Post-Treaty, an eastern influx brought new metrics: the PLSS (Public Land Survey System) land grid, major diversion of streams, building of reservoirs, and construction of vast canal systems meant to store and utilize water at the scale of the dreams of man.
In Costilla County, the charge was led in part by Gilpin, who with a team of investors named the Freehold Land and Emigration Company took on title of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant for $15,000 in 1864.
Like most major figures of the West, Gilpin was entrenched. He and his brother served concurrent Presidents (Gilpin was appointed by Andrew Jackson at West Point; his brother was attorney general under Van Buren). Gilpin slept in the White House throughout March of 1861, Wallace Stegner writes, to protect President Lincoln as he took office. By the end of March, Lincoln appointed Gilpin as first territorial governor of Colorado, and Gilpin traveled west to take his post.
But Lincoln fired Gilpin within the year after soldiers organized for the Union Army without federal consent to support the Battle of Glorietta Pass surfaced in Washington to demand the wages and reimbursements Gilpin had promised them.
Gilpin was not deterred. Having learned the lay of the land, he dove headfirst into real estate and prospecting, purchasing the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in 1864 along with other land grants and large land claims. Neither Stegner nor history recall Gilpin’s regard of Western resource allocation with grace, and his paper trail is seasoned with fraud: water, land, trees, minerals, metals, diamonds. Gilpin took advantage of the slow news cycle and relative isolation of his land holdings to maintain the core of his marketing: cheap land, endless water. An eastern Quaker turned political orator from Missouri, Gilpin embraced semantics and relied heavily on the fact that first-person accounts from the ground he was hocking to immigrants were few and far between.
For every Edison, there is a Tesla. While Gilpin filled in the blanks toward a personal end, Major Powell stressed discovery and unity in an unknown landscape. Comparatively, Powell’s ethos of western water resources was studied, tempered, and skeptical: a glass-is-already-half-empty approach. “Instead of preaching unlimited supply and unrestrained exploitation,” Stegner writes, Powell “preach[ed] conservation of an already partly gutted continent and planning for the development of what remained.” According to Stegner, Powell endeavored to study, classify, and document Native American oral histories and languages before they were “obliterated by the tide of Gilpin’s settlers.”
The 100th meridian, an oft-acknowledged longitudinal land boundary, came to define post-Treaty lands as a natural division of precipitation between the fertile, afore-settled east and the dry, barren western landscape. Gilpin and his associates worked hard to create a counter-narrative to the desert sage brush, circulating lofty brochures and advertisements aimed at enticing European settlers. Powell, meanwhile, spent his career attempting to unravel impractical claims about the ease and everlastingness of water in the desert west.