Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Nearly all of the time, the creeks that plunge down the ravines of the Grand Canyon will barely float a walnut shell, but the flash floods resulting from a desert downpour can dislodge boulders as big as a jitney bus. Tumbled by gravity, the boulders carom into the main river and sit there, creating a dam, which doesn’t so much stop the river as make it mad. Except for the rapids of the Susitna, the Niagara, and perhaps a couple of rivers in Canada, the modern Colorado’s rapids are the biggest on the continent. Before the dams were built, however, the Colorado’s rapids were really big. At Lava Falls, where huge chunks of basalt dumped in the main river create a thirty-foot drop, waves at flood stage were as high as three-story houses. There was a cycling wave at the bottom that, every few seconds, would burst apart with the retort of a sixteen-inch gun, drenching anyone on either bank of the river—two hundred feet apart. To run Lava Falls today, in a thirty-foot Hypalon raft, wrapped in a Mae West life jacket, vaguely secure in the knowledge that a rescue helicopter sits on the canyon rim, is a lesson in panic. The Powell expedition was running most of the canyon’s rapids in a fifteen-foot pilot boat made of pine and a couple of twenty-one-foot dories made of oak—with the rudest of life jackets, without hope of rescue, without a single human being within hundreds of miles. And Powell himself was running them strapped to a captain’s chair, gesticulating wildly with his one ...

Capitalists, newspaper editors, lonely pioneers, local emperors of Gilpin’s ilk—all had a stake in retreating deserts. But they were not the only ones. Abolitionists, for example, did, too. In the 1850s, when Kansas seemed likely to be the next state admitted to the Union, something approaching warfare broke out between those who would have made it a free state and those who would have tolerated slavery. Horace Greeley, an avowed abolitionist with considerable interest in the West, found the climate in Kansas wonderful and the rainfall abundant. In such a state, Greeley said in his influential editorials, a 160-acre homestead could produce an ample living. A plantation, of course, demanded more land—but if Kansas was full of yeoman farmers working 160-acre plots, plantations and slaves were not likely to intrude.

One hundred and sixty acres. If anything unifies the story of the American West—its past and its present, its successes and its dreadful mistakes—it is this mythical allotment of land. Its origins are found in the original Homestead Act of 1862, which settled on such an amount—a half-mile square, more often referred to as a quarter section—as the ideal acreage for a Jeffersonian utopia of small farmers. The idea was to carve millions of quarter sections out of the public domain, sell them cheaply to restless Americans and arriving immigrants, and, by letting them try to scratch a living out of them, develop the nation’s resources and build up its character. In the West, the Homestead Act had several later incarnations. The Desert Lands Act, the Timber Culture Act, and the Timber and Stone Act were the principal ones. Neither Congress nor the General Land Office, which was responsible for administering the acts, could ever comprehend that the relative success of the land program east of the Mississippi River had less to do with the perseverance of the settlers or the wisdom of the legislation than with the forgiving nature of the climate. In the East, virtually every acre received enough rainfall, except during years of extraordinary drought, to grow most anything that didn’t mind the soil and the temperature. (Unlike much of the West, which suffers through months of habitual drought, the East gets precipitation year-round; in the spring and early summer, when crops need wa...

In the West, even if you believed that the rainfall was magically increasing, you still had to contend with high altitudes (the western plains, the Snake River Valley, and most of the irrigable lands in the Great Basin would float over the tops of all but the highest Appalachian Mountains) and, as a result, chronic frost danger even in May and September. Then there were the relentless winds, hailstones bigger than oranges, tornadoes, and breathtaking thunderstorms. There were sandy lands that would not retain moisture and poorly drained lands that retained too much; there were alkaline lands that poisoned crops. The General Land Office bureaucrats sat in Washington pretending that such conditions did not exist. Their job, as they perceived it, was to fill little squares with people. They extended no credit, provided no water, offered no services. And the permutations of the Homestead Act that found their way into the western versions of the law sometimes added to the farmers’ burdens. Under the Timber Culture Act, for example, you had to plant one-quarter of your quarter section with trees, a stipulation inserted because it was thought that trees increased the rainfall. In West Texas, where, meteorologically speaking, all that is predictable is the wind, you would have to spend most of your time replanting your fallen-down trees. Under the Desert Lands Act, which applied to land so arid even the government realized that farming was hopeless without irrigation, you had to d...

The members of Congress who wrote the legislation, the land office agents who doled out land, and the newspaper editors who celebrated the settlers’ heroism had, in a great many cases, never laid eyes on the land or the region that enclosed it. They were unaware that in Utah, Wyoming, and Montana—to pick three of the colder and drier states—there was not a single quarter section on which a farmer could subsist, even with luck, without irrigation, because an unirrigated quarter section was enough land for about five cows. 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...

Speculation. Water monopoly. Land monopoly. Erosion. Corruption. Catastrophe. By 1876, after several trips across the plains and through the Rocky Mountain states, John Wesley Powell was pretty well convinced that those would be the fruits of a western land policy based on wishful thinking, willfulness, and lousy science. And by then everythi...

The doctrine of riparian rights, which had been unthinkingly imported from the East, made it possible to monopolize the water in a stream if you owned the land alongside it. But if the stream was anything larger than a creek, only the person who owned land upstream, where it was still small, could manage to build a dam or barrage to guarantee a summer flow; then he could divert all he wanted, leaving his downstream neighbors with a bed of dry rocks. Riparian doctrine alone, therefore, made it possible for a tiny handful of landowners to monopolize the few manageable rivers of the West. When their neighbors saw their predicament and sold out, they could monopolize the best land, too. As for the Desert Lands Act and the Timber and Stone Act, they could not have promoted land monopoly and corruption more efficiently if they had been expressly designed for that purpose. A typical irrigation scene under the Desert Lands Act went as follows: A beneficiary hauled a hogshead of water and a witness to his barren land, dumped the water on the land, paid the witness $20, and brought him to the land office, where the witness swore he had seen the land irrigated. Then, with borrowed identification and different names, another land application was filed, and the scene was repeated. If you could pull it off six or seven times, you had yourself a ranch. Foreign sailors arriving in San Francisco were offered a few dollars, a jug of whiskey, and an evening in a whorehouse in exchange for fi...

One of the unforeseen results of the homestead legislation was a high rate of employment among builders of birdhouses. In most instances, you were required to display an “erected domicile” on your land. The Congress, after all, was much too smart to give people land without requiring them to live on it. In a number of instances, the erected domicile was a birdhouse, put there to satisfy a paid witness with a tender conscience. It is quite possible that the greatest opportunity offered by the homestead legislation in the West was the opportunity to earn a little honest graft. By conservative estimates, 95 percent of the final proofs under the Desert Lands Act were fraudulent. “Whole townships have been entered under this law in the interest of one person or firm,” thundered Binger Hermann, a commissioner of the General Land Office, about the Timber and Stone Act. Not long afterward, Hermann himself was fired for allowing unrestricted fraud.

Powell was advocating cooperation, reason, science, an equitable sharing of the natural wealth, and—implicitly if not explicitly—a return to the Jeffersonian ideal. He wanted the West settled slowly, cautiously, in a manner that would work. If it was done intelligently instead of in a mad, unplanned rush, the settlement of the West could help defuse the dangerous conditions building in the squalid industrial cities of the East. If it was done wrong, the migration west might go right into reverse. The nation at large, however, was in no mood for any such thing. It was avid for imperial expansion, and the majority of its citizens wanted to get rich. New immigrants were arriving, dozens of boatloads a day, with that motive burning in their brains. To them America was not so much a democratic utopia as a gold mine. If monopolists reigned here, they could accept that; someday they would be monopolists, too. Forty years earlier, Alexis de Tocqueville had captured the raw new country’s soul: “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.” In Powell’s day, that passion for wealth had if anything grown more intense. A pseudoscientific dogma, Social Darwinism, had been ...

The unpeopled West, naturally, was where a great many immigrants hoped to find their fortunes. They didn’t want to hear that the West was dry. Few had ever seen a desert, and the East was so much like Europe that they imagined the West would be, too. A tiny bit semiarid, perhaps, like Italy. But a desert? Never! They didn’t want to hear of communal pasturelands—they had left those behind, in Europe, in order that they could become the emperors of Wyoming. They didn’t want the federal government parceling out water and otherwise meddling in their affairs; that was another European tradition they had left an ocean away. Agricultural fortunes were being made in California by rampant capitalists like Henry Miller, acreages the size of European principalities were being amassed in Texas, in Montana. If the federal government controlled the water, it could also control the land, and then the United States might become a nation of small farmers after all—which was exactly what most Americans didn’t want. For this was the late nineteenth century, when, as 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.”

But none of this prestige and power, none of these connections, was a match for ignorance, nonsense, and the nineteenth century’s fulsome, quixotic optimism. When he testified before Congress about his report and his irrigation plan, the reception from the West—the region with which he was passionately involved, the region he wanted to help—was icily hostile. In his biography of Powell, Wallace Stegner nicely characterized the frame of mind of the typical western booster-politician when he surveyed Powell’s austere, uncompromising monument of facts: What, they asked, did he know about the West? What did he know about South Dakota? Had he ever been there? When? Where? For how long? Did he know the average rainfall of the James River Valley? Or the Black Hills? . . . [Did he] really know anything about the irrigable lands in the Three Forks country in Montana? They refused to understand his distinction between arid and subhumid, they clamored to know how their states had got labelled “arid” and thus been closed to settlement. . . .[W]hat about the artesian basin in the Dakotas? What about irrigation from that source? So he gave it to them: artesian wells were and always would be a minor source of water as compared to the rivers and the storm-water reservoirs. He had had his men studying artesian wells since 1882. . . . If all the wells in the Dakotas could be gathered into one county they would not irrigate that county. Senator Moody [of South Dakota] thereupon remarked that...

Powell had felt that the western farmers would stand behind him, if not the politicians themselves; there he made one of the major miscalculations of his life. “Apparently he underestimated the capacity of the plains dirt farmer to continue to believe in myths even while his nose was being rubbed in unpleasant fact,” Stegner wrote. “The press and a good part of the public in the West was against him more than he knew. . . . The American yeoman might clamor for government assistance in his trouble, but he didn’t want any that would make him change his thinking.”

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. But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it. And the same Congress which had once insisted he didn’t need federal help was now insisting that such help be continued, at any cost. Released from a need for justification, released from logic itself, the irrigation program Powell had wanted became a monster, redoubling its efforts and increasing its wreckage, both natural and economic, as it lost sight of its goal. Powell’s ideal was a future in which the rivers of the Am...

On top of all this, the Owens was a generous desert river, with a flow sufficient for two million people. It was laughable to think of Los Angeles growing that big, so even under the worst of circumstances there would be water enough for all. The reasoning was very sensible, the logic very sound, and it was fatefully wrong. There was one person who knew that it was. She was Mary Austin, the valley’s literary light, who had published a remarkable collection of impressionistic essays entitled Land of Little Rain that won her recognition around the world. In the course of her writing she had spent long hours with the last of the Paiutes, the Indians who had lived in the valley for centuries until they were instantly displaced by the whites. The Paiutes showed her what no one else saw—that order and stability are the most transient of states, that there is rarely such a thing as a partial defeat. In a subsequent book, a novella about the Owens Valley water struggle called The Ford, she wrote about what happens when “that incurable desire of men to be played upon, to be handled,” runs up against “that Cult of Locality, by which so much is forgiven as long as it is done in the name of the Good of the Town.” Mary Austin was convinced that the valley had died when it sold its first water right to Los Angeles—that the city would never stop until it owned the whole river and all of the land. One day, in Los Angeles for an interview with Mulholland, she told him so. After she had lef...

Pinchot was the first director of Roosevelt’s pet creation, the Forest Service, but that was only one of his roles. He was also the Cardinal Richelieu of TR’s White House. Temperamentally and ideologically, the two men fit hand in glove. Both were wealthy patricians (Pinchot came from Pittsburgh, where his family had made a fortune in the dry-goods business); both were hunters and outdoorsmen. Though their speeches and writings rang of Thomas Jefferson, at heart Pinchot and Roosevelt seemed more comfortable with Hamiltonian ideals. Roosevelt liked the Reclamation program because he saw it as an agrarian path to industrial strength, not because he believed—as Jefferson did—that a nation of small farmers is a nation with a purer soul. Pinchot espoused forest conservation not because he worshiped nature like John Muir (whom he privately despised) but because the timber industry was plowing through the nation’s forests with such abandon it threatened to destroy them for all time. Roosevelt was a trust-buster, but only because he feared that unfettered capitalism could breed socialism. (For evidence he only had to look as far as Los Angeles, where Harrison Gray Otis was whipping labor radicals into such a blind, vengeful froth that two of them blew up his printing plant in 1910 and killed twenty of their own.) The conservation of Roosevelt and Pinchot was utilitarian; their progressivism—they spoke of “the greater good for the greatest number”—had a nice ring to it, but it also...

The Inyo National Forest! With six inches of annual rainfall, the Owens Valley is too dry for trees; the only ones there were fruit trees planted and irrigated by man, some of which were already dying for lack of water. This didn’t seem to bother Pinchot, nor did the fact that his action appears to have been patently illegal. The Organic Act that created the Forest Service says, “No public forest reservation shall be established except to improve and protect the forest . . . or for the purpose of creating favorable conditions of water flow, and to provide a continuous supply of timber for the use and necessities of the United States; but it is not the purpose of these provisions . . . to authorize the inclusion . . . of lands more valuable for the mineral therein, or for agricultural purposes, than for forest purposes” (emphasis added). The valley’s irrigated orchards were infinitely more valuable than the barren flats and scattered sagebrush that characterized the new national forest, so Pinchot’s action was incontrovertibly a violation of the legislation that put him in business. He lamely countered that he was simply acting to protect the quality of Los Angeles’ water; but since much of the treeless acreage he included in the Inyo National Forest lay below the intake of the aqueduct, it was a flimsy excuse. As a formality, Pinchot was obliged to send an investigator to the Owens Valley to recommend that he do what he had already made up his mind to do. He sent three bef...

By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people of the plains states, still shell-shocked by the great white winter, began to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust. The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have arrived half a century early. When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 homesteading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imperfections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather. How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one year and expired fr...

The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat. On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot wave. When the reservoir was finally in the Allegheny River, sending it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually put at twenty-two hundred—twice as many casualties as in the burning of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in the Chicago fire. The only single disaster in American history that took more lives was the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, eleven y...

The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts, and the graduates headed west in a fog of idealism, ready to take on the most intractable foe of mankind: the desert. But the desert suffers improvement at a steep price, and the early Reclamation program was as much a disaster as its dams were engineering marvels. The underlying problems were politics and money. Under the terms of the Reclamation Act, projects were to be financed by a Reclamation Fund, which would be filled initially by revenues from sales of federal land in the western states, then paid back gradually through sales of water to farmers. (It should be mentioned right away that the farmers, under the law, were exempted from paying interest on virtually all of their repayment obligations—a subsidy which was substantial to begin with, and which was to become breathtaking in later decades, as interest rates topped 10 percent. In some cases, the interest exemption alone—which is, of course, an indirect burden on the general taxpayer—has amounted to a subsidy of ninety cents on the dollar.)

The engineers who staffed the Reclamation Service tended to view themselves as a godlike class performing hydrologic miracles for grateful simpletons who were content to sit in the desert and raise fruit. About soil science, agricultural economics, or drainage they sometimes knew less than the farmers whom they regarded with indulgent contempt. As a result, some of the early projects were to become painful embarrassments, and expensive ones. The soil turned out to be demineralized, alkaline, boron-poisoned; drainage was so poor the irrigation water turned fields into saline swamps; markets for the crops didn’t exist; expensive projects with heavy repayment obligations were built in regions where only low-value crops could be grown. In the Bureau of Reclamation’s quasi-official history, Water for the West, Michael Robinson (the son-in-law of a Commissioner of Reclamation) discreetly admits all of this: “Initially, little consideration was given to the hard realities of irrigated agriculture. Neither aid nor direction was given to settlers in carrying out the difficult and costly work of clearing and leveling the land, digging irrigation ditches, building roads and houses, and transporting crops to remote markets. . . .” Robinson also acknowledges the political pressures that have bedeviled the Reclamation program ever since it was born. The attitude of most western members of Congress was quaintly hypocritical: after resisting this experiment in pseudosocialism, or even vot...

Congress’s decision, in passing the act, to ignore much of John Wesley Powell’s advice made things worse. Powell had proposed that in those inhospitable regions where only livestock could be raised, settlers should be allowed to homestead 2,560 acres of the public domain—but allocated enough water to irrigate only twenty. The Reclamation Act gave everyone up to 160 acres (a man and wife could jointly farm 320 acres), whether they settled in Mediterranean California or in the frigid interior steppes of Wyoming, where the extremes of climate rival those in Mongolia. You could grow wealthy on 160 acres of lemons in California and starve on 160 acres of irrigated pasture in Wyoming or Montana, but the act was blind to such nuances. And by building so many projects in a rush, the Reclamation Service was repeating its mistakes before it had a chance to learn from them.

All of these problems were compounded by the fact that few settlers had any experience with irrigation farming—nor were they required to. They overwatered and mismanaged their crops; they let their irrigation systems silt up. Many had optimistically filed on more acreage than they had resources to irrigate, and they ended up with repayment obligations on land they were forced to leave fallow. From there, it was a short, swift fall into bankruptcy. Fifty years earlier, the ancestors of the first Reclamation farmers had endured adversity by putting their faith in God and feeding themselves on game. But this was the twentieth century; the game was vanishing, and government was replacing God as the rescuer of last resort. As Michael Robinson wrote, “Western economic and social determinants were changing rapidly. Nineteenth-century irrigation pioneers were better suited to endure hardships than settlers who struggled to survive on Federal Reclamation projects after 1902. In the nineteenth century, wild game wa...

Besides the hazards of the construction work (the falling rock, the explosives, electrocution, behemoth machines); besides the hazards of off-hours (fist fights, drunken binges, social diseases from the whores who camped about); besides all this, there was the heat. The low-lying parts of the Colorado and Sonora deserts are the hottest corner of North America, and we are speaking of temperatures in open, ambient air. The Colorado’s box canyon held heat like an oven with the door open about an inch. Workers sometimes sacrificed eggs to see if they would actually fry on a sun-fired rock. The first death from heat prostration occurred a few days after construction began, and so many men collapsed that some of the crews finally forced a shutdown, demanded a pay raise, and ultimately staged a strike. The strike, however, did no good. Next to Boulder City was an encampment of tents and shanties known as Ragtown, where the unemployed waited by the hundreds for someone to give up, be fired, or die. “One of the myths about the Depression,” Arthur Miller, the playwright, once said, “is that it brought everyone closer together. Actually, it just made everyone more voracious.” “They will work under our conditions, or they will not work at all,” proclaimed W. H. Wattis. And they did, at a base pay of $4 per day.

The bed of the Mississippi River is hundreds, even thousands, of feet deep in silt. The Columbia and the Missouri flow over alluvial wash as thick as Arctic glaciers. On the Colorado, however, to everyone’s amazement, bedrock was struck at forty feet. A milled piece of sawtimber was found resting at the bottom of the muck, obviously of very recent origin. Since white men had begun to settle the region, perhaps eighty years before, a huge flood had evidently washed the entire channel clean. No one seemed bothered by the certainty that all of the silt constantly being relocated along the entire 1,450-mile length of the river would be forever imprisoned behind Hoover and the other dams soon to be built.

The main stem of the Columbia River didn’t have a single dam on it until 1933, when the Puget Sound Power and Light Company went out on its own and built a run-of-the-river dam called Rock Island, which produced 212,000 kilowatts of power—a mind-boggling amount in its day. Five years later, Bonneville Dam was finished and generated almost three times as much power. In 1941 came Grand Coulee; in 1953, McNary Dam; in 1955, Chief Joseph Dam; in 1957, The Dalles, contributing 1,807,000 kilowatts to the seven million or so that had already been wrung out of the river. In that same year, the Grant County Public Utility District finished Priest Rapids Dam, which added another 788,500 kilowatts. In 1961, the Chelan County PUD came back and built Rocky Reach Dam, with a capacity one million kilowatts greater than the dam by which it had gotten things off to a start twenty-eight years before. And it still wasn’t over. In 1963, the Grant County PUD added Wanapum Dam and another 831,250 kilowatts. In 1967, the Douglas County PUD completed Wells Dam. The Corps of Engineers, which had built Bonneville and Chief Joseph and McNary and The Dalles, got back into the picture in 1968 with John Day Dam, whose 2,160,000 kilowatts were second only to Grand Coulee. In that year, the Canadians finally joined in, building Keenleyside Dam, whose sole purpose was to equalize the upper river’s flow throughout the year for the benefit of navigation and power production. In 1973, they added Mica Dam, wh...

And these were just the main-stem dams. As they were going up, the Columbia tributaries were also being chinked full of dams. Libby Dam on the Kootenai River. Albeni Falls and Boundary dams on the Pend Oreille. Cabinet Gorge and Noxon Rapids dams on the Clark Fork. Kerr and Hungry Horse on the Flathead. Chandler and Roza dams on the Yakima. Ice Harbor Dam, Lower Monumental Dam, Little Goose Dam, Lower Granite Dam, Oxbow Dam, Hells Canyon Dam, Brownlee Dam, and Palisades Dam on the Snake. Dworshak Dam on the North Fork of the Clearwater. Anderson Ranch Dam on the South Fork of the Boise. Pelton and Round Butte dams on the Deschutes. Big Cliff, Foster, Green Peter, and Detroit dams on the three forks of the Santiam River. Cougar Dam on the South Fork of the McKenzie. Dexter, Lookout Point, and Hills Creek dams on the Willamette. Merwin Dam, Yale Dam, and Swift Dam on the Lewis River. Layfield and Mossyrock dams on the Cowlitz. Thirty-six great dams on one river and its tributaries—a dam a year. The Age of Dams.

The Corps of Engineers and the region’s public utilities played a big role in the damming of the Pacific Northwest because it had in abundance what the rest of the region lacked—water—so many of the dams were built for flood control, navigation, or power. Everywhere else in the West, however, where deserts were the rule and irrigation was the be-all and end-all of existence, the Bureau reigned supreme. Within its first thirty years, it had built about three dozen projects. During the next thirty years, it built nineteen dozen more. The Burnt River Project, the Cachuma Project, the Mancos Project, the Ogden River Project, the Collbran Project, the Gila Project, the Pine River Project, the Palisades Project, the Weber Basin Project, the Columbia Basin Project, and the Central Valley Project. Shasta Dam, Parker Dam, Friant Dam, Davis Dam, Laguna Dam, Canyon Ferry Dam, Cascade Dam, Flaming Gorge Dam. Cedar Bluff Lake, Paonia Reservoir, Kirwin Reservoir, Webster Reservoir, Pathfinder Reservoir, Waconda Lake, Clair Engle Lake, Lake Berryessa, Lake C. W. McConaughy, Enders Reservoir, Box Butte Reservoir. The Tucumcari Project, the Palo Verde Project, the San Angelo Project, the Canadia...

By 1956, the Congress had voted 110 separate authorizations for the Bureau of Reclamation, some encompassing a dozen or more irrigation projects and dams. Of these, seventy-seven—nearly three-quarters—were authorized between 1928 and 1956, along with hundreds of projects built by the Corps of Engineers in the East and West. In that astonishingly brief twenty-eight-year period between the first preparations for Hoover Dam and the passage of the Colorado River Storage Project Act, the most fateful transformation that has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere, was wrought. It was profound change—profound and permanent. You can levee a river, dredge it, riprap it, channelize it, straighten it, do almost anything to it except build a dam on it, and unless you maintain your works diligently, nature will soon take the river back. Simple diversion works of great ancient civilizations collapsed not long after the civilizations themselves did; for the most part, a remnant here and there is all that remains. Had the Assyrians built Grand...

In the Northwest, the dams produced so much cheap hydroelectricity that hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to the region during and after the war did not bother to insulate their homes. Insulation was expensive; electricity was dirt cheap. In 1974, $196.01 worth of power from Con Edison in New York would have cost $24 if purchased from Seattle City Light. (For decades, the Northwest and British Columbia have had the highest rates of electricity consumption in the world.) The result was that by the 1970s, to everyone’s amazement, the seemingly limitless hydroelectric bonanza was coming to an end; brown-outs were being predicted for the 1980s. Since the good damsites were gone, the region’s utilities and their federal power broker, the Bonneville Power Administration—another product of the go-go years—launched a program of coal and nuclear powerplant construction which, viewed in retrospect, seems more like dementia than the rational, orderly planning it was purported to be. Of the twenty-four thousand-megawatt plants that were to be built under the Washington Public Power Supply System—one a year—five were begun, only to be scrapped or mothballed, half-completed, a few y...

It was, of course, a love affair not limited to the Northwest or even the West. The whole country wanted more dams. In Appalachia, the Tennessee Valley Authority had an answer to poverty: dams. No river in the entire world has as much of its course under reservoirs as the Tennessee; by the late 1960s, it was hard to find a ten-mile free-flowing stretch between dams. The Missouri is a close second; about seven hundred miles in its middle reaches became a series of gigantic stairstep reservoirs. In Texas and Oklahoma, between 1940 and 1975, something like eight million acres of land were submerged by artificial lakes. Much of this land was in the eastern part of those states; it was exceptionally fertile (as were the bottomlands along the Tennessee) and visited by adequate rainfall, making it some of the best farmland in the nation. No one seemed bothered by the spectacle of a government creating ...

There were legitimate reasons, of course, to build a fair number of those thousands of dams. Hydropower obviously was one; the Columbia dams helped prevent the horror of Nazism from blackening the entire world. Some new irrigation projects made economic sense, as late as the 1940s and 1950s (though virtually none did after then). The Tennessee and Red rivers were prone to destructive floods, as was the Columbia—as were many rivers throughout the country. A better solution, in many cases, would have been to discourage development in floodplains, but the country—least of all the Congress—wasn’t interested in that. For a dam, whether or not it made particularly good sense, whether or not it decimated a salmon fishery or drowned a gorgeous stretch of wild river, was a bonanza to the constituents of the Congressman in whose district it was located—especially the engineering and construction firms that became largely dependent on th...

And this, as much as the economic folly and the environmental damage, was the legacy of the go-go years: the corruption of national politics. Water projects came to epitomize the pork barrel; they were the oil can that lubricated the nation’s legislative machinery. Important legislation—an education bill, a foreign aid bill, a conservation bill—was imprisoned until the President agreed to let a powerful committee chairman tack on a rider authorizing his pet dam. Franklin Roosevelt had rammed a lot of his public-works programs through a Congress that was, if not resistant, then at least recumbent. A generation or two later, however, it was Congress that was writing omnibus public-works bills authorizing as much as $20 billion worth of water projects at a stroke and defying threats of presidential vetoes. Most members who voted for such bills had not the faintest idea what was in them; they didn’t care; they didn’t dare look. All that mattered was that there was something in it for them. ...

“During the next twenty years,” Cassidy went on, “we estimate that we will have to provide some 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage at a cost of about $15 billion; about thirteen thousand miles of new or improved inland waterways; about sixty new or improved commercial harbors; thirty million kilowatts of hydroelectric power–generating capacity; some eleven thousand miles of levees, floodwalls, and channel improvements; and recreational facilities for perhaps 300 million visitors at our reservoirs. . . .” If all of that seemed “unduly large or visionary,” Cassidy admonished, “let us remember the responsibilities our nation is facing.” It is worth taking a moment to put some of these figures in perspective. In 1962, the total amount of federally built reservoir storage in the nation was somewhere around 300 million acre-feet. In twenty years, Cassidy wanted to more than double that. Every year, the Mississippi River carries about 355 million acre-feet of water out to sea, the runoff of most of the United States from Pennsylvania to Montana. In twenty years, according to the Corps of Engineers, we were going to put the equivalent of 90 percent of that water behind dams. In 1962, there were 37,342 megawatts of installed hydroelectric power–generating capacity in the United States; by 1982, that figure was nearly to double. By 1962, nearly all the major rivers in the United States—long reaches of the Mississippi, the Snake, the Columbia, the Illinois, the Missouri, the ...

Even allowing for the temper of the times, Cassidy’s prophecy, in retrospect, seems one of derangement more than vision. Nineteen years later, the $15 billion which was to construct 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage would barely suffice to build ten million acre-feet of new storage in California—had it been politically possible to do it.

Across the entire West, the Corps, as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen, was trying to seduce away the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; it was toadying up to big corporate farmers who wanted to monopolize whole rivers for themselves; it was even prepared to defy the President of the United States. As a result, the business of water development was to become a game of chess between two ferociously competitive bureaucracies, on a board that was half a continent plus Alaska, where rivers were the pawns and dams the knights and queens used to checkmate the other’s ambition. But the Corps and the Bureau played a little too well and a little too long for their own good. While they were fighting over a Lake Ontario-size reservoir in the middle of Alaska, and over countless squalid little projects desired by local interest groups, an unprecedented water crisis was gathering on the southern high plains—a crisis tailor-made for their own limitless ambition which, in the end, they would do nothing about. The Corps and the Bureau wasted so much money on frivolous projects which didn’t so much solve the nation’s water situation as satisfy the greed of powerful interests and their own petty ambitions that in the 1980s, despite dozens of new dams and reservoirs built during the intervening years, a water crisis loomed larger than in 1962. Within the next half century, as much irrigated land is likely to go out of production—land that grows nearly ...

The Corps’ great work—and its transmutation into one of history’s most successful bureaucracies—began late in the nineteenth century, when it took upon itself the task of restyling America’s largest rivers to accommodate barge traffic and, occasionally, deep-draft ships. At the same time, it found a role for itself in flood control, which it first accomplished by building levees and dikes, and then, after denying for years that reservoirs could control floods, by building flood-control reservoirs. And it built them at a pace that would have left the most ambitious pharaoh dazzled—something like six hundred in sixty years. The Army Engineers have so many hands in so many different types of work that their various activities sometimes cancel each other out. The Corps drains and channels wetlands—it has ruined more wetlands than anyone in history, except perhaps its counterpart in the Soviet Union—yet sometimes prohibits the draining and dredging of wetlands by private developers and other interests. (This was a role forced on the Corps by the Congress, not one it undertook voluntarily.) Its dams control flooding, while its stream-channelization and wetlands-drainage programs cause it. Its subsidization of intensive agriculture—which it does by turning wetlands into dry land, so they may then become soybean fields—increases soil erosion, which pours into the nation’s rivers, which the Corps then has to dredge more frequently. Cynics say this is all done by design, because the...

The Corps confined its activities mainly to the East and Middle West until the Great Depression—it is widely, and falsely, regarded as the “eastern counterpart” of the Bureau of Reclamation—but the temptations of the West ultimately proved too much to resist. Throughout much of the East, it is hard to find a decent spot for a dam. There are few tight gorges and valleys, or there are few natural basins behind them, or there are too many people along rivers who would have to be moved. (Not that uprooting and relocating people particularly bothers the Army Engineers; it is more a matter of expense.) The West, however, is a dam builder’s nirvana, full of deep, narrow canyons and gunsight gaps opening into expansive basins. The West is also more sparsely populated, and has floods—enormous floods—because its precipitation tends to be both erratic and highly seasonal, and because of this, the groundcover, compared with the East, is spare. With little in the way of grass or forests or wetlands to hold it back, runoff during the storms is extreme. Small streams, even tiny creeks, have flowed at rates approaching the country’s largest rivers. They rarely flow like this for long, but a few minutes is all it takes to float away a town. Bijou Creek in Colorado, nearly always dry, has gone over 400,000 cubic feet per second after an eight-inch rainstorm. California’s Eel River peaked at 765,000 cubic feet per second—the flow of the Mississippi and the Columbia combined—during the Christ...

The Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern are the southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley of California. They are the only rivers that do not ultimately end up in either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin drainage, because a low rise of land in the upper San Joaquin Valley, south of Fresno, effectively divides the valley into two hydrologic basins. The southernmost one, which receives the runoff of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern, is known as Tulare Basin. Historically, the four rivers of Tulare Basin went into two terminal lakes, Tulare and Buena Vista, which appeared and disappeared every year like phantoms. During the wet winters, the lakes would begin to fill; they would reach their largest size in May, after twenty feet of Sierra snow had melted into them in a matter of weeks; and, in all but the wettest years, they would evaporate so quickly under the glaring summer sun that they were dry again, or mostly dry, around September. Tulare, the more impressive of the two lakes, often grew larger than Lake Tahoe, though it was not more than a few feet deep. From year to year, its shoreline would shrink or grow by miles. It was a wonderful sight to see all of that water glimmering amid the merciless dryness of the San Joaquin Valley in summer, and the lakes were a stopover for millions of migrating ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes.

Although Tulare and Buena Vista lakes were privately owned, for the most part, the rivers that fed them were in the public domain. The four big farming companies held rights to a substantial amount of their water, but there were still big surpluses in all but the driest years—especially in the larger rivers, the Kings and the Kern. Had those surpluses been directed elsewhere in the valley, they could have created a great many small irrigated farms. If the rivers were going to be developed—if any agency of government was to develop them—it was a job for the Bureau of Reclamation. The only problem with that rationale was that the big growers wanted all of the water for themselves, they wanted the government to develop it for them, and they didn’t want to have to pay for it. Someday, if anyone has the inclination or the ability to penetrate the wall of secrecy behind which the Corps of Engineers has always managed to carry on its affairs, we may hear from its own mouth—from incriminating letters, memoranda, or confessions of its officials—why it was so eager to develop the Kings and the Kern—to ally itself unabashedly with a handful of huge land monopolies and, in the process, shove the Bureau off two made-to-order small-farm irrigation projects. The only obvious explanation (which is probably the correct one) is that it sensed the growing unpopularity of the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. Here was an unparalleled opportunity to establish a beachhead in a region ...

But as an example of government subsidizing the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, nothing would quite equal its performance thirty-five years later in the Tulare Lake floods of 1983. During the El Niño winter of 1983, when the eastern Pacific’s resident bulge of high pressure migrated to Australia and the storm door was left open for months, much of California got double or triple its normal precipitation. The previous year hadn’t been much different. By the early spring of 1983, all four Corps of Engineers dams were dumping hundreds of thousands of acre-feet over their spillways as the largest snowpack in the annals of official California weather records melted. Because the farmlands in what used to be Tulare Lake were now protected by dikes, most of the water couldn’t enter its old basin and had to go elsewhere. When the floodwaters began encroaching on nearby towns, the Corps of Engineers spent $2.7 million in emergency funds to erect levees around them. There was nothing inherently wrong with that, except that 80,000 acres of old lake bottom—land that could have absorbed the floods—remained dry; one need only have breached one of the levees that had since been built around the ex-lake. But the Tulare Lake Irrigation District, dominated by Salyer and Boswell, wouldn’t have that, so the growers convinced the Corps to spend taxpayers’ money on levees in order that their land, the natural catch basin for the floods, could remain in subsidized production.

However, El Niño was soon to prove too much even for the big growers and the Army Engineers. By March of 1983, the flooding rivers were out of control and one of the lake levees was breached, inundating thirty thousand acres of farmland. The Tulare Lake Irrigation District immediately applied to the Corps for a permit to pump out the water and send it over the Tulare Basin divide into the San Joaquin River, which feeds San Francisco Bay. There was nothing inherently wrong with that idea, either—the bay and the Delta normally can use all the fresh water they can get—except that at least one of the reservoirs upstream had been illegally planted with a species of fish called white bass, which got flushed down by the floodwaters and were already flourishing in the reincarnated Tulare Lake. White bass are a voracious, opportunistic, highly adaptable type of rough fish and love to eat young salmon and striped bass. (Salmon and white bass have never managed to coexist, anywhere.) Unless a fish screen below the pumps could guarantee that 100 percent of the white bass would be removed before entering the San Joaquin, the bay and Delta’s two most valuable commercial and sports fish would be threatened with extinction. Just a handful of escaped white bass of opposite sexes could be enough to seal their doom. Even though no fish screen has ever operated 100 percent effectively, the Corps of Engineers, ignoring a cacophony of protest from sportsmen in several states, issued another “em...

It would have been one thing, this whole game of Russian roulette with the most important anadromous fishery in the state, if the drowned lands in Tulare Lake were pumped out so they could grow valuable food. Most of them, however, have been planted in cotton for years. And as the lake was being pumped out, they were not even growing cotton. In March of 1983, just four days after the levee was breached and the floodwaters began to fill Tulare Lake, several of the big corporate farmers applied to the Department of Agriculture for enlistment in the Payment-in-Kind (PIK) program, which had recently been created to relieve the nation’s chronic problem of surplus crop production. Thanks to PIK, they would receive free grain from bulging silos in exchange for not planting crops. The Boswell Company alone got $3.7 million worth of wheat in exchange for keeping fourteen thousand acres idle. (Boswell has consistently received more money f...

In his personal epitaph on the Kings and Kern saga, written in 1951, Harold Ickes lambasted the Corps as “spoilsmen in spirit . . . working hand in glove with land monopolies.” He called it a “willful and expensive . . . self-serving clique . . . in contempt of the public welfare” which had the distinction of having “wantonly wasted money on worthless projects” to a degree “surpassing any federal agency in the history of this country. . . . [N]o more lawless or irresponsible group than the Corps of Army Engineers,” Ickes co...

The Missouri River is, after the Columbia, the biggest river in the American West, though it takes it a long time to grow to size. The Columbia, rising prodigiously out of the rain forests of the Purcell Mountains in Canada, is like a Clydesdale horse, big and powerful at birth. The Missouri, still small after going a distance in which the Columbia becomes huge, is a scavenger of a river, struggling to attain size. It isn’t until the North Dakota border, nearly a thousand miles from its source, where the Yellowstone River adds a surge out of the Absaroka and Big Horn Mountains, that the Missouri begins to look impressive. The river turns south, capturing the Platte and the Niobrara and the Kansas and the James, and then east again. By the time it has gone two and a half thousand miles and joined the Mississippi, it is the twelfth-longest river in the world; however, because of the aridity of the basin it drains, the Missouri is only the seventh-ranking river in the country in terms of annual flow. Meager for its huge watershed and length, the virgin Missouri also flowed erratic in the extreme. At Hermann, Missouri, the discharge to the Mississippi has been measured as low as forty-two hundred cubic feet per second and, in June of 1944, as high as 892,000 cubic feet per second, enough water in a day to satisfy New York City for a year. Its course was as unpredictable as its volume. Flowing across the glacial outwash of the plains, the Missouri is unconfined by a true canyon...

Until 1940, when the Corps of Engineers finished Fort Peck Dam and created, for reasons that were and still are less than obvious, a 140-mile-long flood-control reservoir in the arid heart of Montana, the Missouri River was almost completely uncontrolled. There were two reasons for this. One was that the river didn’t show promise of carrying much barge traffic—at least compared to other big rivers like the Mississippi and the Illinois—so the Corps of Engineers didn’t have a good reason to improve it for navigation. Even if it had wanted to, the task of making such an erratic, muddy, unconfined river suitable for navigation was overwhelming. The Missouri habitually flooded Kansas City and other towns along its course, but until a major federal flood-control act was passed in 1937—and until the Corps abandoned the doctrine, which it had held to with Ptolemaic rigidity, that reservoirs don’t control floods—the Army Engineers had little interest in doing much about it.

The Bureau hadn’t built much in the upper Missouri Basin, either, for the same reason that it hadn’t built much along the upper Colorado and its tributaries: irrigation farming in cold, high-altitude terrain was usually a losing proposition. It had investigated the basin thoroughly, and by 1907 it had nine projects underway there, mainly for political reasons: the Missouri Basin states contributed a lot of money to the Reclamation Fund. But of the nine projects, not a single one was going to pay for itself within the forty-year term required by the amended Reclamation Act. The nine projects together owed the Treasury and the Reclamation Fund $55,755,000, but had repaid only $17,518,000, even though they were exempted from paying interest. ...

The only way to steer reclamation away from utter financial disaster in the Missouri Basin was to subsidize it with hydropower revenues. Hydroelectric output being a function of two variables—volume of water and height of drop—it made good sense, from the Bureau’s point of view, to build high dams along the upper tributaries to generate as much power as possible. The stored water could then be used to irrigate adjacent agricultural land, and hydropower revenues would cover the inevitable losses. Glenn Sloan, an assistant engineer in the Billings office, had begun to draw the outlines of such a basinwide project in the late 1930s, and was reasonably close to finishing his report in 1943, when the Missouri decided to go on a rampage. It produced three big floods—in March, May, and June—and during the last one Omaha and Kansas City were navigable by boat. The Corps’ regional office happened to be in Omaha, and its petulant director, Lewis Pick, who would later become the Chief of Engineers, was nearly chased by the river to higher ground. To a military man like Pick...

The trouble with the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan—which was frantically completed after the Bureau learned about the Pick Plan—was that you could logically build one or the other, but not both. The Corps wanted to build a few dams on upriver tributaries, although, in locating them, it paid no attention at all to irrigation. It also wanted to erect fifteen hundred miles of new levees. All of that was dwarfed, however, by what the Corps planned to do to the river between Fort Peck Reservoir and Yankton, South Dakota. The plan called for five dams and reservoirs, all of them of monstrous size. Garrison Dam, in western North Dakota, was the largest, and would, as the Corps took pains to point out, contain twenty-five times as much material as the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Two and a half miles long, 210 feet high, the dam would be the second-biggest structure on earth (Fort Peck Dam was larger). The Washington Monument would stick out of it like a spike in a railroad tie. The other dams—Oahe, Gavins Point, Big Bend, Fort Randall—would be smaller, but large enough to dwarf almost anything else around. Eight hundred miles of the Missouri would be transformed into a chain of huge, turbid reservoirs. The six main-stem dams would back up almost ninety million acre-feet of water, sufficient to turn Pennsylvania into a shallow lake. The whole scheme—if one believed the Corps’ figures, which have always been notoriously low—would cost $660 million, in 1944 dollars.

There was almost nothing about the Corps’ plan that the Bureau liked. The dams were all too low or poorly situated to draw the power potential out of the river. (The Corps usually installed about as much public power as it felt the private power companies would tolerate, and it was no surprise to anyone that the Western Power Company became a champion of the Pick Plan, not the Sloan Plan.) The storage was, with a few exceptions, far downriver from the lands the Bureau wanted to irrigate, and a lot of it was in the middle of unirrigable wastelands, which made the Bureau furious. The Missouri’s potential as a navigable waterway—that was one of the main justifications of the Pick Plan—was, as far as the Bureau was concerned, shamelessly overstated; to spend more than half a billion dollars on a river channel that would never carry more than a few hundred barges a year was a criminal waste of scarce money and water. It was wasteful in other ways as well. One of the reservoirs, Garrison, would drown the best winter cattle range in North Dakota. Although the Bureau had flooded its share of productive river bottomlands, this was an instance where it was troubled by the idea. As for flood control, Glenn Sloan, who understood the hydrodynamics of the Missouri River as well as anyone alive, said in Congressional testimony that “the 1943 flood could have been regulated to a safe capacity . . . at Sioux City, Omaha, and Kansas City with only two million acre-feet in storage.” But the ...

The Corps of Engineers’ obsession with humbling the wild Missouri River seemed to derive mainly from the fact that Colonel Pick was mad at it. (Although, needless to say, in the wake of the war his agency, its staff swollen by the thousands, was eager for new work.) According to Henry Hart, a journalist and historian who covered the Pick-Sloan controversy in the 1940s and later wrote a book about the Missouri, the Corps “relied for justification entirely on the public sense of shock at the disruption caused by floods.” Nonetheless, the Pick Plan went through the House Rivers and Harbors Committee without a...