Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

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 expensive farmland out of deserts in the West while drowning millions of acres of perfect farmland in the East. If there was a stretch of free-flowing river anywhere in the country, our reflex action was to erect a dam in its path.