John Wesley Powell and the Mapping of the Colorado Plateau, 1869 –1879: Survey Science, Geographical Solutions, and the Economy of Environmental Values

In 1869, John Wesley Powell led an expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers through the Grand Canyon, the last “great blank space” on the map of the continental U.S. In the work of filling in the continental map, Powell and others in an emerging community of government scientists in Washington anticipated a new set of concerns over productivity, order, and the limits of natural resources—including land itself—in the arid lands of the West. This article examines the historical geographical processes through which Powell’s maps of an unexplored region gave way, in roughly a decade, to his maps of proper land use, epitomized by his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which is still conventionally recognized as a foundational piece in American environmental thought. Focusing on the work of the Powell Survey (1869 – 1879), as well as Powell’s lesser–known work as a special commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1873 – 1874), the article situates the maps, censuses, and expert advice produced during Powell’s early career as part of a wider traffic of knowledge linking Washington to the western territories. The article develops a broadly materialist geographical analysis to explore how the production of knowledge about people and place on the Colorado Plateau articulated with the westward geographical expansion of systems of value and signification. It thus raises questions about the relations between environmental values, on the one hand, and the scientific and political work of valuing environments, on the other.