Regions of government science: John Wesley Powell in Washington and the American west.

Best known as the first down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, John Wesley Powell built his extraordinary career as geographer, geologist, anthropologist, bureaucrat, and conservationist from his knowledge of the arid region of the American West. Yet as much as Powell's scientific work, and his prescriptions for land reform, were grounded in the western landscape, they were equally situated in the booming Gilded Age capital of Washington, DC, where a new community of government scientists was gelling as part of an increasingly centralized federal state.