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Reclamation, its Influence and Impact on the History of the West
RECLAMATION, ITS INFLUENCE AND IMPACT ON THE HISTORY OF THE WEST
By Marshall N. Dana
The sun rises upon a plain bounded by faraway purple-blue mountains. Through the sagebrush swings a pair of cowboy boots, their owner humming — as he rides — a song that in the dust of arid sand repeats over and over "cool, cool water." The steady clippety-clop of the bronco makes a rhythm with the song.
Under the same sun the scene changes. Where the bespurred cowboy boots swayed below the high-pommeled saddle, a pair of farmer boots trudges patiently behind the plow down the long furrow.
The morning sun — with its new welcome to meadowlarks — looks down upon other scenes that seem to dissolve one into the other. The farmer boots become familiar with business shoes. The plow gives way to the tractor. The bulldozer and the tractor have been there. Where the sagebrush grew is a home, with paint and flowers.
The tiny, summer-dried trickle gives way to a cemented canal in which, repeating the cowboy's song, "clear, cool water" flows.
The steep, high, rock walls of the mountain are linked by towering masses of masonry. The flood, that once in the melting of winter s snow and because of cloudbursts sometimes ripped away in accented erosion the mineralized volcanic soil, becomes a deep, long lake, ready to make the new fields green and fruitful and to send over copper cables the white dynamic electric power. Along its shores the hopeful cast their lures, and frequently its otherwise placid surface erupts into the rainbowed wake of small but energetic pleasure craft.
The sense of great and aching emptiness has departed from the wide valley. There are farms lush with alfalfa and rustling with corn. There are roads in the successive stages of dust and gravel and pavement. All the evolution of the trail becomes the broad highway, and over the tops of the trees, which grow where trees never grew, rise the spires of churches. Even closer by, sound the voices and the laughter of children in the school playground.
The cow pony rounds up the sheep and the cattle only where irrigation's magic does not reach. But white-faced beeves and longwooled sheep graze contentedly on the swift-growing meadow grasses. There is a congestion of traffic and some of it is in constant motion upon the highways. Some of it is signaled by the whistling of railroad trains, and some of it drones in the sky. There is a central meeting place, and that place is the city with its intriguing window displays, its meters to take toll of parking, its warehouses, railway stations and airports, and the skeleton towers of radio and TV. Regularly meeting are the luncheon clubs where people eat and listen patiently to speakers even as you and I.
And there where the city rises, it glows as though Aladdin had rubbed the magic lamp, because the mountain has become a reservoir, and the current flows through aqueducts and over wires into the valley that once was dead with drought and now is splendidly productive.
There is another way to tell about "Reclamation — Its Influence and Impact on the History of the West." The statistics also are vivid. In the sixteen states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming (later Texas and Alaska were added) —named in the first reclamation act signed by President Roosevelt on June 17, 1902, there were then eleven million people. There are now some thirty-four million. Twenty-five million acres have been irrigated — six and a quarter million in federal reclamation projects.
The federal investment in reclamation approximates two billion dollars, of which one billion has been invested since the 1930's. Reclamation was placed upon a pay-back basis without interest as the federal government's acknowledgment of stewardship, but called for repayment of principal as the honest debt of settlers. There are some additions to the reclamation fund through the disposal of public lands, but this too represents a genius inasmuch as the depleting areas and mineral assets could be converted into the nondepletive and living values of irrigated farms and prosperous communities.
There has been good faith. Water users have repaid almost one hundred million dollars. Power users have paid more than two hundred million dollars for more than four million kilowatts of developed electric current. Crop values are ascending toward one billion dollars a year. The products are vital essentials of public health and trade, such as fruit, dairy products, foods, feed, and fibers. But the profit to the nation is shown with greatest effect in the fact that taxes paid from the properties and income of federal reclamation projects have gone beyond two and one-half billion dollars.
Reclamation was not unknown before the act of 1902. The Indians in the American Southwest had discovered that they could subsist upon food produced from moistening the dry soil by means of small ditches. Brigham Young and his fellow Mormons in 1847 took from the water of City Creek near Great Salt Lake enough of die current to prove the value of irrigation and to build in the desert the splendor of stone made into temples, clay molded into sculpture, and music converted through rippling water into the melody of the Salt Lake City choir.
Let it be noted, however, that the influence and impact of reclamation on the history of the West was felt first in the growth of a contentious idea. Two schools of thought were vociferous as the debate proceeded. Congressman Ray of New York echoed the doubt as to whether there was any value in the West, or anything save sagebrush and rattlesnakes. Said he: "An acre of arid land that a coyote can not live on is not a free home to any human being." Others ascribed ulterior motives. They called reclamation a railroad scheme, a scandal, and unconstitutional. Reclamation, they insisted, would be "a very dangerous power to put into die hands of the Secretary of the Interior."
The President, Theodore Roosevelt, with farther-reaching vision declared:
Debate became acrid on the question of federal versus private responsibility. But President Roosevelt again had the answer:
The profit pointed to by this great American president was realized in a nation occupied as it never could have been without reclamation. It was the conversion of wilderness into man-controlled civilization.
What do we mean by civilization? That very authoritative volume, Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, says that civilization is "A state of social culture." Civilization is "characterized by relative progress in the arts, science, and statecraft." All true! But the definition that comes closest to the dreams and vision of the settlers who moved out upon the western lands speaks simply and beautifully of the "aspirations of the human spirit."
Reclamation repudiated the errors of ancient times. Of Mesopotamia, traditional site of the Garden of Eden, W. C. Lowdermilk, noted authority, says: "At least eleven empires have risen and fallen in this tragic land in 7,000 years. It is a story of a precarious agriculture practiced by people who lived and grew up under the threat of raids and invasions from the denizens of grasslands and the desert, and of the failure of their irrigation canals because of silt."
Nebuchadnezzar boasted of works which he had built in Babylon such as "no king before had done," but, because the irrigation canals which he dug filled with silt, the palaces and temples were buried by desert sands, and Babylon became "a desolation, a dry land, and a wilderness, a land wherein no man dwelleth."
The American reclamation West is learning the secret which the ancient and fallen civilizations failed to learn. That secret is the management of water to combine with the management of land and with the newer science of management of forests.
Water is the controlling factor of the American future. What has been done and is being done in the reclamation states in the development and use of water resources is an object lesson for the nation as a whole. The causes that reduced the vast domain of a Ghengis Khan to bitter aridity frequented only by small nomadic groups will not be repeated here if the western example becomes the basis of a national water policy. Within a ten-year period, the issue of water resource development will become as prominently acute as the missile program is today.
We have had, among others, the report of the President's Advisory Committee on Water Policy. The administration seems sluggish in presenting implementing legislation, but action cannot be long delayed in the face of a study made jointly by the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Reclamation. This is a study of the needs for food, feed, and fiber related to land resources fifty years hence. The forecast by these agencies is a population of 370 million in the United States by the year 2010, only fifty-two years from now. It is less time than has elapsed since the Reclamation Act of 1902.
Also forecast is 151 million persons in gainful employment, a gross national product of twenty-three billion dollars and a personal income of eighteen hundred billion. Such growth is inevitably premised upon the sound development of land and water resources. It could not come to pass otherwise.
In 1955 the daily estimated water use in the United States was 262 billion gallons. By 1975 the forecast is for a daily water use of 453 billion gallons. The increase in the consumption of water for irrigation and for industry has grown in the same proportion. It will not be enough to plan water use for irrigation alone, nor for power alone, nor for domestic and municipal supply, industry and recreation alone. All legitimate users must have their place in the planning of water use, in the planning of water storage, its protection against pollution, and its equitable distribution.
A national water policy is a mandate laid upon this generation in trust to generations unborn, in faith to the vital precept of leaving the land better than we found it. We cannot dodge the duty of a national water policy. Equitable multiple use of water has its counterpart in another growing idea. This is the multiple-purpose river basin development.
In the total concept of river basin development, there is a policy that should dominate. All values appurtenant to natural resources should be listed and interrelated. Since all are interdependent, all should be reciprocally contributive. Specifically, power, which is the most saleable merchandise of water resource development, should help to pay those charges for irrigation which are beyond the settlers' ability to pay. The basin account is a sound formula under which to operate. A productive agriculture is essential to a balanced economy which otherwise contains industry, business, mining, forestry, fishery, the professions, and recreation. When irrigation shares in the revenues of electric energy, it helps to animate all other enterprises and thus to broaden the markets in which the power is sold.
The National Reclamation Association is one of the first great conservation organizations to declare that the development of water resources must be programmed not for localities alone but for the multiple purposes of entire river basins and the people that dwell therein. It is not a simple matter to define the most worthy claimants upon water supply. Nor is it a simple matter to make one program fit all geographic areas.
We must, as a nation, settle upon essential and fundamental principles. These include storage, flood control, protection from pollution, and prevention of erosion. Beyond this point lie necessities of distribution in accordance with the controlling factors of geographic areas, river basins, and localities. In the West the emphasis will be on reclamation, although growing industry will more and more exert its claims. In other sections of America it will be industry above reclamation. Whatever is paramount in need for water supply should be well served but without detriment to other worthy claimants.
As the water program expands, it will be urgently necessary to clarify the relative authority of the agencies which develop and administer wafer resources. It is traditional that when the federal government undertakes programs for the benefit of subnational areas and interests, it extends restrictive authority where federal money is spent.
In the reclamation West this has taken the form of disregard of state water laws. More, than a score of federal agencies concerned with water administration have more and more, and by means of legal devices, sought to set aside state water laws in the expansion of their own activities. Thus we have the contests involving the licensing of power developments. Thus we have the theory that the government is the over-all water master and will continue to supply and control water for irrigation even after districts have paid in full the price of the works. Thus we have the proposals for subnational and regional authorities standing between the states and the federal government, exercising power never established by any plebiscite, and setting up controls that extend not only to the general economy but to the earning and the living of every person.
Top: Fertile farmlands reclaimed from the desert by water made available by the construction of huge western irrigation projects.
Bottom: Recreational facilities keeping pace with the great water conservation projects are contributing to the growth of a new industry. Photos, Courtesy Bureau of Reclamation
It is to be hoped, if the administration does not soon submit clarifying legislation which will also implement national water policy, that the Congress will take its own initiative as the legislative representative of the American people, acting in their behalf to preserve popular free enterprise and initiative and the home rule, which are the genius of free America for free Americans.
A bright thread in reclamation and indeed in all our land and water development is the startling expansion of what we call recreation. An inventory of recreational resources in the Pacific Northwest conducted at the instance of the Columbia Basin Inter-Agency Committee showed that there were 10,750,000 visits to state parks, national forests, national parks, and federal reservoir areas in 1947. In 1954 total attendance was approximately thirty million, an increase in eight years of 300 per cent. On the basis of these figures and the accompanying study the estimate is made that there will be over forty million visits in 1960.
Shorter hours of work, extension of highways and the big highway program, the allure of motorboats, and the deep human instinct for fun account for the amazingly swift growth of the recreation industry. The health and sanity increases among the millions who seek the play side of the great out-of-doors, and the several billions of annual expenditure make the industry one of the nation's top economic factors. In all of the planning and building of public works, recreation must have its co-ordinate place along with irrigation and power, flood control, and fishery.
Find the influence and impact of reclamation upon the history of the West in the vast works it has produced: for example, Grand Coulee Dam, the largest concrete mass in the world, and its adjacent millionacre irrigation project which is fed with water pumped from Lake Roosevelt behind the dam through enormous pipes, one of which could supply the daily needs of New York; Hoover Dam, which went far to solve the water supply problem of Los Angeles and the American Southwest; Shasta Dam, key of the great Central Valley Development in California; the Hungry Horse Dam in Montana; the Anderson Dam of Idaho; the Owyhee Dam in Oregon; and the innumerable smaller irrigation projects with their farms and their cities.
In a more simple and homely way let me find another example. It is a report on the Moses Lake School District in the Columbia Basin Project. "Less than ten years ago the town of Moses Lake had wooden sidewalks, dirt streets, a handful of houses." Two hundred children comprised the total school census. But in ten years there was a growth of 1000 per cent. The school population rose to thirty-six hundred. Preparations are being made for twelve thousand children by 1960.
In the Owyhee Project, the farmer planted sugar beets. A milliondollar sugar factory followed the water to the land.
Only sagebrush grew on a spot I visited before the water came, but, after the water began its flow, I found a home with every electrical facility. There were a living-room equipped with deep upholstery, a glassed-in porch with a fireplace, and shelves filled with intriguing books. A table was covered with magazines. It was a home equipped for living, sustained by the yield of the now fertile soil; and happiness did dwell therein.
The adventures in homemaking tiiat reclamation permits have for me as significant a historic value as the huge power and irrigation dams, and the skillfully-spread distribution systems. For here we meet the people who justify the immense structures. Here we meet the children who are to be the engineers and the scientists, the builders and leaders of the years to come.
Reclamation has its economic proof in the billions of dollars of value it represents and produces; reclamation with a fluid pen writes its history in soil and water productively combined; in the funds which advance the American standard of living and raise the level of public health; in the balanced economy of agriculture, industry, mining, and forestry; and in the great works of water conservation that have been built and will be built greater in the future.
But it is in the scientists who will solve this nation's complex problems of growth, in the engineers who master the combinations of structural material, in the production of leaders capable of guiding this nation through the atomic age, that we find not only the more lasting values but the promises of future security and the prophesies of human attainment beyond our present dreams.
The impact of reclamation upon Western civilization was felt when pioneers first led the water from the mountains to make green the desert. It is still felt by their successors, who are, in very practical ways, helping to write an epic of freedom.
The history of reclamation is a history of people. The effect of reclamation is to be recorded not only in the transformation of the sterile land into fruitful soil, but in the development of vivid and resourceful human personality.
In the unirrigated land there are wide spaces and large establishments such as ranch headquarters. When the water reaches the soil and it is possible to farm on twenty-acre tracts, not only are the line fences succeeded by nearer boundaries, but the people come closer to each other.
As the roots of food and fiber become more numerous and reach deeper into watered soil, the roots of people are sunk deeper in the love and nourishment of the soil that nourishes them. Then is introduced the community and its mutual interests which presuppose organization and co-operation.
Where there were in the sagebrush the isolated and highly individualistic few, in the irrigation districts there are the many who know that the word "neighbor" means the tie that binds and the neighborly interchange that is precious.
The successes of reclamation attract from far away the visits of engineers and technicians who are seeking to correct the fatal errors of land and water management in foreign and ancient lands. These visitors, experience shows, are impressed not only by great dams and mighty power plants and widely arrayed water distribution systems, but by the character and the quality of the people who live upon the land. They prove not only the promise given to the food resources of the nation by their products, but the promise to the future of the nation represented by their children. I submit that here is a gain in international good will that even excels a Point Four Program.
The miracle of irrigation is also the miracle of the good life won by courage and vision and hard work by bringing water to the arid and semiarid land. There is the same contrast between the lives of people deprived of opportunity and those who enjoy the advantages derived from well-managed resources of nature upon the reclamation projects. It is the line which marks where the water stops that tells the story, on one side, emerald green and fragrant flowers — on the other the desperate gravelike gray of the desert.
The values worthy of being recorded by history become also the fulfillments of the future. The writing of the history of reclamation is a continuous process. There is a way, profiting from experience and responding to clear necessity, by which the future history of reclamation may be reduced to a format of order and co-operation.
Let national administration first acknowledge that water resource development is a task so urgent that it must be met with the best plans and facilities at the command of American genius.
Let the agencies of government which deal with multiple-purpose developments get together and share their ideas and their plans. People who get together do not stay apart. Also, make national water policy a subject for the conferences of American governors as well as of action for the President and the Congress.
Dredge from many water resource reports their best ideas. Condense them into a coherent pattern. Let the great natural resource organizations of citizens participate not only in formulating a water management program but in informing the public. Let the great information media — the newspapers, the magazines, the radio and TV — tell the story well and fully.
America cannot be better defended by guns and bombs than by such a program with the action that follows wide understanding of necessity, and with the active support of public opinion.
Do this and our nation, a thousand years hence, will still be steering a course toward the greater prosperity and happiness of all its people.
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