Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

And there the irony of the whole long fight between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers came full circle. Had they really cooperated—as General William Cassidy had stated they would, and must—there is no telling what they might have built. Their rivalry prevailed, and grew more intense, during one of history’s truly unique periods—a time when we had the confidence, and the money, and, one might say, the compulsion to build on a fantastically grand scale. The money invested in the dozens of relatively small projects each agency built—in many cases because the other threatened to build first—would have sufficed to build the great works they insisted were necessary, but which required extraordinary determination, cooperation, and raw political clout in order to be authorized. Fifty million here, eighty million there, a hundred million here, and soon one was talking about real money. In the 1960s, Dos Rios Dam could have been built for $400 million; today it might cost $3 billion or more. A diversion from the Columbia River to the Southwest could have been built for $6 billion or so in the sixties, and there was so much surplus energy in the Northwest that a few million acre-feet of water removed from a river that dumps 140 million acre-feet into the sea might not have been missed. Today the cost seems utterly prohibitive, and Washington and Oregon would probably resist the engineers with tanks. The opportunity was there. But the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau squandered ...