Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [29]
Speculation. Water monopoly. Land monopoly. Erosion. Corruption. Catastrophe. By 1876, after several trips across the plains and through the Rocky Mountain states, John Wesley Powell was pretty well convinced that those would be the fruits of a western land policy based on wishful thinking, willfulness, and lousy science. And by then everything he predicted was happening, especially land monopoly, water monopoly, graft, and fraud.
Homesteads fronting on streams went like oranges aboard a scurvy-ridden ship. The doctrine of riparian rights, which had been unthinkingly imported from the East, made it possible to monopolize the water in a stream if you owned the land alongside it. But if the stream was anything larger than a creek, only the person who owned land upstream, where it was still small, could manage to build a dam or barrage to guarantee a summer flow; then he could divert all he wanted, leaving his downstream neighbors with a bed of dry rocks. Riparian doctrine alone, therefore, made it possible for a tiny handful of landowners to monopolize the few manageable rivers of the West. When their neighbors saw their predicament and sold out, they could monopolize the best land, too.
As for the Desert Lands Act and the Timber and Stone Act, they could not have promoted land monopoly and corruption more efficiently if they had been expressly designed for that purpose. A typical irrigation scene under the Desert Lands Act went as follows: A beneficiary hauled a hogshead of water and a witness to his barren land, dumped the water on the land, paid the witness $20, and brought him to the land office, where the witness swore he had seen the land irrigated. Then, with borrowed identification and different names, another land application was filed, and the scene was repeated. If you could pull it off six or seven times, you had yourself a ranch. Foreign sailors arriving in San Francisco were offered a few dollars, a jug of whiskey, and an evening in a whorehouse in exchange for filing a land claim under the Timber and Stone Act. Before shipping out, the sailors abdicated title; there were no restrictions on transfer of ownership. Whole redwood forests were acquired in such a manner.
Then there was the Swamplands Act, or Swamp and Overflow Act—a Desert Lands Act of the bulrushes. If there was federal land that overflowed enough so that you could traverse it at times in a flat-bottomed boat, and you promised to reclaim it (which is to say, dike and drain it), it was yours. Henry Miller, a mythical figure in the history of California land fraud, acquired a large part of his 1,090,000-acre empire under this act. According to legend, he bought himself a boat, hired some witnesses, put the boat and witnesses over county-size tracts near the San Joaquin River where it rains, on the average, about eight or nine inches a year. The land became his. The sanitized version of the story, the one told by Miller’s descendants, has him benefiting more from luck than from ruse. During the winter of 1861 and 1862, most of California got three times its normal precipitation, and the usually semiarid Central Valley became a shallow sea the size of Lake Ontario. But the only difference in this version is that Miller didn’t need a wagon for his boat; he still had no business acquiring hundreds of thousands of acres of the public domain, yet he managed it with ease.
One of the unforeseen results of the homestead legislation was a high rate of employment among builders of birdhouses. In most instances, you were required to display an “erected domicile” on your land. The Congress, after all, was much too smart to give people land without requiring them to live