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of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, a forceful woman named Patricia Mulwray (the murdered hero in Chinatown had the same last name), also happens to be chairman of a new Washington lobby group representing most of the urban water agencies in the western states. Its agenda is simple: more water for cities, more for the environment, and less for agriculture—especially water-gorging, low-value agriculture, which usually means cows. “It’s not really the irrigators’ water,” says an urban water agency lobbyist, still too cautious to let me use his name. “It belongs to the people of the states. They have allowed the growers to put all that water to a reasonable and beneficial use. But those words could mean something entirely different in the future. What’s so reasonable and beneficial about ruining salmon rivers to raise subsidized surplus crops while industries that employ lots of people decide to relocate to wetter states?”

The irrigation lobby still has a few things going for it, mainly sentimentality, tradition, and law. In many western states, it’s the irrigation districts that set water policy: They can forbid sales of water rights from farms to cities beyond the district boundaries, and many of them do. And the irrigation lobby still has a few people convinced that, if it doesn’t get almost all the region’s water, then the whole world will starve. But the growers and their allies (anyone who wants to build more dams) are fighting a rearguard battle, and they know it. A number of states have legitimized water transfers, and a number of others—notably California—are going to soon. With George Miller now presiding over the House Interior Committee, the growers may be lucky to get any more subsidized federal water at all.

The West’s real crisis is one of inertia, of will, and of myth. As Wallace Stegner wrote, somehow the cow and the cowboy and the irrigated field came to symbolize the region, instead of the bison and the salmon and the antelope that once abounded here. Stegner said that he spent much of his writing career breaking lances against windmills turned by the cowboy mystique. You needn’t even get rid of the cowboys, who add color and relief to a culture that is becoming depressingly urbanized and, worse, suburbanized. But they might be driving bison, in reasonable numbers, instead of cows, and raising them, for the most part, on unirrigated land—which bison tolerate far better than cows. In a West that once and for all made sense, you might import a lot more meat and dairy products from states where they are raised on rain, rather than dream of importing those states’ rain.

You would have a West where most people live in contained cancers called cities (as they already do, anyway), and where more rural people would provide the opportunities for people from the cities—for people from all over the world—to enjoy the region’s splendors as they once were. A region where people begin to recognize that water left in rivers can be worth a lot more—in revenues, in jobs—than water taken out of the rivers. Maybe even a region where a lot of people really don’t give a damn how much money a river can produce.

At some point, perhaps within my lifetime, the American West will go back to the future rather than forward to the past.

M.R.

October 1992

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It would have been absolutely impossible for me to write this book without the love, support, and indulgence of my wife, Dorothy Lawrence Mott.

Second only to hers was the faith and support of my agent and dear friend F. Joseph Spieler, who talked me out of quitting several times, and not for selfish reasons; and of my parents, Konrad and Else Reisner, who rescued me from insolvency more than once.

I must also acknowledge and thank my brother-in-law, Roald Bostrom, who convinced me that I should try to write for a living in the first place.

This book managed to consume three editors in the process of being written. Alan Williams liked the idea, bought the book, and provided much encouragement at the beginning. William Strachan offered moral support