Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [167]
When the newspapers caught wind that an army had actually been dispatched, they were ecstatic. The Los Angeles Times promptly inducted its military correspondent to cover the hostilities. He made it to the Parker Dam site on his state’s fast macadam roads before the expeditionary force even arrived. When it did, exhausted from the heat, dust, and twelve fords across the ooze of the Bill Williams River, Major Pomeroy requisitioned a ferryboat from the town of Parker, and the force was instantly renamed the Arizona Navy. After a full inspection of the offending cable, Pomeroy tried to steam up the Colorado to the mouth of the Bill Williams to reconnoiter, but the ferry was too high to sneak under the cable, and it got hung up. It was a harbinger of how things were to turn out that the occupants were finally delivered to their campsite by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s fast motor launch.
Pomeroy stayed at the site for seven months, sending daily dispatches to the governor by radio. When the Bureau finally began to lay a trestle bridge to the Arizona shore, Moeur decided to demonstrate that he meant business. He declared the whole Arizona side of the river under martial law and sent out a hundred-man militia unit in eighteen trucks, some with mounted machine guns. According to residents of the town of Parker, who were watching a good joke turn sour in a hurry, the guardsmen seemed eager for a fight. By now, however, the imbroglio had became national news and a source of embarrassment to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Well aware that Arizona had at least a moral case to make, Ickes ordered construction halted on the dam while the dispute was settled in the courts. To its own surprise as much as everyone else’s, Arizona, which had already lost twice in the Supreme Court in its efforts to block Boulder Dam, was upheld. Parker Dam, ruled the Court, was technically illegal because it had not been specifically authorized by Congress. (That the Bureau could begin to put up a big dam without even asking Congress for formal approval says a lot about how far it had come in the intervening years.) Four months later, however, California’s Congressional delegation pushed a bill through Congress that specifically authorized the dam, and Arizona was left without recourse, unless it wanted to declare war on the United States.
A few years later, in 1944, Secretary of State Cordell Hull formally promised Mexico the 1.5 million acre-feet that had been set aside for it by the Colorado River Compact. Feeling itself the odd man out, Arizona finally gave in and signed the compact in disgust; it also signed a contract with the Interior Secretary to purchase 2.8 million acre-feet of water. A few years after that, in 1948, the upper-basin states apportioned their 7.5 million acre-feet among themselves, and only two major issues involving the river remained unresolved: how much of her allocated 2.8 million acre-feet Arizona could take out of the main-stem Colorado, and whether California could invoke prior appropriation and deny Arizona most of that. These, at any rate, were the last legal issues left to be resolved. The real issues had much more to do with nature and economics than with law, and they were just beginning to make themselves felt.
The 1940s and 1950s were boom years in Arizona. Phoenix—population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000—grew overnight from outsize village to big city. Between 1920 and 1960, the state’s population doubled twice, and millions of irrigated acres came into production. One of the revelations of the postwar period was that, given the opportunity, people were happy to leave temperate climates with cold winters for desert climates with fierce summers, provided there was water to sustain them and air conditioning to keep them from perishing (Phoenix, in the summer, is virtually intolerable without air conditioning). Not that the migrants had bothered to ask whether there was enough water before