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By Root 1463 0

Section 9 of the Reclamation Act implied, if it didn’t require, that all money accruing to the Reclamation Fund from sales of land in any given state should be spent in that state as well. Frederick Newell, the Service’s first director, was particularly anxious to locate a few projects in each state anyway, because that might dispel some of the antipathy that had attended the Service’s creation. By 1924, twenty-seven projects were completed or under construction. Of those, twenty-one had been initiated before the Service was even half a decade old.

The engineers who staffed the Reclamation Service tended to view themselves as a godlike class performing hydrologic miracles for grateful simpletons who were content to sit in the desert and raise fruit. About soil science, agricultural economics, or drainage they sometimes knew less than the farmers whom they regarded with indulgent contempt. As a result, some of the early projects were to become painful embarrassments, and expensive ones. The soil turned out to be demineralized, alkaline, boron-poisoned; drainage was so poor the irrigation water turned fields into saline swamps; markets for the crops didn’t exist; expensive projects with heavy repayment obligations were built in regions where only low-value crops could be grown. In the Bureau of Reclamation’s quasi-official history, Water for the West, Michael Robinson (the son-in-law of a Commissioner of Reclamation) discreetly admits all of this: “Initially, little consideration was given to the hard realities of irrigated agriculture. Neither aid nor direction was given to settlers in carrying out the difficult and costly work of clearing and leveling the land, digging irrigation ditches, building roads and houses, and transporting crops to remote markets....”

Robinson also acknowledges the political pressures that have be-deviled the Reclamation program ever since it was born. The attitude of most western members of Congress was quaintly hypocritical: after resisting this experiment in pseudosocialism, or even voting against it, they decided, after it became law, that they might as well make the best of it. “The government was immediately flooded with requests for project investigations,” Robinson writes. “Local chambers of commerce, real estate interests, and congressmen were convinced their areas were ideal for reclamation development. State legislators and officials joined the chorus of promoters seeking Reclamation projects.... Legislative requirements and political pressures sometimes precluded careful, exhaustive surveys of proposed projects.... Projects were frequently undertaken with only a sketchy understanding of the area’s climate, growing season, soil productivity, and market conditions.”

Congress’s decision, in passing the act, to ignore much of John Wesley Powell’s advice made things worse. Powell had proposed that in those inhospitable regions where only livestock could be raised, settlers should be allowed to homestead 2,560 acres of the public domain—but allocated enough water to irrigate only twenty. The Reclamation Act gave everyone up to 160 acres (a man and wife could jointly farm 320 acres), whether they settled in Mediterranean California or in the frigid interior steppes of Wyoming, where the extremes of climate rival those in Mongolia. You could grow wealthy on 160 acres of lemons in California and starve on 160 acres of irrigated pasture in Wyoming or Montana, but the act was blind to such nuances. And by building so many projects in a rush, the Reclamation Service was repeating its mistakes before it had a chance to learn from them.

All of these problems were compounded by the fact that few settlers had any experience with irrigation farming—nor were they required to. They overwatered and mismanaged their crops; they let their irrigation systems silt up. Many had optimistically filed on more acreage than they had resources to irrigate, and they ended up with repayment obligations on land they were forced to leave fallow. From there, it was a short, swift fall into bankruptcy. Fifty years earlier,