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POWELL: No one supported my ideas. My friends did, Clarence King and Henry Adams and other enlightened men, and some local people did. Certainly, the Mormons understood this principle in a way that gentiles never did, that if you have a scarce amount of water in a dry place and you intend to create a community, that you cannot allow typical riparian doctrines of prior appropriation and an intense individualism to prevail in that district. Now why does Mormonism work in this way? Mormonism works in this way because it's a close knit theocracy which has survived decades of persecution. That would not be the favorable model for creating watershed commonwealths. With our separation of church and state doctrines, theocracy is always in itself frightening and constitutionally troubling. So that's not the answer. Another answer would be the Pueblo tradition. But the Pueblos lived so lightly on the land and they had no industrial culture. In a sense, that's a compari- son that breaks down automatically. So we need to find one that works for us, an industrial people, highly individualistic, governed by a spirit of secular- ism and tolerance rather than theocracy. But I think we can learn from all of those models and I think we should learn what we can. I was surrounded all my life, at the Cosmos Club in Washington and at the National Geographic Society and elsewhere, by men who agreed, at least in principle, in my views. They agreed with my views but the momentum of Mr. Jefferson's rectangular survey grid system and the momentum of our habits about agriculture were so great that it led inexorably to the Newlands Project. I was in favor of the Newlands legislation within limits but I, again raised my concern about government gigantism and government caprice in this way. I think it would be in our interests to think of the West beyond the lOOth meridian as fundamentally different from all other agricultural regions of this country. QUESTION FROM THE AUDIENCE: I was curious the statement that every square inch of water be utilized. How do you protect those few square inches required for the environment? POWELL: This is an interesting question. Let me say as the water czar of the United States during this period, I actually cited 200 potential dam sites in the American West. I went through our maps and examined in the field these places and cited 200 potential dam sites, including one where your Hoover Dam is and one that would have been basically where Glen Canyon Dam is. Now, of course, the magnitude of these projects would have been different in the late 19th Century from what they could be in the 20th Century. You understand the engineering differences, I'm sure. But, even though I loved the Colorado River and its canyons, even though I named Glen Canyon and considered it the most beautiful place on earth that I had ever seen, I want it dammed, dammed immedi- ately and I want that water brought up onto the tables to irrigate land. The highest use of human civilization is family agriculture. We cannot be sentimental about the West. We cannot be sentimental about Glen Canyon anymore than we can be sentimental about the Paiute Indians. If it were not for the press of European immigrants and the press of people who had been unsatisfied by the economies of Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio, perhaps we could talk about environmental sanctity. But that is not a 19th Century way of viewing the world and I was not even slightly taken by that proposition. Whether I would have changed later in the course of my lifetime, I'm not sure, but I looked upon my adventure on the Colo- rado River as, in a sense, the last pristine adventure on that river and the beginning of its domesti- canon. I looked upon the Indians that I studied so assiduously, and I was much more known as an ethnologist than I was as a geologist in my time. I studied their cultures, I developed revolutionary classification systems for their languages, I took down more Indian languages than any other figure of the 19th Century. My ethnology is still considered to be good. But I saw it as reclamation work, I saw it as capturing these people in the last days of their pre-historic existence. I lamented this to a certain degree but I have a stage theory of culture. I don't mean any moralism by this, but let me quickly tell you what it is. I think culture works in a four stage ascent; savagery, barbarism, civilization and republic. Now, again, I don't judge people at any level of this hierarchy, but the lowest stage of culture is savagery. We saw it in the bigger Indians of the great basin. Then we move to barbarism, there are plenty of white barbarians as there are plenty of Indian barbarians. Again, these are no moral categories but I hope descriptive ones. Then REFLECTIONS OF AN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY adventure on the I looked upon my Colorado River as, in a sense, the last on that river and pristine adventure the beginning of its domestication. SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 o