Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [166]
And that is exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.
When Franklin Roosevelt came out to dedicate Hoover Dam on September 30, 1935, the one important dignitary who refused to attend the ceremony, which drew some ten thousand people, was the governor of Arizona, B. B. Moeur.
Though the dam had been built to safeguard the future of the entire Southwest—that was what FDR said in his speech—Moeur, like many Arizonans, looked on it more with trepidation than with satisfaction and awe. The Colorado River Compact hadn’t really given Arizona anything; it had just promised the lower basin 7.5 million acre-feet. In passing the Boulder Canyon Project Act, Congress had implied that Arizona’s share was at least 2.8 million acre-feet, but this, Moeur felt, was only a paper guarantee. For one thing, the guarantee had probably been jeopardized, in a legal sense, by Arizona’s refusal to sign the compact. Even if it wasn’t, Arizona’s water rights would become exceptionally vulnerable the moment the Bureau of Reclamation completed its giant canal to the Imperial Valley and California built the mammoth aqueducts headed for the Coachella Valley, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Southern California was growing much too fast to be satisfied with 4.4 million acre-feet of the river’s flow—its compact entitlement. In all likelihood, its demand for water would overtake its allotment in another twenty years. Suppose, then, that California began “borrowing” some of Arizona’s unused entitlement, which it could probably do. Would Arizona ever get it back, if millions of people depended on it? For the foreseeable future, Arizona was in no position to use its share of the river, because most of the people and most of the irrigated lands were in the central part of the state, nearly two hundred miles away. Rich, urban Los Angeles had the money to build an aqueduct that long, but Arizona, still mostly agricultural, did not. And yet California had vowed to blockade any effort by Arizona to have a federal aqueduct authorized unless the major issue that still divided the two states—the Gila River—was resolved in California’s favor.
The Gila, with its tributaries, the Salt and the Verde, was Arizona’s only indigenous river of consequence. In the historic past, it evaporated so quickly as it meandered through the scorching Sonoran desert that all that reached the Colorado River at Yuma was an average flow of 1.1 million acre-feet. However, the Salt River Project, by erecting damns in the mountain canyons east of Phoenix, had increased storage and reduced evaporation enough to give the state 2.3 million acre-feet to use. Which of those figures ought to be deducted from Arizona’s 2.8-million-acre-foot share of the Colorado watershed? Arizona said neither, or, at most, 1.1 million acre-feet, which was the historical flow. California said 2.3 million acre-feet—the amount which the dams effectively conserved for Arizona’s use. If California’s reasoning prevailed, Arizona would be left with a paltry 500,000 acre-feet of compact entitlement, which was hardly enough to sustain growth. But if Arizona’s reasoning prevailed, California had vowed that a Central Arizona Project would never be built.
To Moeur, a showman politician in the grand carnival style, California’s threats were worse than an outrage. In the arid West, denying one’s neighbor water was a virtual declaration of war. But Moeur had his own response to such a challenge. He would begin waging a real war.
The advance expeditionary force consisted of Major F. I. Pomeroy, 158th Infantry Regiment, Arizona National Guard, plus a sergeant, three privates, and a cook. Their instructions, issued personally by the governor, were to report “on any attempt on the part of any person to place any structure on Arizona soil either within the bed of said river [the Colorado] or on the shore.” Moeur knew full well that such an attempt had already been made, for the Bureau was doing some test drilling at the site of Parker Dam—a smaller regulation dam downriver from Hoover—from a barge, and the barge