Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

millions settled in regions where nature, left alone, would have countenanced thousands at best;

Only one desert civilization, out of dozens that grew up in antiquity, has survived uninterrupted into modern times. And Egypt’s approach to irrigation was fundamentally different from all the rest.

In May of 1957, a very distinguished Texas historian, Walter Prescott Webb, wrote an article for Harper’s entitled “The American West, Perpetual Mirage,” in which he called the West “a semidesert with a desert heart” and said it had too dark a soul to be truly converted.

In 1885, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad linked Los Angeles directly with Kansas City, precipitating a fare war with the Southern Pacific. Within a year, the cost of passage from Chicago had dropped from $100 to $25. During brief periods of mad competition, you could cross two-thirds of the continent for a dollar. If you were asthmatic, tubercular, arthritic, restless, ambitious, or lazy—categories that pretty well accounted for Los Angeles’ first flood of arrivals—the fares were too cheap to pass up. Out came Dakota farmers who despaired at the meager profits they made growing wheat. You could grow oranges.

California is a dream.