Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The sensible thing for a mechanically gifted farm boy who didn’t particularly like farming to major in was engineering. At Hastings College, Dominy had given it a brief go and quit. “I didn’t like the preciseness,” he says. In 1930, he entered the University of Wyoming at Laramie, choosing economics as a major. He was captain of the hockey team. He stayed on and won a master’s degree in 1933. By then the country’s economy was in a screaming nosedive and the West was five years into the Great Drought. The ranchers around Laramie couldn’t sell their cattle—first because no one had money to buy them, second because the cattle weren’t worth buying anyway. They were thirsty and starving, vacant-eyed beasts with bellies bloated from hunger and protruding ribs. Stupefied by the intensity of the disaster, Wyoming’s people were in the same condition, mentally if not physically. Campbell County, two hundred miles north of Laramie, was typical of the places that had plummeted through FDR’s safety net of relief. Roosevelt couldn’t launch a federal dam project there because Campbell County had no river worth a dam. It had no highway project because no one went there and it hardly had cars. It had no writers’ projects, no hospital projects, no dog census. All it had was the cattle liquidation program. The Agriculture Department’s county agent paid the ranchers $8 a head for their scrawny cattle, then shot them. The farmers took the $8 and spent it on horse feed and rifle shells, then he...