On January 17, 1890, John Wesley Powell strode into a Senate committee room in Washington, D.C., to testify. He was hard to miss, one contemporary comparing him to a sturdy oak, gnarled and seamed ...

On January 17, 1890, the explorer and scientist John Wesley Powell testified to the U.S. Senate about the development of the western United States, and how water scarcity across that vast ...

By 1890 Kansas and Nebraska had over a million ... insufficient rainfall to sustain agriculture. That voice was John Wesley Powell, a hero of the Civil War who lost an arm fighting the rebels ...

Nearly a century and a half after explorer John Wesley Powell zeroed in on the ... but the boundary it represents is more gradual. In 1890, Powell wrote, "Passing from east to west across this ...