Stephen Grace - Dam Nation: How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future

DAM NATION

DAM NATION

How Water Shaped the West and Will Determine Its Future

STEPHEN GRACE

Copyright 2012 by Stephen Grace

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, P.O. Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

Layout artist: Kirsten Livingston

Project manager: Ellen Urban

Map by Design Maps, Inc.

The Library of Congress has previously catalogued an earlier (hardcover) edition as follows:

Grace, Stephen.

Dam nation : how water shaped the west and will determine its future / Stephen Grace. 1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7627-7065-6

1. Water-supplyWest (U.S.) 2. Water-supplyWest (U.S.)History. 3. HydrologyWest (U.S.) 4. DamsWest (U.S.) 5. Water resources developmentWest (U.S.)History. 6. West (U.S.)History. I. Title.

TD223.6.G73 2012

333.9100958dc23

2012003167

Printed in the United States of America

E-ISBN 978-1-4930-0011-1

AUTHORS NOTE

I am a citizen of the West curious about its past and concerned about its future. Like many others in this droughty place where people fight over streams so small they can walk across them without getting their ankles wet, I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about water.

Most books about water are, unfortunately, quite dry. The stuff upon which empires are founded and works of art are built, water should never be dull; to make it so by letting legalese and technical jargon deaden waters capacity to stimulate avarice and awe, to make poets write verse and politicians wage war, is to drain a teeming river to a dusty bed. Water moves through our bodies, through the world we inhabit, through the societies we construct. When you explore water, you explore everything.

The story of water in the western United States begins with confronting a hostile wilderness, crescendos in epic political battles and heroic feats of technology, and turns into an increasingly tense tale of survival as scientists chart the future of a diminishing substance essential for life. My hope for this book is that it will ignite the curiosity and concern of readers, leading them to more deeply examine the Wests history with water and to further explore the future of this crucial resource surrounded by controversy.

Water in the American West wends its way through a multitude of disciplines: geography, geology, hydrology, meteorology, climatology, biology, ecology, agronomy, engineering, economics, history, law, political science, urban planning, and public policy, to name some that spring to mind. The drawback to a book that covers as much ground as this one is that it can be a bit like looking at paintings while galloping on horseback through a gallery. By no means is this book meant to be comprehensive; it is intended to whet the appetite of readers for a vast and sprawling subject that is endlessly fascinating, and for which there exist scores of scholarly studies and literary treatments. Should you choose to delve deeper into the subject of water in the West, in the Sources section I have noted the works that gripped my attention and proved the most useful in my research.

Learning the logic and terminology of water law is like studying a foreign language. It consumes time and effort and can be a bit tedious; but becoming conversant with basic vocabulary and principles is essential to understanding the issues surrounding water. A student of the West must learn to speak and understand the strange language of western water law with a reasonable degree of fluency.

As a reader, when I am faced with a chapter titled Fundamentals of Western Water Law, or some such thing, I glaze over. Forced continually to consult a glossary, I become comatose. In this book I have spread information about water law throughout, allowing for what I hope will be pleasurable interludes between tackling concepts such as prior appropriation and the public trust doctrinewhich when studied exhaustively and without interruption can be about as exciting as watching concrete set.

To the portions of this book that contain historical narratives, I have added details based on my own observations of the natural world. I have done so in an attempt to convey the fundamental aridity of the West, in its harshness and its elegance, and to depict the lands overarching indifference to the people who inhabit it.

S.G.

South Boulder Creek watershed, Colorado

For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground.

ISAIAH 44:34

There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

EDWARD ABBEY, DESERT SOLITAIRE

I bought instant water. Now I dont know what to add.

STEVEN WRIGHT

INTRODUCTION: TROUBLE

Whenever you put a lot of people in an area with little water, there is going to be trouble. The trouble might be as focused as the engineering challenge of moving a river from one side of a mountain to another; it might be as all-consuming as the collapse of a civilization.

Though the United States as a whole has a wealth of freshwater, the resource most vital to life is not distributed evenly throughout the nation. The 100th meridianwhich cuts the Dakotas roughly in half and runs through Nebraska and Kansas, cleaves Oklahomas panhandle, and forms the eastern edge of the Texas panhandleprovides a dividing line for rainfall. East of this line, at least twenty inches of precipitation spills from the sky each year, enough to sustain agriculture. Land west of the line, with the exception of a strip of temperate rainforest along the Pacific Northwest coast and scattered patches of lushness on mountain slopes, receives less than twenty inches of precipitationnot enough for crops to flourish without irrigation. Simply put, the West begins where moisture tapers off and dryness takes over.

Early explorers of western lands labeled the frontier that stretched beyond the 100th meridian the Great American Desert. Into these parched wastes adventurers trekked and then returned to the rich gardens of the East with tales of the Wests burning plains stretching dry and treeless in all directions and its mountains wrapped in shrouds of snow beneath a sky so wide it seemed of a world that could not be. The West was as alien as Mars to Anglo-Americans. That they chose to settle there, and still to this day do so in droves, demonstrates the regions pull on the imagination. From these arid lands grow dreams of wealth and fresh beginnings in a world of bright sun and boundless possibility.

Recent arrivals to Phoenix or Las Vegas, surrounded by splashy water parks and golf courses of vivid green, have been known to mutter, I heard somewhere this was a desert. A real estate developer in Denver recently said to me, The only thing I know about water is that it comes out of my faucet. Water managers across the West have done such a superb job of making sure cities have adequate supplies they have created an illusion of profusion, which can make people take water for granted. But mention water to a Westerner whose great-grandparents homesteaded a patch of land as dry as a legal brief and listen to the stories flow. Water might not seem like a big deal to someone from a state that sloshes with rain, but people whose ancestors settled this water-shy region know that the West was won not by men on horseback with six-shooters hanging from their holsters, not by sheriffs with stars of tin pinned upon their chests and guns blazing in high noon shootouts. It was won by farmers and ranchers with irrigation shovels in handand by politicians and lawyers divvying up water rights in a dry land.