By Phil Roberts, 3-25-26
Realized that preparations for my talk at Rock Springs some years ago actually began a lifetime ago through encounters with John Wesley Powell and his work in various guises. I lived in places formed out of the various stages described in his Arid Lands report. Great Plains ranch in Niobrara County, rooted in homestead laws and access to water; town-life in irrigation canal farm town in Goshen County (Torrington); eventually, in another town based on curative water in Hot Springs County (Thermopolis).
Then to a classic canal company town, formed after the turn of the century by the Hanover Canal Company, utilizing federal and state subsidies in land, water and cash (Worland); and then to the ultimate such Western location where a private/public “partnership” had to be rescued by the federal government and where residents resented that fact for generations, even when I lived there in high school (Cody). Finally, in community college in the town named in the decade after John Wesley Powell’s death in belated recognition of his vision (Powell).
But my encounters with Powell and his 1878 report didn’t stop there. After the Marine Corps, I edited the then-weekly newspaper, the Lake Powell Chronicle, in a town built just two decades earlier and still wholly owned and managed by the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation (Page). So you can see that John Wesley Powell and I go way back.