Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [341]
Samuel Hays’s Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency is a very good account of the early conservation movement and its utilitarian tenets.
Michael Robinson’s Water for the West contains some good material on the failures of private irrigation ventures and contrasts vividly with William Smythe’s supremely glorified view in The Conquest of Arid America (which was written much earlier). Eugene Hollon’s The Great American Desert, Then and Now provided outstanding general background for this chapter, as did National Land for People’s “Reclamation History” (three-part series).
BOOKS
Delano, Alonzo. Life on the Plains and Among the Diggings. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1966.
Gaffney, Mason. Diseconomies Inherent in Western Water Laws. Riverside, Calif.: January 1961 (unpublished monograph).
Hawgood, John A. America’s Western Frontiers. New York: Knopf, 1967.
Hays, Samuel P. Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency. New York: Atheneum, 1975.
Hollon, W. Eugene. The Great American Desert, Then and Now. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Ise, John. Sod and Stubble. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1936.
Lilley, William, and Lewis L. Gould. “The Western Irrigation Movement 1878—1902: A Reappraisal.” In Gene M. Gressley, ed., The American West: A Reorientation. Laramie: University of Wyoming Publications, 1966.
Robinson, Michael. Water for the West. Chicago: Public Works Historical Society, 1979.
Smythe, William E. The Conquest of Arid America. New York: Macmillan, 1905.
Warne, William. The Bureau of Reclamation. New York: Praeger, 1973.
CHAPTERS FOUR AND EIGHT: An American Nile (I) and (II)
These chapters (and the subsequent ones in the book) are drawn mostly from interviews, hitherto unseen files from the Bureau of Reclamation, and articles and reports. Anyone wishing to consult a single source for more background on the Colorado River and the conflicts over its use should read Philip Fradkin’s A River No More.
Empires in the Sun, by Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, contains an interesting account of how Kaiser, Bechtel, Morrison-Knudsen, and other firms that built Hoover Dam became instant giants through its construction. A detailed account of the actual construction work is in the Bureau of Reclamation’s “Hoover Dam.”
Helen Ingram’s book, Patterns of Politics in Water Resource Development, is the best account I have seen of the political jockeying and compromising that led to passage of the Colorado River Basin Project Act. Dean Mann’s The Politics of Water in Arizona is also helpful.
The Congressional debates over the Colorado River Storage Project (the 1956 act), especially those involving the late Senator Paul Douglas, one of the brainiest, wittiest, and most eloquent Senators we have ever had, are well worth reading. Economists were some of the earliest critics of water projects, but Douglas was even ahead of most economists.
Anyone who wishes to see how desperately Arizona wanted the Central Arizona Project built should review articles and editorials in the Arizona Republic and other state newspapers, particularly from the mid-1960s (prior to passage of the CAP legislation) and the late 1970s (the dread Carter years). Frank Welsh’s How to Create a Water Crisis is a slightly dry but devastating dissection of the CAP and Arizona’s perceived shortage of water, written by a former engineer with the Corps of Engineers and past president of the Phoenix chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers.
David Brower’s interviews for the Bancroft Library’s Oral History Program (University of California, Berkeley) contain a lot of interesting anecdotal material about