Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Salt Lake City, Orem, Draper, Provo: we were over most of the population of Utah. That thin avenue of civilization pressed against the Wasatches, intimidated by a fierce desert on three sides, was a poignant sight. More startling than its existence was the fact that it had been there only 134 years, since Brigham Young led his band of social outcasts to the old bed of a drying desert sea and proclaimed, “This is the place!” This was the place? Someone in that first group must have felt that Young had become unhinged by two thousand horribly arduous miles. Nonetheless, within hours of ending their ordeal, the Mormons were digging shovels into the earth beside the streams draining the Wasatch Range, leading canals into the surrounding desert which they would convert to fields that would nourish them. Without realizing it, they were laying the foundation of the most ambitious desert civilization the world has seen. In the New World, Indians had dabbled with irrigation, and the Spanish had improved their techniques, but the Mormons attacked the desert full-bore, flooded it, subverted its dreadful indifference—moralized it—until they had made a Mesopotamia in America between the valleys of the Green River and the middle Snake. Fifty-six years after the first earth was turned beside City Creek, the Mormons had six million acres under full or partial irrigation in several states. In that year—1902—the United States government launched its own irrigation program, based on Mormon e...

If you begin at the Pacific rim and move inland, you will find large cities, many towns, and prosperous-looking farms until you cross the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades, which block the seasonal weather fronts moving in from the Pacific and wring out their moisture in snows and drenching rains. On the east side of the Sierra-Cascade crest, moisture drops immediately—from as much as 150 inches of precipitation on the western slope to as little as four inches on the eastern—and it doesn’t increase much, except at higher elevations, until you have crossed the hundredth meridian, which bisects the Dakotas and Nebraska and Kansas down to Abilene, Texas, and divides the country into its two most significant halves—the one receiving at least twenty inches of precipitation a year, the other generally receiving less. Any place with less than twenty inches of rainfall is hostile terrain to a farmer depending solely on the sky, and a place that receives seven inches or less—as Phoenix, El Paso, and Reno do—is arguably no place to inhabit at all. Everything depends on the manipulation of water—on capturing it behind dams, storing it, and rerouting it in concrete rivers over distances of hundreds of miles.

One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an uneasy truce with it. New England was completely forested in 1620 and nearly deforested 150 years later; Arkansas saw nine million acres of marsh and swamp forest converted to farms. Through such Promethean effort, the eastern half of the continent was radically made over, for better or worse. The West never can be. The only way to make the region over is to irrigate it. But there is too little water to begin with, and water in rivers is phenomenally expensive to move. And even if you succeeded in moving every drop, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. John Wesley Powell, the first person who clearly understood this, figured that if you evenly distributed all the surface water flowing between the Columbia River and the Gulf of Mexico, you would still have a desert almost indistinguishable from the one that is there today. Powell failed to appreciate the vast amount of water sitting in underground aquifers, a legacy of the Ice Ages and their glacial melt, but even this water, which has turned the western plains and large portions of California and Arizona green, will be mostly gone within a hundred years—a resource squandered as quickly as oil.

The Colorado River rises high in the Rockies, a trickle of frigid snowmelt bubbling down the west face of Longs Peak, and begins its fifteen-hundred-mile, twelve-thousand-foot descent to the Gulf of California. Up there, amid mountain fastnesses, its waters are sweet. The river swells quickly, taking in the runoff of most of western Colorado, and before long becomes a substantial torrent churning violently through red canyons down the long west slope of the range. Not far from Utah, at the threshold of the Great Basin, the rapids die into riffles and the Colorado River becomes, for a stretch of forty miles, calm and sedate. It has entered the Grand Valley, a small oasis of orchards and cows looking utterly out of place in a landscape where it appears to have rained once, about half a million years ago. The oasis is man-made and depends entirely on the river. Canals divert a good share of the flow and spread it over fields, and when the water percolates through the soil and returns to the river it passes through thick deposits of mineral salts, a common phenomenon in the West. As the water leaves the river, its salinity content is around two hundred parts per million; when it returns, the salinity content is sixty-five hundred parts per million. The Colorado takes in the Gunnison River, whose waters have also filtered repeatedly through irrigated, saline earth, and disappears into the canyonlands of Utah. Near the northernmost tentacle of Lake Powell, where the river backs ...

In 1963, the Bureau closed the gates of Glen Canyon Dam. As Lake Powell filled, the flow of fresh water below it was greatly reduced. At the same time, the Welton-Mohawk drain was pouring water with a salinity content of sixty-three hundred parts per million directly into the Colorado. The salinity of the river—what was left of it—soared to fifteen hundred parts per million at the Mexican border. The most important agricultural region in all of Mexico lies right below the border, utterly dependent on the Colorado River; we were giving the farmers slow liquid death to pour over their fields. The Mexicans complained bitterly, to no avail. By treaty, we had promised them a million and a half acre-feet of water. But we hadn’t promised them usable water. By 1973, Mexico was in a state of apoplexy. The ruin of its irrigated agricultural lands along the lower Colorado was the biggest issue in the campaign of presidential candidate Luis Echeverría, who was elected by a wide margin in that year. Still, the United States continued to do nothing. But 1973 also saw the arrival of OPEC. Some new geologic soundings in the Bay of Campeche indicated that Mexico might soon become one of the greatest oil-exporting nations in the world. When Echeverría threatened to drag the United States before the World Court at The Hague, Richard Nixon sent his negotiators down to work out a salinity-control treaty. It was signed within a few months.

By the late 1970s, there were 1,251 major reservoirs in California, and every significant river—save one—had been dammed at least once. The Stanislaus River is dammed fourteen times on its short run to the sea. California has some of the biggest reservoirs in the country; its rivers, seasonally swollen by the huge Sierra snowpack, carry ten times the runoff of Colorado’s. And yet all of those rivers and reservoirs satisfy only 60 percent of the demand. The rest of the water comes from under the ground. The rivers are infinitely renewable, at least until the reservoirs silt up or the climate changes. But a lot of the water being pumped out of the ground is as nonrenewable as oil. Early in the century, before the federal government got into the business of building dams, most of the water used for irrigation in California was groundwater. The farmers in the Central Valley (which comprises both the Sacramento and the San Joaquin) pumped it out so relentlessly that by the 1930s the state’s biggest industry was threatened with collapse. The growers, by then, had such a stranglehold on the legislature that they convinced it, in the depths of the Depression, to authorize a huge water project—by far the largest in the world—to rescue them from their own greed. When the bonds to finance the project could not be sold, Franklin Delano Roosevelt picked up the unfinished task. Today, the Central Valley Project is still the most mind-boggling public works project on five continents, and...

The vanishing groundwater in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Nebraska is all part of the Ogallala aquifer, which holds two distinctions: one of being the largest discrete aquifer in the world, the other of being the fastest-disappearing aquifer in the world. The rate of withdrawal over natural replenishment is now roughly equivalent to the flow of the Colorado River. This was the region called the Dust Bowl, the one devastated by the Great Drought; that was back before anyone knew there was so much water underfoot, and before the invention of the centrifugal pump. The prospect that a region so plagued by catastrophe could become rich and fertile was far too tantalizing to resist; the more irrigation, everyone thought, the better. The states knew the groundwater couldn’t last forever (even if the farmers thought it would), so, like the Saudis with their oil, they had to decide how long to make it last. A reasonable period, they decided, was twenty-five to fifty years. “What are you going to do with all that water?” asks Felix Sparks, the former head of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. “Are you just going to leave it in the ground?” Not necessarily, one could reply, but fifty years or a little longer is an awfully short period in which to exhaust the providence of half a million years, to consume as much nonrenewable water as there is in Lake Huron.

During the first and only term of his presidency, Jimmy Carter decided that the age of water projects had come to a deserved end. As a result, he drafted a “hit list” on which were a couple of dozen big dams and irrigation projects, east and west, which he vowed not to fund. Carter was merely stunned by the reaction from the East; he was blown over backward by the reaction from the West. Of about two hundred western members of Congress, there weren’t more than a dozen who dared to support him. One of the projects would return five cents in economic benefits for every taxpayer dollar invested; one offered irrigation farmers subsidies worth more than $1 million each; another, a huge dam on a middling California river, would cost more than Hoover, Shasta, Glen Canyon, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee combined. But Carter’s hit list had as much to do with his one-term presidency as Iran.

The American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. In 1539, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a nobleman who had married rich and been appointed governor of Guadalajara by the Spanish king, set out on horseback from Mexico with a couple of hundred men, driving into the uncharted north. Coronado was a far kinder conquistador than his ruthless contemporaries Pizarro and De Soto, but he was equally obsessed with gold. His objective was a place called Cibola, seven cities where, legend had it, houses and streets were veneered with gold and silver. All he found, somewhere in northwestern Arizona, were some savage people living in earthen hovels, perhaps descendants of the great Hohokam culture, which had thrived in central Arizona until about 1400, when it mysteriously disappeared. Crestfallen, but afraid of disgracing the Spanish crown, Coronado pushed on. Tusayan, Cicuye, Tiguex, Quivira—no gold. His fruitless expedition took him from the baking desert canyons of south-central Arizona up to the cool ponderosa highlands of the Mogollon Rim, then down again into the vast, flat, treeless plains of West Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas. He returned, miraculously, a couple of years later, having lost half his men and some of his sanity when his horse stepped on his skull as he was exercising it.

The greatest irony of Coronado’s adventure was that he must have passed within a few miles of the gold and silver lodes at Tombstone and Tubac, Arizona. A few of his party, on a side excursion, discovered the Grand Canyon, but they were unimpressed by its beauty, and guessed the width of the Colorado River far below them at eight feet or so. The Rio Grande, which would later sustain the only appreciable Spanish settlements outside of California, didn’t impress them, either. When he returned to Guadalajara, Coronado was put on trial for inept leadership, which, though an utterly unfounded charge, was enough to discourage would-be successors who might have discovered the precious metals that would have induced Spain to lay a far stronger claim on the New World. His expedition also lost a few horses, which found their way into the hands of the native Americans. The two dominant tribes of the Southwest, the Apache and Comanche, soon evolved into the best horsemen who ever lived, and their ferocity toward excursionists made them formidable adversaries of the Spaniards who tried to settle the region later. The Spanish did make a more than desultory try at establishing a civilization in California, which was more to their liking than the remainder of the West. (And, in fact, the huge California land grants doled out by the king established a pattern of giant fiefdoms that persists there to this day.) But they never found gold in California, so the territory didn’t seem worth a fi...

In 1803, the United States of America consisted of sixteen states along the Atlantic Seaboard, three-quarters of whose area was still untrammeled wilderness, and a vast unmapped tract across the Appalachian Mountains—which would metamorphose, more quickly than anyone might have expected, into the likes of Cleveland and Detroit. In that same year, the new First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, sat in Paris wrestling with a question: what to conquer? France had recently acquired a million square miles of terrain in North America from Spain—Spain having gotten it originally from France—and the prospect of a huge colonial empire in the New World was tempting. On the other hand, here was Europe—settled, tamed, productive—waiting for civilized dominion by the French. For what would history remember him better—the conquest of Russia or the conquest of buffalo? The new President of the United States was Thomas Jefferson, an ardent Francophile, but, above all, a practical man. Jefferson knew better than anyone that a French presence in the New World could only be considered a threat. Jefferson was also exceedingly clever, and he was not above a little ruse. “The day that France takes possession of Louisiana,” he wrote in a message to his ministers in Paris, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Having said that, Jefferson, through the offices of a Franco-American gunpowder manufacturer named du Pont de Nemours, then inaugurated a hallowed presidential trad...

In 1804, Jefferson’s personal secretary, a private, moody, and sensitive young man named Meriwether Lewis, together with a bluff and uncomplicated army captain named William Clark, left St. Louis with a party of fifty men. Poling, tugging, and, at times, literally carrying a fifty-foot bateau up the whipsawing braided channels of the Missouri River, they arrived at the villages of the Mandan tribe, in what has come to be North Dakota, in the early winter. When the ice broke in the spring, some of the party returned to St. Louis with the boat. The thirty-one others, accompanied by a Shoshone Indian girl named Sacajawea, who had been captured and enslaved by the Mandans, and her newborn baby, continued westward on horseback and on foot. Guided by Sacajawea—whose usefulness as an interpreter was only a small part of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s fabulous luck—they pressed across the plains to the beginning of the true Missouri at Three Forks, Montana. From there, they struggled over the Continental Divide and found the Salmon River, whose alternative name, the River of No Return, is an indication of the experiences they had trying to follow it. In despair, the party gave up and turned northward, finding the Clearwater River, which offered them an easier path westward. The Clearwater led them to the Snake, and the Snake led them to the Columbia—a huge anomaly of a river in the pale desert east of the Cascades. Entering the Columbia gorge, they made an almost instantaneous t...

impressions. In the same year the expedition returned, General Zebulon Montgomery Pike crossed the plains on a more southerly course, through what was to become Kansas and Colorado. There he saw “tracts of many leagues . . . where not a speck of vegetable matter existed” and dismissed the whole country as an arid waste. “These vast plains of the western hemisphere may become in time as celebrated as the sandy deserts of Africa,” wrote Pike. Major Stephen Long, who followed Pike a decade later, had a similar impression. Long referred to the whole territory between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains as the Great American Desert—a phrase and an image that held for almost half a century.