Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

If anything, the United Western Investigation suffered from a surfeit of choices. “Numerous possibilities exist for the interbasin transfer of supplies into water-deficient regions,” wrote McCasland in the cover document, which bore the splendidly militaristic title United Western Investigation, Interim Report on Reconnaissance, Report of the Chief. You could, for example, take a few million acre-feet out of the Snake River at Twin Falls, Idaho, pump it up the south side of the Snake River plain in fifteen-foot siphons, and drop it into the Humboldt River, the only constant river in the state of Nevada, meandering small and forlorn beside Interstate 80 for three hundred miles until it disappears in shallow, salty Humboldt Lake. Then you could move the suddenly prodigious Humboldt straight across seamless desert to the Owens Valley, two hundred miles away. You could tunnel thirty miles under the White Mountains and just dump it in. Then you could quadruple the size of everything Los Angeles had built to divert the Owens River, and move the mingled waters of the Snake and the Humboldt and the Owens to Los Angeles, to San Diego, to the Mojave Desert, and dump the surplus in the Colorado to satisfy our treaty with Mexico, leaving the other basin states with the whole Colorado to hoard for themselves.