The American Future (47 page)

One hundred and sixty acres were too many and yet not enough, John Wesley Powell told anyone who would listen to him at the Irrigation Congress that convened in Los Angeles in October 1893, about a month after the Cherokee Strip Run. It was the 100th meridian that made the difference. Farms in the “humid zone” to the east, or those in drier regions that benefited from intensive irrigation, hardly needed the sacred 160. But those in the west ought to content themselves with pasture and would need upwards of 2,500 acres to have any chance of success. The main thing, Powell said over and again, was that farming should go where the water was. Much as he was in favor of utilizing river waters through dams and ditches, on-stream reservoirs could only do so much. Where water was in short supply, like the prairie beyond the 100th meridian, the sensible thing was to create extensive “pasturage ranches” with water for not more than twenty acres of crops. And Powell believed that water resources in the arid West were too precious to leave to the market, which in all likelihood meant the kind of companies that had been smashed up in the economic train wreck of 1893. (In fact companies founded
during the irrigation boom to produce and sell water were themselves notoriously unstable and insolvent, often underestimating fixed capital costs and the time it would take their customers to become viable farmers.)

Powell's views were heresy many times over; defiance of the plutocratic gods of the Gilded Age whose fortunes were built on economies of scale, vertical integration, and cartelized price fixing. The notion that government—either local or federal—should now be the trustee of water, just when it had at last offloaded millions of acres of unsettled land, appalled the company men. But coming as they did from Major John Wesley Powell, the views had to be given some credence because he was an all-American hero, soldier, explorer, and scientist, the director of the United States Geological Survey, someone who made no distinction between physical and intellectual bravery; a breed that was becoming as rare as the Great Plains bison.

In 1890, 90 percent of the population of the United States lived in its eastern half. With cities bursting at the seams, it was impossible for any far-sighted American statesman—like the young Theodore Roosevelt, for example, who had had personal experience of the West—not to see the region's transformation into settler-friendly farmland as the answer to so many of the nation's problems. But they had to listen to Major Powell. The son of a circuit-riding preacher in Illinois, John Wesley was largely self-taught in the natural history that allowed him, after the battle of Shiloh had blown off an arm, to become first a schoolteacher and then a university professor. In 1869 he had done the unthinkable by taking an expedition of four twenty-foot boats, three oak, one pine, a thousand miles down the notoriously lethal Colorado from its deceptively placid tributary, the Green River in northern Wyoming, through the vertiginous magnificence and terror of the Grand Canyon, hitherto seen only from the rim. Powell survived an ordeal of multiple capsizings, violent storms, and near starvation to make it through the canyon, though three members of his company decided, after a particularly harrowing time on the water, not to press on. Their bodies, probably killed by Shivwits Indians, were found at the top of the cliffs.

So Powell had a ripping yarn to tell, and he told it superlatively.
The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons
became an instant classic, its peculiarity calculated in the shifting tones of its voices. Sometimes
our one-armed hero wants to present himself as the dry impersonal geologist, ethnographer, and naturalist: “The low desert, with its desolate mountains, which has thus been described is plainly separated from the upper region of plateau by the Mogollon Escarpment”; but he slips easily into Bartramesque prose-poetry: “thousands of these little lakes with deep, cold emerald waters, are embosomed among the crags of the Rocky Mountains.” When he comes to his traveling companions, Powell turns ironist as mordant as Twain, and with the same observant touch of a master novelist. He describes his own brother “Captain Powell” (to his major) as “silent, moody and sarcastic, though sometimes he enlivens the camp at night with a song. He is never surprised at anything, his coolness never deserts him and he would choke the belching throat of a volcano if he thought the spitfire meant anything but fun. We call him ‘Old Shady.'” When he needs to, at the moments of high drama, Powell knows how to push and pull the syntax of the writing as if it were carried away by the violent current. He has just gone over two falls in the river, the first a mere ten feet, then bounced to a fifty-foot drop: “I pass around a great crag just in time to see the boat strike a rock and, rebounding from the shock, careen and fill its open compartment with water. Two of the men lose their oars; she swings around and is carried down at a rapid rate, broadside on, for a few yards when, striking amidships on another rock with great force, she is broken quite in two and the men are thrown in the river.”

More than simply an American odyssey through the watery jaws of hell and out again, Powell's story of his successful navigation of the river suggested that there might be more than one way to master the unruly Colorado. After the survey and the accumulation of knowledge came practical speculation. Perhaps this river might even be dammed, forced back into reservoirs from which water could feed the irrigation canals that, in the cliché of the time, would make the desert bloom. Powell's own head was full of hydraulic possibilities, but his
Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States
, originally written for the General Land Office of the government and published by order of Congress in 1878, warned that only 3 percent of the West could ever be turned into farmland without irrigation. Even if the Colorado and other western rivers like the Snake could be dammed and canalized, only a tiny fraction of the immensity of
the West would ever be viable for agriculture, much less capable of supporting new cities in Arizona, Nevada, or Southern California.

Powell did not mean to dash the hopes of the irrigation visionaries, but since water was such a precious resource in the West, he thought the only way it could be rationally utilized was through relatively small-scale and cooperative farming, of the kind he had seen working in the Mormon communities in Utah—the very definition of an unpromising arable landscape. The Mormons had kept the marketplace out of their irrigation projects, had allotted resources carefully and equitably, and as a result had been a model of how to do well in harsh circumstances that Powell thought the rest of America could learn from. The trouble was that his eminently sensible communally based approach to thinking of water as a publicly shared resource went directly against the spirit of the time, which was commercial, technological, and ruggedly individualist.

Powell thought of water as the refreshment of corrupt and jaded democracy: local, accountable; a bond that would hold communities together. What was the alternative: the extension of the bitter war between capital and labor into the West? But to politicians like big Bill Stewart of Nevada, this made Powell, who was evidently “drunk with power and deaf to reason,” an enemy of the American way. For the sake of the “pioneers who are developing the country,” Stewart declaimed from under his white Stetson, Powell needed to be chastened and his Irrigation Survey shut down before he could do more damage. It was all very simple for men like Stewart. Apply the mastery of hydraulic engineering to even the most intractable country,
tame
the rivers, and there would be water galore for western farmers in the hot valleys of Southern California—Sacramento and San Joaquin. They could produce not just corn but alfalfa for cattle feed; peaches, plums, and oranges; and vegetables in quantities as yet unimaginable. On their success, cities would indeed rise in the plain. Their tables would be bounteously served, and their gardens would forever be green.

This, at any rate, was the view of a newspaperman, William Ellsworth Smythe, for whom modern America was all about solving impossible problems. Smythe was the son of a wealthy Massachusetts shoe manufacturer but had lost his share of the family fortune in a failed publishing venture. To get back on his feet Smythe went to work for
a land company that sent him to New Mexico, where he witnessed some of the same communally organized approach to water that the Mormons had used, for the good reason that the Latinos in the West had treated their wells and ditches in the same way. As editor of the
Omaha Bee,
Smythe traveled to Nebraska during the first year of the great drought of 1890, where scenes of farmers shooting livestock that were dying of thirst, and abandoning farms for want of any kind of water, cut themselves into his memory. “The spectacle of the landless man and the manless land,” he wrote, “is enough to make the angels weep.”

The next year Smythe established a journal he called
Irrigation Age
and attended an initial congress of all interested parties—farmers, engineers, and people from government—at Salt Lake City, which he promoted as a model for the rest of the West. He had already become more of a crusader than a promoter. His policy, he stated in the
Age
, would be “to champion the cause of irrigation; to keep step with the swift progress of science in discovering the water resources of the west, to encourage the settlement of the beautiful valleys, the wide-stretching plains and fertile tablelands of the arid west as fast as reclaimed; to explain and illustrate to the farmer the uses and benefits of water…from Kansas to California and from Manitoba to Mexico.” Smythe's vision of what irrigation might be able to do for 100 million acres of the West, and thus for the future of the United States, was epic, but like Powell, he thought in social rather than macroeconomic terms. The great thing about irrigation projects was the amount of close attention they needed, to prevent canals and ditches from silting up and getting choked with debris and vegetation. A big commercial outfit using day-wage labor would never make for the same kind of success that family farms or small-town co-operatives would assure through their personal stake in the new farming.

Two years later in Los Angeles, a much bigger event was deliberately timed to coincide with the last month of the Chicago Exposition, in which America's agrarian past, present, and future had been prominently on display. Smythe printed 100,000 copies of a special issue of
Irrigation Age
for distribution at Chicago, and since delegates came to Los Angeles from Russia, Australia, and Peru it was not entirely vain to call the occasion an International Irrigation Congress. At the entrance to the Opera House where the convention was held, two
massive pumps stood like guardians of the American transformation Smythe believed was about to happen. The cascade of disastrous news from business only made Smythe more resolved to promote irrigation as a way forward; and more controversially, to transfer some of the responsibility for it from private business to government. He said in his opening address: “we are laying today the cornerstone of the Republic of Irrigation. It shall not be laid in avarice and cemented with greed. That would not be fitting; for a people living in sunlit valleys guarded by eternal mountains have ever been the defenders of liberty. We will lay the superstructure of this edifice by the plumb line of justice and equity. We will write upon its white cornerstone ‘Sacred to the Equality of Man.' We inscribe upon its especially massive arch those two synonymous terms ‘Irrigation and Independence.'”

This was grand opera indeed. How Powell, who had been asked to address the congress not once but twice, felt about Smythe's ecstatic rhetoric can be guessed, especially in view of what he was to do: pour cold water on all the rhetorical heat. Powell's first address was mostly a reminiscence of his epic journey down the Colorado; and the intensity of those memories was such that the performance wore him out so badly that there was some doubt whether he would deliver his second lecture on present prospects. And when Smythe had heard what Powell had to say, it's possible he wished he had stayed in his hotel room. For there could not have been a more glaring contrast between the bullish mood of the
Irrigation Age
delegates and the beetle-browed Powell's cautionary words. Even if all the waters of the West were harnessed as they should like, he said, they could do no more than irrigate a minute proportion of the country. It was criminal to bring settlers into the West on promises that would not and could not be kept, and that in all these matters his golden rule that farms should go to where the water was, not the other way around, should be heeded. “Gentlemen,” he went on, “it may be unpleasant for me to give you these facts. I hesitated a good deal but finally concluded to do so. I tell you gentlemen you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation of water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply the land.”

This is not what the delegates had come to Los Angeles to hear. Powell's unanticipated pessimism seemed at odds not just with their
own temper of invincible achievement but with his own past record of enthusiasm about damming the rivers and creating on-stream reservoirs from which fields and homes could be supplied. The patriarch's comments were interrupted by booing and vocal outbursts of angry dissent. Though taken aback by Powell's attack on premature boosterism, Smythe himself had too much respect for the old major to pick a public quarrel. But Smythe's impassioned faith in a transformational irrigation of the West remained fierce. This would be America's true answer to the panic, anger, and defeatism that had gripped the country in that year of economic collapse. Messianic in his nationalist optimism, Smythe told readers of his book
The Conquest of Arid America
that it was “for all optimistic Americans…for homeseekers who under the leadership of the paternal Nation are to grapple with the desert, translate its gray barrenness into green fields and gardens, banish its silence with the laughter of children. This is the breed of men who make the Republic possible, who keep the lamp of faith burning through the night of corrupt commercialism.” It was about “what is being done by the partnership of God and mankind in finishing one important corner of the world.” The outlook in the 1890s might seem bleak for such grand projects, but the armies of the marching unemployed, the fear and gloom surrounding America's cities, were all the more reason to forge ahead, for “when Uncle Sam puts his hand to a task we know it will be done. Not even the hysteria of hard times can frighten him away from the work. When he waves his hand at the desert and says ‘Let there be water!' we know that the stream will obey his command. We know more than that—know when the water will come, how much land will be reclaimed, how many homes will be built. We can even calculate with precision how many towns will spring up and where they will be.”