MORE THAN A RIVER: USING NATURE FOR REFORM IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA A DISSERTATION IN History and English Presented to the Faculty of the University of Missouri-Kansas City in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by PATRICK D. DOBSON M.A., University of Wyoming, 1993 B.A. History and B.A. English-Creative Writing and Journalism, University of Missouri-Kansas City, 1991 Kansas City, Missouri 2013 ©2013 Patrick Dobson All Rights Reserved MORE THAN A RIVER: USING NATURE FOR REFORM IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA Patrick Dobson, Candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2013 ABSTRACT The decades around the turn of the twentieth century were a time of vast social and economic change. Industrialization altered the ways people related to each other and to their social, political, and cultural institutions. Some perceived that the rise of cities, changing middle- class values, and changing work patterns created vexing social convulsions—disorder, inefficiency, and class struggle. The work of John Gneisenau Neihardt, William Ellsworth Smythe, and Francis Griffith Newlands revealed how progressives looked to nature as a tool of social reform. Each of these men understood the American environment in multiple contexts. Nostalgia and romanticized Missouri River history activated themes of empire, race, and manhood in Neihardt’s work. He also voiced the concerns of river improvement advocates, who wanted more federal support for their cause. William Smythe became the chief propagandist for the western irrigation cause. He formulated resilient and emotionally powerful rhetoric that motivated irrigationists. Both the river improvement and irrigation causes, however, proved fractious and parochial. Newlands was a practical politician. In reclamation, he found a mechanism to bring irrigation and river control under coordinated government management for social order, business expansion, and reliable systems of investment and return. These social reform efforts, however, faltered and created new kinds of conflicts that justified and necessitated continued government intervention in society and business in the name of progress. iii APPROVAL PAGE The faculty listed below, appointed by the Dean of the School of Graduate Studies, have examined a dissertation titled “More than a River: Using Nature for Reform in the Progressive Era,” presented by Patrick Dismas Dobson, candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, and certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. Supervisory Committee John Herron, Ph.D., Committee Chair Department of History Stephen Dilks, Ph.D. Department of English Daniel Mahala, Ph.D. Department of English Dennis Merrill, Ph.D. Department of History James Sheppard, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy iv CONTENTS ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................ iii INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................. vi CHAPTER 1. John Gneisenau Neihardt and the Missouri River ........................................................1 2. Neihardt and Missouri River Improvement ................................................................37 3. William Elsworth Smythe and the Irrigated Paradise .................................................71 4. Francis Griffith Newlands and the West ...................................................................114 5. Newlands: from Irrigation to Rivers .........................................................................159 6. Working Together and Not Working Together ........................................................194 AFTERWORD ...........................................................................................................240 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................................242 VITA .....................................................................................................................................295 v INTRODUCTION “Others may praise what they like; But I, from the banks of the running Missouri, praise nothing in art or aught else, Till it has well inhaled the atmosphere of this river, also the western prairie scent, And exudes it all again.” –Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass In 1908, writer John Neihardt embarked on a journey down the Missouri River. A year later, he published a series of travel stories about his journey in Putnam’s. In the articles, he portrayed himself as a modern American man who set out on the river to find more of himself. These stories appeared in his 1910 book, The River and I. The book helped the young writer as he pursued his career. But the book was much more than a recounting of a personal journey. The River and I delivered a full-throated articulation of Progressive perceptions of the river, history, and nature’s utility for individual and social improvement. In the book’s pages, Neihardt demonstrated his belief that contact with the river gave men new energy and renewed faith in the American experiment. He promoted river development while also venerating the river and its environs. Neihardt believed contact with nature served racial and social hierarchies. The river also provided a mechanism for national economic and vi imperial expansion.1 Americans hewed the nation from wilderness, he believed, and shaped social priorities in the West that influenced all of American life. As Americans faced the closing of the frontier, progressives and writers, such as Neihardt, Caspar Whitney, and Theodore Roosevelt, actively sought new ways to continue individual and national development. For them, contact with nature, competitive sports, and adventurism at home and abroad tested men’s mettle. These activities remade men into good Americans who possessed good character and nationalistic vigor.2 Neihardt’s The River and I reflected Americans’ changing and multi-faceted attitudes toward the natural environment. In the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, American confidence in progress and faith in technology fueled a constellation of progressive ideas regarding nature and its uses. Activists, writers, and politicians advocated the benefits of human contact with and new uses of the natural environment. Agrarianist Liberty Hyde Bailey and educator Anna Botsford Comstock endorsed nature-study and back-to-nature movements for Americans mental, physical, and moral health. Progressive conservationist George Bird Grinnell helped establish and later headed the Audubon Society, which advocated nature education as a means of building good citizenship. From 1880 to 1911, Grinnell also edited the influential Forest and Stream magazine, an influential publication that promoted contact with nature and wildlife conservation. Writing stories for Grinnell’s Forest and Stream in 1901, ethnologist and historian James Willard Schultz utilized the Missouri River in tales that bolstered ideas of nature as central to American history and 1 John G. Neihardt, Patterns and Coincidences: A Sequel to All is But a Beginning (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979), 53-64; William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, Cronon, ed., (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 77-9. 2 Julianne Lutz Warren, “Alienation or Intimacy?: The Roles of Science in the Cultural Narratives of Gifford Pinchot and John Burroughs,” American Transcendental Quarterly 21 (December 2007): 254. vii culture. Schultz’ stories later appeared in book form. In Floating on the Missouri, he combined history, landscape, and Native American culture in framing his ideas of the physical environment’s importance to modern cultural life. 3 At the time, conservationists, social activists, and preservationists responded in different ways to a growing anxiety Americans felt as they watched bulldozer, shovel, and saw consume their natural resources and wild spaces.4 Conservationists such as head of the Forest Service Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt believed the survival of American business and democracy depended on stopping the rampant exploitation of natural resources. Scientific management, bureaucratic organization, and expert planning, they believed, replaced old, wasteful practices with new economic and social efficiencies. With confidence in their technological prowess, conservationists set about restructuring the environment for economic benefit.5 Around the same time, the development of the industrial city and the closing of the frontier moved people such as John Muir to promote new appreciation of the nation’s seemingly pristine spaces. With aesthetics and belief in succor and escape from the rigors of modern life that natural spaces gave people, Muir supported saving some resources and landscapes un- or only lightly touched, particularly in the West. The efforts on the part of 3 Kevin C. Armitage, The Nature-Study Movement: The Forgotten Popularizer of America’s Conservation Ethic (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009), 2, 21, 26-7; Mona Domosh, “Selling Civilization: Toward a Cultural Analysis of America's Economic Empire in the Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Centuries,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (December 2004): 453-67, esp. 455; John Rieger, “Pathbreaking Conservationist: George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938),” Forest History Today (Spring/Fall 2005): 16-9; James Willard Schultz,