Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The cost of everything—Ah Pah Dam, the other dams, the tunnels, the aqueducts, the pumps, the canals, the receiving reservoirs, and an item called a Peripheral Canal, which would be built to carry the Sacramento’s greatly swollen flow around California’s Delta—would be $3,293,050,000. It was an incredible bargain; today, a couple of nuclear power plants cost much more than that. Had the Bureau reckoned how expensive life was going to become, the Klamath Diversion might well have been built. “In those days, almost everything the Bureau proposed was being built,” Kuiper says. “But Straus decided to move cautiously on this one. If you read the report, you’ll see that we were always talking about ‘orderly development.’ That’s code talk for building at a deliberate pace, taking care to butter everyone’s bread, instead of going gung-ho, which is what they did on the Missouri. In California, you had two choices: you could build a lot of little projects on tributaries of the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, or you could built one huge project on the Klamath. I don’t know whether it made better sense to do one or the other. What I do know is that Mike Straus was constitutionally incapable of seeing that the clock was already running out on these tremendous projects. He thought it was the other way around—that the Bureau would keep building bigger and bigger things. The only way Mike knew how to think was bigger and bigger. He and Bill Warne were sure the Klamath Diversion was going ...