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By Root 1430 0

of the Reclamation farms remained high. The only relief in a pitiless desert landscape, their worth was computed in almost ethereal terms, as if they were art. And their investment value to speculators remained high, too. An acre which in pre-project years was worth $5 or $10—if that—was suddenly worth fifty times as much. At such prices, many farmers found the temptation to sell out irresistible; by 1927, at least a third of the Reclamation farmers had. The buyers were usually wealthy speculators who figured they could absorb some minor losses for a while—especially if they could convince Congress to give them tax breaks—as long as they could make money when agricultural prices went back up. The Salt River Project in Arizona was notable for having been all but taken over by speculators. Elwood Mead, who succeeded Newell and Arthur Powell Davis as Commissioner of Reclamation, called speculation “a vampire which has done much to destroy the desirable social and economic purposes of the Reclamation Act.” But the big, distant new owners were often better at paying their water bills than the stone-broke small farmers, so the Reclamation Service, in a number of instances, turned a blind eye toward what was going on. It was a case of lawlessness becoming de facto policy, and it was to become more and more commonplace.

Part of the reason the Reclamation Service (which metamorphosed, fittingly, into the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923) seemed so hapless at enforcing its social mandate had to do with the Omnibus Adjustment Act of 1926, one of those well-meaning pieces of legislation that make everything worse. Intended to clamp down on speculation, the act demanded that landowners owning excess amounts of land sign recordable contracts in which they promised to sell such lands within a designated period, at prices reflecting the lands’ pre-project worth. But the contracts were to be signed with the local irrigation district acting as wholesaler of the Bureau’s water—not with the Bureau itself. It was an ideal opportunity to camouflage acreage violations, since the same people who were in violation of the Reclamation Act often sat on the local irrigation district’s board of directors.

A more important and insidious reason, however, had to do with the nature of the Bureau itself. “There was a tendency for some engineers to view public works as ends in themselves,” admits Michael Robinson. “Despite official declarations from more sensitive administrators that ‘Reclamation is measured not in engineering units but in homes and agricultural values’ ... the Service regarded itself as an engineering outfit.’ ”

That may have been the understatement of the year. To build a great dam on a tempestuous river like the Snake was terrifically exhilarating work; enforcing a hodgepodge of social ideals was hardly that. Stopping a wild river was a straightforward job, subjugable to logic, and the result was concrete, heroic, real: a dam. Enforcing repayment obligations and worrying about speculators and excess landowners was a cumbersome, troublesome, time-consuming nuisance—a nuisance without reward. Was the Bureau to abandon the most spellbinding effort of modern times—transforming the desert into a garden—just because a few big landowners were taking advantage of the program, just because some farmers couldn’t pay as much as Congress hoped?

There were to be still more “reforms” tacked onto the Reclamation Act: reforms extending the repayment period to fifty years, setting water prices according to the farmers’ “ability to pay,” using hydroelectric revenues to subsidize irrigation costs. It wasn’t until the 1930s, however, that the Reclamation program went into high gear. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the nation’s nexus of political power still lay east of the Mississippi River; the West simply didn’t have the votes to authorize a dozen big water projects each year. Western politicians who were to exercise near-despotic rule over the Bureau’s authorizing committees in later years, men like Wayne Aspinall and Bernie Sisk and Carl Hayden, were still