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It was bad enough for Powell that he was pulling against such a social tide. He also had to deal with the likes of William Gilpin, who had traded his soapbox for the governor’s mansion in Denver; he had to fight with the provincial newspapers, the railroads, and all the others who were already there and had a proprietary interest in banishing the Great American Desert; he had to deal with western members of Congress who could not abide anyone calling their states arid (although a hundred years later, when the Bureau of Reclamation had become their prime benefactor, members of Congress from these same states would argue at length over whose state was the more arid and hostile).

Powell seemed at first to have everything going in his favor. The West was coming hard up against reality, as more hundreds of thousands of settlers ventured each year into the land of little rain. His exploits on the Colorado River had made him a national hero, the most celebrated adventurer since Lewis and Clark. He was on friendly if not intimate terms with a wide cross-section of the nation’s elite—everyone from Henry Adams to Othniel C. Marsh, the great paleontologist, to Carl Schurz, the Interior Secretary, to Clarence King, the country’s foremost geologist, to numerous strategically placed members of Congress. By 1881, he was head of both the Bureau of Ethnology and the Geologic Survey, two prestigious appointments that made him probably the most powerful, if not the most influential, scientist in America. But none of this prestige and power, none of these connections, was a match for ignorance, nonsense, and the nineteenth century’s fulsome, quixotic optimism. When he testified before Congress about his report and his irrigation plan, the reception from the West—the region with which he was passionately involved, the region he wanted to help—was icily hostile. In his biography of Powell, Wallace Stegner nicely characterized the frame of mind of the typical western booster-politician when he surveyed Powell’s austere, uncompromising monument of facts:

What, they asked, did he know about the West? What did he know about South Dakota? Had he ever been there? When? Where? For how long? Did he know the average rainfall of the James River Valley? Or the Black Hills? ... [Did he] really know anything about the irrigable lands in the Three Forks country in Montana? They refused to understand his distinction between arid and subhumid, they clamored to know how their states had got labelled “arid” and thus been closed to settlement.... [W]hat about the artesian basin in the Dakotas? What about irrigation from that source? So he gave it to them: artesian wells were and always would be a minor source of water as compared to the rivers and the storm-water reservoirs. He had had his men studying artesian wells since 1882.... If all the wells in the Dakotas could be gathered into one county they would not irrigate that county.

Senator Moody [of South Dakota] thereupon remarked that he did not favor putting money into Major Powell’s hands when Powell would clearly not spend it as Moody and his constituents wanted it spent. We ask you, he said in effect, your opinion of artesian wells. You think they’re unimportant. All right, the hell with you. We’ll ask somebody else who will give us the answer we want. Nothing personal.

The result, in the end, was that Powell got some money to conduct his Irrigation Survey for a couple of years—far less than he wanted, and needed—and then found himself frozen permanently out of the appropriations bills. The excuse was that he was moving too slowly, too deliberately; the truth was that he was forming opinions the West couldn’t bear to hear. There was inexhaustible land but far too little water, and what little water there was might, in many cases, be too expensive to move. Having said this, held to it, and suffered for it, Powell spent his last years in a kind of ignominy. Unable to participate in the settlement of the West, he retreated into the Bureau of