Beyond the Hundredth Meridian

It is said to require twenty inches of annual rainfall to allow agriculture without irrigation. Within the United States, one can't or couldn't count on those twenty inches beyond roughly the 100th meridian of west longitude. Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of John Wesley Powell, who led the first expedition through the Grand Canyon, founded the Bureau of Ethnology, and for practical purposes was the first director of the Geological Survey. Powell's notions about reclamation, damming, irrigation, and dry land agriculture were prescient. Stegner, the son of an unsuccessful dry land farmer, used Powell's history to draw in many threads of western American history.

The first part of the book, through the running of the Grand Canyon, can be read as an adventure story. Powell lost an arm at Shiloh:

Losing one's right arm is a misfortune; to some it would be a disaster, to others an excuse. It affected Wes Powell's life about as much as a stone fallen into a swift stream affects the course of the river. With a velocity like his, he simply foamed over it. He did not even resign from the army, but returned after a leave and a stretch of recruiting duty, and served as an artillery officer with Grant, Sherman, and Thomas. On January 2, 1865, after tasting more battle at Port Gibson, Grand Gulf, Raymond, Jackson, Champion's Hill, Big [Black?] River, Vicksburg, the Meridian Raid, Nashville, and having risen to the command of the artillery of the 17th Army Corps, he resigned [for family reasons].

Powell was in the first party to make a documented ascent of Long's Peak in Colorado (though I understand there are reasons to think that local tribes had climbed it and trapped eagles there). He did quite a lot of climbing of canyon walls for a man with just one arm.

The meat of the book occurs after the expedition has come out of the canyon in late 1869, though. Powell's exertions in geology, ethnography, and attempting to rationalize the pattern of settlement in the dry western plains were remarkable. In the last he was unfortunate in bearing a message that almost nobody wanted to hear: that water was scarce in the West, and that a fair allocation of water required time and care. The belief that "rain follows the plow" had been briefly shaken by a succession of dry years that followed some unusually wet ones. But the pressure for allocation of land was hard to resist. Still, many of Powell's suggestions were followed long after he had retired and died. 

The West now seems to be facing droughts more severe than in Powell's day. The fires in California in particular suggest that some patterns of land use are just not safe. The forces pushing back against regulation of the use of federal land have increased since the 1970s. Though it was published nearly seventy years ago, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian remains topical.