CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Giant Dams, Water Abundance, and the Rise of Global Society
Developing the Far West presented a radically unfamiliar set of water challenges to the United States. While the continent as a whole had an abundance of water wealth, its best resources were concentrated in its temperate, river-rich, eastern half, where annual precipitation normally exceeded the minimum 20 annual inches necessary for sustaining small-scale, nonirrigated farming. Moving west from the Mississippi Valley into the semiarid, treeless grasslands of the high plains and prairies of western Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas—America’s steppes—rainfall tapered off and became more undependable. Beyond the 99th and 100th meridians, water, not free land, was the main limiting factor in development. Only in wet years did the Great Plains have enough rainfall to maintain cultivation. In 1865 the farming frontier ran roughly along eastern Kansas and Nebraska’s 96th meridian. Over the following quarter century successive waves of hardy, yeoman farmers tried settling in wet years across the 100th meridian, only to be pushed back by the dry periods that always ensued. Between 1870 and 1880 the population of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado increased by more than 1 million to 1.6 million. But by 1890, in the third year of a ten-year drought and after the terrible winter of 1885–1886, Kansas and Nebraska had depopulated by one-fourth to one-half. West of the Rockies most of the valleys and lowlands were deserts drier than North Africa; many were scarcely habitable regions with less than seven inches of annual rainfall, such as those of present-day Phoenix and Las Vegas. Western precipitation, including the winter mountain snows that melted into abundant spring runoff, was also highly seasonal and prone to prolonged cycles of drought. Thus even where freshwater existed in sufficient volume for farming, it was often unavailable when it was needed. Additionally, most of the Far West’s perennial surface water was confined within three large mountain-fed river systems—the Colorado in the Southwest, the Columbia in the Northwest, and the San Joaquin and Sacramento in California’s Central Valley—that were often long distances away over rugged terrain from most arable land.
Water scarcity, in short, was the defining geographical condition of America’s Far West. As a result, the struggle for water was inseparable from the naked contest for power and wealth. Water rights were the stuff of family blood feuds, such as depicted in the 1958 Hollywood movie The Big Country. In the West, as author and humorist Mark Twain wryly put it, “Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fightin’ over.” By pioneering the world’s first giant, multipurpose dams—the defining water innovation of the twentieth century—America from the mid-1930s successfully converted the West’s few wild rivers into dynamic engines of inexpensive irrigation, hydroelectricity, water storage, and flood control. The Far Western deserts were miraculously transformed into the richest irrigated farmland on the planet. The arid western hydrological frontier added potent new impetus to America’s rising civilization. Large cities rose in the desert. America’s federal government-led development became a standard feature of the national political economy. Very rapidly American dam technology diffused worldwide, spreading the prodigious material benefits deriving from the intensification of man’s basic uses of water.
The Far West’s water challenge had more in common with the authoritarian, hydraulic societies of ancient Mesopotamia, although over rougher, harsher, and far more expansive landscapes than it did with the rainy, eastern United States, which had helped nurture America’s market democracy of independent, yeoman farmers, entrepreneurial industries, and decentralized political power. Indeed, incorporating the arid west into mainstream American civilization, posed political economic and cultural challenges within the purely technical one. These broader challenges were explored by America’s great turn-of-the-century historian, Frederick Jackson Turner, whose seminal 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” established the prevailing paradigm that America’s uniquely individualistic, democratic, pragmatic, and pluralistic character and institutions had been forged primarily by the frontier experience of continuous westward expansion, rather than by older theories of European values transplanted in the New World or the interplay of conflicting interests between the North and South. In his classic analysis of American history, Turner noted that the effective closure of the free land, farming frontier—which he considered to be virtually complete by 1893—had been accompanied by a gradual trend away from individualism and toward the social tendencies of cooperation, big business combination, and increasing reliance on government assistance. The physical challenges of Far Western settlement, he argued presciently, would inevitably accelerate that trend: “When the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In short, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.” Turner predicted hopefully that the frontier spirit of the yeoman farmer might endure by infusing itself in new democratic forms as America faced the historically centralizing, authoritarian tendencies of large states that organized control and distribution of irrigation river water in semiarid landscapes.
American West
California Aqueducts
By the time Turner delivered his landmark frontier thesis to the American Historical Association in Chicago, it was already apparent that private irrigation alone could not develop the Far West. Irrigation efforts in the region dated back to about 1200 BC, when indigenous southwest natives began digging irrigation canals to cultivate crops. By AD 500 the advanced Hohokam culture, northern neighbors of the Aztecs and Mayas, was well established with an extensive canal network around central Arizona’s Salt River, a tributary of the Colorado. Yet by the sixteenth century the Hohokams had vanished, likely victims of one of the prolonged natural droughts to which the region was prone or of ecosystem depletion caused by the soil salinization byproduct of intensive irrigation. Some of their canals were reexcavated and reopened in the late 1860s when U.S. settlers moved into the region. Modern western irrigation had begun with the Mormons, who migrated to Utah from 1847. Through centralized organization, religious discipline, and arduous work, the Mormons created numerous small, farm communities growing potatoes, beans, corn, and wheat by diverting small mountain streams into short canals. Between 1850 and 1890, they expanded their irrigated cropland fifteenfold to support a total population of over 200,000. Irrigated farming began in earnest in California after the gold rush with the coming of the transcontinental steam railroad in 1869. Speculative real estate consortiums organized communities of small farmers around water drawn through canals, sometimes with the help of privately built dams, from streams and rivers that flowed through California’s fertile Central Valley, including the King, the San Joaquin, the Kern, and the Sacramento. Eastern Colorado, settled from the 1870s by people inspired by utopian community ideals, was another pocket of western irrigated farming. As late as 1909, Colorado had more acres under irrigation than California.
All in all, however, nineteenth-century American irrigators had done hardly much better than their Hohokam predecessors in transforming the Far Western landscape into an agricultural garden. By the mid-1880s, the best irrigation sites on most of the region’s small streams already were being tapped. If western farming was to be developed on a meaningful scale, bigger dams on the few large, wild rivers were needed. But enormous risk capital had to be pledged, and complex water rights issues settled, for such an undertaking. With the depredations of the late 1880s drought and the great economic depression of 1893, moreover, private financing all but dried up for large irrigation projects and land values fell. The final blow against private enterprise solutions was struck with the tragic collapse in the spring of 1889 of a privately built eastern dam in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that unleashed a flood that kill
ed 2,200. Throughout the 1890s, western private sector and elected leaders increasingly beseeched the federal government to take the lead.
The groundwork for federal irrigation had been built over many years thanks to the pioneering efforts of John Wesley Powell. Born in 1834, Powell had explored the Mississippi River in the 1850s. Although he lost his lower right arm as a Union officer at the battle of Shiloh, he intrepidly led a blind expedition in 1869 of nine men on four wooden boats on the first ever explorative run of the wild Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. Parlaying his fame as an explorer into a national platform on western geography and development, Powell in 1874 shocked Congress and the nation in testimony that challenged cherished national myths: He declared that nearly the entire western region of the United States beyond the 99th or 100th meridian was too arid for small-scale, eastern-type agriculture without irrigation, and that even with irrigation the total available supply of water was sufficient to reclaim a much more limited amount of cropland for a much smaller population than irrigation boosters supposed. At the time, many public officials clutched to the comforting but fanciful notion that rain would follow the plow, permitting the unending advancement of small yeoman farmers across the continent. In 1878, Powell expounded his views in greater depth in his influential Report on the Arid Land of the Arid Region of the United States. This led to his appointment as head of a new government bureau to scientifically study western lands and later the irrigation potential of western water resources.
In this capacity, Powell became a formidable champion of government-led water storage dams to irrigate America’s west. His view was that all the waters of every free flowing river should be commandeered from its natural bed in economic service to the nation. Public lands that naturally stored and accumulated water, such as mountain forests, should be conserved in government hands and not be sold to timber companies or other private interests that would deplete them. Powell did not fret that the United States might repeat the authoritarian history of the ancient hydraulic societies. Indeed, he advocated his own idealistic, technocratic program for development based on political units that would be reorganized around natural watersheds. Powell maintained that his plan would enable 1.25 million small farmers to cultivate 100 million acres of irrigable cropland.
Powell’s idiosyncratic views, however, rankled vested establishment interests and disturbed the popular political myth that a federal irrigation program could be based upon a simple adaptation of Homestead-type grants of small, public lots to much-idealized, Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. At the second National Irrigation Congress in Los Angeles in 1893, Powell triggered an uproar by declaring, factually, that large private interests already controlled all the best irrigable lands in the West. But by then the irrigation movement had enough momentum from conventional politicians and powerful private interests to be able to divorce itself from the quirky, water wealth administration schemes of the original champion of the irrigation cause. A year later, Powell resigned from the government. In 1902, he died in obscurity in Maine.
Before dying, however, Powell had the satisfaction of witnessing the birth of a federally run western irrigation effort. The prime mover behind the 1902 Reclamation Act was America’s great water president, Teddy Roosevelt, who had recently come to office in September 1901 with McKinley’s assassination. Roosevelt was an admirer of Powell. He had lived in the West’s South Dakota Badlands, and ardently believed in Powell’s prescription of federally supported irrigation to develop its fertile, though dry soil. In his very first formal message to Congress on December 3, 1901—even as he was maneuvering to reopen the debate over the route of the sea canal route through Central America—he declared his determination to open the West through federal water conservation and irrigation. “In the arid region it is water, not land, which measures production,” he said, echoing both Powell and Frederick Jackson Turner. “The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation.”
Under the 1902 Reclamation Act, money from the sale of public lands in the West was to fund federal irrigation works administered by a new Reclamation Service within the Department of Interior. Only family farms of 160 acres or smaller were supposed to benefit from the government’s irrigation largesse—a proviso that, in practice, would be routinely breached over the years. Roosevelt also appreciated the intimate interlinkages between water and forests. Forests served as natural reservoirs, conservers of soil, and restrainers of terrible floods. “The forest and water problems are perhaps the most vital internal questions of the United States,” Roosevelt stated. Near the end of his presidency, Roosevelt created the celebrated western public parks system, partly to conserve forest watersheds.
Although the Reclamation Service (renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923) eventually became world history’s largest government-run water technocracy—a modern democratic version of the ancient priestly elites of the Middle East and China’s professional mandarins—the irrigation program started ineffectually. In its first two decades its total projects covered so little acreage as to barely make a noticeable difference in the expansion of western agriculture. Its economic foundations also seemed dubious. Despite the generous water subsidy and extension of payment terms, over half of irrigation project farmers were defaulting on their water loan repayments by 1922. Wealthy land speculators tracked Reclamation engineers like buzzards, swooping in to buy up public homesteads wherever projects seemed likely in order to resell them later at greatly multiplied values to the new, and quickly overindebted, small farmers. Existing private landholders also enjoyed unearned bonanzas from the federal irrigation projects. Then in the early 1920s, the U.S. agricultural sector went into a depression with sharply falling farm prices, one of the contributing factors of the economy-wide Great Depression of the 1930s. Without the remarkable resilience of public bureaucracies to endure over time despite failure and loss of purpose, the Reclamation Bureau and the western irrigation program might well have vanished at that point as a forgettable footnote of one of history’s failed policy initiatives.
What changed everything was the Hoover (aka Boulder) Dam. Reclamation engineers had dreamed about building a dam on the Colorado River ever since the bureaucracy’s inception. But it wasn’t until the late 1910s and 1920s that the combination of political, economic, and technological forces aligned favorably to impel the first serious steps toward undertaking the world’s first giant multipurpose dam on the lower Colorado. Another decade of political maneuvering would go by before construction could begin. The completed dam, which started full operations in 1936, was simply stupendous. It dwarfed all previous dams in history by orders of magnitude in scale and novelty. From ancient Roman and Han times through the nineteenth century few dams had surpassed 150 feet in height. The systematic application of the sciences of civil engineering, hydraulics, and fluid mechanics from the mid-nineteenth century, however, enabled the building of much more complex dam structures.
The concrete Hoover Dam would stand 726 feet, over six times taller than the British-built marvel of the first Low Aswan Dam on the Nile even with its final 1929 extension, and more than twice as high as any other dam on Earth. It created the world’s largest man-made reservoir, the 110-mile-long Lake Mead, which could store two times the annual flow of the Colorado, or enough to flood the entire state of Pennsylvania under one foot of water. Its world’s largest hydroelectric power plant was capable of generating 1.7 million horsepower, upgraded to 2.7 million horsepower in the 1980s. By 2000, some 30 million southwesterners, almost 2 million acres of prized cropland, and metropolises such as Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Las Vegas would be dependent upon the Colorado River’s water supply. Its wall contained enough concrete to build a highway across the continental United States. Hoover gave mankind, for the first time in history, the technical means for bringing the world’s mightiest rivers under almost total control, converting
wild, variable currents and unpredictable flooding into tamed pools of carefully regulated flows and allocated levels. Vitally for American water technocrats, too, the Hoover Dam established a viable economic blueprint for dam projects they could emulate again and again to achieve their mission of transforming the arid West.
In addition to its gigantic scale, the key innovation at Hoover was the dam’s successful multipurpose design. Throughout history, most dams and their affiliated waterworks had been built for a single purpose only—usually irrigation or flood control, but also improved navigation, drinking supply, or generating waterpower through waterwheels and, since the 1880s, hydroelectric turbines. Divergent purposes presented competing design challenges—for instance, flood control demanded low reservoir levels to catch flood swells while maximum power generation required full reservoirs; navigation presented still other difficulties. The multipurpose approach had been promoted as early as 1908 by Teddy Roosevelt in an effort to jump-start the flagging development of western irrigation. Despite the ingrained skepticism of the water bureaucracy establishment at the old Army Corps of Engineers, Reclamation officials, hungry to find their raison d’être, began to experiment with integrating hydropower to its irrigation dams. Their most celebrated early success was the elegant 280-foot-tall dam on the Salt River in Arizona. Completed in 1911 and named after President Roosevelt, the dam provided a visible boon to the economic life of the Phoenix area by both alleviating irrigation water shortages for farms built around the dredged-out canals of the long-gone Hohokam natives, and by generating electricity. Crucially, the electricity sales added enough revenue to pay for the dam.
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