Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

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 Coulee Dam, however, it would sit exactly where it does today, looking exactly as it did when it was built. The only thing different is that the dam would no longer function as a dam. It would be a waterfall. The reservoir behind it would have long since silted up.