remarked that he did not favor putting money into Major Powell’s hands when Powell would clearly not spend it as Moody and his constituents wanted it spent. We ask you, he said in effect, your opinion of artesian wells. You think they’re unimportant. All right, the hell with you. We’ll ask somebody else who will give us the answer we want. Nothing personal.
The result, in the end, was that Powell got some money to conduct his Irrigation Survey for a couple of years—far less than he wanted, and needed—and then found himself frozen permanently out of the appropriations bills. The excuse was that he was moving too slowly, too deliberately; the truth was that he was forming opinions the West couldn’t bear to hear. There was inexhaustible land but far too little water, and what little water there was might, in many cases, be too expensive to move. Having said this, held to it, and suffered for it, Powell spent his last years in a kind of ignominy. Unable to participate in the settlement of the West, he retreated into the Bureau of Ethnology, where his efforts, ironically, helped prevent the culture of the West’s original inhabitants from being utterly trampled and eradicated by that same settlement. On September 23, 1902, he died at the family compound near Haven, Maine, about as far from the arid West as he could get.
Powell had felt that the western farmers would stand behind him, if not the politicians themselves; there he made one of the major miscalculations of his life. “Apparently he underestimated the capacity of the plains dirt farmer to continue to believe in myths even while his nose was being rubbed in unpleasant fact,” Stegner wrote. “The press and a good part of the public in the West was against him more than he knew.... The American yeoman might clamor for government assistance in his trouble, but he didn’t want any that would make him change his thinking.”
W hat is remarkable, a hundred years later, is how little has changed. The disaster that Powell predicted—a catastrophic return to a cycle of drought—did indeed occur, not once but twice: in the late 1800s and again in the 1930s. When that happened, Powell’s ideas—at least his insistence that a federal irrigation program was the only salvation of the arid West—were embraced, tentatively at first, then more passionately, then with a kind of desperate insistence. The result was a half-century rampage of dam-building and irrigation development which, in all probability, went far beyond anything Powell would have liked. But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it. And the same Congress which had once insisted he didn’t need federal help was now insisting that such help be continued, at any cost. Released from a need for justification, released from logic itself, the irrigation program Powell had wanted became a monster, redoubling its efforts and increasing its wreckage, both natural and economic, as it lost sight of its goal. Powell’s ideal was a future in which the rivers of the American West would help create a limited bounty on that tiny fraction of the land which it made sense to irrigate. It is hard to imagine that the first explorer of the Colorado River would have welcomed a future in which there might be no rivers left at all.
CHAPTER TWO
The Red Queen
W hile Los Angeles moldered, San Francisco grew and grew. The city owned a superb natural harbor—the best on the Pacific Coast, one of the best in the world. When gold was struck in the
The result, in the end, was that Powell got some money to conduct his Irrigation Survey for a couple of years—far less than he wanted, and needed—and then found himself frozen permanently out of the appropriations bills. The excuse was that he was moving too slowly, too deliberately; the truth was that he was forming opinions the West couldn’t bear to hear. There was inexhaustible land but far too little water, and what little water there was might, in many cases, be too expensive to move. Having said this, held to it, and suffered for it, Powell spent his last years in a kind of ignominy. Unable to participate in the settlement of the West, he retreated into the Bureau of Ethnology, where his efforts, ironically, helped prevent the culture of the West’s original inhabitants from being utterly trampled and eradicated by that same settlement. On September 23, 1902, he died at the family compound near Haven, Maine, about as far from the arid West as he could get.
Powell had felt that the western farmers would stand behind him, if not the politicians themselves; there he made one of the major miscalculations of his life. “Apparently he underestimated the capacity of the plains dirt farmer to continue to believe in myths even while his nose was being rubbed in unpleasant fact,” Stegner wrote. “The press and a good part of the public in the West was against him more than he knew.... The American yeoman might clamor for government assistance in his trouble, but he didn’t want any that would make him change his thinking.”
W hat is remarkable, a hundred years later, is how little has changed. The disaster that Powell predicted—a catastrophic return to a cycle of drought—did indeed occur, not once but twice: in the late 1800s and again in the 1930s. When that happened, Powell’s ideas—at least his insistence that a federal irrigation program was the only salvation of the arid West—were embraced, tentatively at first, then more passionately, then with a kind of desperate insistence. The result was a half-century rampage of dam-building and irrigation development which, in all probability, went far beyond anything Powell would have liked. But even as the myth of the welcoming, bountiful West was shattered, the myth of the independent yeoman farmer remained intact. With huge dams built for him at public expense, and irrigation canals, and the water sold for a quarter of a cent per ton—a price which guaranteed that little of the public’s investment would ever be paid back—the West’s yeoman farmer became the embodiment of the welfare state, though he was the last to recognize it. And the same Congress which had once insisted he didn’t need federal help was now insisting that such help be continued, at any cost. Released from a need for justification, released from logic itself, the irrigation program Powell had wanted became a monster, redoubling its efforts and increasing its wreckage, both natural and economic, as it lost sight of its goal. Powell’s ideal was a future in which the rivers of the American West would help create a limited bounty on that tiny fraction of the land which it made sense to irrigate. It is hard to imagine that the first explorer of the Colorado River would have welcomed a future in which there might be no rivers left at all.
CHAPTER TWO
The Red Queen
W hile Los Angeles moldered, San Francisco grew and grew. The city owned a superb natural harbor—the best on the Pacific Coast, one of the best in the world. When gold was struck in the
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