Cadillac Desert (48 page)

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 concerned, clearly had the upper hand. The white man’s cavalry had made beggars of them; now his courts had made them kings.

Things looked pretty bleak for southern California after the Supreme Court decision. At some point it would presumably have to give up the 600,000 acre-feet of Arizona’s entitlement it was diverting, enough water for the city of Chicago. But things looked bleak for Arizona, too, because the Central Arizona Project, which was supposed to deliver the water to Phoenix and Tucson and the dying farmland in between, was neither built nor even authorized, and California could be counted on to try to achieve politically what it hadn’t been able to achieve in court. Only the Indians were satisfied with what they had won. As it would turn out, however, things were even worse for California and Arizona—white man’s Arizona—than they looked.

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.

The first serious doubts about the 17.5-million-acre-foot figure were raised by Raymond Hill, a distinguished hydrologic engineer, at a conference in Washington, D.C., in 1953. “The discharge of the Colorado River at Lee Ferry [near the Arizona-Utah border],” Hill told his disbelieving audience, “has averaged only 11.7 million acre-feet since 1930.” As Hill pointedly noted, the Colorado Basin states had not only been counting on 17.5 million acre-feet per year; they had been building and planning as if they thought that figure was
conservative.
But during the period from 1930 to 1952, the river’s annual average had fallen nearly six million acre-feet shy of the accepted safe yield. He didn’t need to tell his audience that this was enough water for thirty million people or a couple of million acres of irrigated farmland, maybe more.

As it would do on innumerable occasions, the Bureau refused to believe any expert who told it what it didn’t want to hear. Three years later, it was frantically lobbying the Colorado River Storage Project through Congress, as if it considered Hill’s figures bunk (if he was right, some of the upper-basin reservoirs it wanted to build might never fill). Then, despite mounting evidence that Hill was more right than wrong, it began planning the Central Arizona Project, which would divert another two million acre-feet from the lower basin to Phoenix and Tucson and the sinking farmland in between. Even as it continued to hold forth for 17.5 million acre-feet, however, the Bureau was beginning to develop some serious internal doubts—doubts which it would attempt to conceal for several more years, but which, in the meantime, would lead it on the most ambitious quest for water in U.S. history.

On August 18, 1965, the Bureau’s resident expert on the Colorado River, Randy Riter, forwarded a long letter to Commissioner Floyd Dominy by blue envelope. Blue-envelope mail was meant to be seen by only the commissioner, the regional directors, and a small handful of top assistants. It was the Bureau’s version of a diplomatic pouch, and the contents usually meant trouble.

Riter, a hydrologist and a bishop in the Mormon church, had just attended a meeting of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, a group whose purpose is to prevent a single drop of water from leaving that state’s borders without first having been put to beneficial use. The featured speaker at the closed-door meeting was Royce Tipton, a consulting hydrologist in whom the Bureau placed considerable stock. Tipton’s reluctant conclusion, Riter told Dominy, was that “there is not enough water in the Colorado River to permit the Upper Basin to fully use its apportionment of 7.5 million acre-feet and still meet its compact obligations to deliver water at Lee Ferry.” Tipton’s estimate of the river’s flow was a lot more optimistic than Hill’s had been, but even he felt that it should be set no higher than fifteen million acre-feet. In that case, if one divided the shortage equally between the two basins, each would be left with 6.3 million acre-feet. After you deducted another 1.5 million acre-feet or so for evaporation, and another 1.5 million acre-feet for Mexico, you had a figure low enough to throw seven states into panic.

The implications were enough to make the Bureau panic, too. The Colorado River Storage Project, which it had begun to build—Glen Canyon Dam was already completed—and the Central Arizona Project, which it dearly wanted, were both predicated on the availability of 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin. What if it invested billions in both projects only to find that there wasn’t nearly enough water in the river to operate them? The upper-basin projects, in particular, were critically dependent on the full volume of water flowing through the dams; that was the only way the Bureau could generate enough hydroelectric income to give them the illusion of being economically “viable.” A shortfall of nearly two million acre-feet could initiate a chain of bankruptcies among thousands of farmers or else force the Bureau to appeal to Congress for rescue. It would also open up a ghastly can of worms involving water rights. Would the shortages come equally out of each basin’s hide, or would the earlier projects invoke seniority and try to keep their water under the doctrine of appropriate rights? Obviously, the new figures could knock the whole painstakingly constructed edifice of the Colorado River Compact into rubble. And what would happen when someone discovered that the Bureau had been ignoring warnings such as Hill’s and Tipton’s for years?

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.

The idea of relocating distant rivers into the depletion-haunted Colorado Basin—“augmentation” was the euphemism of choice—was really nothing new. One of its earliest and most relentless proponents was William E. Warne, who was brought into the Bureau by Mike Straus and later built the California Water Project under Governor Pat Brown. As a young boy, Warne had moved from Indiana—average precipitation, thirty-six inches per year—to the Imperial Valley of California—average rainfall 2.4 inches per year—and Warne seems never to have gotten over the shock. A smooth, handsome, genial sort (though even some of his fellow Bureau men considered him water-mad), Warne in his later years would raise his voice to shouting pitch over just one issue: the “ridiculous waste” that was condoned by continuing to allow the rivers of northern California to spill practically unused out to sea. It was unconscionable, Warne would say, that those rivers were so near—“within striking distance,” as he put it—and still undammed. Warne was haunted not only by the desert, but by the desert’s growth. As a boy in the Imperial Valley, he heard stories about how it had been when not a soul lived there, ten years before. By the time his family arrived, forty thousand people had already moved in. Five years later, another forty thousand had come, and the valley was appropriating about 20 percent of what was then considered to be the Colorado’s flow. In the same period, the population of Los Angeles had gone from 100,000 to 500,000 people. “It was the wonder of the world,” Warne mused, “how that city grew.” 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. Since it would involve the movement of unprecedented flows of water over unprecedented distances at unprecedented expense, the investigation would need someone of unusual vision and character to lead it, and Mike Straus and Bill Warne would have to go outside the Bureau to locate him. The found him in Bogotá, Colombia, building dams for the descendants of conquistadors. His name was Stanford P. McCasland.

Stan McCasland had worked in the planning division of the Bureau for some years. He quit, evidently, because the predictable tedium of designing small projects on small rivers was something which he considered beneath him. In South America, where you could find unnamed tributaries of the Amazon bigger than the Colorado, he at last found the landscape of his dreams. Like a lot of Bureau engineers, McCasland had only a faint interest in irrigation; it was damming rivers that got his juices flowing. An irascible Scot, he viewed rivers not so much as challenges or opportunities but as willful monsters to be beaten into submission. In the likes of him, the rivers had an unlikely foe. “He was as skinny as a rail,” says Pat Dugan, a longtime Bureau engineer who worked with him, “and he had a shock of flaming red hair that made him look as if the top of his head had ignited. He always wore a tweed suit that was about three sizes too big. He looked like he could turn around 180 degrees in that suit while the suit stood still.”

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 the Columbia and L.A., so we looked at that, too.”

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 L.A., 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.