Reading List: Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water

Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: the American West and its Disappearing Water. Rev. and updated. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

Cadillac Desert is the now classic cry of resistance against a western water policy that considers any water wasted which flows to the sea. Marc Reisner begins his story tracing John Wesley Powell’s journey down the Colorado River. Powell’s now famous report on the “Arid Lands” found that most of the west beyond the 100th meridian could not support agriculture. There was however a large amount of ground water that could be used for irrigation, something he recommended - to a certain extent.

What Powell envisioned was western boundaries that would be drawn around natural resource inventories, not political whim. He also understood that western farmers would require much larger tracts of land to support ranching and agricultural pursuits, than would be required in the east. None of that mattered once the engineers figured out how they could spread that water across the desert, and the politicians learned what great currency water and water projects would become.

So contends Reisner in his engaging and disarming fashion, sometimes so much so that you wonder if he might be playing loose with his assessments. Chicken Little comes to mind: like peak oil, many of the prophecies of doom have yet to come to pass for the west and its thirst for water. Factually, very little water in the west is used for urban, residential and industrial uses. In Idaho, that number is less than five percent. Well over ninety percent of the water used in that state (and many other Western states) is for agricultural purposes. So the trick, among urbanists, is to figure out how to move some of that allotment away from agricultural practices, and toward urban growth. That is no easy matter.

Reisner does not go where say Charles Wilkinson goes in his assessment of the “lords of yesteryear” policies and statutes that guide western land-use - riparian water doctrine, the mining law of 1872, etc. Instead, Reisner walks through the politics of a number of dam projects and their shepherds as he illustrates the fragility of western life.

Chapters include the shenanigans and literal double-dealings that brought water to Los Angeles from the Owens Valley. Another details the rivalry between the Bureau of Reclamation (the byoo-row as some Western farmers derisively refer to the agency) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. In the “go-go years” as Reisner refers to them, the two agencies, driven by fewer and fewer decent dam sites, often competed to get projects done even if the economics and sometimes the engineering did not make sense.

Even when that was the case, politicians came to use dam projects as high priced chips in log rolling efforts - the, “you support mine and I’ll support yours” game they play in Congress. The Bureau helped this effort when it introduced “river basin accounting” which made cost benefit analysis nearly a slam-dunk when revenues generated from hydropower could be used to offset money losing irrigation projects. Masterful Commissioners like Floyd Dominy (who gets a whole chapter) played Congress like a fiddle, pulling projects away from recalcitrant supporters “like a yo-yo.” Dominy even got a new headquarters building for the Reclamation service by disguising the building as a dam and putting it through a streamlined Congressional appropriations process.

The saddest tale in the book, particularly for Idahoans, is the collapse of the Teton Dam. As in many cases, drought then flood caused local residents to clamor for a government provided solution. Neither drought nor flood caused much damage, still the Bureau sought to provide the classic billion-dollar solution to the million-dollar problem. The real problem however, was that by the time the dam was proposed in the early 1970s, there were few good dam sites remaining in the U.S. Almost needless to say, Reclamation engineers chose an unusually poor site.

Without saying it, Reisner lays fault for the failed dam at the feet of the Bureau. It was the Bureau that chose the site - a site, which on the right side of the river looking downstream, was marred by gigantic fissures that could not be properly grouted. Stalwart dam builders Morrison-Knudsen, which had built Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams among others, built the dam to the Bureau’s specifications and the Bureau ultimately thought the fissures would seal adequately. They did not.

Prevailing wisdom holds that the river flooded into the deep, deep fissures - some were nearly a dozen feet wide and hundreds of feet long - and poured directly back into the earthen dam. The top corner of the dam began to wither away and on the morning of June 5, 1976 workers struggled in vain to dump rip-rap into the dam’s structure and prevent all out collapse. In the end, eleven people died in the resulting flood that brought a six-mile wide river of water and debris in its wake. One city, Wilford, was destroyed completely; it no longer exists. Sugar City and Rexburg suffered enormous damage - $2 billion in total losses counted in part by the loss of 4,000 homes and 350 businesses, and 13,000 livestock animals.

There have been dams built since. Some have even called for a replacement to the Teton Dam. Dam building is big business all over the world often bringing the tripartite benefits of flood control, irrigation water, and inexpensive hydropower. Reisner’s tome though is not one grounded in hope. It is one of folly, one of the dark side of forcing nature to conform to the desires of man. He tells this side of things well, which is no doubt why Cadillac Desert is one of the classics in the oft-documented saga of water in the west.

Reading List: Hoover Dam, An American Adventure

Stevens, Joseph. Hoover Dam: an American Adventure. 1st ed. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988.

Most are familiar with the tale of the Hoover Dam. Begun in 1931 and completed in 1936, the dam at the time of its construction was the largest dam in the world, and even today stands as an engineering feat of the highest order. Stevens’ award winning social history of the Dam’s construction begins with the early attempts to tame the wild Colorado, the most ambitious of which resulted in the Salton Sea disaster in 1907.

Even years before that, though, Bureau of Reclamation engineers had begun looking for sites at which a dam could be constructed in Boulder Canyon, its steep rising faces guiding the river between Arizona and Nevada. Twenty years later in 1921-22 engineers began the work of finalizing site selection, eventually settling on a site in Black Canyon. Confusing the historicity of the dam is the fact that the original site upon which Congress believed the dam would be built was in Boulder Canyon. Thus, much of the political debate over the funding of the dam, and the naming of the dam stems from the fact that it was always referred to in the halls of government as “Boulder Dam.”

Another interesting part of the tale surrounds then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover. The water from the project would be shared by seven states – Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and California. Thus, politics over the distribution of the water among the states was a major issue, an issue eventually solved by Herbert Hoover who recommended splitting the water equally between the northern and southern states. This agreement was enough to get the project moving. As an aside, this role of Hoover as the broker of one of the west’s largest water deals places him again at the center of urban history, Hoover of course being known in the urban studies realm as one of the founders of the modern housing industry.

As previously alluded the simple facts of the Hoover Dam have been well covered and need little repeating. As with the involvement of Hoover, for whom the Dam is still named today, the story of the Dam is as much about the human players as it is the engineering and construction spectacle. Frank Crowe as engineer for Morrison-Knudsen – one of the firms that participated in “Six Companies,” which constructed the dam gets most of the billing, but the rest of the Six Companies officials have stories of their own and a cohesive philosophy that bears telling.

Harry Morrison of Morrison-Knudsen put together the consortium of six companies (M-K, Utah Construction, Kaiser, Bechtel, Shea, and Warren Brothers) because no one firm was financially strong enough to get bonding on a project this size. Warren Brothers were the only east coast firm in the partnership, and that was by design. Stevens explains the importance of the western ethic in the minds of these men as he recalls Bechtel’s work at building a team that could bid on the Dam:

First, Kaiser and Bechtel knew and had worked with all the principals in the Morrison combine. They would be dealing with contractors of their own stripe, men W. H. Wattis aptly described as, “our kind.” Second, by joining Utah-Morrison they would forge a group that was, with the exception of the Warren Brothers, entirely western. Ever the visionary, Kaiser saw Hoover Dam as the key to large-scale industrial development in the West, which would create a bonanza of construction work and other business opportunities. He realized that if a coalition of western contractors could build the dam, then pick up the contracts that were sure to follow, it could end longstanding eastern domination of the construction industry and precipitate a major shift of economic power from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific (p. 42).

We know now that Kaiser was correct. Power from the Hoover Dam, in part, led to a boom in west coast manufacturing in which he was a major player. As the war broke out, Kaiser and Morrison built ships on the west coast and workers swarmed to California to munitions, shipbuilding, and aviation plants. Morrison would later then be responsible for building military bases in the Pacific, which helped Allied Forces gain control there. Though Kaiser’s industrial career has been well documented, the stories of the rest of these men who saw themselves as architects of a pacific century, have gone relatively unnoticed.

Stevens does not shy from the difficult parts of the story. Many workers died on the project, many others were sickened. While Crowe and Morrison were at the forefront of construction practice, being among the first to introduce gasoline powered equipment on a job site, that technological advancement came with a cost. Gasoline powered trucks idling in tunnels led to workers being poisoned by carbon monoxide. In lawsuits on behalf of some workers, Six Companies was found to have tampered with witnesses and juries. The federal government under the new Roosevelt administration also pressed Six Companies on racial issues, and overtime pay practices. Union busting on the part of the company was a constant endeavor. None of that however should be understood as being unique to Six Companies. To the contrary: that mirrors much of the economic and labor history of the early twentieth century.

It seems interesting practice to me to write a social history using an inanimate object – a dam, a piece of our built environment – as the focal point. Stevens though writes a brilliant, if uncritical, story of what is one of the world’s great engineering accomplishments. Hoover Dam is no ordinary structure. It can rightly be pointed to as being a prime driver of the boom of the Sunbelt. Without the power and water from this facility there probably is no Las Vegas or Phoenix, and a downsized Los Angeles is all that we might ever know. Even today, nearly all of the power generated by the Dam is sold to those three metro regions. Aside from a first rate book by a talented writer, Stevens has also left a major gift to future historians – the ability to tell the tales of the Harry Morrisons, the Wattises, the Bechtels – the people who were there to make this thing possible.

Reading List: Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-Day Saints 1930-1900

Since I do so much reading, and have to produce some notes on the books I read, I thought I would go ahead and post them here for anyone interested. These are not official reviews, may or may not be written in review format, and aren’t always ready for prime time. They just get my thoughts on paper on what I’m currently reading. This first one is in a series of books I am reading about the economic history of the Intermountain West. Please enjoy.

Arrington, Leonard. Great Basin Kingdom an economic history of the Latter-Day Saints, 1830-1900. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Arrington’s aging text is a brick-by-brick account of early Mormon economic efforts in the Great Basin. His thesis – that Mormonism is as much an economic philosophy as a religion – he supports well, especially for the period described in the book. There are however a number of interesting quirks about the book that make this a good starting point for understanding how Utah’s economy developed, but not a stand-alone guide.

The book opens with a philosophical history of Mormonism, where Arrington notes, “Of the one hundred and twelve revelations announced by Joseph Smith, eighty eight dealt partly or entirely with matters that were economic in nature (p. 5-6). This led another scholar to proclaim that, “Mormonism, though a religion, is largely, if not primarily, an economic movement” (p. 6). Arrington supports that contention by laying out the economic organization of early Mormon settlements in Jackson County, MO, Kirtland, MO, and then the ill-fated Nauvoo, IL colony where Joseph Smith perished at the hand of a mob.

While still leading the nascent Mormon group, Smith ingrained in his disciples seven ideals, or revelations, that governed the economic life of his saints: 1) the gathering – that they were all called to gather together in a primary place; 2) the Mormon Village – a network of villages (probably like the California missions) that would support Mormon colonization efforts; 3) property as stewardship; 4) redeeming the earth – a classic western sentiment; 5) frugality and economic independence; 6) unity and cooperation; and, 7) equality, or economic justice. These were the principles enacted most completely as the Mormons settled the Great Basin.

The collectivist sentiment identified by Arrington, and his analysis of it in relation to U.S. history, is one of the most fascinating assertions in the book. Arrington writes,

But the character of Mormon economic organization, as early as 1847-1849, and more certainly in the succeeding half-century, suggests the feasibility of regarding Mormon institutions as the more typically early American, and the individualistic institutions of other Westerners as the more divergent. The Mormon response to the problems imposed by the settlement of the Great Basin – a response which becomes ever clearer in succeeding decades – suggests that Mormon economic policies bore a greater resemblance to those of the ante-bellum northeast than did the economic policies of the West during the years when the West was won (p. 62-63).

This truly interesting comparison of Mormon economic policies to ante-bellum development policies places Utah outside of the traditional economic history of the West. Where I naturally hoped Arrington would go then was toward making some claims about how this initial period of economic development shaped future expansion in the State, lead to early leads over rivals such as Idaho, or simply delved deeper into his findings. He does not, and perhaps that was not the place of the book.

The meat of the book is the detailed descriptions of the early Utah settlements - classic historical data gathering and reporting by a very fine historian. Perhaps most interesting in this section was the Mormon plan of sending missionaries out to recruit converts whose talents and treasure they could put to use back in the Great Basin. The Perpetual Emigrating Company existed expressly for this purpose. The Mormons found that recruiting converts was easier than translating their talents back in the barren Great Basin, however.

The ideal of self-sufficiency led the Mormons to attempt to industrialize on their own efforts, for example, by using rags as inputs in their paper producing machinery brought over by an English convert. Like many of their industrial experiments, the paper making experiment was unsuccessful. Here too one hoped that Arrington, writing as an economic historian, would have at least mentioned mercantilist economic thought, which passed out of favor as largely untenable with the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. This though goes unmentioned, so one is left to wonder whether well-read gentlemen like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were familiar with sixteenth century economic theory. One surmises they were but proceeded on with their experiment nonetheless.

The closing portions of the book – “The Raid” – focuses on federal efforts to force Mormons to conform to U.S. social norms. This the feds did through legislation, which stripped the Church of the ability to own property, and made polygamy and cohabitation illegal. Church leaders transferred much Church property to individual church leaders, still economic tolls were high. The social costs were higher yet. As federal authorities sought to root out those practicing polygamy, many church leaders, including the President and the members of the First Presidency, went into hiding. Church President John Taylor, in fact, died while in hiding. The story of the federal crusade against the Mormons is one of the more bizarre moments in American history, and this section of the book is worth reading in its entirety.

The book has a few oddities. One of the most well known American politicians U.S. Senator Reed Smoot, himself a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, gets exactly this mention in the book: “He served a long and distinguished career in that body” (p. 406). That seems a bit of an oversight even for a book ending in 1900. The death of Brigham Young is barely mentioned, nor is the process that led him to the Governorship. Institutions such as the state legislature appear out of nowhere. Finally, for those outside of the Church it is difficult to understand the distinction between the Church controlling and directing the economy, and individual Mormons controlling and directing economic institutions. Most, I think, feel those are one in the same. Yet Arrington makes, indeed laments that situation in his chapter, “Aftermath.” The distinction between conditions pre and post Raid seem to me to be more between collectivism and command and control policies, and laissez faire economics.

For those interested in the early founding of the Great Basin Kingdom, this is a fascinating text. Again, perhaps I am hoping for too much, but I wish that Arrington would have made a few more claims about the importance of this mercantilist experiment and how it shaped the state of Utah for years to come. We get only a small sense of that as he closes the book with statistics on how the Church has grown. But he has left for other historians the task of relating this early history to the State and region of the present.