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By Root 1445 0

all further migration to the West and to ensure disaster for those who were already there—or for those who were on their way. Even as the victims of the great white winter and the drought of the 1880s and 1890s were evacuating the arid regions, the trains departing Chicago and St. Louis for points west were full. The pull of the West reached deep into the squalid slums of the eastern cities; it reached back to the ravined, rock-strewn farms of New England and down into the boggy, overwet farmlands of the Deep South. No matter what the government did, short of erecting a wall at the hundredth meridian, the settlement of the West was going to continue. The only way to prevent more cycles of disaster was to build a civilization based on irrigated farming. Fifty years of effort by countless numbers of people had resulted in 3,631,000 acres under irrigation by 1889. There were counties in California that contained more acreage than that, and the figure included much of the easily irrigable land. Not only that, but at least half the land had been irrigated by Mormons. Each additional acre, therefore, would be won at greater pain. Everything had been tried—cheap land, free land, private initiative, local initiative, state subsidy—and everything, with a few notable exceptions, had failed. One alternative remained.

There seemed to be only one politician in the arid West who fathomed his region’s predicament well enough to end it. He had emigrated to San Francisco from the East, made a fortune through a busy law practice and the inheritance of his father-in-law’s silver mine, moved to Nevada, and in 1888 launched the Truckee Irrigation Project. It was one of the most ambitious reclamation efforts of its day, and it failed—not because it was poorly conceived or executed (hydrologically and economically, it was a good project) but because squabbles among its beneficiaries and the pettiness of the Nevada legislature ruined its hopes. In the process Francis Griffith Newlands lost half a million dollars and whatever faith he had in the ability of private enterprise to mount a successful reclamation program. “Nevada,” he said bitterly as his project went bust in 1891, “is a dying state.”

Newlands, who succeeded at everything else he tried, gave up on irrigation, ran for Congress, and won. For the remainder of the decade, he kept out of the reclamation battles, if only to give everyone else’s solutions an opportunity to fail. All the while, however, he was waiting for his moment. It came on September 14, 1901, when a bullet fired by an anarchist ended the life of President William McKinley.

Theodore Roosevelt, the man who succeeded McKinley as President, was, like Francis Newlands, a student and admirer of John Wesley Powell. Infatuated with the West, he had traveled extensively there and been struck by the prescience and accuracy of Powell’s observations. Roosevelt was first of all a politician, and had no interest in sharing Powell’s ignominious fate; nonetheless, he knew that Powell’s solutions were the only ones that would work, and he wanted a federal reclamation effort badly. A military thinker, he was concerned about Japan, bristling with expansionism and dirt-poor in resources, and knew that America was vulnerable on its underpopulated western flank. A bug for efficiency, he felt that the waste of money and effort on doomed irrigation ventures was a scandal. Roosevelt was also a conservationist, in the utilitarian sense, and the failure to conserve—that is, use—the water in western rivers irritated him. “The western half of the United States would sustain a population greater than that of our whole country today if the waters that now run to waste were saved and used for irrigation,” he said in a speech in December of 1901. For all his enthusiasm, however, Roosevelt knew that his biggest problem would be not the eastern states in Congress but the myth-bound western bloc, whose region he was trying to help. His second-greatest problem, ironically, would be his chief ally, Francis Newlands.

As soon as Roosevelt was in the White