-
7. Basin and Plateau
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
7. Basin and Plateau In late June 1936 Julian and Jane left the crowded streets and steamy heat of Washington dc for the open reaches of the West. As temperatures edged up in summer, the smothering weight of humid heat pressed down. The thick air settled indoors, where even the whirring fans could not stir it. Leaving behind high summer in the city and work that promised to pull Julian into political quicksand, they headed two thousand miles west, to the drylands of Utah and southern Idaho. Over the last six bruising months in the city, Steward had tried to find his way through the federal bureaucracy, a place of long hallways and closed doors that protected entrenched alliances. The air was heavy with politics—but he would always prefer the clear, dry air of science. He saw science and politics, like science and religion, as completely separate. Identifying far more as a government scientist than as a civil servant, he did not quickly make allies among the bureaucrats , especially at the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) where the doors had swung open but would soon slam shut. When the firm offer of a position with the Bureau of American Ethnology (bae) had reached him in Nevada a year earlier, he accepted it with mixed feelings. He looked forward to a research position with the Smithsonian Institution. He did not look forward to returning to Washington, where he had spent the first fifteen years of his life. Only the prospect of working in peace on his own research, having time to think and write about ecology and hunters, had drawn him back to the East. 186 part 3 But just months after he arrived, the bae assigned him to the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a temporary consultant in applied anthropology . He was to assist in applied research on American Indians. The work life that he had imagined—centering on basic research, “pure” research of his own choosing—suddenly shifted shape. He left the Smithsonian Institution and the bae, where his colleagues included two friends, both strong allies. The Bureau of Indian Affairs , which was part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, qualified as foreign turf in the federal bureaucracy. Worse, the bia director , John Collier, was promoting new policies that Steward thought misguided. He did not hide his views, and his new superiors did not hide their displeasure. As summer approached, Steward planned his escape from the East and from rising tensions with the bia. Arriving in the open spaces of the West always felt like a homecoming, despite Washington dc’s status as his birthplace and now his official place of residence. His own father had enjoyed a long and successful career in the federal service, at the U.S. Patent Office. In a sense Steward had entered the family business when he accepted a position with the federal government. But he did not feel at home in Washington, and in a matter of months he had fallen ill. Jane summarized her husband’s emotional state (“Disgusted with bia”) and his physical symptoms (“nausea, weakness, dizziness ”) in two short sentences of sympathy.1 The prospect of spending much of the summer on his own research, which had been interrupted by work demands and illness, lifted his spirits. He had an assignment in Utah for the bia—and generous funding . He saw the trip as an opportunity to continue the fieldwork that he had begun the previous year in California and Nevada. His ambitious plan called for extending his field research to Idaho and Utah, thus completing his study of an immense arid region: the Great Basin and fringes of the Columbia and Colorado plateaus. John Wesley Powell had explored a large part of that country, by [35.172.110.179] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:06 GMT) 187 Basin and Plateau river or on horseback, sixty years earlier. But no anthropologist in Steward’s time had taken on this region, or another of its size in the United States, for fieldwork. The Great Basin covered more than two hundred thousand square miles, and Steward had already seen much of it. Now he intended to see the rest, and more of the Columbia Plateau, which bordered it. He planned to drive to the Fort Hall Reservation in Idaho and to visit other reservations and other sites in Utah.2 “I should be able to get about three months of continuous field work in,” he told Kroeber...