Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The railroad land grants were a gift the size of California plus the major part of Montana. The deeded lands usually paralleled the railroad’s track; reproduced on maps, they resembled jet streams flowing in reverse. Anyone who bought land from the railroads would be utterly dependent on them for getting his harvests to eastern markets and receiving supplies in return. When the time came to set rates, the railroads could charge pretty much what they pleased. But first they had to seduce the settlers who were still content to battle stumps in Kentucky or endure peonage in Germany and Ireland. J. J. Hill, the founder of the Great Northern, said as much himself. “You can lay track through the Garden of Eden,” he told an acquaintance. “But why bother if the only inhabitants are Adam and Eve?” The upswing in precipitation, and the crypto-science that explained it, were exactly what was needed. From there it became a job for advertising.

The Indians accepted things as they were; that is why they were mostly nomadic, wandering toward greener grass and fuller herds and flowing water. If whites were going to insist on living there—fixed, settled, mortgaged, fenced—the best they could do with the land was graze it. But in those three states, an economical grazing unit was, say, twenty-five hundred to five thousand acres, depending on the circumstances. To amass that much land you had to cheat—on a magnificent scale. If you didn’t, you had to overgraze the land and ruin it, and many millions of acres were damaged or ruined in exactly this way. Many settlers were tasting property ownership for the first time in their lives, and all they had in common was greed.

Then there was the Swamplands Act, or Swamp and Overflow Act—a Desert Lands Act of the bulrushes. If there was federal land that overflowed enough so that you could traverse it at times in a flat-bottomed boat, and you promised to reclaim it (which is to say, dike and drain it), it was yours. Henry Miller, a mythical figure in the history of California land fraud, acquired a large part of his 1,090,000-acre empire under this act. According to legend, he bought himself a boat, hired some witnesses, and put the boat and witnesses over county-size tracts near the San Joaquin River, where it rains, on the average, about eight or nine inches a year. The land became his. The sanitized version of the story, the one told by Miller’s descendants, has him benefiting more from luck than from ruse. During the winter of 1861 and 1862, most of California got three times its normal precipitation, and the usually semiarid Central Valley became a shallow sea the size of Lake Ontario. But the only difference in this version is that Miller didn’t need a wagon for his boat; he still had no business acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of the public domain, yet he managed it with ease.

“To clear, to till, and to transform the vast uninhabited continent which is his domain, the American requires the daily support of an energetic passion; that passion can only be the love of wealth; the passion for wealth is therefore not reprobated in America, and, provided it does not go beyond the bounds assigned to it for public security, it is held in honor.”

A pseudoscientific dogma, Social Darwinism, had been invented to give predatory behavior a good name. Darwin could not be taught in the schools; but a perversion of Darwin could be practiced in real life.

Henry Adams wrote, “the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery . . . the whole mechanical consolidation of force . . . ruthlessly . . . created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.”

What is remarkable, a hundred years later, is how little has changed. The disaster that Powell predicted—a catastrophic return to a cycle of drought—did indeed occur, not once but twice: in the late 1800s and again in the 1930s. When that happened, Powell’s ideas—at least his insistence that a federal irrigation program was the only salvation of the arid West—were embraced, tentatively at first, then more passionately, then with a kind of desperate insistence. The result was a half-century rampage of dam-building and irrigation development which, in all probability, went far beyond anything Powell would have liked.

In 1848, the population of San Francisco was eight hundred; three years later, thirty-five thousand people lived there. In 1853, the population went past fifty thousand and San Francisco became one of the twenty largest cities in the United States. By 1869, San Francisco possessed one of the busiest ports in the world, a huge fishing fleet, and the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. It teemed with mansions, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and whorehouses. In finance it was the rival of New York, in culture the rival of Boston; in spirit it had no competitor.

“He is a damned cuss who doesn’t seem to feel well unless he is in a row with someone,”

In the West, drought tends to come in cycles of about twenty years, and the next drought arrived on schedule. The years 1919 and 1920 were a premonition; rainfall was slightly below average. It rose back to average—a measly fourteen inches—in 1921 and went slightly over that in 1922. Then it crashed. Ten inches in 1923; six inches in 1924; seven inches in 1925. In Florida, a seven-inch rainstorm may occur two or three times a year, but Los Angeles was trying to look like Florida, and grow even faster, on a fifth of its precipitation, and when the drought struck it kept going on a tenth. Mulholland had expected 350,000 people by 1925, but had 1.2 million on his hands instead. The city was growing fifteen times faster than Denver, eleven times faster than New York. And though the city at its core had become a metropolis, Los Angeles County led the nation in the value of its agricultural output. All of this agriculture depended on irrigation, which, together with the phenomenal urban growth, depended on a river draining Mount Whitney two hundred miles away.