Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The investigation took two years to complete. Its conclusions filled several volumes with descriptions, economic analyses, appendices, and maps. To Clarence Kuiper, a young engineer recruited from the Corps of Engineers, “it was the closest I ever came to feeling omnipotent. We were looking at ideas even Mike Straus hadn’t thought of yet.” The UWI team raced around the Pacific rim like Rommel’s army, concocting schemes to put deserts to flight. They dinged rock samples out of canyon walls. They traced future reservoir basins by air. They floated rivers and explored by jeep. They spread contour maps across the floors of rooms and built tunnels and aqueducts with pencils. They spread oceans of theoretical water over horizons of potential farmland; on paper, they turned half the Southwest green. “Straus told us to look at every possibility,” Kuiper would recall years later. “He said, ‘Don’t you laugh at a goddamm thing.’ Well, we didn’t. We looked over every harebrained idea that ever came up. We looked at an undersea pipeline from the mouth of the Columbia to Los Angeles. Lord, we found every conceivable place where you could divert the Columbia. We looked into jumping the Willamette out of its bed at Oregon City and turning it right around in an aqueduct to California. Southern Oregon is a big mess of mountains, so we plotted a tunnel that would have been 135 miles long. We had one guy in the Bureau who thought you could keep wall-to-wall tankers moving between the mouth of...