Cheap Land

“Once an entire continent lay sunny and unknown with no names on its face, a vast Unity of ignorance. The fragmentation of Unity began with the first map and continued with every step of the European seizure, every increment to recorded knowledge… the record was one of a gradual dispelling of the mists, a gradual clarification of the roil of speculation, superstition, guesswork, wistfulness, fear, and misunderstanding.”

- "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian," Wallace Stegner, 1953

In "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian," historian and novelist Wallace Stegner foreshadows our present-day natural resources reckoning as a settler-era conflict between two ideologies: a racially motivated and highly romanticized westward expansion fueled by Manifest Destiny and epitomized in the character of Colorado’s first Territorial governor, William Gilpin; and the ecology-savvy realism in Major John Welsey Powell, a Grand Canyon and Colorado River expeditioner for whom Utah’s now-syphoned Lake Powell is named.

As the human-formed Lake Powell reservoir drips to a halt, revealing Native American cliff dwellings, areas of cultural significance and more, one wonders what Powell himself would say half a century after the damming of the Grand Canyon. While Gilpin and his partners privatized land grants and made boisterous claims advertising the near-limitless availability of Western water resources, Powell forewarned over-appropriation, inter-state battles, and irrecoverable depletions. His heed was virtually ignored.