Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

McCasland didn’t help. Contentious and prickly, he may have been a fine engineer, but he was the public relations equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Without asking clearance from the commissioner’s office, he wrote an article describing the Klamath Diversion for Civil Engineering in 1952. Northern California’s thirty-five years of passionate opposition to southern California’s diversion plans can be traced directly to that article. McCasland would not even say that these Pantagruelian waterworks would take care of the southland’s need for all time: “The plan described as the Northern California Diversion,” he wrote, “would not by any means constitute a complete water supply for the Southwest. It would meet the most imminent demands . . . but it would more probably constitute the initial stage of a large plan to serve much wider markets a future economy might dictate.” Clarence Kuiper says, “What I remember about that time is the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from Oregon and Washington asking me if it was true that the Bureau was planning to divert the Columbia River.” But the outrage cascading down from the Pacific Northwest was the least of the Bureau’s problems. Its main problem was that Los Angeles, for whose benefit the Klamath Diversion had mainly been conceived, was unalterably opposed to it, too.