If I had to choose the most sensible plan for settling the American West that was foolishly discarded by politicians with the power to make it so, I’d go with John Wesley Powell’s scheme to arrange the region by watersheds.
Powell lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh in The Civil War but survived his injury to become the One-Armed Oracle of the American West. Just a few years after Appomattox he led the first government-sponsored expeditions down the Green and Colorado rivers. Powell was a careful, honest student of the arid country west of the 100th meridian and in 1877 he published his magnum opus: “Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States.” In it, Powell suggested the grid of 640-acre sections we were busy overlaying on the West made little sense.
Most of the region was too dry for agriculture, he argued. The surveyor’s grid of square-mile sections and larger rectangles — the Four Corner states, Wyoming, the Dakotas and Montana (the eastern three-quarters at least) — would be a perpetual source of conflict as the inhabitants of the grid fought over water. He was right about that. To this day, being a competent water-law attorney is pretty much a guarantee of steady work.
Powell was a creature of his time so he failed to predict the conflicts those squares and rectangles would create for modern, corner-crossing public-land hunters. Tourists paying good money to float the rapids of the Colorado River he’d only recently survived made about as much sense in the 1870s as does trying to terraform Mars in the 21st century rather than addressing the ecological problems we’ve created on the solar system’s only known life-supporting real estate.
Instead of straight lines and right angles, Powell wanted the West’s state boundaries to follow the contours of the region’s scarce watersheds. There’s a colorful rendering of Powell’s suggested plan demonstrating a far more sensible way to divide up the states. There’s a grand logic behind that map.
So of course we went for the grid.
On one hand, Powell was right … wait a second. Let me try that again.
Powell was right about the lines on the map. Watersheds are a more sensible way to divide the region into political units. Montana, west of the divide, encompasses parts of the Idaho Panhandle to form a state in Powell’s map. Eastern Montana is sliced in two. There’s a northern Missouri River watershed state and another to the south for the Yellowstone River watershed.
What Powell failed to anticipate, however, were advances in technology that allowed us to plug canyons with walls of concrete, creating reservoirs that would irrigate the desert.
I have problems with Powell’s map. Part of what makes Montana the greatest state in the Union is its vast reach across the northern tier of the country, from temperate northwest forests to the eastern rattlesnake plains. In Powell’s plan, the Treasure State is sold off for parts, creating three lesser states.
The first time I drove across Montana, from Hamilton to Red Lodge, I remember thinking two things: this state is amazing and it’s so dang big. Then I looked at a map and realized Red Lodge was only halfway to the Dakotas.
No matter the wisdom of Powell’s grand design, it was always doomed to die of indifference. The West’s railroads and other monied interests already owned their square sections and had calculated the profits commerce would bring. Powell’s organic plan probably seemed like a hippy commune in comparison. The status quo was also helped along by those 19th-century know-nothings who argued if we just put the land to productive use, rain would surely follow the plow.
If I were to choose the dumbest plan ever foolishly adopted by those who possessed the power to do otherwise, listening to those sod-busting fools captures the brass ring.