Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles. That city and its burgeoning suburbs would thus receive a huge surge of high-quality water from northern California to replace the salty Colorado. The San Joaquin Valley would siphon off a considerable portion along the way; it was going to be rescued, for the third time, from its suicidal habit of mining groundwater. New Mexico would get Hooker Dam, which would inundate yet another scenic monument—the Gila Wilderness—and Utah would get two more projects. In the middle of the list, camouflaged under “water salvage and recovery programs,” was the most expensive item of all: the Central Arizona Project. It was the same multibillion-dollar shell game that the United Western Investigation had proposed: new water from northern California would take care of southern California’s needs so that the Colorado could be conserved for the upper basin and Arizona.