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Well, when I got to the great basin, I took photographs of the Numa people in their native costume doing what they do in their native way and the Congressmen were not impressed. They didn't find these to be interesting Indians. So, and I feel ashamed of this but if you've ever applied for government grants you know how this can come about, so eventually I took Sioux Indian and Chey- enne Indian costumes into the great basin and put them on Paiute and Ute peoples, took those photo- graphs, those copy sets back to Congress, Congress then dutifully funded the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, and subsequent anthropologists have wondered why Ute peoples were wearing headdresses from the Sioux and Mandan and Cheyenne cultures. It was done because we are, on the whole, an irrational people and we live in myths and I was culpable, because I loved the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology, of fudging this and I'm ashamed of it but I thought I should confess it. I'll say this to you, I know you have important work ahead of you and, as Mr. Jefferson always liked to say, "The earth belongs to the living not the dead." But I'll say this, if you think there is enough water in the American West to do all the things you have in mind, you are sorely mistaken and you are heaping up a legacy of conflict and failure. cApenvord CLAY JENKINSON: I think John Wesley Powell is one of the most extraordinary men of the 19th Century. This was only a little tiny taste of him. He's even more interesting as an essayist, from those last years, than he is as a water planner and as an enlight- ened assimilationist. Now, I don't agree with all that I've been saying here and I don't think we any longer see his Indian policies as necessarily enlightened ones, but compared to the reverse, compared to George Custer, as an exemplar of white civilization, they're positively benevolent. If you're interested, there are good books on the subject, Wallace Stegner's dassic, still exists Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, which is the finest text on the life and work of John Wesley Powell. Daras book, . Powell of the Colorado, a still standard biography, and Donald Wooster, the man who wrote Rivers of Empire, is now finishing a biography of John Wesley Powell, which should be out in the next year or so. We've had a few chances in the course of our history to do things right. Jefferson gave us one chance and we ducked it. Powell gave us a second chance and we ducked that one too. It seems to me that this is a very odd phenomenon of a people, the people of the enlightenment, continuously brought up against this moment when they can provide a sober, rational, reasonable approach to their future or one that just lets it happen, constantly shrugs its shoulders and lets it happen. It's happening now. It's not necessarily about water now in the West, it's more about development questions, but they, of course, have deep water connections. I find it perplexing. When I first started to study Powell, I thought of him as the greatest river rat in American history. Then I realized that this man was a visionary and, for being a visionary, he was essentially marginalized and destroyed by the culture of Wash- ington. So this great national debate continues. I appreciate your giving me the chance to bring the genius of this largely forgotten man to your proceed~ mgs. REFLECTIONS OFAN ADVENTURER ANDA VISIONARY SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 o