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By Root 1461 0

basin was that it was too high, too dry, and too cold. Land that was well suited to irrigation in a topographic sense—meaning that a river flowed through a wide valley with good soil which lay below a natural damsite somewhere in the mountains above—often sat at altitudes above five thousand feet. Virtually the whole state of Wyoming, for example, lies at an altitude of six thousand feet or higher. Much of Colorado is over a mile high; most of Utah is over four thousand feet. In Cheyenne, Wyoming, the frost-free season is barely four months. In such a climate, one can grow only low-value crops—alfalfa, irrigated pasture, wheat—which require much acreage to produce a meager income. Not only that, but some such crops—irrigated pasture in particular—require a lot of water, up to three times more than some high-value crops: oranges, tomatoes, nuts, even lettuce.

In 1915, it made sense to build a few economically ill-advised projects in the interior West anyway, in order to reduce its abject reliance on imported food and offer some economic stability to the region. And, in fact, dozens of marginal projects were built in the Rocky Mountain and northern plains states during the first thirty years of Reclamation’s reign. But it began to make less and less sense by 1945, after tens of billions of dollars had been invested in an efficient transportation system that forever ended the isolation of places like Cheyenne and helped bring them into the nation’s economic mainstream. And it made even less sense by 1955, when the nation was burying itself under mountains of surplus crops—often the same crops (wheat, barley, corn) that had to be grown in the high, cold intermountain West.

What all of this meant—to the taxpayers, anyway—was that the overwhelming share of the cost of any so-called self-financing project in the upper Colorado Basin would end up being subsidized by them. The cost of the projects would be so great, the value of the crops so low, and the irrigators’ ability to pay for water so pitiful that to demand that they repay the taxpayers’ investment in forty years, even allowing for the exemption from interest payments, would be to lead them into certain bankruptcy. Some of the older, better projects had already had some of their repayment contracts sneakily extended by several decades, and there was absolutely no evidence that they could be repaid even then. But, on the other hand, to imagine Congress booting farmers off Reclamation projects because they couldn’t meet their payment obligations was unthinkable. The taxpayers would have to bail them out, even if bailing them out meant a long-term bill of billions and billions of dollars.

How well the Bureau’s leadership understood this is a good question—although the secret correspondence in the Bureau’s files reveals that they knew a lot more than they let on in public. (In the 1920s, Federick Newell, the former Reclamation commissioner, was already decrying the “sentimentality” of the federal irrigation program, through which, he said, money was “deftly taken from the pockets” of the taxpayers.) What is true, of course, does not necessarily matter in a political sense, and that was particularly the case in the American West, and even more so in the upper basin. By the 1950s, California was already using its full 4.4 million acre-foot entitlement to the Colorado River and planning batteries of new pumps that would allow it to suck up 700,000 acre-feet of additional flows. The Bureau, having built Hoover Dam mainly for California’s benefit, was now embarking on the Central Valley Project, a project of absolutely breathtaking scope that was exclusively for California. As far as the upper basin was concerned, it was time for some equity. And equity was only the half of it. If there was surplus water in the river—water which the upper basin owned but wasn’t yet able to use—and California began “borrowing” it, would that imperial-minded state deign to give it back? The imperative for the upper basin was to develop its share of the Colorado River as fast as possible, whether