Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts, and the graduates headed west in a fog of idealism, ready to take on the most intractable foe of mankind: the desert. But the desert suffers improvement at a steep price, and the early Reclamation program was as much a disaster as its dams were engineering marvels. The underlying problems were politics and money. Under the terms of the Reclamation Act, projects were to be financed by a Reclamation Fund, which would be filled initially by revenues from sales of federal land in the western states, then paid back gradually through sales of water to farmers. (It should be mentioned right away that the farmers, under the law, were exempted from paying interest on virtually all of their repayment obligations—a subsidy which was substantial to begin with, and which was to become breathtaking in later decades, as interest rates topped 10 percent. In some cases, the interest exemption alone—which is, of course, an indirect burden on the general taxpayer—has amounted to a subsidy of ninety cents on the dollar.)