Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [30]
Mark Twain might have written it off to the human condition, but Powell, who subscribed to a more benevolent view of humanity, wrote it off to the conditions of the desert and the failure to understand them. Americans were making a Procrustean effort to turn half a continent into something they were used to. It was a doomed effort. Even worse, it was unscientific.
The document that Powell hoped would bring the country to its senses was called A Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, with a More Detailed Account of the Lands of Utah. Published in 1876, the volume was seven years in preparation—though Powell took time out for a second expedition down the Colorado, in 1871, and for his usual plethora of intermittent pursuits. Powell’s Report is remarkably brief, a scant two hundred pages in all. Unlike many of his rivals, such as the bombastic Ferdinand V. Hayden, Powell was more interested in being right than in being long. But his portrait of the American West has revolutionary implications even today.
At the beginning, Powell reconfirmed his view, which he had already submitted to an unbelieving Congress, that two-fifths of the United States has a climate that generally cannot support farming without irrigation. On top of that, irrigation could reclaim only a fraction of it. “When all the waters running in the streams found in this region are conducted on the land,” Powell said, “there will be but a small portion of the country redeemed, varying in the different territories perhaps from one to three percent” (emphasis added). Powell regarded the theory that increased rainfall accompanied human settlement as bunk, but, typically, he disposed of it in a sympathetic and felicitous way: “If it be true that increase of the water supply is due to increase in precipitation, as many have supposed, the fact is not cheering to the agriculturalist of the arid region.... Any sudden great change [in climate] is ephemeral, and usually such changes go in cycles, and the opposite or compensating change may reasonably be anticipated.... [W]e shall have to expect a speedy return to extreme aridity, in which case a large portion of the agricultural industries of these now growing up would be destroyed.”
The whole problem with the Homestead Acts, Powell went on, was that they were blind to reality. In the West, a 160-acre irrigated farm was too large, while a 160-acre unirrigated farm was too small. Most western valley soil was fertile, and a good crop was a near certainty once irrigation water was applied; in the milder regions the growing season was very long and two crops were possible, so one could often subsist on eighty irrigated acres or less. That, in fact, was about all the irrigated land one family could be expected to work. Remove the irrigation water, however, and things were drastically different. Then even a whole section was too small a piece of land. Under most circumstances, Powell claimed, no one could make a living through dryland ranching on fewer than 2,560 acres—four full sections. And even with that much land, a settler’s prospects would be dicey in times of drought, because the land might lie utterly bare. Therefore, every pasturage farm should ideally have a water right sufficient to irrigate twenty acres or so during emergencies.
Having thrown over the preeminent myths about agriculture in the American West, Powell went on to the truly revolutionary