Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Central Arizona Project which Dominy finally managed to build is a medium-sized dwarf compared with the Pacific Southwest Water Plan he had planned, and he had to sacrifice the last years of his career to the effort to get it authorized. Today, few of the other grand projects conceived under him exist. There is no Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, no Texas Water Plan, no Auburn Dam, no Kellogg Reservoir, no English Ridge Dam, no Peripheral Canal, no additional dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake River, no Oahe and Garrison diversion projects. Dominy wanted to move the Bureau’s activities into the eastern United States, because he came to believe that irrigation often makes better sense in wetter regions than in emphatically dry ones, and also because he wanted to invade the Corps of Engineers’ domain in order to retaliate for the Corps having encroached on the Bureau in the West. But all of those plans—for irrigation projects in Louisiana, for a series of reservoirs in Appalachia set around new industrial towns—came to naught. The legacy of Floyd Dominy is not so much bricks and mortar as a reputation—a reputation and an attitude. The attitude is his—one of arrogant indifference to sweeping changes in the public mood—and it is probably the foremost obstacle in the Bureau of Reclamation’s way as it tries to play a meaningful role in the future of the American West.