Narratives of water in the American West have long foregrounded the work of John Wesley Powell as emblematic of the explorers, scientists, and engineers who mapped and charted the region. In some ways, Powell’s name has become synonymous with western exploration and plans to settle the region. As I noted in another publication, “Unlike most American settlers, Powell believed, in essence, that the region should be defined by water and its natural movement and that people could move to be near water; not that water should be moved to supply people in far off cities and settlements.”[1] Powell’s ideas were not necessarily heeded, but his work influenced generations of future explorers, settlers, and scientists.

Despite Powell being a notable name in the annals of Western history, there is another Powell who deserves our attention when thinking about the lasting impact of the exploration of the American West, John Wesley Powell’s sister: Ellen Powell Thompson. Ellen Powell Thompson stands as a significant yet often understated figure in the intertwined histories of western exploration, environmental knowledge production, and women’s political reform in the late nineteenth century – and not just because one of the boats on Powell’s 1871 expedition was named after her (e.g. The Nellie Powell.)[2] Ellen Powell Thompson’s experiences on the Colorado River expedition, especially her botanical collections from the arid landscapes of Utah and Arizona, and her later leadership in the woman suffrage movement reveal the ways women participated in and helped to shape the scientific and political infrastructures of the United States during a period of territorial expansion and social transformation, often receiving little to no credit for their actions.

In the early 1870s, Thompson traveled west with her brother, Major John Wesley Powell, and her husband, Almon H. Thompson, during the surveys associated with Powell’s explorations of the Colorado River.[3] These expeditions through present-day Utah and Arizona are often remembered for their dramatic navigation of the Colorado river through the Grand Canyon and their vast contributions to geographic and geological knowledge.[4] Even though she spent little time on the river, Thompson’s presence as part of the expedition, however, highlights the gendered labor that sustained scientific exploration. Living for extended periods in tents, crossing arid plateaus, and enduring physical isolation and intense weather, and occasionally caring for her sister-in-law and her brother’s new baby — she shared fully in the hardships of expeditionary life. Her own diary and later accounts emphasized that she often spent months without encountering another woman, underscoring both the isolation of the western landscape and the exceptional nature of her participation.[5] She also loved the dramatic climate and region. After a snow covered their camp on the Kaibab Plateau she exclaimed, “I never felt more exultant in my life.”[6]

While traveling through the Colorado Plateau, Thompson did more than take in the sights, she also took part in systematic botanical collecting. Her work coincided with a period when American science increasingly relied on specimen collection to catalogue and classify unfamiliar environments. Thompson gathered plants she encountered along the river corridors and canyon rims, desert valleys, and isolated plateaus. Ellen and another expedition member carefully preserved over 300 specimens that were later sent east to Harvard for study. Most of those plants became part of the Asa Gray collection.[7] Several sources credit her with collecting varieties that had not previously been classified, situating her contributions within the expanding scientific knowledge of western flora.[8] Through this work, Thompson functioned as a critical intermediary between the landscapes of the American West and eastern scientific institutions, translating field experience into durable forms of knowledge. Her work has largely been overshadowed by that of her husband and brother.

Thompson’s botanical labor also reflects the broader role women played in nineteenth-century environmental science. Expeditions and institutions often excluded women from formal scientific positions, yet women like Ellen (Nellie) Powell Thompson contributed to her brother’s expedition as a plant collector, illustrator, and correspondents.[9] Her diary and plant collections remain understudied and historians have only recently started to study her work which can provide insight into both environmental conditions along the Colorado River and the methods used by women to document nature in the field.[10] These records, for instance, can help us better understand how environmental knowledge was produced through collaborative and often uncredited labor — and how that labor sparked an interest in expanding women’s roles in society. It’s also worth exploring how and where she came into contact with the Indigenous people of the region and what she might have learned from them.

Following her return from the West, Thompson leveraged her experiences in the West and her brother’s fame and became deeply engaged in the woman suffrage movement, particularly in Washington, D.C. Her transition from scientific inquiry to political activist was not a departure from public life but a continuation of her engagement with reform. She assumed leadership roles within the District of Columbia Woman Suffrage Association, eventually serving as committee chairman and representing the organization in congressional hearings and public forums.[11]

Thompson’s suffrage advocacy emphasized education, moral responsibility, and fair representation. She came to these arguments after working as a botanist and suffragist. She argued before Congress that women’s education and demonstrated civic engagement qualified them for the franchise and that their participation would strengthen democratic governance.[12] Her activism also extended to local governance, including efforts to secure women’s representation on school boards, where she emphasized the importance of women’s moral authority in public education, arguing that the over 700 women teaching in Washington D.C. schools (compared to 105 men) needed not just to be able to “confer with men” on key subjects, but deserved to be represented by a woman trustee.[13]

By the late nineteenth century, Thompson had become a nationally recognized suffrage leader. She was named a life member of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and played a central role in organizing national conventions in Washington, D.C.[14] Obituaries published after her death in 1911 reflected this dual legacy, commemorating both her contributions to western scientific exploration and her long commitment to women’s political equality.[15]

Ellen Powell Thompson’s life illustrates how environmental exploration and women’s reform were deeply interconnected. Her work along the Colorado River contributed to scientific understandings of western plants and the landscapes where they grew, while her later suffrage activism sought to reshape the political structures governing those same territories. Positioned between field science and civic reform, Thompson exemplifies how women navigated, and even helped to redefine, the boundaries of knowledge, citizenship, and power in nineteenth-century America.

Footnotes

1. Erika Bsumek, “Damming the American West,” April 20, 2022. On Powell’s ideas see: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/visionary-john-wesley-powell-had-plan-developing-west-nobody-listened-180969182/
2. 2. Melissa L. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon (New York: W. W. Norton, 2023), 80.
3. Frederick Samuel Dellenbaugh, A Canyon Voyage: The Narrative of the Second Powell Expedition down the Green–Colorado River from Wyoming, and the Explorations on Land, in the Years 1871 and 1872 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908), Project Gutenberg eBook, last modified December 9, 2022, 165, 166, 195, 216.
4. Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
5. Helen H. Tindall, “Ellen Powell Thompson,” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), Vol. XLII, No. 13, Saturday, April 1, 1911, p. 99.
6. Sevigny, Brave the Wild River, 80.
7. For the full plant list, see Plant List Collected by Ellen Powell Thompson, archive.org, https://archive.org/details/plantlist00thom/mode/1up; Beatrice Scheer Smith, “The 1872 Diary and Plant Collections of Ellen Powell Thompson,” Utah Historical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1994); Stephen Vandiver Jones, “Journal of Stephen Vandiver Jones,” in The Exploration of the Colorado River and the High Plateaus of Utah by the Second Powell Expedition of 1871–1872, ed. Herbert E. Gregory (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1949), 117; Randy Spray, “The Practice of Small Expeditions in American Botany: Three Case Studies of Women Explorers on the Colorado Plateau” (M.A. thesis, University of Wyoming, 2022), 43.
8. Stanley L. Welsh, “Utah Plant Types, Historical Perspective 1840 to 1981: Annotated List,” Great Basin Naturalist, 42, no. 2 (1982): 133.
9. Helen H. Tindall, “Ellen Powell Thompson,” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), Vol. XLII, No. 13, Saturday, April 1, 1911, p. 99.
10. Smith, “The 1872 Diary and Plant Collections of Ellen Powell Thompson,” and “Spray, “The Practice of Small Expeditions in American Botany,”
11. Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (Indianapolis: Hollenbeck Press, 1902), 568.
12. U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Woman Suffrage. Report of Hearing Before the Committee on Woman Suffrage, January 28, 1896. Senate Doc. 157, 54th Cong., 1st sess. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1896. https://lewissuffragecollection.omeka.net/items/show/1221
13. “A Woman School Trustee: Recognition and Representation on the School Board,” Washington Post, May 9, 1893. https://www.proquest.com/hnpwashingtonpost/docview/139035016/680D2282050740DAPQ/1?accountid=7118&sourcetype=Newspapers (accessed December 17, 2025).
14. Woman’s Journal, 37, no. 9 (March 3, 1906): 40.
15. Obituary, Woman’s Journal, April 1, 1911.

Erika Bsumek is the Ellen Clark Temple Chair in Women's History at the University of Texas at Austin. She has written on Native American history, environmental history/studies, the history of the built environment, and the history of the U.S. West. She is the author of the award-winning, Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1848-1960 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and the co-editor of a collection of essays on global environmental history titled Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2013). Her latest book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (University of Texas Press, 2023) explores the social and environmental history of the area surrounding Glen Canyon on the Utah/Arizona border from the 1840s to the present and was awarded with the Best Indigenous Studies Award from the MHA and picked as a 2024 Southwest Book of the Year by Pima County Public Library.