Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [338]
NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHAPTER ONE: A Country of Illusion
Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, the preeminent source for this chapter, remains one of the finest biographies in print. It covers not only the life of John Wesley Powell but the lives of those in his circle—some of the most interesting Americans of the nineteenth century; how such things as laws and climatic aberrations influenced the settlement of the West in the nineteenth century; and the ideas that formed much of our present policy regarding natural resources. There are several Powell biographies, but Stegner’s is the best.
Hamlin Garland’s A Son of the Middle Border is as good a portrayal of life on the plains and the imperative that drove people there as has been written. See also O. E. Rolvaag’s Giants in the Earth and Fred Shannon’s The Farmer’s Last Frontier.
Bernard De Voto, along with Stegner, is probably the finest of the modem western historians. The Course of Empire and Across the Wide Missouri were both a great help.
Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains is scholarly, prickly, readable, and as clean a dissection of the huge body of myth that has been built up around this region as anyone ever wrote. Fascinating visual imagery of the virgin West is contained in Artists and Illustrators of the Old West, edited by Robert Taft.
An interesting biography—really a hagiography, which makes it all the more interesting—of Henry Miller, the most acquisitive land baron in California history, is Edward Treadwell’s The Cattle King. Though he is remembered mainly for his 1,090,000 acres, much of it acquired through a dubious legality, Miller’s real contribution to history is Lux v. Haggin, a legal case which, to a considerable degree, formed the doctrine of western water law. The lawsuit pitted Miller and his lifelong partner, Charles Lux, against Lloyd Tevis and James Ben Ali Haggin, two rival land barons with a fiefdom of their own near the Kern River, who were prevented from irrigating when Miller tried to invoke his riparian water rights. Haggin and Tevis argued, unsuccessfully, that riparian doctrine would doom most of California’s best land to dryland ranching, and that land-owners with river frontage should not be allowed to hog all the water. Public reaction against Miller and Lux’s victory was so strong that most western states who hadn’t already opted strongly for the “appropriative”-rights doctrine soon did. (This doctrine awarded water rights to anyone who used them first, even if his acreage did not border water.) California, for its part, has modified its legal code to allow a complex coexistence of riparian- and appropriative-rights doctrine.
The Education of Henry Adams, one of the most peculiar books ever written by an American, is interesting, in the context of this chapter, for its depiction of the mood of empire that swept the nation in the late nineteenth century.
Powell’s journal—actually an embellished and edited version published for public consumption—is a very lively account of his Colorado River adventure and is worth reading, as is his original Report on the Arid Lands. Few, if any, bureaucrats since Powell have written as well.
A. B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky, though a work of fiction, is the most compelling and realistic portrait of the mountain men I have seen. It is one of the few great American novels. Harrison Clifford Dale’s account of the Ashley-Smith expeditions is a fairly rich account of some astonishing exploratory feats.
BOOKS
Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Athearn, Robert G. High Country Empire. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Boulton,