Cadillac Desert (28 page)

Public relations and salesmanship, skills few engineers possess, were second nature to Mike Straus. “Born with a gold-plated irrigation shovel ready to be placed in her hands,” reads a Straus press release dated June 5, 1952, “Reclamation’s Golden Jubilee baby arrived at Washington’s Yakima Memorial Hospital at 12:45 today, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Donald T. Dunn of Moses Lake, Washington.... The baby was born on the eve of the fiftieth anniversary of federal Reclamation, and the child has been adopted by the National Reclamation Association....

“Michael W. Straus, Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, declared in a congratulatory message that ‘the Reclamation program must be pushed forward with utmost speed so the Dunn child and all the other kiddies born this year will have a happier and more secure life on the land through Reclamation development.... We should be starting today on [new] development so that there will be a Reclamation farm ready for baby Dunn.’ ”

Whether the cost of supplying water to baby Dunn’s ex-desert was utterly beyond reason; whether she even wanted to spend her life on an irrigation farm; whether the country, already suffocating under mountainous farm surpluses by 1952, really needed her production—these were the kinds of questions which the Bureau, after eight years of Mike Straus, would rarely ask again.

To Mike Straus, millionaire dam builder, economic feasibility mattered little, if at all. Once, on a visit to the Bureau’s regional office in Billings, Montana, Straus rented the town’s only theater and demanded that all the employees show up in the evening for a “pep talk.” The Billings office was in charge of the upper Missouri Basin, where the greatest concentration of physically possible but economically unfeasible projects happened to be located. When the employees had filed in and taken their seats, Straus slouched against a lectern on the stage and launched into a tirade against them for doing their jobs. “I don’t give a damn whether a project is feasible or not,” he thundered at his astonished staff. “I’m getting the money out of Congress, and you’d damn well better spend it. And you’d better be here early tomorrow morning ready to spend it, or you may find someone else at your desk!”

The Great Depression and the Roosevelt administration, together with the pyramid-scheme economics of the river-basin accounts, were more than enough to launch the federal dam-building program on a forty-year binge. It probably wouldn’t have needed the Dust Bowl—but it helped.

Since the blizzards and drought of the 1880s and 1890s, the farmers of the western plains had been playing a game of “Mother May I?” with nature. When the isohyet of twenty inches of rainfall maundered westward, they advanced. When it moved eastward, they retreated— some of them, anyway. Through most of the first three decades of the twentieth century, the line stayed close to the lee side of the Rockies. The teens and 1920s, in particular, were years of extraordinary and consistent rainfall. Millions and millions of acres of shortgrass prairie west of the hundredth meridian, land already depauperated by livestock overgrazing during the last century, were converted to the production of wheat, whose price had reached record levels during the war. “Everything in the country was going full blast,” wrote Paul Sears in his book
Deserts on the March.
“It was the most natural thing in the world for the plains farmers, whose cattle business had prospered during the war and who had been encouraged to try dry farming, to attempt the growing of wheat on a huge scale. The soil was loose and friable; the land was theirs to use as they saw fit.” Even in the wettest years of the 1920s, the high-plains wheat rarely grew taller than someone’s knee; sometimes it was ankle-high, and during a dry year it wouldn’t come up at all. Everyone knew the wet years wouldn’t last, and everyone knew that the loose soil, with the wheat stubble disked under, had nothing to hold it if drought and wind should coincide. But everyone was making money.

The first of the storms blew through South Dakota on Armistice Day, November 11, 1933. By nightfall, some farms had lost nearly all their topsoil. “Nightfall” was a relative term, because at ten o’clock the next morning the sky was still pitch-black. People were vomiting dirt. Machinery, fences, roads, shrubs, sheds—everything was covered by great hanging drifts of silt. “Wives packed every windowsill, door frame, and keyhole with oiled cloth and gummed paper,” William Manchester wrote, “yet the fine silt found its way in and lay in beach-like ripples on their floors.” As a gallon jug of desert floodwater, after settling, contains a quart and a half of solid mud, the sky seemed to be one part dust to three parts air. A naked human tethered outside would have been rendered skinless—such was the scouring power of the dirt-laden gales. Huge numbers of jackrabbits, unable to close their eyes, went blind. That was a blessing. It gave the human victims something to eat.

The storms, dozens of them, continued through the spring and summer of 1934. An old physician in southwestern Nebraska wrote in his diary, “Wind forty miles an hour and hot as hell. Two Kansas farms go by every minute.” With the temperature up to 105 degrees and the horizon lined with roiling clouds that seemed to promise ten inches of rain but delivered three feet of dirt, the plains took on a phantasmagorical dreadfulness. The ravenous storms would blow for days at a time, eating the land in their path, lifting dust and dirt high enough to catch the jet stream, which carried it to Europe. In 1934, members of Congress took time out from debating the Taylor Grazing Bill—designed to control overgrazing on the public lands—to crowd the Capitol balcony and watch the sky darken at noon. From the look of the western horizon, half the continent could have been on fire. The Taylor Act was passed in that year, despite efforts by some western members to weaken it even as their states were sailing over their heads. Between storms, when visibility sometimes increased to five or six miles, people in the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, in Kiowa and Crowley counties in Colorado, in Texas’s Gaines County on the New Mexico border, in 756 counties in nineteen states that were ultimately affected, watched their world turn into the Sahara.

The Dust Bowl was triggered by the same fatal congelation of hope and drought that caused the plains to empty half a century earlier. The longest severe drought in the nation’s history—the one that Bureau of Reclamation planners, ever optimistic, now use as their “worst-case scenario”—began to descend over the West in 1928. For seven years in a row, precipitation remained below normal. The snow that fell on the plowed-up fields of the Dakotas was so light that the ground, bereft of insulation, froze many feet down; the snow evaporated without penetrating and the spring rains, those that came, slid off the frozen ground into the rivers, leaving the land bare. The virgin prairie, grazed well within its carrying capacity by thirty million buffalo, could probably have withstood the wind and drought; ravaged by too many cattle and plowed up to make way for wheat, it could not. If not the worst man-made catastrophe in history, it was, at least, the quickest.

By 1934, the National Resources Board reported that thirty-five million acres—Virginia and then some—had been essentially destroyed; 125 million acres—an area equivalent to Virginia plus Ohio plus Pennsylvania plus Michigan plus Maryland—were severely debilitated, and another hundred million acres were in marginal shape. “We’re through,” wrote a wheat baron from the shortgrass territory. “It’s worse than the papers say. Our fences are buried, the house hidden to the eaves, and our pasture, which was kept from blowing by the grass, had been buried and is worthless now. We see what a mistake it was to plow up all that land, but it’s too late to do anything about it.” In the wake of the Dust Bowl, the short-term prospect was bankruptcy; the long-term prospect was the migration of three-quarters of a million itinerant paupers to California, Washington, and Oregon.

As the grizzled Okies advanced on California in their ancient LaSalles, Dodges, and Model T’s, mattresses and washbasins strapped to the rooftops, they seemed to represent, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote, “the threat of social revolution by a rabble of crazed bankrupts and paupers—a horrid upheaval from below ... which could only end in driving all wealth and respectability from the state.” Since the population of Hall County, Texas, to cite one example, had dropped from forty thousand to one thousand, and the states of North and South Dakota lost at least 146,000 people, the laws of probability demanded that there had to be at least a grain of respectability in the human tide—mayors and preachers were migrating along with toothless dirt farmers and petty thieves—but to those who were being invaded, the Okies were an appalling mob. They had to be settled somewhere; anywhere but here.

One of the more promising places to settle them was the Central Valley of California—more specifically, in the arid and morosely bleak southern two-thirds known as the San Joaquin Valley. The irrigation of the San Joaquin Valley—60 percent of all the prime farmland in a state made up mostly of mountains and high desert—had been an unrequited obsession with California for half a century. By the late 1800s, a few parts of it had been privately reclaimed by farmers and irrigation districts rich enough to build small dams, but most of the valley was a vista of wild blond grassland and wheat. Then came cheap oil, electricity, and the motorized centrifugal pump. Finally freed from all constraints but nature’s (irrigation would last only as long as the finite aquifer held out), the farmers began pumping in the finest California tradition—which is to say, as if tomorrow would never come.

By 1930, a million and a half acres were under irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley, and a subterranean thicket of 23,500 well pipes had sucked up so much groundwater that the prognosis for irrigation was terminal within thirty to forty years. In some places, the water table dropped nearly three hundred feet. It was a predicament of their own making, but the farmers were not about to blame themselves; guilt-free life-styles took root in the San Joaquin Valley long before Marin County became a trendsetter. Having exhausted a hundred centuries’ worth of groundwater in a generation and a half, they did what any pressure group usually does: run to the politicians they ordinarily despise and beg relief.

Thanks to the stunning wealth irrigation farming had produced, California came rolling out of the 1920s like Jay Gatsby in his alabaster phaeton. Agriculture
was
California; there were no sprawling defense and aerospace industries, there was no Silicon Valley. To give all of this up was unthinkable, even if it was the middle of the Depression. The rescue project which the legislature approved in 1933 not only was bold, it was almost unimaginable. If built, it would be by far the biggest water project in history. It would capture the flows not just of the San Joaquin River, which drained the southern half of the Sierra Nevada, but of the Sacramento, which drained the northern half and some of the Coast Range. It was planned to capture two-thirds of the runoff of the nation’s second-largest state, and would move water through thousands of miles of canals and relocate rivers, quite literally, from one end of the state to the other. In normal times, California might even have had the means to begin building it. But this was the Depression, and California, rich as it was, still had to go to the New York bond markets for cash. The voters had no sooner approved a $170 million bond issue (a colossal sum considering the time and circumstances) than the bottom fell out of the market. No sooner had that happened, however, than Franklin Roosevelt landed in the White House.

On FDR’s orders, the Bureau of Reclamation officially took over the Central Valley Project in December of 1935. By then the Great Plains had dissolved into the Dust Bowl and the first hundreds of thousands of Okies were rattling into California. In the face of such destitution and calamity, the dams going up were a thrilling sight. The grandest of them was rising in a wild madrone and digger pine canyon on the upper Sacramento River; 602 feet high, it would top out 124 feet lower than Hoover, but it would be half again as wide, an immense, curvilinear, gravity-arch curtain of concrete whose name would first be Kennett, then Shasta. On the San Joaquin River, a big squat dam called Friant was being built at the same time; a third huge earth-and-rock structure would be erected later on the Trinity River, shoveling water from the Klamath drainage to the Sacramento. All together, the dams would give the project an annual yield of more than seven million acre-feet of water, enough to irrigate a million and a half, two million, perhaps three million acres—depending on how much was supplemental irrigation for existing farms and how much was new land. But all of this effort would create, at most, jobs and farms for 100,000 displaced people. (Most of the refugees would actually become migrant workers—wetbacks with Oklahoma accents and white skin.) The biggest public-works project in the world, in other words, was not nearly big enough to soak up the huge tide of the dispossessed. FDR knew that, and that was why he had announced, before the Central Valley Project was even officially underway, “in definite and certain terms, that the next great... development to be undertaken by the Federal Government must be that on the Columbia River.”

Daughter of ice, orphan of fire, the Columbia River emerged sometime within the relatively recent past, say twenty million years ago, and for most of its ancestral existence followed a course straight westward toward Seattle and Puget Sound. Seattle, of course, was not there when the Columbia first rose. Neither was Puget Sound. Neither was Washington. Most of what we call the Pacific Northwest is accreted terrain—a landmass of exotic origin that migrated up from somewhere around the Equator, riding the Pacific Plate, and glommed on. When the Pacific and North American plates began to collide millions of years ago, the Pacific Plate was at first subducted into North America’s basement. Down there, it encountered the large fraction of the planet that is still molten, and began to crowd it. The lava had nowhere to go but up.