English 680
Critical Digest #2
October 6, 2000
The
Search for Water in Reisner’s Cadillac Desert
The
American West – conquered by cowboys wearing white hats, saving the day from
Indians or the cowboys wearing black and riding off into the sunset,
right? Actually this depiction is what
people see in Hollywood movies. The
players in the live version of the fight for the West were humans versus
Nature, and the prize was water. Marc
Reisner brings this story to life in a historical narrative called Cadillac
Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Published in 1986 and winner of the National
Book Critics Circle Award, Reisner’s chronological account walks readers
through the unknown battle settlers fought with finding, obtaining, and
maintaining a water supply out in the arid desert lands of California, Utah,
Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming. Ultimately,
Reisner portrays the western desert’s struggle not really in the search for
water, but the right of human survival against the will of the land.
Reisner
opens his book with a reflection of a time when he was flying over Utah on his
way back to California. He describes
how empty the land looks – no towns, no light, and no signs of
civilization. This narration leads the
reader into the history of how settlers came to live and survive off the land:
“One does not really conquer a place like this. One inhabits it like an occupying army and makes, at best, an
uneasy truce with it” (4-5). His book
details the western desert’s historical quest for water in twelve chapters,
three of which will be highlighted in this digest. Reisner not only recounts historical facts, but he uses personal
stories and materials about the actual people and events involved. His extensive research (located in the back
of the book) includes books, articles, reports, documents, letters and
memoranda, plus dialogues of traders, geologists, and government leaders such
as John Wesley Powell, Floyd Dominy, William Mulholland, Richard Lamm, and C.
J. Kuiper. Maps and photographs,
inserted throughout the book, allow the reader to see what changes the land
went through once people found the need for more and more water.
The
desert West itself is very different than what most people imagine, especially
people who have never been past the 100th meridian. According to Reisner, people who live there
say they love the desert (in their air-conditioned cars), yet they want to change
it. To really experience the desert,
“you have to march right into its white bowl of sky and shape-contorting heat
with your mind on your canteen as if it were your last gallon of gas and you
were being chased by a carload of escaped murderers” (4). That is just what some settlers did, only to
find out that the land was rocky, the rivers were untamable, and there was no
gold. Farming seemed out of the
question; the only business a person could start was trading furs and beaver
hats. Soon people discovered that
nothing would present more of a challenge than retaining and reserving a water
supply. “Everything depend[ed] on the manipulation of water – on capturing it
behind dams, storing it, and rerouting it in concrete rivers over distances of
hundreds of miles” (3). This challenge
still waits to be permanently solved.
In
chapter one, “A Country of Illusion,” Reisner recalls how the West and its
desert lands were founded and almost abandoned. The American West was explored a half a century before colonists
came to Virginia by Coronado, Pizarro, and De Soto, all looking for gold. Basically, in the early 1800s, the West came
alive through trading; settlement owed itself to the beaver hat (20). Traders moved in the area to hunt and sell,
but they were faced with some terrors that would not likely draw other settlers
and homemakers. The plains were so arid
they could barely support bunchgrass.
The deserts were fiercely hot and fiercely cold. Streams flooded a few weeks a year, then
they would dry up. Trees in the forests
were so large it would take days to bring one down. As for the weather, it would hail, and then a drought would set
in followed by more hail. On top of all
this, there were Indians, grizzly bears, wolves, grasshopper plagues, and no
gold (25). No one was brave enough to
try and conquer this land until John Wesley Powell ventured west.
Reisner
uses Wallace Stegner’s Beyond the Hundredth Meridian as a dominant
source on the discovery of the West for this chapter. Reisner and Stegner credit John Wesley Powell, a former Union
army major from Ohio, as the man who opened the West. On May 24, 1869, the Powell Geographic Expedition set out on the
Green River, a tributary of the Colorado River, for three months and six
days. In four 21ft. wooden dories and a
15ft. pine pilot boat, Powell and his men ran the river and named the gorges,
canyons, and river ports. They endured
extreme temperatures and water conditions, all of which Powell recorded in his
journal (36). By the late 1870s, the
100th meridian had been crossed by over 1,000 people, and more than
183 million acres went out of public domain and into railroad ownership
(39). More and more people ventured
west, towns sprang up, but Powell saw a catastrophe waiting to happen. No one knew how the West and its desert
would react to new inhabitants. When
the first drought came in the late 1800s, people realized that water was not as
abundant as it was back east. Soon
water became a commodity sold for a quarter of a cent per ton. As a result of this discovery, westerners
spent half a century building dams and developing irrigation systems, all at
the public’s expense, but nothing was guaranteed (54).
Chapter
three, “First Causes,” highlights the desert West’s battle for the control of
water and introduces the dam. In this
century, almost a quarter of a million dams have been built in the United
States. These dams hold back rivers
like the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Snake, and the Colorado that were once
thought to be untamable. Back in 1886,
a harsh winter followed by three years of drought wiped out a huge population
of people and cattle. Only 400,000 out
of a million homesteading families persevered on the Plains (111). With families needing water desperately, the
federal government stepped in with irrigation system proposals, around the
early 1890s, and eventually took over private irrigation practices (112). With everyone out to make a buck,
homesteaders soon saw irrigation companies take control of the water
supply. However, farmers weren’t stupid
and resorted to using groundwater and plowing smaller plots of land. After the irrigation companies fell, states
like California, Colorado, and Wyoming attempted to distribute water by districts,
built reservoirs, and anticipated government promises yet all failed
(113). Finally, in 1902, the passage of
the Reclamation Act led to the first man-made transformation of the Colorado
River called the Hoover Dam. The dam
seemed like a solution to the water problem that everyone could agree
on…everyone except the rivers.
Chapter
eleven, “Those Who Refuse to Learn,” goes past the glory of the dam and reveals
some of the West’s biggest disasters.
Three dams were built on sites that for twenty, thirty, and forty years
had been labeled unsafe for a dam structure.
The Fontenelle Dam, on the Green River in Wyoming, sprang a leak in
September of 1965. The earthfill dam
was built on a known troubled site (geological problems) because engineers were
running out of good places to put dams (393).
Though the dam held, accusations against the Bureau of Reclamation began
stirring up. Supposedly, the Bureau had
been building dams on sites that had been rejected years ago, but due to the
demand for water, the sites were considered usable (397).
The
Teton River community in Idaho, however, was not so lucky; the Teton Dam sprang
a leak in 1976. The Teton River
ultimately joins the Snake River above Idaho Falls. A dam was never built on this site because geologists noted that
the ground had rock that was “fractionated, cavitated, and crisscrossed by
minor faults;” an earthquake, of any size, would be the biggest hazard for a
dam (399). Nevertheless, a dam was
built and finished, more or less, on October 3, 1975. The job had taken 503,000 cubic feet of grout to fill up most of
the holes and caves. Then in June of
1976 the dam crumbled under the pressure of the reservoir. The level of the reservoir had risen above
its capacity due to the huge snowfall of the past winter. The flood engulfed towns; eleven people
died, 4,000 homes were destroyed, 350 businesses were lost, and the total
damage was estimated around $2 billion dollars (422). Ironically, some townspeople would like to see the dam rebuilt.
You
would think that westerners would learn from their mistakes, but another dam
was proposed under the same conditions on the South Platte River, which flows
through Denver, Colorado. The Narrows
Dam was first proposed in 1944, but geologists delayed its construction because
they wanted to study the ground of the site.
The foundation was like a coffee filter, made of gravel, loose rock, and
sand (436). Later on, further research
was done on the Narrows dam proposal, and the following was revealed: the dam
would only deliver one third of the water promised; it could conceivably
collapse; engineers would have to relocate 26 miles of railroad track; the dam
would not generate a single kilowatt of hydroelectric power; it would be
worthless for flood control; and, most farmers who were to benefit from the dam
did not want the water [mainly because they had to get it from the dam – there
was no delivery to the farmers’ headgates] (446). Even though the dam provided no benefits, politicians still got
appropriations for the project in 1982, 1983, and 1984. I’m not sure if the dam has ever been built;
Reisner ended the chapter with the dam’s future up to politics and money.
Reisner
concludes his book by condemning the methods of the past in the western
desert’s search for water:
Through water development, the federal government set out to rescue farmers from natural hardships – droughts and floods – but created a new kind of hardship…[w]e set out to tame rivers and ended up killing them. We set out to make the future of the American West secure; what we really did was make ourselves rich and our descendants insecure. (505)
Yet, he does provide some research on water solutions that have been discussed by politicians and neighboring countries. The North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA) was conceived in the 1950s by Donald McCord Baker. His idea was to create a dam in British Colombia’s deep river canyons that would provide water for the United States and electricity for Canada. The project has been debated by both Americans and Canadians, but Reisner leaves his book stating that so far there was no word from the Reagan administration on what it thought of the plan (514).
Reisner’s historic tale of “rivers diverted and damned, political corruption and intrigue, billion dollar battles over water rights, and economic and ecological disasters” (Barnes & Noble review) gives insight into the hassles with the humans and the water of the West. For ecocritics, this book will introduce you to how the West’s water was won and lost, but it will not give you any insight into literature [I still haven’t figured out where the title came from]. Reisner’s descriptions of the land and geology still leaves the region out of reach and foreign to people who have never been there. But if you have been out west, and you like history, then Reisner will entertain you with a story that is fresh and alive, unlike his chosen literary backdrop.
Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. New
York: Viking, 1986.