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Water and the West in Historical Imagination: Part Two—A Decade Later

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 66; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1540-6563.2004.00079.x

1540-6563

Norris Hundley,

Water Governance and Infrastructure

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1. Water and the West in Historical Imagination,”Western Historical Quarterly 27 (spring 1996): 5–31 (quote, p. 5). The then notorious “F” word was, of course, “Frontier.”2. Ibid., 5–8.3. Donald Worster, A River Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (New York, 2000).4. Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), xi (quote); Pisani, To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1992). See also Pisani , “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: Nationalizing the History of Water in the United States,”Environmental History 5 (October 2000): 466–82; ; ; ; and . For a collection of ten of Donald Pisani's previously published articles that skillfully probe major issues involving land and water laws from the 1850s into the early twentieth century, see Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920 (Lawrence, Kans., 1996).5. Daniel Tyler, Silver Fox of the Rockies: Delphus E. Carpenter and Western Water Compacts (Norman, Okla., 2003).6. Steven Schulte, Wayne Aspinall and the Shaping of the American West (Boulder, Colo., 2002); Stephen C. Sturgeon, The Politics of Western Water: The Congressional Career of Wayne Aspinall (Tucson, Ariz., 2002).7. Shulte, Wayne Aspinall, 177 (“as his greatest . . .”).8. Sturgeon, Politics of Western Water, 85 (“Extortion . . .”; “Blackmail . . .”).9. Jack L. August, Jr., “Water, Politics, and the Arizona Dream: Carl Hayden and the Modern Origins of the Central Arizona Project,”Journal of Arizona History 40 (winter 1999): 391–414.10. Wendy N. Espeland, The Struggle for Water: Politics, Rationality, and Identity in the American Southwest (Chicago, Ill., 1998), xiv (“younger, unconventional . . .”; “the decision . . .”; “their power . . .”; “the role of science . . .”), 8 (“changed everything”).11. Byron E. Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs: Congress, the Sierra Club, and the Fight to Save Grand Canyon (Tucson, Ariz., 2002); Pearson , “‘We Have Almost Forgotten How to Hope’: The Hualapai, the Navajo, and the Fight for the Central Arizona Project,”Western Historical Quarterly,”31 (autumn 2000): 297–317.12. Pearson, “We Have Almost Forgotten How to Hope,” 299 (“the centrality of . . .”), 313 (“the debate over . . .”).13. Ibid., 314 (“the enormous annuity payments”), 316 (“large‐scale . . .”; “destroyed vast stretches . . .”; “coal‐fired . . .”; “air pollution”).14. Douglas E. Kupel, Fuel for Growth: Water and Arizona's Urban Growth (Tucson, Ariz., 2003); Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York, 1986), 7 (“a coercive, monolithic . . .”).15. For an account that broadens Donald Worster's “hydraulic society” from an irrigation civilization to one that includes “California's cities and natural ecosystems,” see Tim Stroshane, “Water and Technological Politics in California,”Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 14 (June 2003): 34–76 (quote, p. 40).16. Robert K. Schneiders, Unruly River: Two Centuries of Change along the Missouri (Lawrence, Kans., 1999).17. See, among other recent publications, Andrew M. Honker, “‘A Terrible Calamity Has Fallen Upon Phoenix’: The 1891 Flood and Salt River Valley Reclamation,”Journal of Arizona History 43 (summer 2002): 109–32; Mona Lambrecht, “ ‘Good Baptist Weather’: Boulder County and the Flood of 1894,” Colorado Heritage (autumn 2001): 29–40; William Lindley, “High-Stakes Dredging Plan Brings Close Look at Columbia,” Journal of the West 39 (fall 2000): 57–62; Paul E. Todhunter, “Flood Hazard in the Red River Valley: A Case Study of the Grand Forks Flood of 1997,” North Dakota Quarterly 65.4 (1998): 254–75; Gordon Bakken and J. Elwood Bakken, “The Goldfish Died: Great Falls, Fort Benton, and the Great Flood of 1908,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 51 (winter 2001): 38–51; Dale E. Nimz, “Damming the Kaw: The Kiro Controversy and Flood Control in the Great Depression,” Kansas History 26 (spring 2003): 14–31.18. Schneiders, Unruly River, 9.19. Ibid., 258.20. Schneiders, Big Sky Rivers: The Yellowstone and Upper Missouri (Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 320.21. Todd Kerstetter, “‘The Worst Floods in History’: Federal Government and the Floods of 1944 in the Elkhorn River Basin,”Great Plains Quarterly 21 (summer 2001): 179–92, 190 (“piecemeal”; “economically and politically . . .”); 191 (“hit and miss”; “failed to treat . . .”; “open to uncoordinated . . .”); Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York, 1979), 4 (quotations).22. Hugh T. Lovin, “Federal Intervention and Irrigated Farming at King Hill,”Pacific Northwest Quarterly 94 (spring 2003): 59–68.23. Ibid., 67. See also Hugh Lovin, “Dreamers, Schemers, and Doers of Idaho Irrigation,”Agricultural History 76 (spring 2002): 232–43. For a valuable special issue of Agricultural History containing twenty‐four articles on “Water and Rural History,” see volume 76 (spring 2002).24. Stephen Bogener, Ditches Across the Desert: Irrigation in the Lower Pecos Valley (Lubbock, Tex., 2003), 7 (“bullying”; “remnant landholders”; “only grudgingly . . .”; “a concerted effort . . .”).25. Ibid., 8 (“methodically”; “a system of capital . . .”).26. Ibid., 9 (“never lived up . . .”); 10 (“Dammed in many places . . .”).27. Peter Carrels, Uphill Against Water: The Great Dakota Water War (Lincoln, Neb., 1999).28. Andrew H. Fisher, “They Mean to Be Indian Always: The Origins of Columbia River Indian Identity, 1860–1885,”Western Historical Quarterly 32 (winter 2001): 468–92, 471 (“Many Indians in the Far West . . .”). See also Brad Asher, Beyond the Reservation: Indians, Settlers, and the Law in Washington Territory, 1853–1889 (Norman, Okla., 1999); Alexandra Hamilton, Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1999); Frederick E. Hoxie, Parading through History: The Making of the Crow Nation in America, 1805–1935 (New York, 1995).29. Fisher, “They Mean to be Indian Always,” 492 (quotations).30. Roberta Ulrich, Empty Nets: Indians, Dams, and the Columbia River (Corvallis, Ore., 1999). William D. Layman, Native River: The Columbia Remembered (Pullman, Wash., 2002); William D. Layman, “River of Memory: The Columbia, Wild and Free,”Columbia 17 (spring 2003): 17–24. For a fascinating collection of essays on the Columbia River area, see William M. Lang and Robert Carriker, Great River of the West: Essays on the Columbia River (Seattle, Wash., 1999).31. Allen Cain, “Replacing Salmon: Columbia River Indian Fishing Rights and the Geography of Fisheries Mitigation,”Oregon Historical Quarterly 104 (summer 2003): 196–227 (quote, p. 197).32. Ann Caylor, “‘A Promise Long Deferred’: Federal Reclamation on the Colorado River Indian Reservation,”Pacific Historical Review 69 (May 2000): 193–215. See also Caylor, “Fed on Promises: The Indian and White Struggle for Reclamation on the Colorado River Indian Reservation” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1996).33. Leonard Carlson, “The Economics and Politics of Irrigation Projects on Indian Reservations, 1900–1940,” in The Other Side of the Frontier: Economic Explorations into Native American History, ed. Linda Barrington (Boulder, Colo., 1999), 235–258, 235 (“example of the broader . . .”), 236 (“well‐organized . . .”; “scattered throughout . . .”; “in a waste . . .”); 247 (“to train Indians . . .”).34. Christian Mcmillen, “Rain, Ritual, and Reclamation: The Failure of Irrigation on the Zuni and Navajo Reservations, 1883–1914,”Western Historical Quarterly 21 (winter 2000): 435–56, 446 (“seasonal obligations . . .”), 456 (“The Navajo and the Zuni . . .”).35. Donald J. Pisani, “Case Studies in Water and Power: The Yakima and the Pima,” in Pisani, Water and American Government, 181–201. See also Pisani, “Uneasy Allies: The Reclamation Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” in ibid., 154–80.36. Robert B. Campbell, “Newlands, Old Lands: Native American Labor, Agrarian Ideology, and the Progressive‐Era State in the Making of the Newlands Reclamation Project, 1902–1926,”Pacific Historical Review 71 (May 2002): 203–38, 211 (“The white farmers . . .”), 238 (“new systems of control . . .”).37. Ibid., 207 (“the newcomers’ best efforts . . .”); 238 (the remaining quotations).38. John Shurts, Indian Reserved Water Rights: The Winters Doctrine in Its Social and Legal Context, 1800s–1930s (Norman, Okla., 2000), 8 (“had real . . .”; “partially favorable”), 149 (“the reserved rights . . .”).39. Daniel McCool, Native Waters: Contemporary Indian Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era (Tucson, Ariz., 2002), xi (“to demonstrate . . .”), xiii–xiv (“some people . . .”), xiv (“the jury . . .”), 9 (“provide the legal . . .). For the earlier pessimism, see Hundley, “Water and the West in Historical Imagination,” 27–28. For two recent and cogent articles advocating negotiated settlements, see Harold S. Shepherd, “State Court Jurisdiction over Tribal Water Rights: A Call for Rational Thinking,”Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation 17 (fall 2002): 343–88; . For additional useful articles on the Indian water rights question, see John H. Davidson, “Indian Water Rights, the Missouri River, and the Administrative Process: What Are the Questions?” American Indian Law Review 24.1 (2000): 1–20; Mark A. Weitz, “Congressman John J. Rhodes and Representation: The Case of Native American Water Rights,” Western Legal History 12 (winter/spring 1999): 77–99; Barbara A. Cosens, “The Measure of Indian Water Rights: The Arizona Homeland Standard, Gila River Adjudication,” Natural Resources Journal 42 (fall 2000): 835–72.40. Gordon M. Bakken, ed., Law in the Western United States (Norman, Okla., 2000). For another perspective, see Dan Tarlock, “The Future of Prior Appropriation in the New West,”Natural Resources Journal 41 (fall 2001): 769–93.41. G. Emlen Hall, High and Dry: The Texas‐New Mexico Struggle for the Pecos River (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2002). See also William M. Fleming and G. Emlen Hall, “Water Conservation Incentives for New Mexico: Policy and Legislative Alternatives,”Natural Resources Journal 40 (winter 2000): 1–18.42. Jeffrey S. Ashley and Zachary A. Smith, Groundwater Management in the West (Lincoln, Neb., 1999), 246. See also William Blomquist, Tanya Heikkila, and Edella Schlager, “Institutions and Conjunctive Water Management among Three Western States,”Natural Resources Journal 41 (summer 2001): 653–84.43. Robert Glennon, Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping and the Fate of America's Fresh Waters (Washington, D.C., 2002).44. Char Miller, ed., Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict (Tucson, Ariz., 2001), 338 (“a revolution in water . . .”). For another valuable collection of essays which deal with water‐related issues and were brought together by Char Miller from the pages of High Country News, see Water in the West: A High Country News Reader (Corvallis, Ore., 2000).45. Daniel Tyler, “The Spanish Colonial Legacy and the Role of Hispanic Custom in Defining New Mexico Land and Water Rights,”Colonial Latin American Historical Review 4 (spring 1995): 149–65, 149 (quotes).46. John O. Baxter, Dividing New Mexico's Waters, 1700–1912 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1997), viii (“water administration”; “community acequia . . .”; “remains . . .”;); 107–08 (“governors exercised . . .”); 109 (“regional acequia . . .”). In essential agreement with both Tyler and Baxter is José A. Rivera, Acequia Culture: Water, Land, and Community in the Southwest (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1998) See also for a discussion of a subject far from arcane, Baxter , “Measuring New Mexico's Irrigation Water: How Big Is a Surco? New Mexico Historical Review 75 (July 2000): 397–413.47. Malcolm Ebright, “Sharing the Shortages: Water Litigation and Regulation in Hispanic New Mexico, 1600–1850,”New Mexico Historical Review 76 (January 2001): 3–45, 32 (“available water should be . . .”). See also Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550–1850 (Tucson, Ariz., 1984), 148–50; Meyer and Michael M. Brescia, “The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo as a Living Document: Water and Land Use Issues in Northern New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review 73 (Oct. 1998): 321–45; David Guillet, “Rethinking Legal Pluralism: Local Law in the Evolution of Water Property Rights in Northwestern New Spain,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (Jan. 1998): 45–48; John R. Brown, “ ‘Whiskey’s fer Drinkin’; Water’s fer Fightin’!’ Is It? Resolving a Collective Action Dilemma in New Mexico,” Natural Resources Journal 43 (winter 2003): 185–222.48. G. Emlen Hall, “Tularosa and the Dismantling of New Mexico Community Ditches,”New Mexico Historical Review 75 (January 2000): 77–106, 98 (“the issue of . . .”).49. Jennie L. Bricker and David E. Filippi, “Endangered Species Act Enforcement and Western Water Law,”Public Land and Resources Law Digest 38 (2001): 355–90, 357–58 (quotations).50. Robert W. Matson, William Mulholland: A Forgotten Forefather (Stockton, Calif., 1976); Margaret L. Davis, Rivers in the Desert: William Mulholland and the Inventing of Los Angeles (New York, 1993); Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2000).51. Catherine Mulholland, William Mulholland, xvii (“the problems inherent . . .”).52. Blake Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River: Its Life, Death, and Possible Rebirth (Baltimore, Md., 1999), 3 (“used, abused, and forgotten”), 13 (“upside‐down”).53. Ibid., 293 (“peeling back the concrete . . .”; “What began as a movement . . .”). For more recent attempts to revitalize the river, see the Christian Science Monitor, 10 February 2003.54. David Igler, Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850–1920 (Berkeley, Calif., 2001); Mark Arax and Rick Wartzman, The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire (New York, 2003).55. Sue McClurg, Water and the Shaping of California: A Literary, Political, and Technological Perspective on the Power of Water, and How the Effort to Control It Has Transformed the State (Sacramento, Calif., 2000), “Acknowledgments” page (“to create a better understanding . . .”); David Carle, Drowning the Dream: California's Water Choices at the Millennium (Westport, Conn., 2000). This book was published three years later as Water and the California Dream: Choices for the New Millennium (San Francisco, Calif., 2003).56. Brent M. Haddad, Rivers of Gold: Designing Markets to Allocate Water in California (Washington, D.C., 2000), 149–50 (“rural‐urban . . .”; “reliable year‐round . . .”; “the expansion of . . .”; “likely to be . . .”). See also Janis M. Carey and David L. Sunding, “Emerging Markets in Water: A Comparative Institutional Analysis of the Central Valley and Colorado‐Big Thompson Projects,”Natural Resources Journal 41 (spring 2001): 283–328.57. Norris Hundley, jr., The Great Thirst: Californians and Water—A History (Rev. ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2001), 466–511; “Quantification Settlement Agreement,” 10 October 2003, copy provided to the author by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California; Los Angeles Times, 17 October 2003.58. César N. Caviedes, El Niño in History: Storming Through the Ages (Gainesville, Fla., 2001).59. Environmental History 8 (Jan. 2003): 130.60. Michael F. Logan, The Lessening Stream: An Environmental History of the Santa Cruz River (Tucson, Ariz., 2002).61. James M. Aton and Robert S. McPherson, River Flowing from the Sunrise: An Environmental History of the Lower San Juan (Logan, Utah, 2000). See also William Debuys, “Navigating the River of Our Future: The Rio Poco‐Grande,”Natural Resources Journal 41 (spring 2001): 265–82; James M. Burson, “Middle Rio Grande Regional Water Resource Planning: The Pitfalls and the Promises,” Natural Resources Journal 40 (summer 2000): 533–66.62. Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Irrigated Landscape in the American West (Seattle, Wash., 1999), 22 (“canals and ditches . . .”; “The irrigators’ integration . . .”).63. Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed (Seattle, Wash., 2003).64. Ibid., 9.65. Jared Orsi, Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2004).66. Ibid., 3 (“Many apparently . . .), 167 (“unpredictable political . . .), 181 (“and let the rivers . . .”; “urban life in Los Angeles . . .”; “The solution . . .”), 182 (“the value of urban . . .”; “recreation, education, . . .”; “antagonistic viewpoints . . .”).67. Ibid., 163 (“the region's . . .”), 183 (“Nothing has been accomplished . . .”).68. William deBuys, with photographs by Joan Myers, Salt Dreams: Land & Water in Low‐Down California (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1999), 1. See also Evan Ward, Border Oasis: Water and the Political Ecology of the Colorado River Delta, 1940–1975 (Tucson, Ariz., 2003); Ward , “The Twentieth‐Century Ghosts of William Walker: Conquest of Land and Water as Central Themes in the History of the Colorado River Delta,”Pacific Historical Review 70 (Aug. 2001): 359–86; and “Water Issues in the U.S.‐Mexico Borderlands,” Special Issue, Natural Resources Journal 40 (fall 2000).69. deBuys, Salt Dreams, 252–53 (quotes).70. Eric W. Mogren, Warm Sands: Uranium Mill Tailings Policy in the Atomic West (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2002).71. Ibid., 12.72. Hundley, The Great Thirst (2000), 442–46; San Jose Mercury News, 7 March 2004; Needles Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, 3 April 2004. On a related problem, see Bob Faust, “Lead in the Water: Power, Progressivism, and Resource Control in a Missouri Mining Community,”Agricultural History 76 (spring 2002): 405–19.73. Among some of the recent critics, see Steven W. Carothers and Dorothy A. House, “Decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam: The Key to Colorado River Ecosystem Restoration and Recovery of Endangered Species? Arizona Law Review 42, no. 2 (2000): 215–38; ; Mathew B. Gross, ed., The Glen Canyon Reader (Tucson, Ariz., 2003). The preceding book is an anthology of eloquent voices—Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, John McPhee, Katie Lee, David Brower, among others—remembering the Glen Canyon that was. See also Richard Fleck, ed., A Colorado River Reader (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2000) and Michael Collier, Water, Earth, and Sky: The Colorado River Basin (Salt Lake City, Utah, 1999).74. Jared Farmer, Glen Canyon Dammed: Inventing Lake Powell and Canyon Country (Tucson, Ariz., 1999). See also Pearson, Still the Wild River Runs, passim. For environmental concerns raised about Yellowstone National Park, see Hugh T. Lovin, “Conservation, Irrigated Farming, and Yellowstone National Park's Cascade Corner,”Pacific Northwest Quarterly 93 (winter 2001/2002): 13–25; ; and . See also ; David R. Montgomery, Susan Bolton, Derek B. Booth, and Leslie Wall, Restoration of Puget Sound Rivers (Seattle, Wash., 2003);William L. Lang, “Beavers, Firs, Salmon, and Falling Water,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104 (summer 2003): 151–65; Jennifer Ott, “ ‘Ruining‘ the Rivers in the Snake Country: The Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fur Desert Policy,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 104 (summer 2003): 166–95; David Kent Sproul, “Environmentalism and Kaiparowits Power Project, 1964–76,” Utah Historical Quarterly 70 (fall 2002): 356–71; Michael Hibbard and Jeremy Madsen, “Environmental Resistance to Place-Based Collaboration in the U.S. West,” Society and Natural Resources 16 (Sept. 2003): 703–18. Another recent book of an environmental nature is Powell Greeland's Hydraulic Mining in California: A Tarnished Legacy (Spokane, Wash., 2001). It is a fine book but does not seem to add much not found in Robert Kelley's splendid forty‐five‐year‐old Gold vs. Grain: The Hydraulic Mining Controversy in California's Sacramento Valley—A Chapter in the Decline of Laissez‐Faire (Glendale, Calif., 1959).75. Elizabeth Grossman, Watershed: The Undamming of America (New York, 2002), xiii (quote).76. Russell Martin, A Story That Stands Like a Dam: Glen Canyon and the Struggle for the Soul of the West (New York, 1989); Keith Petersen, River of Life/Channel of Death: Fish and Dams on the Lower Snake (Lewiston, Idaho, 1995).Additional informationNotes on contributorsNorris HundleyNorris Hundley, jr. is a professor emeritus of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. The author wishes to thank Donald Pisani and Donald C. Jackson for reviewing a draft of this essay.