Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

When the newspapers caught wind that an army had actually been dispatched, they were ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times promptly inducted its military correspondent to cover the hostilities. He made it to the Parker Dam site on his state’s fast macadam roads before the expeditionary force even arrived. When it did, exhausted from the heat, dust, and twelve fords across the ooze of the Bill Williams River, Major Pomeroy requisitioned a ferryboat from the town of Parker, and the force was instantly renamed the Arizona Navy. After a full inspection of the offending cable, Pomeroy tried to steam up the Colorado to the mouth of the Bill Williams to reconnoiter, but the ferry was too high to sneak under the cable, and it got hung up. It was a harbinger of how things were to turn out that the occupants were finally delivered to their campsite by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s fast motor launch.