Cadillac Desert (25 page)

Nothing, however, was more astonishing than the speed with which all of it was built. As the nation languished in the Depression, as plant after plant remained idle and company after company went bankrupt, Hoover Dam was being built at a breathtaking pace. The eyes of the country were fixed on it in awe. A landmark event—the completion of a spillway, the installation of the last generator—was front-page news. The initial excavations for the diversion tunnels had begun on May 16, 1931. The river was not detoured from its channel until November, and the cofferdams were not completed until April of 1933. But two years later, all the blocks in the dam were raised to crest elevation, and a year later everything was finished: spillways, powerplant, penstocks, generators, galleries, even the commemorative plaque in the frieze alongside U.S. Highway 93, which ran across the top. The first electrical power, from what was then the largest power plant in the world, was produced in the fall of 1936. The greatest structure on earth, perhaps the most significant structure that has ever been built in the United States, had gone up in under three years.

T
he difference in climate between the eastern and western United States-the fact that the East generally gets enough rainfall to support agriculture, while the West generally does not—is easily the most significant distinction between those two regions. It is also obvious that there are significant distinctions within each region as well. For example, oranges grow well in central Florida; they do not in South Carolina, a few hundred miles north. The climate in Duluth, Minnesota, is quite different from that in Chicago, a mere day’s drive away.

In the West, however, climatic differences far more striking than these may occur within the same state, even within the same county. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, a farmer can raise a number of different crops without irrigation; there is usually a summer drought, but it is short, and even if he decides not to depend entirely on rainfall, a few inches of irrigation water—instead of the hundred inches used by some farmers in California and Arizona—will usually do. Two hours away, on the east side of the Cascades, rainfall drops to a third of what the Willamette Valley ordinarily receives; not only that, but the whole of eastern Oregon is much higher than the section west of the Cascades, and lacks a marine influence, so the climate is far colder as well. It can be forty above zero in Eugene and ten below zero in Bend, a two-hour drive to the east. In eastern Oregon, not only must a farmer irrigate but he is extraordinarily limited, compared to his Willamette Valley counterpart, in the types of crops he can grow.

Around Bakersfield, California, an irrigation farmer can raise the same crops that one sees growing in Libya, southern Italy, Hawaii, and Iraq: pistachios, kiwis, almonds, grapes, olives, melons, crops whose value per cultivated acre is astonishingly high. An hour’s drive away, across the Tehachapi Mountains, lies the Antelope Valley, a high-desert region with a cold interior climate that can bring frost in May, and where little but alfalfa and grass can be grown. Both Bakersfield and the Antelope Valley are within Kern County, whose climatic extremes are rather typical of California, and, for that matter, of many counties throughout the West. Air conditioners and furnaces in two relatively nearby towns—Phoenix and Flagstaff—may be running at the same time; one end of a county may be plagued by floods while another is plagued by drought.

The reason for all this is mainly topographic: the mountains that block weather fronts and seal off the interior from the ocean’s summer cooling and winter warmth (the prevailing westerly winds of the northern hemisphere give the ocean a much wider influence in the West than in the East, reaching as far away as Idaho); the tectonic upheavals that pushed much of the interior West, even the flat mountainless sections, to elevations higher than a mile. The significance of it, from the standpoint of water development, is that it makes infinitely greater economic sense to build dams and irrigate in warmer regions than in colder ones—even if it makes infinitely greater
political
sense to do otherwise.

When John Wesley Powell explored the American West, he duly noted these bewildering extremes of climate. Powell knew that irrigation was an expensive proposition, and that a few inches of extra rainfall or a couple of thousand feet of elevation difference would mean a project that was worth developing or, on the other hand, a project that would require heavy subsidization. A farmer raising fruit or two annual crops of tomatoes in the Imperial Valley might earn ten times more per irrigated acre than a farmer raising alfalfa at six thousand feet in Colorado; yet it might cost far more to deliver water to the Colorado farmer because his water might have to be pumped uphill, out of deep river canyons, while the Imperial Valley lay near sea level below Hoover Dam. The Imperial Valley farmer could pay enough for water to allow the government to recoup its enormous investment in dams, canals, and other irrigation works; the Colorado farmer might be able to repay, at best, a dime on every dollar.

What Powell did not foresee, however, was the Colorado River Basin arbitrarily divided, with each half given an equal amount of water. To him, such a false partitioning might have seemed absurd, for it made far better sense to irrigate in the lower basin than in the upper. But he could not imagine that the blind ambition of the Bureau and the political power of the upper basin would join forces to try to pretend that a mile of elevation difference, and the staggering climatic difference such a disparity implies, did not exist.

Simply stated, the problem with most of the upper 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 the projects that could be built there made sense or not. And it was the basin’s unbelievably good fortune that in the 1940s, Congress would give it a money-making machine that would allow it to do so—a machine that became known as the cash register dam.

A cash register dam was to be a dam with an overriding, if not a single, purpose: to generate electricity for commercial sales. If electricity would bring in many millions of dollars in annual revenues which could be used to subsidize irrigation projects that hadn’t a prayer of paying back the taxpayers’ investment. The dams were an invention spawned by something the Bureau of Reclamation called river-basin “accounting,” which was itself spawned by something it called river-basin “planning.”

River-basin planning, at least, made a certain amount of sense. A river like the Arkansas, which rises in the Colorado Rockies and empties into the Mississippi in an utterly different time zone and topography and climate, invites competing and potentially incompatible uses. Upstream, it is valuable for irrigation; downstream, it is valuable for inland navigation. If the Bureau diverts too much water for upstream irrigation, there won’t be enough water available downstream to justify the Army Corps of Engineers’ efforts to turn the lower river into a freeway for barges—an obsession it has been pursuing on virtually every large river in the country. The dilemma could also work in reverse; if the Corps got a head start on the lower sections of a river, the Bureau could find itself unable to get any upriver projects authorized. The creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority marked the first time a major river system was “viewed whole,” even if the natural river virtually disappeared as a result. The TVA was regarded as such a success by the administration of Franklin Roosevelt that it began to demand, if not more quasi-dictatorial authorities like the TVA, then at least a coordinated plan of development between the Bureau and the Corps. This was river-basin “planning,” and, except for the fact that no one ever spent more than a minute or two thinking about the value of a river in its natural state, it made some degree of sense.

River-basin “accounting” was a horse of a different color, though the Bureau developed a propensity to use “planning” and “accounting” interchangeably. With river-basin accounting, one could take all the revenues generated by projects in any river basin—dams, irrigation projects, navigation and recreation features—and toss them into a common “fund.” The hydroelectric dams might contribute ninety-five cents of every dollar accruing to the fund, while the irrigation features might contribute only a nickel (and cost three times as much to build and operate as the dams), but it wouldn’t matter; as long as revenues came in at a pace that would permit the Reclamation Act’s forty-year repayment schedule to be met, the whole package could be considered economically sound. It was as if a conglomerate purchased a dozen money-losing subsidiaries while operating a highly profitable silver mine—a case of horribly bad management which, nonetheless, still leaves the company barely in the black.

Michael Robinson, the Bureau’s semiofficial historian, exhibits no compunction about admitting any of this in the Bureau’s authorized history,
Water for the West:

By the late 1930s, the high cost of projects made it increasingly difficult for Reclamation engineers to meet economic feasibility requirements. In the early 1940s, the Bureau devised the plan of considering an entire river basin as an integrated project. It enabled the agency to derive income from various revenue-producing subfeatures (notably power facilities) to fund other works not economically feasible under Reclamation law.

Thus, by offsetting construction and development costs against pooled revenues the Bureau was able to demonstrate the economic feasibility for the entire, pooled program. In 1942 this method was used for the first time in planning a basinwide development program for the Bighorn River in Wyoming. All benefits and income from producing units were lumped together to establish overall feasibility. In 1944, the Bureau’s “Sloan Plan” for the development of the Missouri River followed the same formula ... [and] encouraged the Bureau to
enthusiastically prepare basinwide plans for several western rivers....
[Emphasis added]