Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The unpeopled West, naturally, was where a great many immigrants hoped to find their fortunes. They didn’t want to hear that the West was dry. Few had ever seen a desert, and the East was so much like Europe that they imagined the West would be, too. A tiny bit semiarid, perhaps, like Italy. But a desert? Never! They didn’t want to hear of communal pasturelands—they had left those behind, in Europe, in order that they could become the emperors of Wyoming. They didn’t want the federal government parceling out water and otherwise meddling in their affairs; that was another European tradition they had left an ocean away. Agricultural fortunes were being made in California by rampant capitalists like Henry Miller, acreages the size of European principalities were being amassed in Texas, in Montana. If the federal government controlled the water, it could also control the land, and then the United States might become a nation of small farmers after all—which was exactly what most Americans didn’t want. For this was the late nineteenth century, when, as Henry Adams wrote, “the majority at last declared itself, once and for all, in favor of the capitalistic system with all its necessary machinery . . . the whole mechanical consolidation of force . . . ruthlessly . . . created monopolies capable of controlling the new energies that America adored.”