Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [71]
Even if their land abutted a stream with some surplus water rights, few farmers had the confidence, cooperative spirit, and money to build a dam and lead the stored water to their lands through a long canal. It was one thing to throw a ten-foot-high earthen plug across a freshet in order to create a two-acre stock pond—though even that taxed the resources of most farmers in the West, who had invested all their savings simply to get there from Kentucky or Maine. It was quite another thing to build a dam on a stream large enough to supply a year-round flow, and to dig a canal—by horse and by hand—that was long enough, and deep enough, and wide enough, to irrigate hundreds or thousands of acres of land. The work involved was simply stupefying; clearing a field, by comparison, seemed like the simplest, most effortless job.
The farmers’ predicament, on the other hand, was an opportunity for the legions of financial swashbucklers who had gone west in pursuit of quick.wealth. In the 1870s and 1880s, hundreds of irrigation companies, formed with eastern capital, set themselves to the task of reclaiming the arid lands. Almost none survived beyond ten years. At the eighth National Irrigation Congress in 1898, a Colorado legislator likened the American West to a graveyard, littered with the “crushed and mangled skeletons of defunct [irrigation] corporations ... [which] suddenly disappeared at the end of brief careers, leaving only a few defaulted obligations to indicate the route by which they departed.”
There was, indeed, a kind of cruel irony in the collapse of the irrigation companies. Most of them operated in the emphatically arid regions—the Central Valley of California, Nevada, Arizona, southeastern Colorado, New Mexico—where agriculture without irrigation is daunting or hopeless, but otherwise the climate is well suited for growing crops. The drought, on the other hand, struck hardest in the region just east of the hundredth meridian, where, in most years, a nonirrigating farmer had been able to make a go of it. Kansas was emptied by the drought and the white winter, Nevada by irrigation companies gone defunct. In the early 1890s, the exodus from Nevada, as a percentage of those who hung on, was unlike anything in the country’s history. Even California, in the midst of a big population boom, saw the growth of its agricultural population come to a standstill in 1895.
California, the perennial trend-setting state, was the first to attempt to rescue its hapless farmers, but the result, the Wright Act, was another in the long series of doomed efforts to apply eastern solutions to western topography and climate. The act, which took its inspiration from the township governments of New England, established self-governing mini-states, called irrigation districts, whose sole function was to deliver water onto barren land. Like the western homestead laws, it was a good idea that foundered in practice. The districts soon buckled under their responsibilities—issuing bonds that wouldn’t sell, building reservoirs that wouldn’t fill, allocating water unfairly, distributing it unevenly, then throwing up their hands when anarchy prevailed. Elwood C. Mead, then the state engineer of Wyoming and probably the country’s leading authority on irrigation, called the Wright Act “a disgrace to any self-governing people.” George Maxwell, a Californian and founder of the National Irrigation Association, said “the extravagance or stupidity or incompetence of local [irrigation] directors” had left little beyond a legacy of “waste and disaster.” Though the Wright Act was in most ways a failure, Colorado, thinking it had learned something from California’s mistakes, adopted its own version, which added a modest subsidy for private irrigation developers in order to improve their odds of success. By 1894, under Colorado’s new program, five substantial storage reservoirs had been built. Three were so poorly designed and situated that they stored