Cadillac Desert (47 page)

Whatever happened, the Hohokam, by A.D. 800, had already established a civilization that rivaled the Aztec, Inca, and Maya farther south. They were good builders, using rafters for houses and I-beams to create ancestral skyscrapers four stories high. They lived in small cities; the ruins of one of them, Pueblo Grande, occupied a large piece of land just about where downtown Phoenix is today. Superb flint and stone masons and excellent potters, they also worked beautifully with shells; they may have traded with people living on the Mexican coasts. For sport, they built enclosed ball courts very much like those of the Maya, who probably gave them the idea.

When it came to irrigation, however, the Hohokam were in a league by themselves. The largest of the canals they dug was fifteen miles long and eleven yards wide from bank to bank; like the other main canals, it had a perfectly calibrated drop of 2.5 meters per mile, enough to sustain a flow rate that would flush out most of the unwanted silt. There were dozens of miles of laterals and ditches, implying irrigation of many thousands of acres of land. Because of the dry climate and the provenance of the irrigated land, the Hohokam should have enjoyed good health; they made superior weapons; they were more populous than any culture around. Why then should they disappear? It is hard to imagine a civilization covering thousands of square miles and comprising hundreds of thousands of people just vanishing, but according to Emil Haury, an archaeologist who became fascinated by their demise, they apparently did. “We are almost totally ignorant of Hohokam archaeology... after 1400,” writes Haury in
Snaketown,
an archaeological record of the impressive Hohokam artifacts he and his colleagues unearthed. The relatively few Pima Indians whom whites found living in central Arizona in the 1800s were presumably descended from the Hohokam—which in Pima language, means “those who have gone”—but they offered no explanation as to what happened to them. Drought remains a possibility—perhaps a twenty-year drought the likes of which they had never seen—but an equally plausible explanation is that they irrigated too much and waterlogged the land, leading to intractable problems with salt buildup in the soil, which would have poisoned the crops. In either case, the mysterious disappearance of Hohokam civilization seems linked to water: they either had too little or used too much.

And that is exactly the problem that Arizona faces today.

W
hen Franklin Roosevelt came out to dedicate Hoover Dam on September 30, 1935, the one important dignitary who refused to attend the ceremony, which drew some ten thousand people, was the governor of Arizona, B. B. Moeur.

Though the dam had been built to safeguard the future of the entire Southwest—that was what FDR said in his speech—Moeur, like many Arizonans, looked on it more with trepidation than with satisfaction and awe. The Colorado River Compact hadn’t really given Arizona anything; it had just promised the lower basin 7.5 million acre-feet. In passing the Boulder Canyon Project Act, Congress had implied that Arizona’s share was at least 2.8 million acre-feet, but this, Moeur felt, was only a paper guarantee. For one thing, the guarantee had probably been jeopardized, in a legal sense, by Arizona’s refusal to sign the compact. Even if it wasn’t, Arizona’s water rights would become exceptionally vulnerable the moment the Bureau of Reclamation completed its giant canal to the Imperial Valley and California built the mammoth aqueducts headed for the Coachella Valley, San Diego, and Los Angeles. Southern California was growing much too fast to be satisfied with 4.4 million acre-feet of the river’s flow—its compact entitlement. In all likelihood, its demand for water would overtake its allotment in another twenty years. Suppose, then, that California began “borrowing” some of Arizona’s unused entitlement, which it could probably do. Would Arizona ever get it back, if millions of people depended on it? For the foreseeable future, Arizona was in no position to use its share of the river, because most of the people and most of the irrigated lands were in the central part of the state, nearly two hundred miles away. Rich, urban Los Angeles had the money to build an aqueduct that long, but Arizona, still mostly agricultural, did not. And yet California had vowed to blockade any effort by Arizona to have a federal aqueduct authorized unless the major issue that still divided the two states—the Gila River—was resolved in California’s favor.

The Gila, with its tributaries, the Salt and the Verde, was Arizona’s only indigenous river of consequence. In the historic past, it evaporated so quickly as it meandered through the scorching Sonoran desert that all that reached the Colorado River at Yuma was an average flow of 1.1 million acre-feet. However, the Salt River Project, by erecting damns in the mountain canyons east of Phoenix, had increased storage and reduced evaporation enough to give the state 2.3 million acre-feet to use. Which of those figures ought to be deducted from Arizona’s 2.8-million-acre-foot share of the Colorado watershed? Arizona said neither, or, at most, 1.1 million acre-feet, which was the historical flow. California said 2.3 million acre-feet—the amount which the dams effectively conserved for Arizona’s use. If California’s reasoning prevailed, Arizona would be left with a paltry 500,000 acre-feet of compact entitlement, which was hardly enough to sustain growth. But if Arizona’s reasoning prevailed, California had vowed that a Central Arizona Project would never be built.

To Moeur, a showman politician in the grand carnival style, California’s threats were worse than an outrage. In the arid West, denying one’s neighbor water was a virtual declaration of war. But Moeur had his own response to such a challenge. He would begin waging a
real
war.

The advance expeditionary force consisted of Major F. I. Pomeroy, 158th Infantry Regiment, Arizona National Guard, plus a sergeant, three privates, and a cook. Their instructions, issued personally by the governor, were to report “on any attempt on the part of any person to place any structure on Arizona soil either within the bed of said river [the Colorado] or on the shore.” Moeur knew full well that such an attempt had already been made, for the Bureau was doing some test drilling at the site of Parker Dam—a smaller regulation dam downriver from Hoover—from a barge, and the barge was secured against the current by a cable whose eastern end was anchored in Arizona soil.

When the newspapers caught wind that an army had actually been dispatched, they were ecstatic. The Los Angeles
Times
promptly inducted its military correspondent to cover the hostilities. He made it to the Parker Dam site on his state’s fast macadam roads before the expeditionary force even arrived. When it did, exhausted from the heat, dust, and twelve fords across the ooze of the Bill Williams River, Major Pomeroy requisitioned a ferryboat from the town of Parker, and the force was instantly renamed the Arizona Navy. After a full inspection of the offending cable, Pomeroy tried to steam up the Colorado to the mouth of the Bill Williams to reconnoiter, but the ferry was too high to sneak under the cable, and it got hung up. It was a harbinger of how things were to turn out that the occupants were finally delivered to their campsite by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power’s fast motor launch.

Pomeroy stayed at the site for seven months, sending daily dispatches to the governor by radio. When the Bureau finally began to lay a trestle bridge to the Arizona shore, Moeur decided to demonstrate that he meant business. He declared the whole Arizona side of the river under martial law and sent out a hundred-man militia unit in eighteen trucks, some with mounted machine guns. According to residents of the town of Parker, who were watching a good joke turn sour in a hurry, the guardsmen seemed eager for a fight. By now, however, the imbroglio had became national news and a source of embarrassment to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. Well aware that Arizona had at least a moral case to make, Ickes ordered construction halted on the dam while the dispute was settled in the courts. To its own surprise as much as everyone else’s, Arizona, which had already lost twice in the Supreme Court in its efforts to block Boulder Dam, was upheld. Parker Dam, ruled the Court, was technically illegal because it had not been specifically authorized by Congress. (That the Bureau could begin to put up a big dam without even asking Congress for formal approval says a lot about how far it had come in the intervening years.) Four months later, however, California’s Congressional delegation pushed a bill through Congress that specifically authorized the dam, and Arizona was left without recourse, unless it wanted to declare war on the United States.

A few years later, in 1944, Secretary of State Cordell Hull formally promised Mexico the 1.5 million acre-feet that had been set aside for it by the Colorado River Compact. Feeling itself the odd man out, Arizona finally gave in and signed the compact in disgust; it also signed a contract with the Interior Secretary to purchase 2.8 million acre-feet of water. A few years after that, in 1948, the upper-basin states apportioned their 7.5 million acre-feet among themselves, and only two major issues involving the river remained unresolved: how much of her allocated 2.8 million acre-feet Arizona could take out of the main-stem Colorado, and whether California could invoke prior appropriation and deny Arizona most of that. These, at any rate, were the last
legal
issues left to be resolved. The
real
issues had much more to do with nature and economics than with law, and they were just beginning to make themselves felt.

T
he 1940s and 1950s were boom years in Arizona. Phoenix—population in 1940, 65,000; population in 1960, 439,000—grew overnight from outsize village to big city. Between 1920 and 1960, the state’s population doubled twice, and millions of irrigated acres came into production. One of the revelations of the postwar period was that, given the opportunity, people were happy to leave temperate climates with cold winters for desert climates with fierce summers, provided there was water to sustain them and air conditioning to keep them from perishing (Phoenix, in the summer, is virtually intolerable without air conditioning). Not that the migrants had bothered to ask whether there was enough water before they loaded their belongings and drove west. They simply came; no one could stop them. How they were to fill their pools and water their lawns was Arizona’s problem.

Arizona’s solution was the same most other western states relied on; it began sucking up its groundwater, the legacy of many millennia, as if tomorrow would never come. By the 1960’s, despite the Bureau’s big Salt River Project—which captured virtually the entire flow of the Gila drainage—four out of every five acre-feet of water used in the state came out of the ground. The annual overdraft—the difference between pumping and replenishment by nature—went past 2.2 million acre-feet a year, which was more than the historic yearly runoff of all the rivers in the state. In dry years, it approached four million acre-feet. In the early days, artesian wells flowed around Phoenix. By the 1960s, some farmers could drill to two thousand feet and bring up nothing but hot brine. Parts of Maricopa County, which included metropolitan Phoenix, literally began to subside as the water below was pumped out and the aquifers collapsed. Drivers heading toward Tucson on Interstate 10 learned to watch for fissures opening in the highway as a vast block of land sank several inches and the one next to it stayed put. Arizona had reversed the pattern of some western states—it had fully developed its surface water first, and
then
began to overdraft its groundwater. Except for its Colorado River entitlement—whatever it was—it literally had nothing left.

Arizona’s politicians reserved their most grandiloquent and apocalyptic imagery for speeches about the state’s water dilemma. “Without more water,” Congressman John Rhodes liked to say, “we are all going to perish.” Morris Udall, Rhodes’s ideological opposite on most matters, sounded no less like John the Baptist. Arizona, he said, was “returning to desert, to dust.” As far as Senator Carl Hayden was concerned, “the survival of our dear state is at stake.”

In 1952, when Los Angeles built a second battery of pumps at the head of its aqueduct and California’s diversion climbed toward 5.3 million acre-feet—900,000 more than its entitlement—Arizona, in desperation, went to the Supreme Court a third time to try to get the issues resolved. The case,
Arizona v. California,
was to become one of the longest-running lawsuits in the annals of the Court, and the Justices appointed a “Special Master,” the New York lawyer Simon Rifkind, to review the case. (Rifkind found the lawsuit and the constant commuting to San Francisco, where the trial was held, so taxing that he suffered a heart attack halfway through; he was still in his early fifties.) The performance of California’s chief attorney, Northcutt Ely, is still studied by lawyers interested in the high art of dilatory obfuscation; one expert witness complained that Ely spent three days cross-examining him about a matter that could have been settled in a minute and a half. California, of course, had a vested interest in delay, since each year of irresolution meant 300 billion more gallons of water for the state.

In 1963, the Supreme Court finally ruled. To California’s astonishment, it upheld Arizona on virtually all counts. The Salt-Verde-Gila watershed was exclusively Arizona’s except for a small portion that belonged to New Mexico. Its use of that water would not be counted against its 2.8-million-acre-foot main-stem Colorado entitlement, which remained intact. That Los Angeles counted on hundreds of thousands of annual acre-feet it might never see—that a California-born Interior Secretary, Ray Lyman Wilbur, had contracted to sell it 5,362,000 acre-feet of water—mattered not in the least. The real zinger, though, came at the end of the decision, and had nothing to do with the immediate issues at hand. If, during a natural calamity or a drought, the river could not begin to satisfy all the claims on it, then, according to the Court, it was up to the Interior Secretary to decide who got how much. From that moment on, the genealogy of each Secretary became a matter of high importance to all the basin states. But there was another matter of even greater importance. The one exception to the rule it had just established, said the Court, was when someone had water rights that predated the Colorado River Compact. Those rights had to be satisfied first, no matter what.