Cadillac Desert (32 page)

And this Promethean agenda was going to be possible, according to the director of civil works, because we were “about to enter an era of unprecedented cooperation in planning water resource development to meet future needs.... The walls which formerly separated various spheres of interest are crumbling under the pressure of manifold needs.”

Even allowing for the temper of the times, Cassidy’s prophecy, in retrospect, seems one of derangement more than vision. Nineteen years later, the $15 billion which was to construct 320 million acre-feet of reservoir storage would barely suffice to build ten million acre-feet of new storage in California—had it been politically possible to do it. It was hard to imagine thirteen thousand miles of new or “improved” navigable waterways without envisioning barges bumping against the Rocky Mountains or poking into bulrushes at the headwaters of southern streams. Even had there been money to build all those reservoirs, there wasn’t any room for them—as Cassidy was almost willing to admit. “In many intensively occupied river basins,” he said, using the military jargon of which the Corps is inordinately fond, “we ... face a very difficult task in finding sites for the reservoirs needed to support future growth”—thus raising the prospect of a nation requiring so many new dams to feed water and electricity into its hyperventilating economy that it would flood itself right off the land and find itself forced to go about its business aboard houseboats.

Actually, the General’s vision was to mutate into irony as fabulous as the prophecy itself. He was right in one sense—you did not build such incredible works to carry water from areas of “surplus” to areas of “deficit” without intricate political compromises among the states involved and unprecedented collaboration between the agencies that would presumably do the job, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Corps. But he was dead wrong in predicting that such harmonious relations would ever be. And if a single entity could be blamed for this—because it schemed constantly against its would-be confederate, because it seized every opportunity to build any senseless project it could, because it worked diligently, if unwittingly, to give water development a bad name—it was none other than his own agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

In California, where Cassidy gave his speech—at the very moment, in fact, when he was giving his speech—the Corps of Engineers was shamelessly trying to steal from the Bureau of Reclamation at least one major project the Bureau had intended to build for years. It had already done it several times before, in California and elsewhere. Across the entire West, the Corps, as opportunistic and ruthless an agency as American government has ever seen, was trying to seduce away the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; it was toadying up to big corporate farmers who wanted to monopolize whole rivers for themselves; it was even prepared to defy the President of the United States. As a result, the business of water development was to become a game of chess between two ferociously competitive bureaucracies, on a board that was half a continent plus Alaska, where rivers were the pawns and dams the knights and queens used to checkmate the other’s ambition. But the Corps and the Bureau played a little too well and a little too long for their own good. While they were fighting over a Lake Ontario-size reservoir in the middle of Alaska, and over countless squalid little projects desired by local interest groups, an unprecedented water crisis was gathering on the southern high plains—a crisis tailor-made for their own limitless ambition which, in the end, they would do nothing about. The Corps and the Bureau wasted so much money on frivolous projects which didn’t so much solve the nation’s water situation as satisfy the greed of powerful interests and their own petty ambitions that in the 1980s, despite dozens of new dams and reservoirs built during the intervening years, a water crisis loomed larger than in 1962. Within the next half century, as much irrigated land is likely to go out of production—land that grows nearly 40 percent of our agricultural exports—as the Bureau of Reclamation managed to put
into
production during its entire career. And though projects to rescue those regions remain on the drawing boards, the age when they might have been built seems to have passed.

T
he Corps of Engineers, the construction arm of the United States Army, was baptized during the Revolutionary War, when a group of engineers in the Continental Army built a breastwork on Bunker Hill. In 1794, the Corps was officially christened with its current name and divided into a civilian and a military works branch. The civil works branch, which was to become by far the larger of the two, began modestly enough, clearing driftwood and sunken ships out of rivers and harbors and occasionally doing a bit of dredging. It also played a role in the early exploration and surveying of the nation. The Corps’ great work—and its transmutation into one of history’s most successful bureaucracies—began late in the nineteenth century, when it took upon itself the task of restyling America’s largest rivers to accommodate barge traffic and, occasionally, deep-draft ships. At the same time, it found a role for itself in flood control, which it first accomplished by building levees and dikes, and then, after denying for years that reservoirs could control floods, by building flood-control reservoirs. And it built them at a pace that would have left the most ambitious pharaoh dazzled—something like six hundred in sixty years.

The Army Engineers have so many hands in so many different types of work that their various activities sometimes cancel each other out. The Corps drains and channels wetlands—it has ruined more wetlands than anyone in history, except perhaps its counterpart in the Soviet Union—yet sometimes prohibits the draining and dredging of wetlands by private developers and other interests. (This was a role forced on the Corps by the Congress, not one it undertook voluntarily.) Its dams control flooding, while its stream-channelization and wetlands-drainage programs cause it. Its subsidization of intensive agriculture—which it does by turning wetlands into dry land, so they may then become soybean fields—increases soil erosion, which pours into the nation’s rivers, which the Corps then has to dredge more frequently.

Cynics say this is all done by design, because the Corps of Engineers’ motto, “Building Tomorrow Today,” really ought to be “Keep Busy.” Its range of activities is breathtaking: the Corps dams rivers, deepens rivers, straightens rivers, ripraps rivers, builds bridges across rivers, builds huge navigation locks and dams, builds groins on rivers and beaches, builds hatcheries, builds breakwaters, builds piers, and repairs beach erosion (finally fulfilling the first stage of a destiny conservationists have long wished on it: carrying sandpiles from one end of the country to the other and back again). The works for which the Corps is most famous—or notorious, depending on one’s point of view—are the monumental inland navigation projects such as Red River, Tennessee-Tombigbee, and Arkansas River. However, though each of these may cost billions to begin with, and hundreds of millions to maintain, the opportunities for such work are pretty thin. Opportunities for serious work come most frequently in the form of flood-control and water-supply dams.

The Corps confined its activities mainly to the East and Middle West until the Great Depression—it is widely, and falsely, regarded as the “eastern counterpart” of the Bureau of Reclamation—but the temptations of the West ultimately proved too much to resist. Throughout much of the East, it is hard to find a decent spot for a dam. There are few tight gorges and valleys, or there are few natural basins behind them, or there are too many people along rivers who would have to be moved. (Not that uprooting and relocating people particularly bothers the Army Engineers; it is more a matter of expense.) The West, however, is a dam builder’s nirvana, full of deep, narrow canyons and gunsight gaps opening into expansive basins. The West is also more sparsely populated, and has floods—enormous floods—because its precipitation tends to be both erratic and highly seasonal, and because of this, the groundcover, compared with the East, is spare. With little in the way of grass or forests or wetlands to hold it back, runoff during the storms is extreme. Small streams, even tiny creeks, have flowed at rates approaching the country’s largest rivers. They rarely flow like this for long, but a few minutes is all it takes to float away a town. Bijou Creek in Colorado, nearly always dry, has gone over 400,000 cubic feet per second after an eight-inch rainstorm. California’s Eel River peaked at 765,000 cfs—the flow of the Mississippi and the Columbia combined—during the Christmas flood of 1964.

On many rivers in the West a dam built for irrigation will incidentally control floods. But the equation also works in reverse: a flood-control dam, by evening out a river’s flow year-round, makes it useful for irrigation. And if the Corps of Engineers builds the dam, and calls it a flood-control dam, the water is free.

The Kings, the Kaweah, the Tule, and the Kern are the southernmost rivers flowing out of the Sierra Nevada into the Central Valley of California. They are the only rivers that do not ultimately end up in either the Sacramento or the San Joaquin drainage, because a low rise of land in the upper San Joaquin Valley, south of Fresno, effectively divides the valley into two hydrologic basins. The southernmost one, which receives the runoff of the Kings, Kaweah, Tule, and Kern, is known as Tulare Basin. Historically, the four rivers of Tulare Basin went into two terminal lakes, Tulare and Buena Vista, which appeared and disappeared every year like phantoms. During the wet winters, the lakes would begin to fill; they would reach their largest size in May, after twenty feet of Sierra snow had melted into them in a matter of weeks; and, in all but the wettest years, they would evaporate so quickly under the glaring summer sun that they were dry again, or mostly dry, around September. Tulare, the more impressive of the two lakes, often grew larger than Lake Tahoe, though it was not more than a few feet deep. From year to year, its shoreline would shrink or grow by miles. It was a wonderful sight to see all of that water glimmering amid the merciless dryness of the San Joaquin Valley in summer, and the lakes were a stopover for millions of migrating ducks, geese, and sandhill cranes.

Before World War II, most of the agricultural lands around Tulare and Buena Vista lakes—and the lakes themselves—were owned by four private landholders. They were, in a sense peculiar to California, “family” farms. Buena Vista Lake and the land around it was the largest remnant of the million-acre domain amassed by Henry Miller, and later squandered by a succession of dissolute heirs. The property encompassed about eighty thousand acres, seven times the area of Manhattan Island. The adjacent Kern County Land Company, the estate originally put together by Miller’s archenemies James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, was even larger. According to testimony by Senator Paul Douglas before the Senate Interior Committee in 1958, the company controlled some 1.1 million acres in 1939, of which 413,300 acres were in California—most of it in Kern County. (The Kern County Land Company later became the main agricultural holding of the Tenneco Corporaton, one of the nation’s largest conglomerates.) The Salyer and Boswell farming empires were in and around Tulare Lake, each of them comprising tens of thousands of acres. Since most large California growers also lease land, the total acreage under their control could only be guessed at; they may not have known themselves. Without a doubt, however, Salyer, Boswell, Kern County Land, and Miller and Lux were among the very largest and richest farmers in the entire world.

To the four companies, Tulare and Buena Vista Lake were both a convenience and a nuisance. Usually, as the lakes shrank, their exposed beds would be quickly planted with grains or row crops, which were irrigated by pumping back the remaining water. After particularly wet winters, however—and there had been a string of them in the 1940s—the Sierra snowmelt kept filling them into July and August, by which time it was too late to plant. Both water and available land were therefore unpredictable, and, though farmers around the world have learned to live with unpredictableness, it is something that California’s big growers, accustomed as they are to perfect summer weather and unfailing man-made rain through irrigation, intensely dislike.

Although Tulare and Buena Vista lakes were privately owned, for the most part, the rivers that fed them were in the public domain. The four big farming companies held rights to a substantial amount of their water, but there were still big surpluses in all but the driest years—especially in the larger rivers, the Kings and the Kern. Had those surpluses been directed elsewhere in the valley, they could have created a great many small irrigated farms. If the rivers were going to be developed—if any agency of government was to develop them—it was a job for the Bureau of Reclamation. The only problem with that rationale was that the big growers wanted all of the water for themselves, they wanted the government to develop it for them, and they didn’t want to have to pay for it.

Someday, if anyone has the inclination or the ability to penetrate the wall of secrecy behind which the Corps of Engineers has always managed to carry on its affairs, we may hear from its own mouth—from incriminating letters, memoranda, or confessions of its officials—why it was so eager to develop the Kings and the Kern—to ally itself unabashedly with a handful of huge land monopolies and, in the process, shove the Bureau off two made-to-order small-farm irrigation projects. The only obvious explanation (which is probably the correct one) is that it sensed the growing unpopularity of the acreage limitations of the Reclamation Act. Here was an unparalleled opportunity to establish a beachhead in a region where the natural topography and demand for water could give it new work for decades to come. No stranger to power politics, the Corps knew that its best hope of long-range success was a quick, dramatic demonstration of its abilities. The best way to ensure that was to pick a group of beneficiaries who were nearly as potent a political force as the Corps itself. If this was indeed its reasoning, then it reasoned well.