• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1697 0

and advice along the way. I am most grateful, however, to Dan Frank, who replaced Bill Strachan when the book was nearly completed but treated it as if he had been with it from the beginning. His aesthetic sensibility, resonant judgment, and clear thinking rescued many parts of the book that had managed to beach themselves on the shoals of muddleheadedness, and he wouldn’t have tolerated a hackneyed metaphor like that if I’d showed it to him first.

I owe a tremendous debt to the Alicia Patterson Foundation, which got me going; to E. Philip LeVeen and Robert Wolcott of Public Interest Economics, who helped keep me going; to Robert Rodale and the Rodale Foundation, who helped keep me going a while longer; and to the now-defunct American Edition of Geo magazine, whose generous expense policy helped fund a good bit of the research.

I can’t imagine how the book could have been written had it not been for a handful of people who were extraordinarily generous with their time, candid in their observations, and forthcoming with memoranda, anecdotes, documents, and private letters. I would especially like to thank C. J. Kuiper for many hours of his time and a superb memory and storytelling flair. I am much in debt to Floyd Dominy, another great storyteller, who believes in open files and is as fearless of consequences as his reputation suggests. H. P. Dugan, Daniel Dreyfus, and Jim Casey, all former high officials of the Bureau of Reclamation, were also exceptionally candid and helpful.

Peter Carlson of the Environmental Policy Institute is as knowledgeable as anyone alive on the subject of water projects, and answered countless questions over the telephone. John Leshy of the Arizona State University Law School and Tom Graff of the Environmental Defense Fund were also especially helpful, not only in answering questions but in reviewing portions of the manuscript. A lot of thanks are also owed to James Flannery, Jim Free, Robert Edgar, Alan Merson, Patrick Porgans, Robert Smythe, David Shuster, Jim Cook, and Jan van Schilfgaarde.

Among the hundreds of others I interviewed, I want to single out a few dozen for special thanks. They are Philip Bowles, Helen Ingram, Frank Welsh, Robert Witzeman, Don and Karen Christenson, Richard Wilson, James Watt, Tom Barlow, John Gottschalk, Gilbert White, Bill Martin, Sam Steiger, Stewart Udall, David Brower, Dorothy Green, Phil Nalder, Steven Reynolds, Herbert Grubb, Arleigh West, former Governor Edmund G. Brown, Sr., John Erlichman, Nathaniel Reed, Pete van Gytenbeek, Derrick Sewell, Wayne Wyatt, William Gookin, Mohammed El-Ashry, Richard Madson, the late Horace Albright, Jack Burby, Willoughby Houk, George Baker; Jeffrey Ingram, Ronald Robie, Oliver Houck, Lynn Ludlow, Joe Moore, Barney Bellport, Kendall Manock, John Lawrence, George Ballis, Michael Catino, Keith Higginson, Peter Skinner, Edwin Weinberg, Ben Yellen, Samuel Hayes, Myron Holburt, Don Maughan, Moira Farrow, Bob Weaver, Sandy White, Felix Sparks, Russell Brown, Terry Thoem, Glenn Saunders, Robert Curry, Gus Norwood, Mason Gaffney, John Bryson, Bill Dubois, Mark Dubois, Alex Pesonen, the late Paul Taylor, Gilbert Stamm, Daniel Beard, Irving Fox, Lorelle Long, Stanford P. McCasland, John Newsom, Mary Ellen Morbeck, Brant Calkin, Carolina Butler, and W. R. Collier.

The American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming is a hospitable, if not luxurious, place to work and contains a monstrous trove of archives relating to the settlement of the West and water development; I would like to extend special thanks to Gene Gressley and his staff. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library at the University of Texas, Austin, the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, the main library at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Interior Department Library in Washington, D.C., were also most helpful in providing source material.

For many favors and services rendered I am grateful to Tom Turner, the staff of Not Man Apart, and the now-defunct San Francisco office of Friends of the Earth. Thanks also to Donna Wilcox and