Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [78]
All of this was to change more abruptly than the Bureau of Reclamation and its growing dependency could have hoped. The most auspicious event in its entire history was the election to the presidency in 1932 of a free-wheeling, free-spending patrician. The second most auspicious event was the passage, during the five-term Roosevelt-Truman interregnum, of several omnibus river-basin bills that authorized not one, not five, not even ten, but dozens of dams and irrigation projects at a single stroke. Economics mattered little, if at all; if the irrigation ventures slid into an ocean of debt, the huge hydroelectric dams authorized within the same river basin could generate the necessary revenues to bail them out (or so it was thought). It was a breathtakingly audacious solution to an intractable problem, and the results were to be breathtaking as well. Between Franklin Roosevelt and the river-basin approach—which, in an instant, could authorize dams and canals and irrigation projects from headwaters to river mouth, across a thousand miles of terrain—the natural landscape of the American West, the rivers and deserts and wetlands and canyons, was to undergo a man-made transformation the likes of which no desert civilization has ever seen. The first, and perhaps the most fateful, such transformation was wrought in the most arid and hostile quarter of the American West, a huge desert basin transected by one comparatively miniature river: the Colorado.
CHAPTER FOUR
An American Nile (I)
Ours was the first and will doubtless be the last party of whites to visit this profitless locale.
—Lieutenant Joseph Christmas Ives, on sailing up the Colorado River to a point near the present location of Las Vegas, in 1857
The Colorado is neither the biggest nor the longest river in the American West, nor, except for certain sections described in nineteenth-century journals as “awful” or “appalling,” is it the most scenic. Its impressiveness and importance have to do with other things. It is one of the siltiest rivers in the world—the virgin Colorado could carry sediment loads close to those of the much larger Mississippi—and one of the wildest. Its drop of nearly thirteen thousand feet is unequaled in North America, and its constipation-relieving rapids, before dams tamed its flash floods, could have flipped a small freighter. The Colorado’s modern notoriety, however; stems not from its wild rapids and plunging canyons but from the fact that it is the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world. It also has more people, more industry, and a more significant economy dependent on it than any comparable river in the world. If the Colorado River suddenly stopped flowing, you would have four years of carryover capacity in the reservoirs before you had to evacuate most of southern California and Arizona and a good portion of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. The river system provides over half the water of greater Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix; it grows much of America’s domestic production of fresh winter vegetables; it illuminates the neon city of Las Vegas, whose annual income is one-fourth the entire gross national product of Egypt—the only other place on earth where so many people are so helplessly dependent on one river’s flow. The greater portion of the Nile, however, still manages, despite many diversions, to reach its delta at the Mediterranean Sea. The Colorado is so used up on its way to the sea that only a burbling trickle reaches its dried-up delta at the head of the