Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [82]
In 1928, after six years of paralysis, Congress took matters into its own hands. It authorized Boulder Dam and the All-American Canal on the condition that at least six of the seven states ratify the compact, and that California limit its annual diversion to 4.4 million acre-feet per year. That implied only 2.8 million for Arizona (Nevada got 300,000 acre-feet), which was less than it wanted. Arizona, as a result, became the one state that refused to ratify, an act of defiance that would muddle things for another thirty-five years. At the time, however, its vote wasn’t needed, and the other states’ ratification led forthwith to the California Limitation Act and, subsequently, to passage of the Boulder Canyon Project Act. All of this appeared to settle matters: the basin could now embark on an orgy of growth the likes of which the West had never seen. And it did settle things, temporarily at least, except for one small matter: the average annual flow of the Colorado River was nowhere near 17.5 million acre-feet.
In 1930, the American West had a population of eleven million people, about the population of New York State. Half of the people were in California, by far the most populous and modern of the western states. When Californians traveled, however, they went mainly on dirt roads. The drive from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe, which is now done in three or four hours, was a two-day adventure or ordeal, depending on one’s point of view. The city’s great bridges had not yet been built. San Jose was not yet a city of thirty thousand, Silicon Valley a strong-hold of orchards and roaming mountain lions. In some of the other states, the usual means of locomotion was still a horse and wagon. Electricity and telephones were unknown in most rural communities, and didn’t reach the more remote ones until the 1950s. In the midst of this same depopulated, untrammeled region, however, the engineering wonder of all time was about to rise.
In Oakland, California, an egomaniacal small-time construction tycoon named Henry J. Kaiser had followed the passage of the Boulder Canyon Project Act with consuming interest. Obsessed with his niche in history, Kaiser was still enough of a realist to know that he could not begin to build such a dam alone. So he called up his friend W. A. Bechtel to ask if he was interested in making a joint bid. Dad Bechtel was a horse-drawn Fresno-scraper kind of contractor; most of his business was road paving, his most noteworthy innovation a folding toothbrush which he carried on trips. Outside of northern California, and even there, the Bechtel Corporation was all but unknown. “I don’t know, Henry” was Bechtel’s response when Kaiser, flushed with excitement, got him on the phone. “It sounds a little ambitious to me.”
A thousand miles away in Utah, two sheep-ranching Mormon brothers named W. H. and E. O. Wattis were as captivated by the Boulder Canyon Project as Kaiser, and just as unable to undertake it themselves. The Wattises’ other business, the Utah Construction Company, specialized in something as mundane as Bechtel’s paving contracts : laying railroad bed. Lately, however, they had taken on a new partner, a maverick Mormon banker with Keynesian leanings who talked about deficit financing while candidate Franklin Roosevelt was still promising a balanced budget. His name was Marriner Eccles, and the reward he was about to receive for his ideological flexibility was an influential position on the Federal Reserve Board. The Wattises had also been in contact with Harry Morrison and Morris Knudsen, two engineers formerly with the Bureau of Reclamation who had gone into business together in Boise, Idaho. And they had spoken with Frank Crowe, another former Bureau engineer whose enthusiasm for Boulder Dam was as obsessive as Kaiser’s. Morrison had just returned from a trip east, where he had tried to influence the financial community to back a bid on the dam. He was told by the western bankers that there wasn’t a company west of the Mississippi they would trust to take on something