Cadillac Desert (4 page)

In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does, as it leaps three thousand feet across the Tehachapi Mountains in gigantic siphons to slake the thirst of Los Angeles, as it is shoved a thousand feet out of Colorado River canyons to water Phoenix and Palm Springs and the irrigated lands around them. It goes 444 miles (the distance from Boston to Washington) by aqueduct from the Feather River to south of L.A. It goes in man-made rivers, in siphons, in tunnels. In a hundred years, actually less, God’s riverine handiwork in the West has been stood on its head. A number of rivers have been nearly dried up. One now flows backward. Some flow through mountains into other rivers’ beds. There are huge reservoirs where there was once desert; there is desert, or cropland, where there were once huge shallow swamps and lakes.

It still isn’t enough.

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. Since the distance the water would have to travel is a thousand miles, and the elevation gain four thousand feet, and since six million acre-feet of water weigh roughly 16.5 trillion pounds, a lot of energy would be required to pump it. The Bureau figured that six nuclear plants would do, and calculated the cost of the power at one mill per kilowatt-hour, a tiny fraction of what it costs today. The whole package came to $20 billion, in 1971 dollars; the benefit-cost ratio would have been .27 to 1. For each dollar invested, twenty-seven cents in economic productivity would be returned. “That’s kind of discouraging,” says Stephen Reynolds. “But when you consider our balance-of-payments deficits, you have to remember that we send $100 billion out of this country each year just to pay for imported oil. The main thing we export is food. The Ogallala region produces a very large share of our agricultural exports.”

More water projects. In the early 1960s, the Ralph M. Parsons Corporation, a giant engineering firm based in Pasadena, California, released a plan to capture much of the floor of the Yukon and Tanana rivers and divert it two thousand miles to the Southwest through the Rocky Mountain Trench. The proposal, called the North American Water and Power Alliance, wasn’t highly regarded by Canada, which was the key to the “alliance,” but in the West it was passionately received. Ten years later, as environmentalism and inflation both took root, NAWAPA seemed destined for permanent oblivion. But then OPEC raised the price of oil 1,600 percent, and Three Mile Island looked as if it might seal fission’s doom. California was hit by the worst drought in its history; had it lasted one more year, its citizens might have begun migrating back east, their mattresses strapped to the tops of their Porsches and BMWs. All of a sudden the hollowness of our triumph over nature hit home with striking effect. With hydroelectricity now regarded by many as salvation, and with nearly half the irrigated farmland in the West facing some kind of doom—drought, salt, or both combined—NAWAPA, in the early 1980s, began to twitch again. The cost estimate (phony, of course) had doubled, from $100 billion to $200 billion, but by then we were spending that much in a single year on defense. The project could produce 100,000 megawatts of electricity; it could rescue California, the high plains, and Arizona and still have enough water left to turn half of Nevada green. The new Romans were now saying that it wasn’t a matter of whether NAWAPA would be built, but when.

Perhaps they are right. Perhaps, despite the fifty thousand major dams we have built in America; despite the fact that federal irrigation has, for the most part, been a horribly bad investment in free-market terms; despite the fact that the number of free-flowing rivers that remain in the West can be counted on two hands; perhaps, despite all of this, the grand adventure of playing God with our waters will go on. Perhaps it will be consummated on a scale of which our forebears could scarcely dream. By encouraging millions of people to leave the frigid Northeast, we could save a lot of imported oil; by doubling our agricultural exports, we could pay for the oil we import today. As the ancient, leaking water systems and infrastructure of the great eastern cities continue to decay, we may see an East-West alliance develop: you give us our water projects, we’ll give you yours. Perhaps, in some future haunted by scarcity, the unthinkable may be thinkable after all.

In the West, of course, where water is concerned, logic and reason have never figured prominently in the scheme of things. As long as we maintain a civilization in a semidesert with a desert heart, the yearning to civilize more of it will always be there. It is an instinct that followed close on the heels of food, sleep, and sex, predating the Bible by thousands of years. The instinct, if nothing else, is bound to persist.

T
he lights of Salt Lake City began to fade, an evanescent shimmer on the rear horizon. A few more minutes and the landscape was again a black void. We were crossing the Great Basin, the arid heart of the American West. The pilot announced that the next glow of civilization would be Reno, some six hundred miles away. I remembered two things about Reno. The annual precipitation there is seven inches, an amount that Florida and Louisiana and Virginia have received in a day. But even though gambling and prostitution are legal around Reno, water metering, out of principle, was for a long time against the law.

CHAPTER ONE

A Country of Illusion

T
he American West was explored by white men half a century before the first colonists set foot on Virginia’s beaches, but it went virtually uninhabited by whites for another three hundred years. In 1539, Don Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a nobleman who had married rich and been appointed governor of Guadalajara by the Spanish king, set out on horseback from Mexico with a couple of hundred men, driving into the uncharted north. Coronado was a far kinder conquistador than his ruthless contemporaries Pizarro and De Soto, but he was equally obsessed with gold. His objective was a place called Cibola, seven cities where, legend had it, houses and streets were veneered with gold and silver. All he found, somewhere in northwestern Arizona, were some savage people living in earthen hovels, perhaps descendants of the great Hohokam culture, which had thrived in central Arizona until about 1400, when it mysteriously disappeared. Crestfallen, but afraid of disgracing the Spanish crown, Coronado pushed on. Tusayan, Cicuye, Tiguex, Quivira—no gold. His fruitless expedition took him from the baking desert canyons of south-central Arizona up to the cool ponderosa highlands of the Mogollon Rim, then down again into the vast, flat, treeless plains of West Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas. He returned, miraculously, a couple of years later, having lost half his men and some of his sanity when his horse stepped on his skull as he was exercising it. Since the climate of the American West is often compared, by those who don’t know better, with that of Spain, it is instructive to quote part of the letter Coronado wrote to Viceroy Mendoza as he was recovering along the Rio Grande:

After traveling seventy-seven days from Tiguex over these barren lands, our Lord willed that I should arrive in the province called Quivira [Kansas], to which the guides El Turco and the other savage were taking me. They had pictured it as having stone houses many stories high; not only are there none of stone, but, on the contrary, they are of grass, and the people are savage like all I have seen and passed up to that place. They have no woven fabrics, nor cotton with which to make them. All they have is tanned skins of the cattle they kill, for the herds are near the place where they live, a fair-sized river. [The Indian guides’ reward for their misleading travelogue was to be garroted to death.] ...

The natives gave me a piece of copper which an Indian chief wore suspended from his neck. I am sending it to the viceroy of New Spain, for I have not seen any other metal.... I have done everything within my power to serve you, as your faithful sergeant and vassal, and to discover some country where God our Lord might be served by extending your royal patrimony.... The best country I have discovered is this Tiguex River [the Rio Grande] and the settlement where I am now camping. But they are not suitable for colonizing, for, besides being four hundred leagues from the North Sea and more than two hundred from the South Sea, thus prohibiting all intercourse, the land is so cold, as I have informed Your Majesty, that it seems impossible for anyone to spend the winter here, since there is no firewood, nor any clothing with which the men may keep themselves warm, except the skins which the natives wear....

The greatest irony of Coronado’s adventure was that he must have passed within a few miles of the gold and silver lodes at Tombstone and Tubac, Arizona. A few of his party, on a side excursion, discovered the Grand Canyon, but they were unimpressed by its beauty, and guessed the width of the Colorado River far below them at eight feet or so. The Rio Grande, which would later sustain the only appreciable Spanish settlements outside of California, didn’t impress them, either. When he returned to Guadalajara, Coronado was put on trial for inept leadership, which, though an utterly unfounded charge, was enough to discourage would-be successors who might have discovered the precious metals that would have induced Spain to lay a far stronger claim on the New World. His expedition also lost a few horses, which found their way into the hands of the native Americans. The two dominant tribes of the Southwest, the Apache and Comanche, soon evolved into the best horsemen who ever lived, and their ferocity toward incursionists made them formidable adversaries of the Spaniards who tried to settle the region later.

The Spanish did make a more than desultory try at establishing a civilization in California, which was more to their liking than the remainder of the West. (And, in fact, the huge California land grants doled out by the king established a pattern of giant fiefdoms that persists there to this day.) But they never found gold in California, so the territory didn’t seem worth a fight. Challenged by the first American expeditionary force in 1842, Mexico ceded the entire territory six years later—just a few months before a man named James Marshall was to discover a malleable yellow rock in the tailrace of Sutter’s Mill on the American River above Sacramento.

In 1803, the United States of America consisted of sixteen states along the Atlantic Seaboard, three-quarters of whose area were still untrammeled wilderness, and a vast unmapped tract across the Appalachian Mountains—which would metamorphose, more quickly than anyone might have expected, into the likes of Cleveland and Detroit. In that same year, the new First Consul of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, sat in Paris wrestling with a question: what to conquer? France had recently acquired a million square miles of terrain in North America from Spain—Spain having gotten it originally from France—and the prospect of a huge colonial empire in the New World was tempting. On the other hand, here was Europe—settled, tamed, productive—waiting for civilized dominion by the French. For what would history remember him better—the conquest of Russia or the conquest of buffalo?

The new President of the United States was Thomas Jefferson, an ardent Francophile, but, above all, a practical man. Jefferson knew better than anyone that a French presence in the New World could only be considered a threat. Jefferson was also exceedingly clever, and he was not above a little ruse. “The day that France takes possession of Louisiana,” he wrote in a message to his ministers in Paris, “we must marry ourselves to the British fleet and nation.” Having said that, Jefferson, through the offices of a Franco-American gunpowder manufacturer named du Pont de Nemours, then inaugurated a hallowed presidential tradition known as the intentional leak. Reading the “intercepted” message, Napoleon lost his half-formed resolve to create an empire on two continents. The result was the Louisiana Purchase.

Napoleon had no idea what he had sold for $15 million, and Jefferson had no idea what he had bought. For fifteen years, however, he had been trying to send an expedition to the unknown country west of the Mississippi River, and now, for the first time, he was able to persuade Congress to put up the money. In 1804, Jefferson’s personal secretary, a private, moody, and sensitive young man named Meriwether Lewis, together with a bluff and uncomplicated army captain named William Clark, left St. Louis with a party of fifty men. Poling, tugging, and, at times, literally carrying a fifty-foot bateau up the whipsawing braided channels of the Missouri River, they arrived at the villages of the Mandan tribe, in what has come to be North Dakota, in the early winter. When the ice broke in the spring, some of the party returned to St. Louis with the boat. The thirty-one others, accompanied by a Shoshone Indian girl named Sacajawea, who had been captured and enslaved by the Mandans, and her newborn baby, continued westward on horseback and on foot. Guided by Sacajawea—whose usefulness as an interpreter was only a small part of the Lewis and Clark expedition’s fabulous luck—they pressed across the plains to the beginning of the true Missouri at Three Forks, Montana. From there, they struggled over the Continental Divide and found the Salmon River, whose alternative name, the River of No Return, is an indication of the experiences they had trying to follow it. In despair, the party gave up and turned northward, finding the Clearwater River, which offered them an easier path westward. The Clearwater led them to the Snake, and the Snake led them to the Columbia—a huge anomaly of a river in the pale desert east of the Cascades. Entering the Columbia gorge, they made an almost instantaneous transition from arid grasslands to rain forest as the river sliced through the Cascade Range—a type of transition utterly fantastic to an easterner. From there, it was a short hop to the Pacific, where the party spent the winter, fattening on seafood. In August of 1806, they were back in St. Louis.