Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [70]
By 1890, the third year of the drought, it was obvious that the theory that rain follows the plow was a preposterous fraud. The people of the plains states, still shell-shocked by the great white winter, began to turn back east. The populations of Kansas and Nebraska declined by between one-quarter and one-half. Tens of thousands went to the wetter Oklahoma territory, which the federal government usurped from the five Indian tribes to whom it had been promised in perpetuity and offered to anyone who got there first. Meanwhile, the windmills of the farmers who remained north were pumping up sand instead of water, and the huge dark clouds on the horizon were not rain but dust. The great cattle freeze of the white winter had been, in retrospect, a blessing in disguise. Had several million more cows been around to graze the dying prairie grasses to their roots, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s could have arrived half a century early.
When statistics were collected a few years later, only 400,000 homesteading families had managed to persevere on the plains, of more than a million who tried. The Homestead Acts had been a relative success in the East; west of the hundredth meridian, however, they were for the most part a failure, even a catastrophic failure. Much of the blame rested on flaws in the acts themselves, and on the imperfections of human nature, but a lot of it was the fault of the weather. How could you settle a region where you nearly froze to death one year and expired from heat and lack of water during the next eight or nine?
The drought that struck the West in the late 1880s did not occlude the entire continent. In the spring of 1889, the jet stream that had bypassed the West was feeding a thoroughfare of ocean moisture into the eastern states. In the mountains of Pennsylvania, it rained more or less continuously for weeks. The Allegheny and Susquehanna rivers became swollen surges of molten mud. Above Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on the South Fork of the Conemaugh River, a tributary of the Allegheny, sat a big earthfill dam built thirty-seven years earlier by the Pennsylvania Canal Company; it was, for a while, the largest dam in the world. Pounded by the rains, infiltrated by the waters of the rising reservoir, the dam was quietly turning into Cream of Wheat. On May 31, with a sudden flatulent shudder, it dissolved. Sixteen billion gallons of water dropped like a bomb on the town below. Before anyone had time to flee, Johnstown was swallowed by a thirty-foot wave. When the reservoir was finally in the Allegheny River, sending it far over its banks, the town had disappeared. Four hundred corpses were never positively identified. The number of dead was eventually put at twenty-two hundred—twice as many casualties as in the burning of the General Slocum on the East River in 1904; many more than in the San Francisco earthquake and fire; nine times as many as in the Chicago fire. The only single disaster in American history that took more lives was the hurricane that struck Galveston, Texas, eleven years later. The Johnstown flood was significant if only for this sheer loss of life; but it was also an indictment of privately built dams.
The rapid rise of the federal irrigation movement in the early 1890s was due in part to this succession of overawing catastrophes. But it had just as much to do with the fact that by the late 1880s, private irrigation efforts had come to an inglorious end. The good sites were simply gone. Most of the pioneers who had settled successfully across the hundredth meridian had gone to Washington and California and Oregon, where there was rain, or had chosen homesteads along streams whose water they could easily divert. Such opportunities, however, were quick to disappear. Groundwater wasn’t much help either. A windmill could lift enough drinking water for a family and few cattle; but it would require thirty or forty windmills, and reliable wind, to lift enough water