Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Bureau hadn’t built much in the upper Missouri Basin, either, for the same reason that it hadn’t built much along the upper Colorado and its tributaries: irrigation farming in cold, high-altitude terrain was usually a losing proposition. It had investigated the basin thoroughly, and by 1907 it had nine projects underway there, mainly for political reasons: the Missouri Basin states contributed a lot of money to the Reclamation Fund. But of the nine projects, not a single one was going to pay for itself within the forty-year term required by the amended Reclamation Act. The nine projects together owed the Treasury and the Reclamation Fund $55,755,000, but had repaid only $17,518,000, even though they were exempted from paying interest. At the rate that revenues—which depended more than anything else on the irrigators’ meager ability to pay—were dribbling in, the projects wouldn’t be repaid within two hundred years, if ever.