John Wesley Powell
![Powell as he appears at the [[National Portrait Gallery (United States)|National Portrait Gallery]] in Washington, D.C.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/John_Wesley_Powell.jpg)
Powell was appointed by US President James A. Garfield to serve as the second director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881–1894) and proposed, for development of the arid West, policies that were prescient for his accurate evaluation of conditions. Two years prior to his service as director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Major Powell had become the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution where he supported linguistic and sociological research and publications. Provided by Wikipedia