Cadillac Desert (20 page)

No one says or remembers much about the Reclamation Service’s involvement in the Owens Valley story, which is ironic, because nothing in its history may have affected the interests of the nation-at-large quite as much. Almost as soon as it was created—well before it metamorphosed into the mighty Bureau of Reclamation—the agency found itself working on behalf of the wealthy and powerful and against the interests of the constituency it was created to protect, the small western irrigation farmer. In California, to a surprising degree, it has done so ever since. Small farmers do not matter much in the worldly scheme of things; if they did, their numbers would not be declining by the tens of thousands every year. But large farmers do, and explosively growing desert cities do, too, arid the Bureau of Reclamation, after learning this lesson in the Owens Valley, would remember it well. Its largest dam is San Luis in central California; its most magnificent dam is Hoover. Above all, the Bureau loves to build great dams, and were it not for Los Angeles, the odds are low that either Hoover or San Luis would exist.

The Owens River created Los Angeles, letting a great city grow where common sense dictated that one should never be, but one could just as well say that it ruined Los Angeles, too. The annexation of the San Fernando Valley, a direct result of the aqueduct, instantly made it the largest city in the world in geographic size. From that moment, it was doomed to become a huge, sprawling, one-story conurbation, hopelessly dependent on the automobile. The Owens River made Los Angeles large enough and wealthy enough to go out and capture any river within six hundred miles, and that made it larger, wealthier, and a good deal more awful. It is the only megalopolis in North America which is mentioned in the same breath as Mexico City or Djakarta—a place whose insoluble excesses raise the specter of some majestic, stately kind of collapse. In
The Water Seekers,
Remi Nadeau, a city historian, says, “They brought in so much water for so many people that few cared any more whether Los Angeles grew at all.... Indeed, one might say that ... they have brought in too much water. For if California now has enough water to more than double in population, then much of California is doomed to be insufferable.”

That, in any event, is the way it appears some days from atop Mulholland Drive.

CHAPTER THREE

First Causes

W
hen archaeologists from some other planet sift through the bleached bones of our civilization, they may well conclude that our temples were dams. Imponderably massive, constructed with exquisite care, our dams will outlast anything else we have built—skyscrapers, cathedrals, bridges, even nuclear power plants. When forests push through the rotting streets of New York and the Empire State Building is a crumbling hulk, Hoover Dam will sit astride the Colorado River much as it does today—intact, formidable, serene.

The permanence of our dams will merely impress the archaeologists; their numbers will leave them in awe. In this century, something like a quarter of a million have been built in the United States alone. If you ignore the earthen plugs thrown across freshets and small creeks to water stock or raise bass, then fifty thousand or so remain. These, in the lexicon of the civil engineer, are “major works.” Even most of the major works are less than awesome, damming rivers like the Shepaug, the Verdigris, Pilarcitos Creek, Mossman’s Brook, and the North Fork of the Jump. Forget about them, and you are left with a couple of thousand really big dams, the thought of whose construction staggers the imagination. They hold back rivers our ancestors thought could never be tamed—the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Sacramento, the Snake, the Savannah, the Red, the Colorado. They are sixty stories high or four miles long; they contain enough concrete to pave an interstate highway from end to end.

These are the dams that will make the archaeologists blink—and wonder. Did we overreach ourselves trying to build them? Did our civilization fall apart when they silted up? Why did we feel compelled to build so many? Why five dozen on the Missouri and its major tributaries? Why twenty-five on the Tennessee? Why fourteen on the Stanislaus River’s short run from the Sierra Nevada to the sea?

We know surprisingly little about vanished civilizations whose majesty and whose ultimate demise were closely linked to liberties they took with water. Unlike ourselves, future archaeologists will have the benefit of written records, of time capsules and so forth. But such things are as apt to confuse as to enlighten. What, for example, will archaeologists make of Congressional debates over Tellico Dam, where the vast majority ridiculed the dam, excoriated it, flagellated it—and then allowed it to be built? What will they think of Congressmen voting for water projects like Central Arizona and Tennessee-Tombigbee—projects costing three or four billion dollars in an age of astronomical dencits—when Congress’s own fact-finding committees asserted or implied that they made little sense?

Such debates and documents may shed light on reasons—rational or otherwise—but they will be of little help in explaining the psychological imperative that drove us to build dam after dam after dam. If there is a Braudel or a Gibbon in the future, however, he may deduce that the historical foundations of dams as monumental as Grand Coulee, of projects as nonsensical as Tennessee-Tombigbee, are sunk in the 1880s, a decade which brought, in quick succession, a terrible blizzard, a terrible drought, and a terrible flood.

The great white winter of 1886 came first. The jet stream drove northward, grazed the Arctic Circle, then dipped sharply southward, a parabolic curve rushing frigid air into the plains. Through December of 1886, the temperature in South Dakota barely struggled above zero. A brief thaw intervened in January, followed by a succession of monstrous Arctic storms. Week after week, the temperature fell to bottomless depths; in the Dakotas, the windchill factor approached a hundred below. Trapped for weeks, even for months, in a warp of frozen treeless prairie, thousands of pioneers literally lost their minds. As the last of the chairs were being chopped and burned, settlers contemplated a desperate hike to the nearest town, unable to decide whether it was crazier to stay or to leave. No one knows how many lost their lives, but when the spring thaw finally came, whole families were discovered clutching their last potatoes or each other, ice encrusted on their staring, vacant eyes.

But the settlers’ suffering was merciful compared to that of their cows. On the woodless plains, barns were rare. Cattle were turned out into blizzards to survive by their wits, which they don’t have, and which wouldn’t have done them much good anyway. They were found piled by the hundreds at the corners of fenced quarter sections, all facing southeast; even when a storm abated, the survivors were too traumatized to turn around, and they died a night or two later under a listless winter’s moon. It was a winter not just of horrendous cold but of gigantic snows, horizontal broadsides that reduced visibility to zero and stung the cattle like showers of needles. Twenty-foot drifts filled the valleys and swales, covering whatever frozen grass was left to eat. At night families would lie awake listening to their cows’ dreadful bawls, afraid to go out and have the wind steal their last resources of warmth. Anyway, there was nothing they could do.

The toll was never officially recorded. Most estimates put the loss of cattle at around 35 percent, but in some regions it may have been nearer 75 percent. In sheer numbers, enough cows died to feed the nation for a couple of years. Much of the plains’ cattle industry was in financial ruin. The bankrupt cattle barons dismissed thousands of hired hands, who were forced to find new careers. When the snows of 1886 melted, Robert Leroy Parker, a young drover, cattle rustler, and part-time bank robber with a reputation, had more recruits on his hands than he knew what to do with. He organized them into a gang known as the Wild Bunch and called himself Butch Cassidy. The Wild Bunch and the scores of outlaw bands like them worked the banks, the railroads, and the Pinkerton agents into a murderous froth. To others, however, they were a moral weight on the mind. Many of the outlaws had been “good boys,” former ranch hands and farmers, occupations that everyone hoped would domesticate the West and cure it of its cyclical agonies of boom and bust. But weather was the ultimate arbiter in the American West. Unless there was some way to control it, or at least minimize its effects, a good third of the nation might remain uninhabitable forever.

As if to confirm such a prophecy, the decade following the great white winter was a decade when the western half of the continent decided to dry up. Like most droughts, this one came gradually, building up force, nibbling away at the settlers’ fortunes as inexorably as their cattle nibbled away the dying grass. The sun, to which the settlers had so recently offered prayerful thanks, turned into a despotic orb; as Hamlin Garland wrote, “The sky began to scare us with its light.” In July of 1888, at Bennett, Colorado, the temperature rose to 118, a record that has never since been equaled in the state. It was the same throughout the West, as an immense high-pressure zone sat immobile across the plains. Orographic clouds promising rain formed over the Rockies, were boiled off in midair, and disappeared. The atmosphere, it seemed, had been permanently sucked dry.

By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people of the plains states, still shell-shocked by the great white winter, began to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust. The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have arrived half a century early.

When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 homesteading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imperfections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather. How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one year and expired from heat and lack of water during the next eight or nine?

The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat. On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot wave. When the reservoir was finally in the Allegheny River, sending it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually put at twenty-two hundred—twice as many casualties as in the burning of the
General Slocum
on the East River in 1904; many more than in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in the Chicago fire. The only single disaster in American history that took more lives was the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, eleven years later. The Johnstown flood was significant if only for this sheer loss of life; but it was also an indictment of privately built dams.

The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s was due in part to this succession of overawing catastrophes. But it had just as much to do with the fact that by the late 1880s, private irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across the hundredth meridian had gone to Washington and California and Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams whose water they could easily divert. Such opportunities, however, were quick to disappear. Groundwater wasn’t much help either. A windmill could lift enough drinking water for a family and few cattle; but it would require thirty or forty windmills, and reliable wind, to lift enough water to irrigate a quarter section of land—a disheartening prospect to a farmer with no money in a region with no wood.

Even if their land abutted a stream with some surplus water rights, few farmers had the confidence, cooperative spirit, and money to build a dam and lead the stored water to their lands through a long canal. It was one thing to throw a ten-foot-high earthen plug across a freshet in order to create a two-acre stock pond—though even that taxed the resources of most farmers in the West, who had invested all their savings simply to get there from Kentucky or Maine. It was quite another thing to build a dam on a stream large enough to supply a year-round flow, and to dig a canal—by horse and by hand—that was long enough, and deep enough, and wide enough, to irrigate hundreds or thousands of acres of land. The work involved was simply stupefying; clearing a field, by comparison, seemed like the simplest, most effortless job.