It was the business of the United States Geological Survey, in the progressive era of the early twentieth century, to provide authoritative answers to public questions. Science reigned in those days, or so the scientists thought.
And yet, despite their best efforts, people kept sending in fool questions about water witching, or dowsing. The agency finally assigned one of its best and brightest, a young hydrologist named Arthur J. Ellis, to debunk the business of dowsing once and for all.
Ellis, born in Kansas in 1885, died of appendicitis in 1920, but not before establishing himself as a scientist’s scientist, writing dry-as-dust reports such as Ground Water in Musselshell and Golden Valley Counties Montana. Still — and most any serious researcher will confirm this — the best investigator can be captured by his subject.
That happened to Ellis when his agency superiors put him on the case of water witching. His lengthy report, dating from 1917 — his best-known published work, as it turns out — is The Divining Rod: A History of Water Witching. In the preface, the author’s supervisor, O. E. Meinzer, expresses satisfaction that Ellis is laying to rest this “curious superstition” responsible for “a large number of inquiries received each year by the United States Geological Survey.”
Not so fast there; did you even read the report, Mr. Meinzer? Because I have, and in my reading, young Ellis is having a grand time digging up the origins of dowsing, exposing the unscientific nature of the practice, but nevertheless acquiring a not-so-grudging affection for dowsers and their defenders.
“The origin of the divining rod is lost in antiquity,” we read, but
Ellis proceeds to track the emergence of dowsing among German miners searching for valuable ores in the 1600s. He recounts its introduction to Britain by German miners. When dowsing appeared in Cornwall during Elizabethan times, “Everywhere it aroused controversy,” Ellis says.
He goes on to detail the investigations of multiple authorities who have attempted to explain how dowsing works, or seems to. They largely concur with one authority of 1883 who concludes that “it is the students of psychology and biology, not of geology and hydroscopy and the science of ore deposits, who can profitably consider it.”
Then there is the work of an Irish investigator of 1891, however, who credits the action of the peach branch or other dowsing rod to “unconscious muscular action” that may, just might, be “due to a subconscious perceptive power commonly called clairvoyance.”
Thus, during the settler era on the Great Plains, water witching still had literate defenders along with countless practitioners abroad on the land.
You may know some water witches, as I do. I know dowsers who find ground water, but also can locate buried water lines or human bodies. I’ve even known doodlebuggers who could witch petroleum, although I have always wondered why none of them were rich. I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the science or lack of it.
So as a folklorist, I’m happy to welcome Mr. Ellis of the geological survey to the dark side, where we delight in human phenomena like water witching for the persistent curiosity and sheer enchantment of the enterprise. The older I get, the more I think maybe we don’t have to know everything.
