This is the telling of Powell's famous 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, with photographs, engravings and excerpts from his journals.
Read More
This is the telling of Powell's famous 1869 expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers, with photographs, engravings and excerpts from his journals.
Read Less
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Good. Good condition. A copy that has been read but remains intact. May contain markings such as bookplates, stamps, limited notes and highlighting, or a few light stains. Bundled media such as CDs, DVDs, floppy disks or access codes may not be included.
Choose your shipping method in Checkout. Costs may vary based on destination.
Seller's Description:
Fine. Size: 8.2 x 5.1 x 0.5 inches; From the Foreword: With his spectacular conquest of the Colorado River, Major John Wesley Powell burst upon the American scene like a rocket shot across the Western sky. Acclaimed as a hero, Powell rode the tide of popularity into a commanding position in Government science, from which he was able to exert substantial influence on the American frontier. Major Powell was a man who saw with clear insight into the tangled pattern of Western development. His genius lay in an ability to grasp the intellectual challenges of geology, ethnology, physics, chemistry, and civil engineering as they applied to the frontier, and out of these studiesto forsee the problems that lay ahead for the settlers. Many hopeful pioneers, for instance, believed that the cultivation of land would induce more rainfall, the old "rain follows the plow" concept, but Powell riddled their ideas and called them foolish fantasies. He saw that the West was extremely varied in its topography and in its resources, and he said that the West should not be treated as if it were uniform farmland. Unfortunately, Powell's was but a voice among many competitors. Since his proposals called for reasonable sacrifice and forebearance, his arguments were highly unpopular. The 1870's and 1880's were part of an era of wishful thinking so far as the West was concerned, : a time when men believed what they wanted to believe, a time when a pot of gold lay at the end of every rainbow. Those earlybirds who had appropriated the resources of the West--particularly its water--were violently oppossed to Powell. In spite of the opposition, Powell's persuasive personality and driving intellect pushed ahead programs that led to the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey (of which Powell was the second Director), and later the Bureau of American Ethnology and the Bureau of Mines. For a while Powell headed the Irrigation Survey, an agency designed to map and classify the water resources of the West, but the agency was killed by the speculators and promoters who did not want people to wait for "facts" about the land before they settled on it. Just before Powell died in 1902 he was told that the President, Theodore Roosevelt, had urged Congress to create what was to become the Bureau of Reclamation. It would mean that the Federal Government would participate in irrigation projects of the West. Powell reflected a moment and then said, "These things take time. You must learn to control impatience, but always be impatient." 44 pages.
