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SYMPOSIUM PROCEEDINGS SEPTEMBER 1999 JOHN WESLEY POWELL * My name is John Wesley Powell. My friends call me Wes. My colleagues call me the Major. And the Ute and Paiute Indians, whose cultures I've studied for so many years, call me Kapurats, right arm missing. Such is the blunt honesty of the Indian mind. You probably remember me chiefly as the Civil War veteran and famous adventurer, but I wish you to think of me in other terms. I want to be remem- bered primarily as a scientist and also a government functionary, but mostly as a planner for the future of the American West. I will tell you very briefly about my life and my adventure. Then I would like to speak a bit about Indian policy in the American West, which is one of my favorite subjects, and in more detail water policy. But let me begin. I was born in upstate New York in 1834. My father was a hard scrabble itinerant Wesleyan Preacher, a drifter who went from one farm frontier to the next. I would have probably been absorbed into that same hard scrabble life had it not been for two things, the Civil War and my mentor, a man named George Crookham. In fact, we were living in Jackson, Ohio, when, in the public schools there, I was persecuted. My father was an abolitionist and 1, therefore, spoke as an abolitionist in the school yard and was frequently bullied and sometimes beaten by sympathizers with, what was called that peculiar institution, slavery. George Crookharn was an independent farmer of the district. He was a huge man, he weighed more than 300 pounds. He had a successful farm. Next to it, a laboratory in which he conducted scientific experiments and his own museum, which he shared o , "