Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Alternatively, you could build a whole series of dams at a more or less equal elevation on the bigger rivers of coastal Oregon and, at a level approximate to the elevation of the upper Sacramento Valley, run a gravity-diversion aqueduct from reservoir to reservoir, picking up half-million-acre-foot increments as a bus picks up passengers, then run the aqueduct beneath the Siskiyou Mountains and plop the water into Shasta Lake, then lead it south from there. You could take millions and millions of acre-feet out of the Pend Oreille in Washington, an obscure river bigger than the Wabash or the Hudson or the Sacramento, and move it by gravity—through a series of aqueducts and tunnels—from Albeni Falls, near the Canadian border, across the deserts of eastern Washington and Central Oregon all the way to California, passing by the Rogue and the Illinois and picking up some surplus flows, with the end result that California’s developed water yield would be increased by nearly one-half. “The total length of the aqueduct . . . would be about 1,020 miles, of which about 290 miles would be tunnel and 40 miles in siphon. No estimates of cost were made for this plan because the necessary length of aqueduct causes it to appear unattractive.” Most or all of these diversions, the Report of the Chief implied, would have to be built, sooner or later. “Regardless of magnitude, scope, and timing of the undertaking, if it can be shown that moving surplus waters of the Northwest to water-deficie...