1834, in Mount Morris, New York, the son of Joseph and Mary Powell. His father, a poor itinerant preacher, had emigrated to the United States from Shrewsbury, England, in 1830. His family moved westward to Jackson, Ohio, then Walworth County, Wisconsin, before settling in rural Boone County, Illinois.
Education
Powell's education was often interrupted and in good part homemade; but a frontier man of learning, George Crookham of Jackson, early initiated Powell into the natural history and into the habit of collecting trips in the field. Later, when he was working his father’s Wisconsin farm, teaching in a country school, or snatching short periods of instruction at Illinois Institute (now Wheaton College), Illinois College, and Oberlin. Powell continued collecting. A persistent and omnivorous amateur at that stage, he made long solitary trips through Wisconsin, down the Mississippi to New Orleans, down Ohio from Pittsburgh to Cairo, through the Iron Mountain country of Missouri, down Illinois, up the Des Moines.
In 1858 Powell was made secretary of the Illinois Society of Natural History. Two years later, as principal of schools in Hennepin, Illinois, he won a prize with his mollusk collection at the fair of the Illinois State Agricultural Society and seemed on his way to becoming a rural savant on the model of his instructor, Crookham.
The Civil War eased Powell into a wider world. Enlisting as a private in May 1861, he was a captain within six months and a member of Grant’s staff, considered something of an authority on fortifications. Despite the loss of his right arm, shattered by a Minié ball at Shiloh, he remained in the army throughout the war, rising to the command of the artillery of the 17th Army Corps. In January of 1865, he resigned with the rank of brevet lieutenant colonel.
Shortly after returning to civilian life, Powell accepted a professorship of geology at Illinois Wesleyan University, moving a year later to its sister institution, Illinois State Normal University. From there in the summer of 1867, he led a party of students to the Rocky Mountains under the sponsorship of the Illinois State Natural History Society. In 1868 he repeated the expedition, exploring west of the continental divide and wintering on the White River in western Colorado. There he conceived and prepared for his 1869 boat exploration down the unknown canyons of the Green and Colorado rivers from Green River, Wyoming, to the mouth of the Virgin. From that exploration, the last major one within the continental United States, he emerged a national hero; and when, on 12 July 1870, Congress created an early, informal version of what would become the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, parallel to and in competition with the King, Hayden, and Wheeler surveys already in the field, Powell was placed in charge of it.
He remained in charge of it throughout its nine years of existence: and out of its continuing investigation of the lands, water, and people of the plateau country of Utah, western Colorado, and northern Arizona he developed most of the broad principles upon which he built his later career. The career was multiple, involving a constant interaction among Powell’s personal knowledge of the west, his active involvement in the nascent sciences of geology and American ethnology, and his increasing influence as a government scientist.
Powell’s pioneering trip down the Green and Colorado was supplemented by a second, and scientifically more productive one, in 1871-1872. The geologists he enlisted in the later years of the survey were men of real stature; and in collaboration with them, especially with Grove Karl Gilbert, Clarence E. Dutton, and W. H. Holmes, he did much to formulate the basic principles of structural geology. His own publications, notably The Exploration of the Colorado River of the West (1875) and The Geology of the Eastern Portion of the Uinta Mountains (1876), as well as the reports and monographs of his collaborators, are of lasting scientific importance. Powell on antecedent and subsequent streams; Gilbert on stream erosion, the recession of cliffs, and laccolithic uplifts; Dutton on isostasy and volcanism; and all of them together on the large problems of orogeny are still basic and indispensable after nearly a century. Their contributions were less individual than mutual. Both Gilbert and Dutton testified to the provocative fecundity of Powell’s ideas and the impossibility of separating out individual contributions.
Knowing the West from years of field experience, Powell early came to feel that the land laws under which it was being settled were both destructive to the land and ruinous to the individual settlers. He believed in the role of government as a source of unbiased scientific information for the use of both citizens and lawmakers; and when President Hayes came into office in 1877 on a platform of reform, Powell seized the opportunity to present to Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz a program for land laws and settlement policies appropriate to the West. His extremely important Report on the Lands of the Arid Region (1878) made use of the staff and the findings of his survey to State the conditions of the West and the necessary institutional and legal changes if it was to be settled without great individual hardship and disaster to the land. It proposed for the lands beyond the 100th meridian a revision of the near-sacred 160-acre formula of the Homestead Act in favor of smaller irrigated farms and very much larger grazing farms; the stopping of the rectangular surveys and the practice of contract surveying; the institution of surveys based upon drainage divides and the location of perennial water: and - in the interest of governmental efficiency - the transfer of the cadastral surveys to the Coast and Geodetic Survey from the General Land Office, and the consolidation of the four competing western surveys into a single bureau under the Interior Department.
In the ensuing struggle between the reformers and the forces engaged in the western promotion, Congress put none of that program into effect except the consolidation of the western surveys into the U.S. Geological Survey. Having supported Clarence King for the directorship of the new bureau, Powell moved over to the Smithsonian Institution to direct the newly created Bureau of Ethnology. His Report on the Lands of the Arid Region, years ahead of the public and governmental acceptances of the times, did not become truly influential until the Dust Bowl years of the 1930’s when its principles became the basis for the attempt to heal conditions that might have been largely prevented if the Report had been acted on when it was presented.
As head of the Bureau of Ethnology, renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1894, Powell put into practice the same collaborative and directive effort that had marked his administration of the Powell Survey. Even before he undertook to direct the governmental study of the Indians, he published his seminal Introduction to the Study of the Indian Languages (1877), building upon and greatly enlarging the pioneer studies of Albert Gallatin. His effort was to create first the alphabet for ethnological study, and then the systematic classification of the Indian tribes. Personally and through his collaborators James Pilling, Garrick Mallery, Cyrus Thomas, and others, he moved from the classification of the language stocks to other sorts of classification and study. Pilling’s bibliographies of the various language stocks grew out of an assignment from Powell. The reports and monographs of the Bureau of Ethnology, beautifully printed and carefully made, mark not only the systematization of the study of the Indian tribes but also its first notable achievements. And Frederick Webb Hodge’s Handbook of the American Indian (1907-1910) was the summation of the work of many, all of them working under Powell’s direction and guided by his powerfully synthesizing and organizing mind.
When Clarence King resigned as director of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1881, Powell succeeded him, without relinquishing his position as head of the Bureau of Ethnology. Thereafter for a dozen years, as head of two major bureaus, he was perhaps the most powerfully placed scientist in the United States.
The aridity which Powell saw as the compelling fact of western life - the fact which should enforce changes in laws and institutions as well as in patterns of agriculture and land use - was impressed upon even the most extreme western boosters by the ten-year drought of the 1880s. In consequence Powell’s proposals, made in the Arid Region report, had a second chance to gain political support. Put in charge of a program of western irrigation surveys in 1888, Powell made use of the opportunity to throw all the resources of the new survey, as well as much of the effort of the U.S. Geological Survey, behind topographical mapping and land classification as the preliminary for the spotting of the dam and canal sites. The bill authorizing the irrigation survey was loosely and ambiguously phrased. Upon interpretation by the attorney general, it proved to have withdrawn from settlement the entire public domain until Powell could complete his designation of reclamation sites and could certify the lands under them as irritable and hence open to filing.
Possessed of sudden, unexpected power, Powell labored to finish his mapping, hoping to forestall in much of the West the unhappy consequences of dryland homesteading. But the so-called irrigation clique, headed by Senator William Stewart of Nevada, had in mind only a quick spotting of irrigation sites upon existing maps, with all the speculation such a program would give rise to. The cries from the West grew louder as Powell’s work dragged on. In 1890 Stewart and his colleagues sharply cut the Irrigation Survey budget, and in the following year, they pursued their feud with Powell by cutting the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey as well. In 1894, defeated for the second time in his program for scientific planning of western settlement, Powell resigned from the Geological Survey. He devoted the rest of his life to the Bureau of American Ethnology and to the writing of philosophical treatises. Of these last the most important, although never influential upon the history of thought, was Truth and Error, or the Science of Intellection (1898).
As a thinker on the origins and patterns of society, Powell should be associated with the social Darwinism of Lester Ward, one of his employees and close collaborators, and with the systematic anthropological theories of Lewis Morgan, another of his close intellectual companions. His synthetic formulations have proved less durable than his contributions to geology and his sound organization of the science of man.
Quotations:
".. wonderful features - carved walls, royal arches, glens, alcove gulches, mounds, and monuments. From which of these features shall we select a name? We decide to call it Glen Canyon."
"August 13, 1869, we are now ready to start on our way down the Great Unknown. Our boats, tied to a common stake, chafe each other as they are tossed by the fretful river. They ride high and buoyant, for their loads are lighter than we could desire. We have but a month's rations remaining. The flour has been resifted through the mosquito-net sieve; the spoiled bacon has been dried and the worst of it boiled. The few pounds of dried apples have been spread in the sun and reshrunken to their normal bulk. The sugar has all melted and gone on its way down the river. But we have a large sack of coffee. The lightening of the boats has this advantage: they will ride the waves better and we shall have but little to carry when we make a portage."
"We are three-quarters of a mile in the depths of the earth, and the great river shrinks into insignificance as it dashes its angry waves against the walls and cliffs that rise to the world above; the waves are but puny ripples, and we but pigmies, running up and down the sands or lost among the boulders."
"We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls ride over the river, we know not. Ah, well! we may conjecture many things. The men talk as cheerfully as ever, but to me the cheer is somber and the jests are ghastly."
Membership
Powell was a member of the Illinois Society of Natural History and was made its secretary in 1858. He was also a member of the American Antiquarian Society (1898) and a member of the Cosmos Club.
American Antiquarian Society
,
United States
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
During the Civil War, Powell lost his right arm, which was shattered by a Minié ball at Shiloh. However, despite this horrible occurrence, he remained in the army throughout the war.
Connections
John Powell married Emma Dean on November 28, 1861.