A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 8

Eighth of a series

“Rain follows the plow.”
- Charles Dana Wilbur

Here is all you really need to know about the history of water in the western United States: This map, which appears on page 170 of Wallace Stegner’s 1954 book,

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, shows a line just east of the 100th meridian that divides America into a wet half and a dry half – a map that has remained essentially unchanged since white Americans began aggressively settling the west over 150 years ago.

Through a long history of damming, drilling, diversions, and water grabs, we have dried up the West’s rivers and extracted its groundwater at rates that are now – and have long been – unsustainable. Over the years, prophets have tried to tell us so – Stegner in Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), John McPhee in Encounters with the Archdruid(1977) and The Control of Nature (1989), and Marc Reisner in Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (1993) – but we didn’t listen.

Before them, there was John Wesley Powell.

Despite having lost his right arm at the Battle of Shiloh, Powell made the first recorded expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers and through the Grand Canyon. Later, as director of the federal government’s U.S. Geological Survey and its Bureau of Ethnology, he argued that the West was far too dry for intensive development. That made him a lot of powerful enemies – from railroad moguls to homesteaders, from farmers to every real estate speculator in the land. “Fraud was never provable,” Stegner wrote of western land deals, “but it was estimated that 95% of the final title proofs were fraudulent, nonetheless.”

“It is good to be shifty in a new country,” said the fictional Captain Simon Suggs.

But Powell’s prescient words were drowned out (if you will pardon the expression) by Charles Dana Wilber’s crackpot theory that “rain follows the plow.” Needless to say, Wilbur was a land speculator and booster of agricultural development in the West. His mantra, which maintained that agricultural production would actually lead to increased rainfall and greater prosperity, had a huge following in the late 19th century, not only in the West but also among the rich and powerful, and therefore, in the halls of Congress.

“I tell you gentlemen,” Powell said to an irrigation conference in 1893, “you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.” He quickly became a pariah.

“He told them,” wrote Stegner, “and they booed him.”

Forty years later, the Dust Bowl devastated land and ruined lives, primarily west of the 100th Meridian, just as Powell had warned them. The drought lasted for almost the entire 1930s. On April 2, 1935, desiccated western topsoil rose up in the wind and blew all the way to Washington, D.C., where the director of the Soil Erosion Service was testifying before Congress in favor of a national soil conservation program. Powell had been dead for 33 years.

And so, in southeast Nevada, which gets 4.2 inches of rain a year, we built the sprawling city of Las Vegas, home to almost three million people and endless fountains – most famously, the “Fountains of Bellagio”, a 375,000 square-foot lake whose 1,214 “devices” keep 17,000 gallons of water in the air. In California, which is just now emerging (hopefully) from years of drought that threatened both water supplies and food production, we created “one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions” in the desert of the San Joaquin Valley . . . by extracting so much groundwater that the land itself is literally sinking. And today, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, California, and Idaho continue to extract more water each year than they replenish.