'We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore. What falls there are, we know not; what rocks beset the channel, we know not; what walls rise over the river, we know not. Ah well! we may conjecture many things.'

John Wesley Powell dealt with controversy the same way he ran the rapids of the Colorado River. Straight on. Fearlessly. Sometimes, such boldness left Powell out on a ledge.

"I can see the roaring fall below, I go too far on the wall, and can neither advance nor retreat," Powell wrote of a stretch of Colorado River whitewater he named Separation Rapid. "I stand with one foot on a little projecting rock and cling with my hand fixed in a little crevice. Finding I am caught here, suspended 400 feet above the river, into which I must fall if my footing fails, I call for help."

So, too, did his unconventional political beliefs leave him dangling above the fracas over homesteading policies and practices of the late 1800s. Do not, Powell warned, send settlers into the arid West believing that 160 acres can sustain a family. It cannot.

The Homestead Act of 1862 is a cruel hoax, Powell said, shameful really. Handing a family the deed to 160 acres in the dry western territories could be - and for many, ultimately was - a death sentence.

Fortunately for his own family but also for history, Powell was rescued from the cliffs above Separation Rapid. His men wedged a boat oar into a crevice and literally pinned Powell against the rocks, then used another oar to create a step on which he could climb out of danger.

Congress and the conventional wisdom of his time did not treat Powell as kindly. Time and again, he fell into the political abyss - his warnings ignored, his ideas discounted. Implement Powell's plan for a region classified and ordered by watersheds, carefully planned and cautiously settled, and you'll stop the march of westward expansion, his critics warned. There will be chaos.

Still, Powell continued on. Down the Colorado. Into the halls of Congress.

"His energy was like a force of nature," said William deBuys, editor of a newly released collection of Powell's most significant writing and a speaker at this weekend's Public Land Law Conference at the University of Montana.

"In the same way that a flooding river can fill some people with exhilaration and joy, it can drive other people to panic and despair," deBuys said. "The same was true of Powell and his effect on people."

He was a Union hero of the Civil War, having lost an arm while signaling to his cannon tenders during the Battle of Shiloh. He was a naturalist, explorer, surveyor, geographer, geologist, linguist, ethnographer, anthropologist, philosopher, reformer and institution builder. And he exasperated quite a few people.

"Powell had a compulsion to analyze, classify and organize intellectually everything with which he came into contact," deBuys said. "He attempted to inventory and classify nearly everything he came to know. The watersheds of the American West. The occupations that the West might support. The native tribes. Languages spoken by the native tribes. No puzzle of existence was too broad to escape his interest, or too small."

From Powell came the first calls for interstate and international agreements on the allocation of water. He advised the creation of irrigation districts. He advised the collective, community-based administration of natural resources. He founded the U.S. Geological Survey and the federal Bureau of Ethnology.

"So much that Powell focused on consisted of questions related to the allocation and governance of natural resources in the West: land, water, timber," said deBuys, who lives in Santa Fe, N.M. "To a substantial degree, we in the West today still have not resolved many of those questions."

For years, in fact, deBuys kept bumping into Powell's copious journal articles and diaries in the course of his own work as a writer and student. As he became involved in land management and conservation issues, Powell's work took on added relevance.

"In all my lines of work, I have encountered John Wesley Powell," deBuys said. "Again and again and again, I would go to my files and pull out things he had written more than a century ago and consult them with regard to my own problems and controversies. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that John Wesley Powell's work should be in print and conveniently available, so folks could consult him easily and directly."

"John Wesley Powell thought about the West and its peculiarities longer and harder and more systematically than probably anyone in history," deBuys said. "He remains highly relevant."

Thus the new collection, entitled "Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell" and published by Island Press. Thus deBuys' discussion of new approaches to Powell's old model for western governance, planned for 11:10 a.m. Saturday at the Public Land Law Conference.

"I am not, by any means, advising that we simply go and adopt Powell's model for watershed commonwealths," deBuys said. "He was writing 112 years ago. But I do think that as we engage in the debate over Western resources today, it is pretty interesting to go back and see what Powell said and why he said it.

"Making that kind of investigation accessible is one of the reasons I put this book together."

For "Seeing Things Whole," deBuys pulled some of Powell's journal entries from his exploration of the Colorado River in 1869. "He was the last of this nation's great continental explorers," the author said. "His heroic attitude and commitment to the West led him to be the first of a new breed of public servant: part scientist, part social reformer, part institution builder."

Part adventurer.

"Powell did write some of the best Western adventure stories that have been produced," deBuys said. His chilling entry as he embarked with nine men and four wooden boats down the main stem of the Colorado is deBuys' favorite: "We have an unknown distance yet to run, an unknown river to explore ..."

The centerpiece of the collection, though, is a series of selections from Powell's 1878 "Report on the Lands of the Arid Region" and a number of follow-up magazine articles (published in Century Magazine in 1890) and addresses (most notably, to the 1889 Montana constitutional convention).

In those writings, Powell laid out his plan for organizing the Arid Lands - as he referred to the interior West - into watershed commonwealths governed by resident-citizens whose interlocking, but varying, interests created the checks and balances needed to ensure wise stewardship of the land and water.

Only in recent years have Westerners started to experiment with Powell's unconventional methods of governance via watershed compacts and collaborative decision-making.

In the words of former Missoula mayor Dan Kemmis, "As Westerners today become ever more aware of how fundamentally ungovernable our arbitrarily defined, box-shaped jurisdictions have become, and as we avidly form watershed councils, we follow Powell's long-ignored advice."

Powell, Kemmis said, "was all about water in the West." And his most enduring teaching: "The need to pay attention to the way the water flows and to shape Western policies and governing institutions accordingly."

Kemmis, now director of UM's O'Connor Center for the Rocky Mountain West and a presenter Friday at the Public Land Law Conference, considers Powell's address to the Montana constitutional convention a remarkable moment in Western history.

Said Powell: "It must be understood that if 35 million acres of land were redeemed by irrigation in this country, it means the utilization of all its waters - it means that no drop of water, which is the blood of agriculture, if you please, the life blood of agriculture - that no drop of water falling within the area of the state shall flow beyond the boundaries of the state. It means that all the waters falling within the state will be utilized upon its lands for agriculture ..."

And later: "I believe that the people of the drainage basin themselves are more interested than any other people can be in that particular drainage basin - that they are the only people who can properly administer that trust, and I believe that the people who live along every valley in this country should be the people who control three things besides the land on which they live: they should have control of the water; they should have control of the common or pasturage lands; and they should have control of the timber lands."

The assembled Montanans applauded.

Powell continued: "The simple question which I have then to present to you, which I think would be worthy of your consideration, and which early in the history of the state or even in the adoption of your state constitution you should consider is, what should be the primary unit of your government? And I think that the careful study of the matter will show you that the drainage basin is the natural unit and should be a county of this state."

There ought to be a requirement, said deBuys, that every newcomer to the West read John Wesley Powell. "As people try to figure out what is this new place that I have come to and how should I live in it, they need Powell. He tried to answer those questions 110 and 120 years ago."

"The key thing about Powell is that better than anyone of his time, he understood that the West was different from the eastern half of the continent and that the difference was primarily owed to the West's aridity," deBuys said. "Had one of his contemporaries asked, Powell would have explained that the West is drier, and the models of settlement and agriculture on which the civilization of the East was built won't work out here. Society needs to develop new institutions and new ways of looking at the land if it is to build a civilization in the West that will last."

"Of course," deBuys added, "we didn't pay enough attention to Powell. But there is still time."

"One of the things we all struggle with is understanding our place in history," he said. "We are all part of history; we stand on the shoulders of those who have come before. The controversies and struggles and debates of our day are lineal descendants of the debates of other days.

"Powell is like a giant boulder in the stream of our past. We've got to go around him one way or the other."

Editor William deBuys will read from "Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell" at 4 p.m. Saturday at Shakespeare and Co., 525 N. Higgins Ave. in Missoula.