biography
| name: |
Powell, John Wesley
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1834–1902)
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| biography:
| Geologist and geographer, born in Mount Morris, New York, USA. Moving throughout the Midwestern states with his family, he attended Oberlin College, where he realized his interest was in geology. He volunteered for the Union army when the Civil War broke out, and had his right arm amputated at the elbow after being wounded at Shiloh. Taking up a career as a professor of geology, in 1867 he began the first of many field trips with his students into the Rocky Mountain region. Then in 1869 he led a professional expedition, financed by the US government, that climaxed with a 900 mi journey down the Colorado R and through the Grand Canyon. He made other government-sponsored expeditions and became director of the US Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region (1875). In 1879 this merged with the US Geological Survey and he became its second director (1881–94). In his seminal work, Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States (1878), he set forth a land classification programme and a survey of irrigation potential, and he was one of the first to call for the federal government to play a role in developing the Western territories. In his trips he had also become a close student of the Native Americans and was the first to attempt to classify their languages. In 1897 he became the first director of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, which he headed until his death. He published on a wide variety of subjects, and beyond that promoted publications and projects which advanced both scientific knowledge and popular awareness of the pre-Columbian American West. |
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