Cadillac Desert (21 page)

The farmers’ predicament, on the other hand, was an opportunity for the legions of financial swashbucklers who had gone west in pursuit of quick.wealth. In the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of irrigation companies, formed with eastern capital, set themselves to the task of reclaiming the arid lands. Almost none survived beyond ten years. At the eighth National Irrigation Congress in 1898, a Colorado legislator likened the American West to a graveyard, littered with the “crushed and mangled skeletons of defunct [irrigation] corporations ... [which] suddenly disappeared at the end of brief careers, leaving only a few defaulted obligations to indicate the route by which they departed.”

There was, indeed, a kind of cruel irony in the collapse of the irrigation companies. Most of them operated in the emphatically arid regions—the Central Valley of California, Nevada, Arizona, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico—where agriculture without irrigation is daunting or hopeless, but otherwise the climate is well suited for growing crops. The drought, on the other hand, struck hardest in the region just east of the hundredth meridian, where, in most years, a nonirrigating farmer had been able to make a go of it. Kansas was emptied by the drought and the white winter, Nevada by irrigation companies gone defunct. In the early 1890s, the exodus from Nevada, as a percentage of those who hung on, was unlike anything in the country’s history. Even California, in the midst of a big population boom, saw the growth of its
agricultural
population come to a standstill in 1895.

California, the perennial trend-setting state, was the first to attempt to rescue its hapless farmers, but the result, the Wright Act, was another in the long series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions to western topography and climate. The act, which took its inspiration from the township governments of New England, established self-governing mini-states, called irrigation districts, whose sole function was to deliver water onto barren land. Like the western homestead laws, it was a good idea that foundered in practice. The districts soon buckled under their responsibilities—issuing bonds that wouldn’t sell, building reservoirs that wouldn’t fill, allocating water unfairly, distributing it unevenly, then throwing up their hands when anarchy prevailed. Elwood C. Mead, then the state engineer of Wyoming and probably the country’s leading authority on irrigation, called the Wright Act “a disgrace to any self-governing people.” George Maxwell, a Californian and founder of the National Irrigation Association, said “the extravagance or stupidity or incompetence of local [irrigation] directors” had left little beyond a legacy of “waste and disaster.” Though the Wright Act was in most ways a failure, Colorado, thinking it had learned something from California’s mistakes, adopted its own version, which added a modest subsidy for private irrigation developers in order to improve their odds of success. By 1894, under Colorado’s new program, five substantial storage reservoirs had been built. Three were so poorly designed and situated that they stored no water at all; the fourth was declared unsafe and was never even filled; and the fifth was so far from the land it was supposed to irrigate that most of the meager quantity of water it could deliver disappeared into the ground before it got there.

In that same year—1894—Senator Joseph Carey of Wyoming, thinking he had learned something from California’s and Colorado’s mistakes, introduced a bill that offered another approach: the federal government would cede up to a million acres of land to any state that promised to irrigate it. But, by some elusive reasoning, the states were forbidden to use land as the collateral they would need to raise the money to build the irrigation works—and land, at the time, was the only thing of value most of them had. Sixteen years later, using a generous estimate, the Carey Act had caused 288,553 acres to come under irrigation throughout the entire seventeen-state West—about as much developed farmland as there was in a couple of counties in Illinois.

As the private and state-fostered experiments with irrigation lay in shambles, many of the western reclamation advocates heaped blame on the East and “Washington” for not doing more to help, just as their descendants, four generations later, would vilify Jimmy Carter, an easterner and southerner, for not “understanding” their “needs” when he tried to eliminate some water projects that would have subsidized a few hundred of them to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece. In each case, the West was displaying its peculiarly stubborn brand of hypocrisy and blindness. Midwestern members of Congress were understandably uneager to subsidize competition for their own farmer constitutents, but they had little to do with making reclamation fail; the West was up to the task itself. Its faith in private enterprise was nearly as absolute as its earlier faith that settlement would make the climate wetter. John Wesley Powell, a midwesterner, knew that all the private initiative in the world would never make it bloom. Theodore Roosevelt, an easterner, had returned from the West convinced that there were “vast areas of public land which can be made available for ... settlement,” but only, he added, “by building reservoirs and main-line canals impractical for private enterprise.” But the West wasn’t listening. For the first time in their history, Americans had come up against a problem they could not begin to master with traditional American solutions—private capital, individual initiative, hard work—and yet the region confronting the problem happened to believe most fervently in such solutions. Through the 1890s, western Senators and Congressmen resisted all suggestions that reclamation was a task for government alone—not even for the states, which had failed as badly as the private companies, but for the national government. To believe such a thing was to imply that their constituents did not measure up to the myth that enshrouded them—that of the indomitable individualist. When they finally saw the light, however, their attitude miraculously changed—though the myth didn’t—and the American West quietly became the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state.

The passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902 was such a sharp left turn in the course of American politics that historians still gather and argue over why it was passed. To some, it was America’s first flirtation with socialism, an outgrowth of the Populist and Progressive movements of the time. To others, it was a disguised reactionary measure, an effort to relieve the mobbed and riotous conditions of the eastern industrial cities—an act to save heartless capitalism from itself. To some, its roots were in Manifest Destiny, whose incantations still held people in their sway; to others, it was a military ploy to protect and populate America’s western flank against the ascendant Orient.

What seems beyond question is that the Reclamation Act, or some variation of it, was, by the end of the nineteenth century, inevitable. To resist a federal reclamation program was to block all further migration to the West and to ensure disaster for those who were already there—or for those who were on their way. Even as the victims of the great white winter and the drought of the 1880s and 1890s were evacuating the arid regions, the trains departing Chicago and St. Louis for points west were full. The pull of the West reached deep into the squalid slums of the eastern cities; it reached back to the ravined, rock-strewn farms of New England and down into the boggy, overwet farmlands of the Deep South. No matter what the government did, short of erecting a wall at the hundredth meridian, the settlement of the West was going to continue. The only way to prevent more cycles of disaster was to build a civilization based on irrigated farming. Fifty years of effort by countless numbers of people had resulted in 3,631,000 acres under irrigation by 1889. There were counties in California that contained more acreage than that, and the figure included much of the easily irrigable land. Not only that, but at least half the land had been irrigated by Mormons. Each additional acre, therefore, would be won at greater pain. Everything had been tried—cheap land, free land, private initiative, local initiative, state subsidy—and everything, with a few notable exceptions, had failed. One alternative remained.

There seemed to be only one politician in the arid West who fathomed his region’s predicament well enough to end it. He had emigrated to San Francisco from the East, made a fortune through a busy law practice and the inheritance of his father-in-law’s silver mine, moved to Nevada, and in 1888 launched the Truckee Irrigation Project. It was one of the most ambitious reclamation efforts of its day, and it failed—not because it was poorly conceived or executed (hydrologically and economically, it was a good project) but because squabbles among its beneficiaries and the pettiness of the Nevada legislature ruined its hopes. In the process Francis Griffith Newlands lost half a million dollars and whatever faith he had in the ability of private enterprise to mount a successful reclamation program. “Nevada,” he said bitterly as his project went bust in 1891, “is a dying state.”

Newlands, who succeeded at everything else he tried, gave up on irrigation, ran for Congress, and won. For the remainder of the decade, he kept out of the reclamation battles, if only to give everyone else’s solutions an opportunity to fail. All the while, however, he was waiting for his moment. It came on September 14, 1901, when a bullet fired by an anarchist ended the life of President William McKinley.

Theodore Roosevelt, the man who succeeded McKinley as President, was, like Francis Newlands, a student and admirer of John Wesley Powell. Infatuated with the West, he had traveled extensively there and been struck by the prescience and accuracy of Powell’s observations. Roosevelt was first of all a politician, and had no interest in sharing Powell’s ignominious fate; nonetheless, he knew that Powell’s solutions were the only ones that would work, and he wanted a federal reclamation effort badly. A military thinker, he was concerned about Japan, bristling with expansionism and dirt-poor in resources, and knew that America was vulnerable on its underpopulated western flank. A bug for efficiency, he felt that the waste of money and effort on doomed irrigation ventures was a scandal. Roosevelt was also a conservationist, in the utilitarian sense, and the failure to conserve—that is, use—the water in western rivers irritated him. “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,” he said in a speech in December of 1901. For all his enthusiasm, however, Roosevelt knew that his biggest problem would be not the eastern states in Congress but the myth-bound western bloc, whose region he was trying to help. His second-greatest problem, ironically, would be his chief ally, Francis Newlands.

As soon as Roosevelt was in the White House, Newlands introduced a bill creating a federal program along the lines suggested by Powell. But the bitterness he felt over his huge financial loss was so strong that he described his bill in language almost calculated to infuriate his western colleagues, who were clinging to the myth that the hostile natural forces of the West could be overcome by individual initiative. In a long speech on the floor of Congress, Newlands said outright that the legislation he was introducing would “nationalize the works of irrigation”—which was like saying today that one intended to nationalize the automobile industry. Then he launched into a long harangue about the failures of state reclamation programs, blaming them on “the ignorance, the improvidence, and the dishonesty of local legislatures” —even though many of his listeners had recently graduated from such legislatures themselves. He even suggested that Congress should have no oversight powers, implying that he distrusted that body as much as he did the thieves, opportunists, and incompetents whom he saw controlling the state legislatures.

Newlands’ bill, as expected, ran into immediate opposition. When it came up for a vote in March, it was soundly defeated. Western members then began to support a rival bill, proposed by Senator Francis E. Warren of Wyoming, that contained none of the features Newlands wanted. By February of 1902, Warren’s bill was finally passed by the Senate and seemed destined to become law. At that point, however, fate and Theodore Roosevelt intervened. Mrs. Warren became gravely ill, necessitating the Senator’s return to Wyoming. In Warren’s absence, Roosevelt leaned on Newlands to tone down his language, and before long the Congressman was describing his defeated measure, which he had already reintroduced, as a “conservative” and “safe” bill. Roosevelt still wouldn’t risk supporting it, but he came up with a brilliant ploy. Announcing his “sympathy with the spirit” of Warren’s bill, he said he would support it with “a few minor changes.” The person whom he wanted to make the changes and lead the bill through Congress was Wyoming’s young Congressman-at-large, Frank Mondell, the future Republican leader of the House. Mondell had a weakness for flattery and a less than athletic mind, and Roosevelt was a master at exploiting both. Before long, he had persuaded Mondell to incorporate as “minor changes” in Warren’s bill almost all of Newlands’ language. Roosevelt then softened up his eastern opposition with some implied threats that their river and harbor projects might be in jeopardy if they did not go along—a strategy that has seen long useful service. By the time Warren returned from Wyoming, Newlands’ bill, disguised as his own, had cleared both houses. On June 17, 1902, the Reclamation Act became law.

The newly created Reclamation Service exerted a magnetic pull on the best engineering graduates in the country. The prospect of reclaiming a desert seemed infinitely more satisfying than designing a steel mill in Gary, Indiana, or a power dam in Massachusetts, and the graduates headed west in a fog of idealism, ready to take on the most intractable foe of mankind: the desert. But the desert suffers improvement at a steep price, and the early Reclamation program was as much a disaster as its dams were engineering marvels.