Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The idea of the city it was trying to save vilifying the project it had planned in order to save it left the Bureau of Reclamation speechless. Had its engineers accepted a thing or two about law and psychology, however, they wouldn’t have been the least surprised. Los Angeles, in the middle of an epic feud with Arizona over Colorado River water rights, saw the Klamath Diversion as a ploy to encourage it to relinquish its claim on the share of the river that it wanted to consider its own. In fact, if any Californian even mentioned the idea of going north for water, Los Angeles came down on him like Thor. When Republican Congressman Richard J. Welch of San Francisco did just that, the Los Angeles Daily News denounced his idea as “the kiss of Judas.” “This San Franciscan,” it fumed, “is trying not to succor but to sucker us.” As Carey McWilliams wrote in California: The Great Exception, “To suggest that Colorado River water was not the only water which might be made available in southern California was, of course, an act of treason, a betrayal.” The Republican Party of the state, with its center of power in Los Angeles and Orange County, went so far as to mount an effort to excommunicate poor Welch, who, as bewildered as the Bureau by then, said he was only trying to help.