Take a look at the following map of the American West. It is known as the John Wesley Powell map. Study it for a moment.

The title is “Arid Region of the United States, Showing Drainage Districts.” A bland name, perhaps, but straightforward. The map’s author is one of the more important scientists in American history, John Wesley Powell.

If you understand the geography of the American West, you know what the John Wesley Powell map is about. Each colored zone on the map signifies the drainage of a major river of the American West. For instance, at the top of the map, the gold zone is the Columbia River watershed, the blue is the Snake River, the yellow, the Missouri River, and the green, the Yellowstone River.

You’ll also note two dividing lines marked on the map. One is the western boundary of the arid region, the other its eastern boundary.

Furthermore, note what you don’t see—the lines of the modern states of the American West. (They’re present, but faint.) What’s the story behind this map? Why is it important? How might it have revolutionized life in the United States?

John Wesley Powell Facts

First, a quick word about Powell. (I’ll have much more to say about his importance in my next post.) He was an explorer, Civil War veteran, ethnographer, and scientist who lived in the United States during the 19th century. You probably know little about him, however. Maybe it’s because Americans don’t really celebrate scientists as a general thing, and especially not scientists who people should’ve listened to but didn’t.

The key fact to know about Powell for this post is that he recognized an important reality about the American West. It was arid. Thus the lines marking the edge of the arid zone on the John Wesley Powell map. (Scientists in Powell’s time classified something as arid that received 20 inches of rainfall or less annually.) Why did that matter?

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Aridity and the John Wesley Powell Watershed Map

Powell understood that aridity was a big deal to farmers. Crops don’t grow without rain. (Now, we irrigate to bring water to crops in some arid regions. But in Powell’s heyday, the 1870s and 1880s, that remained in the future for most people.) Unfortunately, the land distribution policy of the Homestead Acts passed in the 1860s were written by politicians who lived in the East. The East was not arid.

These Homestead Acts provided each claimant with 160 acres of land. This was free land, if one paid a small filing fee and lived there five years. I know, I know. The westward movement is, in American national mythology, all about hard work and individual initiative. But hard work and individual initiative give way better results when you don’t have to pay for the land, too. (This was also, we shouldn’t forget, land formerly inhabited by Native Americans and obtained through broken treaties.)

This policy worked respectably—in the Eastern states, where rainfall wasn’t a problem.

The West was a different story. But the provisions of the Homestead Acts were the same everywhere. A farmer in Western Washington got the same amount of land as a farmer in the western Dakotas. That Washington farmer, however, got a lot more rain on his land most years than his Dakota counterpart.

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Powell’s Plan

John Wesley Powell realized this was a problem. Giving farmers in the West 160 acres was no good if those farmers couldn’t access water. Sooner or later, the farmers would fail, and probably sooner.

So, he devised a better plan for settlement in the American West. For those homesteads that did have access to water, 160 acres was fine. But for those without, Powell advocated homesteads of 2,560 acres (16 x 160 = 2,560). The idea was that these larger homesteads shouldn’t try to grow wheat or other crops, however. If it didn’t rain, that wouldn’t work no matter how many acres one had. Instead, people in these larger homesteads should graze animals to support themselves.

Powell’s plan also had a third classification—people should not homestead steep, mountainous areas at all. This would help prevent erosion, a problem that was all too obvious in mining areas already.

But What About the Colors on the John Wesley Powell Map?

This is the other useful idea that Powell advanced. In his vision of the American West, each color you see on the map at the beginning of this post would be its own state.

His logic was interesting. Powell realized most westerners made a living from the environment in some form. Therefore, why not group people into states based on watersheds? Those people would live in areas with similar weather and where most of the people in the state pursued similar economic activities. These people should have little difficulty figuring out what was in their common interest. They could then make laws and policies that favored the common interest of most of their residents.

Compare Powell’s idea to what actually happened in the American West. For the most part, Americans ended up with big, basically rectangular states like Wyoming or Colorado based on arbitrary lines of latitude and longitude.

This matters today, when one thinks about things for a while. In my home state of Washington, for instance, a fairly substantial difference existed historically between the western part of the state and the eastern part. The western part was more densely populated, more industrial, and more oriented to overseas trade. The eastern part of the state was more agricultural.

Likewise with the other state where I lived for many years, Montana. Western Montana had a mining and timber economy historically. Eastern Montana featured more ranching and farming. Yet, like in Washington, these people were lumped together into one political entity. Finding common ground wasn’t always easy, or even possible, because easterners and westerners wanted different things.

America Says No Way to the John Wesley Powell Map

Of course, Americans didn’t end up with western states based on watersheds. They got what we know from a map of the country today. Part of the reason, I suppose, was that 19th century Americans weren’t really interested in science. Especially not when it came to the American West. Instead, some subscribed to ridiculous ideas like “rain follows the plow.”

Others placed their faith in their faith. God would never allow Americans to fail. Or maybe in technology—merely farming the land would improve its quality, although this contradicted all known facts about farming land over time. (I’ve read newspapers and other publications from the era stating exactly this belief.) Americans simply refused to acknowledge that science mattered in the West.

Railroads also bear much blame. Besides authoring some of the dubious publications mentioned above, they profited from keeping things as they were. Their land grants (they received nearly 200 million acres in subsidies from the U.S. government—another government handout to corporations preaching the virtues of individual initiative) allowed them to sell land to farmers. So, they sold 160-acre parcels. Think of what 2,560-acre parcels would’ve done to their profits.

Consequences

The result was, stated simply, a lot of suffering. Once again, American national mythology says that Westerners succeeded and tamed the land through pure willpower and effort. Except, in reality, they didn’t. One biography of John Wesley Powell mentions that two-thirds of western farmers failed with five years.

That means that, even when the land was free, most farmers couldn’t make a go of things within five years. They gave up and moved on. They couldn’t access enough water. This resulted in a vast number of people living grim, hardscrabble lives. Those lives might have been easier, happier, and more productive with wiser policies.

In my next post, I’ll continue this story by explaining why people couldn’t get enough water, and what all that has to do with John Wesley Powell.

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