Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Legally, under the Reclamation Act, you could irrigate 160 acres and no more. “We didn’t even want them to irrigate that much land,” says Dominy. “The law was created to pack as many farmers as possible in a region with limited water. If they could make a living on forty acres, we gave them water for forty. We were talking about subsistence.” However, many farmers in Bureau projects were irrigating 320 acres, the result of a liberal interpretation of the act that permitted joint ownership and irrigation of 320 acres by a man and wife. (Married men, it was discovered, made more reliable farmers than bachelors.) In all but the highest and coldest regions of the West, you could make a good living on 320 acres irrigated by subsidized water. If you were in California and raised two cash crops a year with water that cost a quarter of a cent per ton, you could make more money than a lawyer. In 1958, the Fresno Chamber of Commerce published a brochure whose purpose was to lure more farmers to the Central Valley, and which estimated the number of irrigated acres one had to plant in various crops to support a family. The figure for oranges was twenty to thirty acres; for peaches, thirty to forty acres; for grapes and raisins, forty to fifty acres; for figs, sixty to eighty acres. Even a hundred and twenty acres of cotton and alfalfa, comparatively low-value crops, could support a family if you had Reclamation water.

Rumors abounded, however, of corporate farmers illegally irrigating thousands of acres with the super-subsidized water—by inventing complicated lease-out lease-back arrangements, by controlling excess land through dummy corporations, by leasing from relatives, and so on. It is unclear how much the Bureau knew about this and how exact its knowledge was; what is clear is that it did little or nothing to end it. Even a self-proclaimed populist like Mike Straus was afraid to tangle with the giant California farming corporations and the politicians they helped elect. “Straus huffed and puffed about the acreage limit,” Dominy said later, “but he didn’t do a damn thing to enforce it.” (This is largely but not completely true. One of Straus’s worries, which turned out to be well founded, was that the Corps of Engineers, unencumbered by social legislation or much of a social conscience, would gladly step in and replace the Bureau as the major water developer of the West if the Bureau began cracking down too hard on violators.)

And though it is true, as Dominy insists, that the record of enforcement during his reign was at least as good as any other commissioner’s, that isn’t saying much, because the record of enforcement over eighty years has been almost nil. Not only that, but the violations had become more frequent and worse by the time Dominy was appointed. It wasn’t until the administration of Jimmy Carter that a serious attempt was even made to find out how bad the violations were. The conclusion was that they had multiplied considerably after the Second World War and reached their apogee about the time Dominy became commissioner. As it happened, the Carter investigation found that the vast majority of illegalities were occurring in California and Arizona. But the senior Senator from Arizona was Dominy’s best friend in Congress, Carl Hayden. In California, the Congressmen who represented the region where most of the acreage violations were taking place were three Dominy stalwarts: Bizz Johnson, John McFall, and Bernie Sisk. None of those gentlemen ever showed much interest in enforcing the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. They did, however, display a passionate interest in new dams, and their attitudes became Floyd Dominy’s attitudes the longer he remained in office. He had begun as a crusader, a person who at least appeared to possess a sense of fairness and justice, a non-engineer whose outlook was basically agrarian. He ended his term as a zealot, blind to injustice, locked in...

The fact is that Dominy knew that scandalous violations of the acreage limit were occurring right around Los Angeles—for example, that the Irvine Ranch, one of the largest private landholdings in the entire world, was illegally receiving immense amounts of taxpayer-subsidized Reclamation water—and did absolutely nothing to stop it. When he was shown the list of violators, compiled during a months-long secret investigation, he put it in his desk drawer and never looked at it again. Though he went to great lengths to try to disprove it, Dominy knew that the Bureau was opening new lands for crops which farmers were paid not to grow back east—cotton being the prime offender. The Bureau could easily have refused to supply new water to a region until it could demonstrate that its crop patterns would not make the nation’s agricultural surpluses worse, but its response, under Dominy, was to launch a belligerent campaign to deny that the problem existed.

What Dominy appeared not to realize was that these three syndromes, often occurring at once—farmers illegally irrigating excess acreage with dirt cheap water in order to grow price-supported crops—were badly tarnishing the Bureau’s reputation. By the 1960s, the Reclamation program was under attack not only from conservationists but from church groups (who objected to its tacit and illegal encouragement of big corporate farms), from conservatives, from economists, from eastern and midwestern farmers, and from a substantial number of newspapers and magazines that had usually supported it in the past—even from the Hearst papers in California. Dominy was not so blind that he didn’t see this; his fatal mistake was in believing that the p...

Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. The Bureau got away with its role in this partly because its spiritual fathers, John Wesley Powell and Theodore Roosevelt, happened to be two of the foremost conservationists of their day—a heritage which, in the right hands, might have all but immunized it against more modern conservationists’ attacks.

Under Dominy, the Bureau lost touch with reality so completely that it developed an uncanny knack for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. At the northern end of Lake Havasu, a few miles south of Needles, California, it had inadvertently created a large freshwater wetland known as Topock Marsh. Migrating ducks and geese that were evicted from the Central Valley soon discovered the marsh and descended on it by the tens of thousands during their winter sojourns. By the late 1940s, Topock Marsh had become one of the most important man-made attractions on the Pacific Flyway, and the Bureau, had it had any sense, would have graciously accepted its share of credit and basked in it. The grasses and duckweed, however, were phreatophytes, and consumed valuable water that could have been sold to Imperial Valley farmers for $3.50 an acre-foot. As a result, the Bureau began trying to dredge the marsh in 1948; when at first the dredging didn’t work, it spent millions of dollars and stepped up its efforts and pursued them so relentlessly that by the 1960s about 90 percent of the food grasses were gone. The marsh’s visiting waterfowl soon diminished from forty or fifty thousand a year to a few hundred or thousand at most.

Dominy’s Bureau regarded the operation as a “success,” failing utterly to recognize the public relations catastrophe into which it had happily stepped. Even Imperial Valley farmers, who had so much water to waste that some of them applied ten or twelve feet per year to their crops, were opposed to the dredging because they liked to shoot ducks. Ben Avery, a widely read outdoor columnist for the Arizona Republic—a newspaper never known to oppose water development unless it was California’s—adopted Topock Marsh as his personal crusade and made a point of savaging the Bureau several times a year. In June of 1966, one of his columns finally caught Dominy’s attention. “I believe we will have to take Avery on,” he wrote to his regional director, Arleigh West, “or face up to the realities [sic] that there is a great deal of truth in what he is saying.” In other words, Dominy knew Avery was right. He knew that Topock Marsh was pitiful compensation for all the habitat the Bureau and Corps had ruined. He knew that the marsh would reappear unless the Bureau continued to spend millions of dollars trying to annihilate it. But which course of action did he choose? The Bureau, he decided, was going to deny everything Ben Avery said and continue demolishing the marsh.

In one issue of Audubon magazine—which had a circulation far smaller than it does today—the magazine’s bird-watching columnist, Olin Pettingill, made a derogatory reference to the Bureau in an article which, for the most part, was about curlews and gallinules. Pettingill remarked that the Bureau’s Nimbus Dam, on the American River east of Sacramento, “has ruined what once were spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead rainbow trout”—an observation that happens to be entirely true. That was the sum total of Pettingill’s criticism: one sentence in a two-thousand-word article about birds. However, as far as Dominy was concerned, the magazine was guilty of delivering “a gratuitous slap in the face.” He wrote to his regional director, “We think it would be opportune and worthwhile to work with the Sacramento newspaper in the development of a feature story on the lengths to which Reclamation has gone . . . to enhance the fishery and wildlife resources of the Central Valley. An ideal situation would be for such a story to be used in the Bee on the opening day of the Audubon Society convention in Sacramento, to be followed up by an editorial.”

Two interesting questions are raised by Dominy’s response. One is whether he really had enough influence with the Sacramento Bee to enlist it in an orchestrated campaign to perfume the Bureau’s reputation. One also wonders what he had in mind when he spoke of Reclamation projects “enhancing” fish and wildlife habitat in the Central Valley. By the mid-1960s, nearly 90 percent of the valley’s wetlands habitat was gone, almost entirely because of irrigation farming, and wetlands were by far the most important natural feature in all its five-hundred-mile length; the valley was once the winter destination of a hundred million waterfowl cruising the Pacific Flyway, and now their numbers were reduced to five or six million, jammed onto refuges or forced to scrounge a meal in unwelcoming farmers’ fields. The Sacramento–San Joaquin river system once had six thousand miles of salmon-spawning streams, but by the mid-1960s there were perhaps six hundred miles left, and it was the Bureau’s dams, cemented across rivers low down in the foothills, that blocked the salmon most effectively. So what had the Bureau done to “enhance” fish and wildlife resources? At best, it had created a series of slack-water reservoirs that were host to such rough fish as catfish, crappie, and bass, plus some trout and an occasional landlocked salmon. The reservoirs were useless to ducks and geese, which couldn’t feed in their deep waters and would be driven mad by the powerboats anyway.

Despite all this, in the late 1960s Dominy was as entrenched as any bureaucrat in Washington. The main reason was his relationship with Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, the chairman of the Appropriations Committee, the most powerful man in legislative government. It was the relationship of a fawning nephew and a favorite uncle—the kind of relationship young Lyndon Johnson enjoyed with Sam Rayburn—and it gave Dominy an authority, an insolence, an invulnerability scarcely anyone else enjoyed. When Carl Hayden was in his late eighties, senile, half blind, half deaf, confined to a hospital bed half the time, Floyd Dominy all but served as chairman of the Appropriations Committee when dam authorizations came around. He managed this by telling Hayden exactly what he wanted him to say—by actually writing dialogue for the two of them to recite. He would go to Hayden’s office, sit down with his legislative aide, Roy Elson, and write the questions he wanted Hayden to ask him; then he would go back to his own office and write the answers. It is unclear whether he did the same for other witnesses. The Hayden-Dominy scripts were of dubious enough ethical propriety for Dominy to keep them locked in the Bureau’s sensitive files, their existence known to only a handful of aides. Old, frail, and sick as he was, Hayden was still a man no one wanted to cross, and Dominy, knowing this, basked as long as he could in his failing light. “When you walked into Dominy’s office,” says John Gottschalk...

It wasn’t his blindness, his stubbornness, his manipulation of Congress, his talent for insubordination, his contempt for wild nature, his tolerance of big growers muscling into the Reclamation program—in the end, it wasn’t any of this that did Dominy in. It was his innate self-destructiveness, which manifested itself most blatantly in an undisguised preoccupation with lust. His sexual exploits were legendary. They were also true. Whenever and wherever he traveled, he wanted a woman for the night. He had no shame about propositioning anyone. He would tell a Bureau employee with a bad marriage that his wife was a hell of a good lay, and the employee wouldn’t know whether he was joking or not. He preferred someone available, but his associates say he wasn’t above paying cash. “The regional directors were expected to find women for him,” says one former regional director. “It always amazed me how he carried on in the light of day. He was opening himself up to blackmail, but somehow he always seemed immune.” The Bureau airplane was known, by some, as the “Winged Boudoir in the Sky.”

As he bullied weak men, Dominy preyed on women whom he considered easy marks. According to one regional director, Felix Sparks, the head of Colorado’s Water Conservation Board, was married to a woman who occasionally overindulged, so Dominy went right after her. In time, an indignant Mary Sparks refused to attend any party where Dominy threatened to show up. Sparks, one of the most decorated veterans of World War II, might have been expected to punch Dominy in the jaw. Everyone, however, seemed to humor him. “He’s just being Floyd,” they would say. “You know how Floyd is.” “He’s just a little drunk. Ignore him.”

Alice Dominy must have known. Her life was insulated, she rarely went with him on trips, but for years everyone suspected that she knew. And there came a day when she had to find out for sure. She drove into town to the hotel where, according to the rumors, he liked to conduct his trysts. She took the elevator upstairs, mustered her courage, and knocked on the door. A woman opened up. Floyd Dominy, her husband, was in the back of the room. “He just told her to go home and mind her own business,” says one of Dominy’s confidants. “And she was of that era where that’s what women did. I don’t know how he rationalized it. He probably said, ‘Well,...

Dominy did not even aspire to discretion. He bragged about his exploits. He taunted his assistants with remarks about their wives. He ordered them to find him women. It seemed as if he simply couldn’t help himself. He could testify before Congress on a half bottle of bourbon and two hours of sleep, he could throw Representative Clair Engle out of his office, he could learn more about the Reclamation program than any person alive—he was tough, ferociously disciplined, indomitable. But he was also compulsive, addicted, a fool for lust—and exposed himself quite recklessly to full view. “I’m not sure what Dominy i...

At Nixon’s behest, the FBI had run its customary investigation of top federal officials to look for improprieties and had come back with a file on Dominy that was inches thick. (“The FBI knows every woman I’ve ever fucked,” Dominy once confessed to me.)

mostly, though, he preoccupied himself with enshrining his reputation and with his cows. In 1979, he was named Virginia Seed Stockman of the Year, a fitting title: he had been proclaimed the state’s preeminent stud expert.

The Central Arizona Project which Dominy finally managed to build is a medium-sized dwarf compared with the Pacific Southwest Water Plan he had planned, and he had to sacrifice the last years of his career to the effort to get it authorized. Today, few of the other grand projects conceived under him exist. There is no Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, no Texas Water Plan, no Auburn Dam, no Kellogg Reservoir, no English Ridge Dam, no Peripheral Canal, no additional dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake River, no Oahe and Garrison diversion projects. Dominy wanted to move the Bureau’s activities into the eastern United States, because he came to believe that irrigation often makes better sense in wetter regions than in emphatically dry ones, and also because he wanted to invade the Corps of Engineers’ domain in order to retaliate for the Corps having encroached on the Bureau in the West. But all of those plans—for irrigation projects in Louisiana, for a series of reservoirs in Appalachia set around new industrial towns—came to naught. The legacy of Floyd Dominy is not so much bricks and mortar as a reputation—a reputation and an attitude. The attitude is his—one of arrogant indifference to sweeping changes in the public mood—and it is probably the foremost obstacle in the Bureau of Reclamation’s way as it tries to play a meaningful role in the future of the American West.

They were the first purely agricultural culture in the Southwest, if not all of North America. Midden remains, well preserved by the desert’s dryness and heat, suggest that the Hohokam rarely hunted, or even ate meat; their copious starch and vegetable diet was supplemented only occasionally by a bighorn sheep, antelope, raven, or kangaroo rat. Sometimes they ate sturgeon. That sturgeon bones have been found amid the Hohokam ruins suggests a Gila River considerably fuller and more constant than the ghost river whites have known—a river that, even before its headwaters were dammed, usually ran underground. And this, in turn, suggests a possible reason for the Hohokam’s demise: that the climate was considerably wetter during the centuries their civilization flourished, then turned suddenly dry.

When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves. The largest of the canals they dug was fifteen miles long and eleven yards wide from bank to bank; like the other main canals, it had a perfectly calibrated drop of 2.5 meters per mile, enough to sustain a flow rate that would flush out most of the unwanted silt. There were dozens of miles of laterals and ditches, implying irrigation of many thousands of acres of land. Because of the dry climate and the provenance of the irrigated land, the Hohokam should have enjoyed good health; they made superior weapons; they were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? It is hard to imagine a civilization covering thousands of square miles and comprising hundreds of thousands of people just vanishing, but according to Emil Haury, an archaeologist who became fascinated by their demise, they apparently did. “We are almost totally ignorant of Hohokam archaeology . . . after 1400,” writes Haury in Snaketown, an archaeological record of the impressive Hohokam artifacts he and his colleagues unearthed. The relatively few Pima Indians whom whites found living in central Arizona in the 1800s were presumably descended from the Hohokam—which in Pima language, means “those who have gone”—but they offered no explanation as to what happened to them. Drought remains a possibility—perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen—but an equally plausible explanation is t...

In the arid West, denying one’s neighbor water was a virtual declaration of war. But Moeur had his own response to such a challenge. He would begin waging a real war. The advance expeditionary force consisted of Major F. I. Pomeroy, 158th Infantry Regiment, Arizona National Guard, plus a sergeant, three privates, and a cook. Their instructions, issued personally by the governor, were to report “on any attempt on the part of any person to place any structure on Arizona soil either within the bed of said river [the Colorado] or on the shore.” Moeur knew full well that such an attempt had already been made, for the Bureau was doing some test drilling at the site of Parker Dam—a smaller regulation dam downriver from Hoover—from a barge, and the barge was secured against the current by a cable whose eastern end was anchored in Arizona soil.

When the newspapers caught wind that an army had actually been dispatched, they were ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times promptly inducted its military correspondent to cover the hostilities. He made it to the Parker Dam site on his state’s fast macadam roads before the expeditionary force even arrived. When it did, exhausted from the heat, dust, and twelve fords across the ooze of the Bill Williams River, Major Pomeroy requisitioned a ferryboat from the town of Parker, and the force was instantly renamed the Arizona Navy. After a full inspection of the offending cable, Pomeroy tried to steam up the Colorado to the mouth of the Bill Williams to reconnoiter, but the ferry was too high to sneak under the cable, and it got hung up. It was a harbinger of how things were to turn out that the occupants were finally delivered to their campsite by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s fast motor launch.

Pomeroy stayed at the site for seven months, sending daily dispatches to the governor by radio. When the Bureau finally began to lay a trestle bridge to the Arizona shore, Moeur decided to demonstrate that he meant business. He declared the whole Arizona side of the river under martial law and sent out a hundred-man militia unit in eighteen trucks, some with mounted machine guns. According to residents of the town of Parker, who were watching a good joke turn sour in a hurry, the guardsmen seemed eager for a fight. By now, however, the imbroglio had became national news and a source of embarrassment to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Well aware that Arizona had at least a moral case to make, Ickes ordered construction halted on the dam while the dispute was settled in the courts. To its own surprise as much as everyone else’s, Arizona, which had already lost twice in the Supreme Court in its efforts to block Boulder Dam, was upheld. Parker Dam, ruled the Court, was technically illegal because it had not been specifically authorized by Congress. (That the Bureau could begin to put up a big dam without even asking Congress for formal approval says a lot about how far it had come in the intervening years.) Four months later, however, California’s Congressional delegation pushed a bill through Congress that specifically authorized the dam, and Arizona was left without recourse, unless it wanted to declare war on the United States.

The 1940s and 1950s were boom years in Arizona. Phoenix—population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000—grew overnight from outsize village to big city. Between 1920 and 1960, the state’s population doubled twice, and millions of irrigated acres came into production. One of the revelations of the postwar period was that, given the opportunity, people were happy to leave temperate climates with cold winters for desert climates with fierce summers, provided there was water to sustain them and air conditioning to keep them from perishing (Phoenix, in the summer, is virtually intolerable without air conditioning). Not that the migrants had bothered to ask whether there was enough water before they loaded their belongings and drove west. They simply came; no one could stop them. How they were to fill their pools and water their lawns was Arizona’s problem.

Arizona’s solution was the same most other western states relied on; it began sucking up its groundwater, the legacy of many millennia, as if tomorrow would never come. By the 1960s, despite the Bureau’s big Salt River Project—which captured virtually the entire flow of the Gila drainage—four out of every five acre-feet of water used in the state came out of the ground. The annual overdraft—the difference between pumping and replenishment by nature—went past 2.2 million acre-feet a year, which was more than the historic yearly runoff of all the rivers in the state. In dry years, it approached four million acre-feet. In the early days, artesian wells flowed around Phoenix. By the 1960s, some farmers could drill to two thousand feet and bring up nothing but hot brine. Parts of Maricopa County, which included metropolitan Phoenix, literally began to subside as the water below was pumped out and the aquifers collapsed. Drivers heading toward Tucson on Interstate 10 learned to watch for fissures opening in the highway as a vast block of land sank several inches and the one next to it stayed put. Arizona had reversed the pattern of some western states—it had fully developed its surface water first, and then began to overdraft its groundwater. Except for its Colorado River entitlement—whatever it was—it literally had nothing left.

The one exception to the rule it had just established, said the Court, was when someone had water rights that predated the Colorado River Compact. Those rights had to be satisfied first, no matter what. There was an exquisite irony in this. Most of the Indians of the Southwest were hunter-gathers when whites arrived; a purely agricultural culture such as the Hohokam no longer existed. When the whites came and killed off the buffalo and antelope and ran the Indians onto reservations, their old way of life perished, and they had no choice but to become farmers or wards of the state. The reservation land they got, however, was, for the most part, land no one else had wanted. Much of it was terrible farmland, too sandy or infertile or high in elevation to grow anything well. Because it was such poor land, it required a lot of irrigation water, and the government had implicitly attached large water rights to it—rights that were confirmed in 1908 by the Supreme Court under the Winters doctrine. The Navajo Reservation in Arizona carried implicit rights to nearly 600,000 acre-feet, about one-fifth of the natural runoff of the state. Now, according to the Supreme Court, the Navajo could use every drop of that water during an extended drought even as people in Phoenix and Tucson were being allocated five gallons per day, even as millions were fleeing Los Angeles and leaving it the largest ghost town in the world. It probably wouldn’t come to that, but the Indians, where water was co...

The 17.5-million-acre-foot yield that the Compact negotiators had ascribed to the Colorado River was based on about eighteen years of streamflow measurement with instruments that, by today’s standards, were rather imprecise. During all of that period, the river had gone on a binge, sending down average or above-average flows three out of every four years. Not once had the flow dropped below ten million acre-feet, as it had repeatedly during the Great Drought of the 1930s. But all it takes to make statisticians look foolish is a few very wet or very dry years. In San Francisco, precipitation records have been kept for more than a hundred years—a log which, one might think, is good enough for a highly accurate guess. But 1976 and 1977, two unprecedented drought years, lowered the average rainfall figure from 20.66 to 19.33 inches. In a marginal farming region such as the Great Plains, an inch less precipitation can mean all kinds of trouble. In a desert region such as the Southwest, utterly dependent on one river, a difference of a couple of million acre-feet can spell disaster.

As far as Riter was concerned, there was only one way to face it. “It is futile to argue about an inadequate water supply,” he wrote to Dominy. “[F]uture development in the Colorado River Basin is dependent upon the future importation of water to augment the dependable supply in the basin.” He suggested that, “as a minimum,” the Central Arizona Project legislation pending before Congress be rewritten to contain “a conditional authorization of an import plan of at least 2.5 million acre-feet.” Riter didn’t say where 2.5 million acre-feet of water from outside the basin should come from. But he knew, and Dominy knew, that there were only a few places where it could come from. That much unappropriated water couldn’t be found within eight hundred miles. It could come from the rivers of far-northern California. It could come from the Pacific Northwest. Or it could come from Canada.

By the time he became Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Water and Power in 1949, Bill Warne had developed an obsession: rerouting the fabulous amount of water that spilled into the Pacific from Eureka on north. The engineering study that would determine how best to do it was called the United Western Investigation. It is, to this day, the best-kept secret in the history of water development in the West; people who have been in the business all their lives have never heard of it.

The investigation took two years to complete. Its conclusions filled several volumes with descriptions, economic analyses, appendices, and maps. To Clarence Kuiper, a young engineer recruited from the Corps of Engineers, “it was the closest I ever came to feeling omnipotent. We were looking at ideas even Mike Straus hadn’t thought of yet.” The UWI team raced around the Pacific rim like Rommel’s army, concocting schemes to put deserts to flight. They dinged rock samples out of canyon walls. They traced future reservoir basins by air. They floated rivers and explored by jeep. They spread contour maps across the floors of rooms and built tunnels and aqueducts with pencils. They spread oceans of theoretical water over horizons of potential farmland; on paper, they turned half the Southwest green. “Straus told us to look at every possibility,” Kuiper would recall years later. “He said, ‘Don’t you laugh at a goddamm thing.’ Well, we didn’t. We looked over every harebrained idea that ever came up. We looked at an undersea pipeline from the mouth of the Columbia to Los Angeles. Lord, we found every conceivable place where you could divert the Columbia. We looked into jumping the Willamette out of its bed at Oregon City and turning it right around in an aqueduct to California. Southern Oregon is a big mess of mountains, so we plotted a tunnel that would have been 135 miles long. We had one guy in the Bureau who thought you could keep wall-to-wall tankers moving between the mouth of...

If anything, the United Western Investigation suffered from a surfeit of choices. “Numerous possibilities exist for the interbasin transfer of supplies into water-deficient regions,” wrote McCasland in the cover document, which bore the splendidly militaristic title United Western Investigation, Interim Report on Reconnaissance, Report of the Chief. You could, for example, take a few million acre-feet out of the Snake River at Twin Falls, Idaho, pump it up the south side of the Snake River plain in fifteen-foot siphons, and drop it into the Humboldt River, the only constant river in the state of Nevada, meandering small and forlorn beside Interstate 80 for three hundred miles until it disappears in shallow, salty Humboldt Lake. Then you could move the suddenly prodigious Humboldt straight across seamless desert to the Owens Valley, two hundred miles away. You could tunnel thirty miles under the White Mountains and just dump it in. Then you could quadruple the size of everything Los Angeles had built to divert the Owens River, and move the mingled waters of the Snake and the Humboldt and the Owens to Los Angeles, to San Diego, to the Mojave Desert, and dump the surplus in the Colorado to satisfy our treaty with Mexico, leaving the other basin states with the whole Colorado to hoard for themselves.

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 leng...

Remote, wild, half-forgotten, the Klamath was a perfect example of how God had left the perfection and completion of California to the Bureau of Reclamation. The second-largest river in the state—three times the size of the third-largest river—it was imprisoned by mountains and hopelessly remote from Los Angeles. Spilling out of Klamath Lake in southern Oregon, a huge shallow apparition cradled between mountains and desert, the river drops across the California border and bends its way westward toward the coast. Then it dips suddenly southward toward populated California, and, as if recognizing covetous intent, immediately doubles back on itself and flees to Oregon through the plunging topography of the Siskiyou Range. Diverting the Klamath would be easy along the first half of its course, but it doesn’t contain much water yet. A hundred miles from the Pacific, however, rainfall shoots up to a hundred inches, the Trinity and Scott and Salmon rivers pour in, and the Klamath is suddenly huge. On a random day late in February of 1983, after a week of rain, the Klamath was flowing at four thousand cubic feet per second below Klamath Lake and at 148,000 cubic feet per second near its mouth, a Niagara-size flow in a canyon you can bat a ball across. Small tributaries were tumbling oven-size rocks like ice cubes. To the Bureau, the Klamath’s huge and reliable winter surges were only its second greatest attraction—the first was its availability. The Klamath was wasting twelve mill...

To capture the Klamath, you had to dam it twelve miles from the Pacific, then move the water in reverse across, or under, a hundred miles of the most rugged topography in the United States. The dam, which would be called Ah Pah, would occupy the river’s last gorge. It would stand 813 feet high. The Pan Am Building in New York City stands 805 feet high. A man-made El Capitán, it would pool water seventy miles up the Klamath and forty miles up the Trinity to form a reservoir with 15,050,000 acre-feet of gross storage. (The reservoir that obliterated Johnstown, Pennsylvania, held fifty thousand acre-feet.) The Klamath, both forks of the Trinity, and the Salmon River would, for all practical purposes, disappear; 98 percent of the salmon and steelhead spawning grounds would be lost; at least seven towns would vanish, including the main settlements of the Hoopa tribe, from whose language the dam’s name was borrowed, and whose reservation it would drown. “Only minor improvements [i.e., towns] exist in this [the reservoir] area,” said the United Western report. The site, in a dense metasandstone formation, was presumed to be safe, although it “probably contains minor faults.”

Trinity Tunnel, which would spin water out of the bottom back side of the reservoir and carry it to the Central Valley, would be sixty miles long, Its shape would resemble a horseshoe, and its diameter would be thirty-seven feet. There would be no tunnel remotely like it anywhere in the world. The Delaware Aqueduct, stretching from the Catskill Mountains to Westchester County, is eighty-five miles long, but its diameter is only fourteen feet. Trinity Tunnel could hold four passenger trains operating on two levels. It alone would cost nearly half a billion dollars, in 1951, and it was merely the longest and biggest of numerous tunnels. The Tehachapi Tunnel, forty miles long, would move the water through the Transverse Ranges, which cordon off Los Angeles from the rest of the state. Seven known fault zones would be crossed along the aqueduct route, and one of them, the San Andreas Fault, would present a fracture zone at least two miles wide in the middle of the Tehachapi Tunnel whic...

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...

McCasland didn’t help. Contentious and prickly, he may have been a fine engineer, but he was the public relations equivalent of Sherman’s march to the sea. Without asking clearance from the commissioner’s office, he wrote an article describing the Klamath Diversion for Civil Engineering in 1952. Northern California’s thirty-five years of passionate opposition to southern California’s diversion plans can be traced directly to that article. McCasland would not even say that these Pantagruelian waterworks would take care of the southland’s need for all time: “The plan described as the Northern California Diversion,” he wrote, “would not by any means constitute a complete water supply for the Southwest. It would meet the most imminent demands . . . but it would more probably constitute the initial stage of a large plan to serve much wider markets a future economy might dictate.” Clarence Kuiper says, “What I remember about that time is the phone ringing off the hook with reporters from Oregon and Washington asking me if it was true that the Bureau was plannin...

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.

On a map of Arizona, the Colorado River can be seen making a wide circle around the northern and eastern half of the state. At every point along that six-hundred-mile sojourn, the populated center of the state is walled off from the river by mountains. In the north, the river flows in a bottomless canyon, a mile below its southern rim; to lift it out of there and lead it to Phoenix would be out of the question—even though the water, once out of the Grand Canyon, could flow downhill all the way. Closer to its mouth, the river escapes its canyon confines and flows across broad sandy wastes, but numerous ranges stand between the river and Tucson and Phoenix—the Aquarius Cliffs, the Black Mountains, the Maricopa Mountains, the Saucera Range. Regardless of where one located the point of diversion, to move a portion of the Colorado River to Tucson and Phoenix would involve a pump lift of at least twelve hundred feet. Pumping irrigation water there would be like taking it out of the Hudson River and lifting it over the World Trade Center in order to water lawns on Long Island. The CAP was to be, first and foremost, an irrigation project, a rescue project to save the dying farmlands between Phoenix and Tucson; the cities would also get some water, but the farmers would receive the overwhelming share. Hardly anywhere on earth, however, is water lifted that high in order to irrigate crops, unless the water flows nearly as far downhill somewhere along its route as it was lifted uphil...

A simple matter of physics, then, made the Central Arizona Project even worse, in an economic sense, than the Colorado River Storage Project. But politics demanded that it be built, and in the 1960s, Arizona had power. Barry Goldwater was the presidential candidate of the Republican Party; Carl Hayden was the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He could, if he wanted, hold up every other water project in the country until his state was satisfied. And there was the issue of equity. California had its water, Nevada had its water, the upper basin was developing its water, and Arizona still had nothing. What were a couple of billion dollars in the face of these other, more important concerns?

Still, something would have to be done about the project’s horrifically poor economic rationale. And something would ultimately have to be done about the fact that the river now seemed certain to dry up if the CAP was built. Something—but what? The obvious answer was a couple of big cash register dams that could generate enough power, and enough money, to give Arizona’s irrigation farmers the 90-percent subsidy they would probably need. If the dams were big enough, there might be enough revenu...

But where could one locate the dams? There were no sites for big dams left in Arizona, and besides, the Gila River system didn’t have nearly enough water to develop the kind of power the Bureau had in mind. California still had a lot of undeveloped hydroelectric potential, but it wouldn’t think of allowing dams to be built within its borders whose revenues would allow Arizona to divert water it was then using. The Colorado River Storage Project was cementing dams in all the best hydroelectric canyons in the upper basin. New Mexico’s rivers had neither the sites nor the water flo...

The proposal for Grand Canyon dams was officially revealed on January 21, 1964, with the release of something called the Pacific Southwest Water Plan. One had only to read the title to see that, now that another New Deal Democrat was enfranchised in the White House (Lyndon Johnson was about to beat Barry Goldwater with 60 percent of the popular vote), the Bureau had happily returned to the mode of thinking prevalent during the FDR and Truman years. The plan was majestic. It contemplated two huge new dams on the Colorado River in Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon, at opposite ends of Grand Canyon National Park. Both had been carefully situated so as not to flood the park itself—except for what the Bureau called “minor” flooding that would drown lower Havasu Creek, the canyon’s most beautiful side stream, and submerge Lava Falls, the river’s most thunderous rapid. But the park would sit inside a dam sandwich: Bridge Canyon Dam would back up water for ninety-three miles below it, entirely flooding the bottom of Grand Canyon National Monument, and Marble Gorge Dam would create a reservoir more than forty miles long right above it. The dams had one purpose—hydroelectric power—and a single objective: lots and lots of cash. They would not conserve any water, because there was none left to conserve; in some years, they would cause a net loss to the river through evaporation. They were there only to take advantage of the thousand feet of elevation loss between Glen Canyon and Hoover d...

One of those features—actually, it was the centerpiece of the plan—was a pair of big dams on the Trinity River, in far-northern California, and a long hard-rock tunnel that would turn their water into the Sacramento River, where it would begin its journey to Los Angeles. That city and its burgeoning suburbs would thus receive a huge surge of high-quality water from northern California to replace the salty Colorado. The San Joaquin Valley would siphon off a considerable portion along the way; it was going to be rescued, for the third time, from its suicidal habit of mining groundwater. New Mexico would get Hooker Dam, which would inundate yet another scenic monument—the Gila Wilderness—and Utah would get two more projects. In the middle of the list, camouflaged under “water salvage and recovery programs,” was the most expensive item of all: the Central Arizona Project. It was the same multibillion-dollar shell game that the United Western Investigation had proposed: new water from northern California would take care of southern California’s needs so that the Colorado could be conserved for the upper basin and Arizona.

The most interesting curiosity about the plan, however, was the obvious discrepancy between the amount of new water the Trinity River could deliver and the looming shortfall in the Colorado River. At the moment the plan was released, the second-largest reservoir in California, Clair Engle Lake, was beginning to fill on the upper reaches of the Trinity. Its capacity of 2,448,000 acre-feet was not much less than the river’s annual flow of 3,958,000 acre-feet. Clair Engle Lake was a main feature of the Central Valley Project; its water, therefore, was exclusively for California’s use. According to the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, only 1.2 million acre-feet would be left in the Trinity to augment the Colorado River—and that was assuming the Trinity, one of the world’s great salmon and steelhead rivers, would be bled virtually dry before reaching the sea. But the shortfall which the Bureau was projecting in the Colorado Basin, privately if not publicly, was at least 2.5 million acre-feet. Where would the other 1.3 million acre-feet come from? The Pacific Northwest Water Plan said nothing about it. It only hinted that it “does not provide an overall solution for the region’s water needs,” then failed to mention what such an ultimate solution would be. The Bureau’s maps had other reservoirs all over the place, drawn in gray—several on the Eel River, one on Cache Creek, the huge Ah Pah reservoir on the Klamath—but referred to these as “alternative storage possibilities,” as if th...

In the Pacific Northwest, there was a lot of suspicion that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was merely a smokescreen for a much larger plan, long a gleam in the Colorado Basin’s eye, to tap the Columbia River. Such paranoia was inflamed by occasional speeches delivered to sympathetic ears by some of the Bureau’s engineers, insisting that this was the final solution that would someday have to be built to allow continued growth in the parching Southwest. Officially, however, the Interior Department went to great lengths to reassure the Northwest that it had no such designs. Udall publicly scoffed at the notion of diverting the Columbia, and Floyd Dominy, the Bureau commissioner, sharply reprimanded his underlings if they even mentioned the idea. But the truth of the matter was that the Pacific Southwest Water Plan was a smokescreen. The Columbia was on Udall’s and Dominy’s minds the entire time.

On December 15, 1964, less than a year after the Pacific Southwest plan was revealed, a four-hour-long meeting quietly took place at the regal new offices of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (Built on a hill at one end of Sunset Boulevard, the MWD headquarters had a splendid view of the immense sprawl and traffic congestion it had helped create—four freeways converged right below its windows—but it was walled off from same by a forest of fountains and, fittingly, a moat.) The participants in the meeting were Udall, Dominy, Interior solicitor Edward Weinberg, Los Angeles Congressman Chet Holifeld (whose twin passions were water diversion and nuclear power), and seven carefully selected members of the MWD. Officially, this was a meeting that never took place, but as the chairman of the MWD, Joe Jensen, enthused in a “Confidential Report to MWD Directors,” it was “one of the most constructive conferences we have attended.” Udall, he reported, “expects to discuss with Senator Jackson of Washington a feasibility study and the eventu...

“The Secretary stated two courses appeared to be possible at the present time,” Jensen wrote his fellow board members. “(1) Have a study made and defer action on authorization while the study is done right; (2) Introduce a bill which would authorize the import program, Bridge and Marble Canyon Dams, Central Arizona Project, and a few of the other projects. By March more definite information should be available and it should be possible to have the Committee report a bill to authorize the study and authorize the construction of the import program. . . . Dominy indicated the first six months of any presidential term was the best time to hit Congress. He stated that the Bureau had never had any trouble getting funds once a project had been authorized, but it frequently had trouble getting projects authorized” (emphasis added).

Udall and Dominy, in other words, wanted to study the feasibility of the Columbia diversion after it was already authorized, on the assumption that even if it wasn’t economically sound, it would be too late to stop it. Their real concern seemed to be lining up the political firepower that would let them succeed. And the plan, as Jensen described it, included so many gifts to so many states that it certainly ought to succeed. It contemplated numerous new irrigation projects in both Oregon and Nevada, some more projects in the upper Colorado Basin, and the stepped-up reclamation program in Washington that would make up for the mysterious “facilities” that might have to be shut down. Even then, Jensen said, “up to 7.5 million acre-feet of [Columbia River] water” would still reach Lake Mead every year. The plan, then, had to be far more expensive and ambitious than anything ever contemplated—more so, by far, than the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, more so even than the Klamath Diversion studied by the Bureau twelve years earlier. That was remarkable enough. What was really remarkable, however, was that the water would be available “at the present price of Columbia River water.”

To charge no more for Colorado River water delivered to Los Angeles or Arizona than was being charged for water from nearby Hoover Dam would be a feat as astonishing as Moses’ bifurcation of the Red Sea. The water would have to come a thousand miles by aqueduct; Hoover water came only a couple of hundred miles, and the immense power output of the dam subsidized the big pump lift to Los Angeles. Hoover Dam was financed with Depression-era interest rates and built by workers earning $4 a day; this project would be financed by Vietnam-era interest rates and built by unionized labor earning at least $6 an hour. There would be little, if any, hydroelectric power produced, but a lot of power might be required for pumping; the water had to go over or through two major mountain ranges! The difference in cost, per acre-foot, ought to be at le...