Sam Adams

Who was Sam Adams?

Sam Adams, who periodically referred to himself as "Captain", was an early explorer of the American west. His survey of the Colorado River was conducted simultaneously to John Wesley Powell's more extensive survey. He struggled for over ten years to impose his view of the Colorado River - that it was a mineral paradise shot through with veins of gold and silver - but ultimately failed. In 1878, Senator Francis Cockrell rejected a resolution that would have compensated Adams for his spontaneous work.

Adams' survey, while wildly off the mark and generally recognized as unscientific, was a notable moment in the exploration of the West. In the words of Powell biographer Wallace Stegner, it was a "symptom. In his resistance to fact and logic he had many allies who were neither so foolish in their folly nor so witless in their rascality as he, but whose justification and platform was the same incorrigible insistence upon a West that did not exist."