Dan Flores

speaker

4,468 appearances 23 recordings 4 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard 18 Aug

Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.

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Gunfighters · Ep. 40: Becoming Natives of Place in the American West | The American West · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

It could be the Great Plains. voice-verified

It could be the Pacific coastline. voice-verified

We were just going to impose a grid on it and do this very methodical kind of very rational way of surveying and offering for sale Western landscapes. voice-verified

What Powell realized when he started going west in the 1860s, and particularly after he became the director of the United States Geological Survey and went west every year, was that the west was different from the country where grid survey had been pioneered. voice-verified

I mean, grid survey doesn't work particularly well in lots of the east either. voice-verified

But he concluded that in the west especially, voice-verified

It did not work at all because the most important item for settlement was water in an arid country. voice-verified

And the part of the world that he was interested in, and he wrote a government report in 1878 called The Lands of the Arid Region. voice-verified

he realized that you had to somehow conform your political ideals around the availability of water. voice-verified

I mean, what this ultimately leads to, and it's always kind of intrigued me that Powell was not necessarily a champion for it. voice-verified

It came from other minds, but it ultimately led to the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevadas and the Cascades being set aside as forest reserves and what became the National Forests. voice-verified

in order to protect the one place where the water fell. voice-verified

It fell as snow on the peaks, so we're gonna protect that. voice-verified

And that, of course, becomes the origin of the public lands in the West. voice-verified

But what Powell ultimately came up with was the idea of damming rivers that flowed out of the mountains. voice-verified

And as head of the irrigation survey, he basically did maps that set up most of our 20th century reservoirs in the West. voice-verified

But what he realized... voice-verified

that led him to the map we're talking about, which was submitted to Congress in 1890, was that rather than imposing this kind of rectangular state-size grid as territories and states, what we ought to really be doing in an arid landscape voice-verified

is managing the countryside based on where water was available. voice-verified

And so he put together this remarkable map. voice-verified

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