Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [111]
Actually, the General’s vision was to mutate into irony as fabulous as the prophecy itself. He was right in one sense—you did not build such incredible works to carry water from areas of “surplus” to areas of “deficit” without intricate political compromises among the states involved and unprecedented collaboration between the agencies that would presumably do the job, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps. But he was dead wrong in predicting that such harmonious relations would ever be. And if a single entity could be blamed for this—because it schemed constantly against its would-be confederate, because it seized every opportunity to build any senseless project it could, because it worked diligently, if unwittingly, to give water development a bad name—it was none other than his own agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
In California, where Cassidy gave his speech—at the very moment, in fact, when he was giving his speech—the Corps of Engineers was shamelessly trying to steal from the Bureau of Reclamation at least one major project the Bureau had intended to build for years. It had already done it several times before, in California and elsewhere. Across the entire West, the Corps, as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen, was trying to seduce away the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; it was toadying up to big corporate farmers who wanted to monopolize whole rivers for themselves; it was even prepared to defy the President of the United States. As a result, the business of water development was to become a game of chess between two ferociously competitive bureaucracies, on a board that was half a continent plus Alaska, where rivers were the pawns and dams the knights and queens used to checkmate the other’s ambition. But the Corps and the Bureau played a little too well and a little too long for their own good. While they were fighting over a Lake Ontario-size reservoir in the middle of Alaska, and over countless squalid little projects desired by local interest groups, an unprecedented water crisis was gathering on the southern high plains—a crisis tailor-made for their own limitless ambition which, in the end, they would do nothing about. The Corps and the Bureau wasted so much money on frivolous projects which didn’t so much solve the nation’s water situation as satisfy the greed of powerful interests and their own petty ambitions that in the 1980s, despite dozens of new dams and reservoirs built during the intervening years, a water crisis loomed larger than in 1962. Within the next half century, as much irrigated land is likely to go out of production—land that grows nearly 40 percent of our agricultural exports—as the Bureau of Reclamation managed to put into production during its entire career. And though projects to rescue those regions remain on the drawing boards, the age when they might have been built seems to have passed.
The Corps of Engineers, the construction arm of the United States Army, was baptized during the Revolutionary War, when a group of engineers in the Continental Army built a breastwork on Bunker Hill. In 1794, the Corps was officially christened with its current name and divided into a civilian and a military works branch. The civil works branch, which was to become by far the larger of the two, began modestly enough, clearing driftwood and sunken ships out of rivers and harbors and occasionally doing a bit of dredging. It also played a role in the early exploration and surveying of the nation. The Corps’ great