John Wesley Powell and the Unmaking of the West

Abstract

Environmental historians have a fondness for the American West, for it is there that the squandering of America's wealth of natural resources is so conspicuous and, by modem standards, so shameful. It is there that the causes of overgrazed ranges, clear-cut forests, wildlife losses, regimented rivers, and mountains of tailings and lakes of toxic sludge are as crystal clear as the azure western sky. There, the sages of the West, from their easy chairs, from their lofty perches above the one-hundredth meridian, and from the besieged gates of the lords of yesterday, decry the sins of private greed, waste, and abuse that was and is, they claim, the unmaking of the West. Who can deny the environmental record of unbridled individualism or question the gallantry of a federal few to save the West from capitalist exploitation? Make no mistake-there was exploitation. Grass was extracted from arid prairies at rates that exceeded the historic harvests of tens of millions of migrating bison. Forests were cut at rates that exceeded the natural periodicity of fire and regeneration. Rivers, wild and choked with salmon, were blocked, stair-stepped, and channeled to make way for a new breed: cultivators and stockmen. Mountains that had taken ages to thrust upward, and then ages more to be sculpted by wind, water, and ice, were deconstructed to their basic elements of rubble. In fact, much of the West has been deconstructed. A generation of insightful and daring historians have dismantled the edifice of myth, the cultural belief that this home on the range of the winsome cowboy somehow steered clear of the ills endemic to the rest of America and stayed true, instead, to its ethos of individualism and its birthright of frontier democracy. But there is a problem, or more accurately a hesitancy. Slash and burn as they might, western historians have shown a stubborn reluctance to dismantle the one icon that is most responsible for the West's environmental undoing: the western hero. By western hero, I do not mean the fictional agents that pass down to us from the ages or the manufactured legends that occasionally grace the cinematic screen, though their ethos shares much in common with what I have in mind. Rather, the heroes I see, the ones who deconstructed the West to stubble, stumps, and stagnant pools, were flesh and blood, mostly male, living but much larger than life. They are the ones who won the West of wise use, the scribes who, in an