LimerickPatricia Nelson - A ditch in time: the city, the west, and water

Text 2012 Patricia Nelson Limerick and Jason L. Hanson

Map Jim Robb, Zia Designs: xiii

Photograph Isaiah West Taber, Sierra Club: 6 (top)

Photographs Jason L. Hanson, Center of the American West: 6 (bottom), 68

Map Sam Chapman and Honey Lindburg, Center of the American West, (based on information from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection): 8

Photographs Denver Public Library Western History Collection: 24 (top) (A. E. Rinehart, X-19429), 24 (bottom) (X-29340), 27 (Harry M. Rhoads, Rh-1341), 40 (William Henry Jackson, WHJ-10450), 70 (Louis C. McClure, MCC-1361), 103 (top) (X-60097), 103 (bottom) (X-60161), 134 (X-29117), 136 (Floyd H. McCally, X-27175), 174 (Terry Brennen, X-29254), 196 (X-21412)

Photographs Denver Water: 47, 59, 61, 62, 64, 87, 109, 117, 119 (top), 144, 151, 154, 168, 228

Photograph Carol Saunders: 97

Photographs Jackie Shumaker/Denver Water: 113, 119 (bottom), 121, 159, 186, 188

Maps Honey Lindburg and Ashley Howe, Center of the American West: 123 (based on information from the US Department of the Interior), 124 (based on information from the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District)

Photographs Ted Wood: 216, 236 (bottom), 246, 252

Photographs Gail Barry: 221, 249

Photographs Honey Lindburg, Center of the American West: 236 (top), 327

Photograph Glen Asakawa, The Denver Post : 278

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval systemexcept by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a reviewwithout permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 1951

A ditch in time : the city, the west, and water / Patricia Nelson Limerick with Jason L. Hanson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-55591-366-3 (pbk.)

1. Denver (Colo.). Water Dept.--History. 2. Water resources development--Colorado--Denver--History. I. Hanson, Jason L. II. Title.

TC425.C6L56 2012

363.6'10978883--dc23

2012012386

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Design by Jack Lenzo

Fulcrum Publishing

4690 Table Mountain Dr., Ste. 100

Golden, CO 80403

800-992-2908 303-277-1623

www.fulcrumbooks.com

To Houston Kempton,

My companion in the flow of time

Contents

Part One

Part Two

Acknowledgments

This book took a long time to come into being.

My own history as a writer figures in the explanation of its long journey to print. Exactly twenty-five years ago, my second book The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West was published. This book has had an adventure-packed life of its own. Denounced by some and welcomed by many, Legacy surprised its author and publisher by becoming a classic: required reading for many undergraduate and graduate students, but also widely read by many in the general public.

If I had been ambitious and hungry for professional achievement before 1987, contentment over the happy destiny of The Legacy of Conquest seemed to put me out of business when it came to the writing of book-length manuscripts. I seemed to have made a permanent switch of genres. To the understandable dismay of editors who had, in good faith, added their signature to mine on book contracts, I churned out essays and articles, as well as the less-exalted literary expressions called reports and memos. More than anything, I became a one-woman, 24/7 production facility for speeches, talks, and lectures.

Was I freaked out by the success of Legacy and thereby unwilling to run the risk of writing and publishing another book? While the pleasant burden of that books success might have played a part in my choices, a greater factor was the founding of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado with my partner, law professor Charles Wilkinson. The robust health of this organization unleashed a wild round of activities perfectly suited for a person grateful to have been born and raised before the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder came into play.

And yet, keeping the Center of the American West in financial well-being meant staying on the lookout for funding opportunities. Various figures at the Denver Water Department held the convincing opinion that their agency had an instructive and important history. Soon after I moved to Colorado, in 1984, I had come to know Chips Barry, who became manager of Denver Water in 1991. Chips, as readers of this book and especially its afterword will know, was a remarkable person. His respect for history matched, in intensity, his sense of humor. An agreement between Denver Water and the Center of the American West, reserving full intellectual independence for the center, launched this project.

In the early years, the plan was not a strenuous one. We would employ graduate students and postdoctoral affiliates to write chapters for a book that would have, as its principal asset and charm, a robust collection of photographs from the Denver Water archives. We began with the assumption, now hard to reconstruct, that the written text would be lite and not particularly weighted with thought, reflection, and interpretation.

The result was not spirit lifting.

I finally settled down and shouldered the burden that should have been mine all along. I took on the job of fundamentally reworking the cobbled-together manuscript. There was some comedy in this situation, since my working circumstances were aided by a parallel and more literal project in remodeling. In January 2010, I moved into my husbands house so that we could remodel my house. I took only books, articles, and notes related to A Ditch In Time . This put a valuable damper on my ordinarily impressive gift for conjuring up distractions.

As the contractor tore apart my house, built new rooms, and reconfigured some of the preexisting structure, I performed a comparable set of actions with the manuscript that, for a spell, ruled my life. By October 2011, I had created a draft that seemed robust, unified, funny, and grounded in the two fields of western history and water policy.

This brings me to the acknowledgments.

On the title page, the author identification appears with these words: Patricia Nelson Limerick with Jason L. Hanson, followed by a phalanx of collaborators and assistants. Christian Heimburger launched the research process years ago. In a game effort, Tim Brown and Buzzy Jackson wrote chapters for the first draft, which bears little resemblance to the current text. (Both Tim and Buzzy, it is important to say, are gifted and original writers when they are set free of the production-by-committee method under which they were forced to operate!) Two very talented recent graduates of the University of ColoradoDylan Eiler and Alex Landedid further research and extensive fact-checking.

Nearly all the work of the Center of the American West is collaborative and cooperative, closer to the customs of a team of scientists than the more individualistic ways of humanists. This leaves us in a state of some perplexity when it comes to the usual allocations of intellectual property. I wrote the text in its current version, and readers familiar with my other work will consistently recognize my voice and style. But Jason Hanson played a crucial role in the books completion, and his name therefore appears with mine on the title page. Jason coordinated the follow-up research when I identified new topics we had to add, and he fact-checked and proofread within an inch of his life (or what would have been within an inch of his life if he were not a person of such unusual vitality). He wrangled the photographs, acquired the permission to use them, and wrote the captions. He did all this with world-class equanimity and good nature.