Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [34]
Powell had felt that the western farmers would stand behind him, if not the politicians themselves; there he made one of the major miscalculations of his life. “Apparently he underestimated the capacity of the plains dirt farmer to continue to believe in myths even while his nose was being rubbed in unpleasant fact,” Stegner wrote. “The press and a good part of the public in the West was against him more than he knew.... The American yeoman might clamor for government assistance in his trouble, but he didn’t want any that would make him change his thinking.”
What is remarkable, a hundred years later, is how little has changed. The disaster that Powell predicted—a catastrophic return to a cycle of drought—did indeed occur, not once but twice: in the late 1800s and again in the 1930s. When that happened, Powell’s ideas—at least his insistence that a federal irrigation program was the only salvation of the arid West—were embraced, tentatively at first, then more passionately, then with a kind of desperate insistence. The result was a half-century rampage of dam-building and irrigation development which, in all probability, went far beyond anything Powell would have liked. But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it. And the same Congress which had once insisted he didn’t need federal help was now insisting that such help be continued, at any cost. Released from a need for justification, released from logic itself, the irrigation program Powell had wanted became a monster, redoubling its efforts and increasing its wreckage, both natural and economic, as it lost sight of its goal. Powell’s ideal was a future in which the rivers of the American West would help create a limited bounty on that tiny fraction of the land which it made sense to irrigate. It is hard to imagine that the first explorer of the Colorado River would have welcomed a future in which there might be no rivers left at all.
CHAPTER TWO
The Red Queen
While Los Angeles moldered, San Francisco grew and grew. The city owned a superb natural harbor—the best on the Pacific Coast, one of the best in the world. When gold was struck in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 150 miles across the Central Valley, San Francisco became the principal destination of the fortune seekers of the world. The names of the camps suggested the potency of the lure: New York-of-the-Pacific, Bunker Hill, Chinese Camp, German Bar, Georgia Slide, Nigger Hill, Dutch Corral, Irish Creek, Malay Camp, French Bar, Italian Bar. Those who found their fortunes were inclined to part with them in the nearest haven of pleasure, which was San Francisco. Those who did not discovered that they could do just as well providing the opportunities. With oranges going for $2 apiece at the mines, and a plate of fresh oysters for $20 or more, it was a bonanza for all concerned.
In 1848, the population of San Francisco was eight hundred; three years later, thirty-five thousand people lived there. In 1853 the population went past fifty thousand and San Francisco became one of the twenty largest cities in the United States. By 1869, San Francisco possessed one of the busiest ports in the world, a huge fishing fleet, and the western terminus of the transcontinental railroad. It teemed with mansions, restaurants, hotels, theaters, and whorehouses. In finance it was the rival of New York, in culture the rival of Boston; in spirit