Water
Development, Extraction, and Diversion (page 4 of 6)
The Thirst of the Growing West
As the 19th century wound to a close, the population of the southwestern United States began to increase at a staggering rate. John Wesley Powell was the first person to recognize that the only way to "make the desert bloom" was through irrigation, and even with widespread water diversion, only a small amount of this dry, harsh region could be made productive. However, his views were widely ignored for many years. From the time of his first westward excursion in 1867 until the time he was an old man, Powell watched the west change dramatically as more and more homesteaders settled across the landscape, seemingly immune to the inherent difficulties in making a living off western lands. A period of favorable climatic conditions from 1865 through the late 1870’s encouraged the expansion of humans across the plains and into the dry western section of the country. The coincidence of increased rains and the expanding frontier were interpreted as being related to each other. This New Meteorology claimed that "the rain follows the plow,"--that is that settlement was actually changing the climate, further encouraging widespread homesteading in even the driest and harshest regions of the West.
At the same time, railroad companies had built lines all over the West, and were heavily indebted to the federal government. In order to fill the millions of acres of land serviced by the railways, the companies had to seduce settlers to these lands. A huge campaign to fill the West was launched, with strong support from the government, politicians, and a diverse group of entrepreneurs, positioned to benefit from westward expansion. Railroads spent millions on publicity, sending agents as far as Europe, touting the favorable farming conditions, lovely weather, and untapped resources of the west, despite the fact that most of the claims were flagrant untruths. Unlike the populous east coast of the United States, which receives ample precipitation for growing crops, much of the arable land in the West is at high elevations with short growing seasons, or at low elevations with very little rainfall. Click here for a description of modern climatic conditions on the Colorado Plateau.
The Homestead Act, as well as numerous other related acts, exacerbated the situation, as this legislation allots 160 acres to homesteaders—an amount of land which is virtually useless to settlers without irrigation, leaving ranching as the next logical choice. However, 160 acres of such arid, unproductive land was suitable for only about five cows—hardly enough to support a family. Without more land, the only other choice was to overgraze and ruin the land, and in fact, this was a common result of these combined ecological and economical factors. Another common result was astonishingly high rates of fraud in land acquisition, easily perpetrated under the loose wording of the law.
By the late 1880’s, all of the good homestead sites—those in the northwest and other areas that got sufficient rainfall, and those along divertable streams—had been taken, and the vast majority of western settlers were in a serious quandary. In response, hundreds of private irrigation companies, funded by eastern money, were formed. The formidable, energy-consumptive task of irrigating vast, waterless lands proved far too great, and most of the companies were bankrupt within a few years. Several states, including California and Colorado, also attempted water diversion projects, and failed just as miserably as the private sector. It soon became clear that without a large-scale attempt to bring water to these arid regions, such as only the federal government could possibly undertake, growth could not be sustained, and the ambitious campaign to populate and convert the west would be a horrendous failure.
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Irrigated agricultural field in the Sevier Valley near Kanab, Utah. Digital photo by John Grahame. |
On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act was passed and the federal government began a long century of reclaiming the desert of the American west. The new agency was based on the irrigation experience of the Mormons, guided by Mormon law, and run largely by Mormons. However, the early years of the Reclamation Service, re-named the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923, were rife with trouble and few projects were actually completed, and most of those were economically marginal. The problem during these first decades was that inexperienced and overly optimistic engineers, politicians, and farmers threw together reclamation projects with little understanding of climate, growing season, and soil productivity. Furthermore, the western United States did not have the political clout to authorize large, well-planned water projects—in 1930, the total population of the West was still only 11 million people, though growing rapidly. All of this changed in the early 1930s with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a freely-spending patrician president, and with the passage of several large bills authorizing the construction of dozens of dams and irrigation projects.
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Page 5 - The Bureau of
Reclamation Transforms the West
Page 6 - The Tide Turns
References