Western Denial of their Dependence on the Federal Government

Question for Discussion: According to
Limerick, why do Westerners deny their
dependence on the Federal Government
and the past?

Reading: Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, pp. 78-96;
Stegner, "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: The
Inheritance " ; Wilkinson, "Water and the Environment" ;
Alaska Thanks You

Video: Cadillac Desert: Water Projects ;
The Greatest Good:Using the Forest

The West & the Federal Government

Limerick, Denial and Dependence (in-class)
Stegner, The Inheritance (in-class)
Wilkinson, Water and the Environment (in-class)
Alaska Thanks You (in-class)
The Great American Desert (in-class)
Frank Spearman, "The Great American
Desert," Harpers, 1888
Percentage by State of U.S. Government
land in the West (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West (in-class)

Bureau of Reclamation

Bureau of Reclamation History (in-class)
U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Data Web (in-class)
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
Map of Water Users in the West (in-class)
Damming in the West
Bureau of Reclamation
Army Corps of Engineers: Corps Lake Gateway
Federal Government Recreation Areas
Reservation System (in-class)

Filling Up the New West
Population per Square Mile in the West
Map of Indian Reservations today
Tourist Playgrounds in the West
Major Ski Areas in the West
Wilderness Areas in the United States
Filling Up the Modern West
The U.S. at Night
Public Land in the West
Growth Rate in the West in the 1990s
Percent Changes in Resident Population
in the West: 1990-2000
Non-economic factors in why people
move to and live in the American West

Damming the West
Dams in the West (in-class)
Water Use in the Western United States (in-class)
The Geography of Development and Water
in the American West
You Can't Go West, Stress in the High Country
(in-class)

Bureau of Land Management

Bureau of Land Management (BLM)
Bureau of Land Management (BLM) History
(in-class)
BLM Land in the West (in-class)
Grazing Permits on Public Lands in the West
(in-class)

Three Traits of the American West (in-class)
Alaska Thanks You (in-class)
The Great American Desert (in-class)
Frank Spearman, "The Great American
Desert," Harpers, 1888
Long's Map of the Great American Desert (in-class)
Long Describes the Great American Desert
(in-class)
Wilkinson, Water and the Environment (in-class)
Stegner, The Inheritance: The
West and Government Aid (in-class)
Annual Rainfall in the West (in-class)
The Bureau of Reclamation (in-class)
Damming the West
Percentage by State of U.S. Government
land in the West (in-class)
Federal Lands and Indian Reservations
in the West
Federal Landlords in the West (in-class)
Public Lands managed by the BLM
and the Forest Service in the West (in-class)
U.S. Forest Service Lands ( in-class)
Map of the National Forests ( in-class)
National Forest Service: What does it Do? (in-class)
The Bureau of Land Management (in-class)
Limerick, Denial and Dependence (in-class)
Limerick on Western Denial (in-class)
Water Use in the Western United States
Water Users in the West (1990 )
Map of Water Users in the West (in-class)
Army Corps of Engineers: Corps Lake Gateway
Google Earth Map of Corps Lakes
Federal Government Recreation Areas (in-class)
The Geography of Development and
Water in the American West (Travis Report)
You Can't Go West, Stress in the High Country

Stegner, The Inheritance

"From approximately the 95th meridian all the way to the Pacific, in fact, reclamation has already remade the map of the West. It has had an effect on the very shape and tension of the earth: reservoirs such as Lake Mead have redistributed so much weight in water and silt that seismological stations watchfully record the settling and shifting of the crust, and the isostacy which Powell and Gilbert and Dutton established as a physical force has been affected by the work of men's hands. The whole Western future is tied to the multiple-purpose irrigation-power-flood-control-streammanagement projects built to specifications first enunciated by Powell's bureaus, and the West's institutions and politics are implicit in the great river plans. "
(353)

"Within the seven great reclamation regions, planning has increasingly come to be by coherent river basins and drainage basins, as Powell foresaw that it must. The responsibility for long-range planning that Powell thought belonged to the federal government, since no one else could or would assume it, has been assumed. The Bureau of Reclamation which came into being with the Newlands Act just a little before Powell's death in 1902 is such a bureau." (354)

"If they had listened to Powell fifty years earlier they would not have had so hard a lesson to learn in 1934. For while Taylor's bill [ the Taylor Grazing act] was before the Senate, winds from the West carried soil from the dustbowl states clear to the east coast and the air of the capital was thick with the presence of what one Senator called "the most tragic, the most impressive lobbyist" that had ever come to Washington." (356)

"And yet what seems, on the maps and on the record, to be a progressive triumph for the Major's ideas is not quite so complete as it seems. The forces that he fought all during his public life are, as of 1953, not only still there but active and aggressive. The agencies that he helped consolidate still persist in division and antagonism. The private interests that he feared might monopolize land or water in the West are still there, still trying to do just that. And the scientific solutions to western problems are still fouled up by Gilpins, by the double-talk of Western members of Congress, by political pressures from oil or stock or power or land or water companies, by the obfuscations of press-agents and the urgings of Iobbyists. In 1953 a public land policy that a few years before had looked reasonably consistent and settled was in danger of complete overturn." (378)

"Were there land-hogs trying to corral grazing empires in Powell's time, and not above barefaced trespass on the public domain? They are still there, only now they are trying to bite out of national parks and national forests chunks of grazing land, oil land, timberland, that they covet. The conservation forces swamped such a foray in 1947; they will have others to fight, and they may never be able to restore the full effectiveness of the Grazing Service." (380)

"And both the bureaucrat and the idealist knew that private interests, whether they dealt in cattle or sheep, oil, minerals, coal, timber, water, or land itself, could not be trusted or expected to take care of the land or conserve its resources for the use of future generations. They could be trusted or expected to protect neither the monetary nor the non-monetary values of the land: even in his day Americans had the passenger pigeon and the buffalo, the plowed and eroded plains, the cutover forests of Michigan , to tell them where "nature and the common incidents of human life" would lead us. Later years have added the Dust Bowl and the eroded watersheds to the evidence." (381-82)

"Too bad. But the alternative was worse. The alternative was creeping deserts, flooded river valleys, dusty miles of unused and unusable land, feeble or partial or monopolistic utilization of the available land and water. The alternative was great power and great wealth to a few and for a brief time rather than competence and independence for the communities of small freeholders on which his political economy unchangeably rested. (382)

Wilkinson, Water and the Environment

"The dam-building movement from the 1920s through the 1970s re-made the face of the West. It was led by the Bureau of Reclamation but was also fueled by the Army Corps of Engineers, the Bonneville Power Administration, cities and towns, the state engineer's offices, and various irrigation districts and other special water districts. Private irrigators, energy companies, and developers of all sorts either participated
in the publicly funded efforts or went their own ways. The era bred hundreds of major projects, tens of thousands of smaller ones. Dams, reservoirs, and diversions re-worked virtually every river in the region." (486-86)

"... [The Columbia River, all the way from Bonneville Dam near Portland, Oregon, to the Canadian border, is almost all reservoir just a few short stretches of free-flowing river remain. On the Colorado River, Hoover Dam set off a rush to develop that reached throughout the basin. The other gargantuan structure, every bit the equal of Hoover, is Glen Canyon Dam. Seven hundred and ten feet tall, the dam created the 27-million-acre-foot Lake Powell , at 186 miles the longest reservoir in the world. Lakes Mead and Powell together hold almost exactly four years flow of the Colorado River. Dozens of other major dams, lesser than the two Goliaths but giants nonetheless, plug up the Colorado and its tributaries. Massive canal and pipeline systems transport water hundreds of miles away from the river--the Colorado River Aqueduct to the Los Angeles--San Diego area, the $4 billion Central Arizona Project to Phoenix and Tucson, the San Juan-Chama Project to Albuquerque, and no fewer than nine major tunnels bored under the Continental Divide to export water from Colorado's Western Slope to the East SIope cities and suburbs of Denver and Colorado Springs and irrigation projects on the South Platte and Arkansas rivers. Every other western river basin--the upper Missouri, draining large parts of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas; the Sacramento-San Joaquin system of California; the Klamath of California and Oregon; the Rio Grande of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas; and many smaller ones--saw project after project, diversion after diversion." (486)

"From the 1920s through the 1960s, reservoir capacity in the West mushroomed, expanding at the rate of 80 percent per decade. The dams of the Colorado River watershed hold back 72 million acre-feet of water in storage-nearly six times the annual flow of the river. Missouri River impoundments dam up 85 million acre-feet. In the Pacific Northwest, reservoirs capture 55 million acre-feet; in California , the figure is 39 million acre-feet. On the much smaller Rio Grande , 7.8 million acre-feet of water are held each year, more than twice the annual runoff of the river. The Bureau of Reclamation alone has built 355 storage reservoirs and 16,000 miles of canals, 1,500 miles of pipelines, and 278 miles of tunnels. Apparently no one has tried to count the total number of miles (though they surely exceed 100,000) of canals that divert the flows of western rivers and deliver water to irrigators and other water users. West-wide, more than a million artificial reservoirs, lakes, and ponds store 294 million acre-feet. This is the equivalent of twenty-two Colorado Rivers hacked up behind dams and over former canyons. It is enough to put Montana , Wyoming , Colorado , and New Mexico--an entire tier of states, from Canada to Mexico --under a foot of water." (486)

"One pervasive problem is the waste of water. The combination of overbuilt water supplies, heavy subsidies, and a hands-off attitude toward individual water use has created a situation in which the arid American West has some of the worst water conservation practices in the world. Per capita water consumption in the West is three times greater than in the eastern states. Much of this is accounted for by irrigation, but even in the cities, westerners use 45 percent more water than their eastern counterparts. (487)

"... In western cities, the high water use is attributable mainly to lush lawns and golf courses (both of which give rise to large evaporative losses in the arid climate when water is overapplied) and to excessive use inside homes and businesses. The greatest losses of all, however, take place in irrigation, due to inefficiencies in transportation from stream or reservoir to the fields and on-field application in agriculture." (487)

Map of Water Users in the West (in-class)

"By and large, the states allow the irrigators--who . . . use 80 percent to 90 percent of all water in every western state--to continue their traditional practices. In a few cases, perhaps most notably in the Central Valley of California and the fields in the Phoenix-Tucson area, irrigators have begun to adopt conservation measures such as leveling fields by laser systems and installing cement-lined canals; drip and trickle irrigation, based on the use of corrugated pipes run down furrows between rows of crops; and sprinkler systems, which, due to precise application, use much less water than does flood irrigation... "
(487)

"Water law in the western states traditionally dealt only with water quantity, not quality. Those who built the system had an intense interest in a supply of water but virtually none in pollution controls. The tacit understanding that controls of any kind were to be avoided kept pollution matters, especially as to mining and agriculture, out of the statute hooks. When the federal government began to get serious about water pollution with the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1973, irrigators managed to lobby through an exemption from the "non-point source" provisions of the act. Thus, the Clean Water Act dealt with point source pollution (from discrete sources. such as industrial pipes) and with most forms of
non-point sources (diffuse surface runoff, including soil erosion, such as from logging, grazing, and road building or other construction activity). The agribusiness lobby, however, had worked hard, and a conspicuous exception from the 1973 act was runoff from agriculture, the largest source of soil loss. "

"Coming from the nation's high court or not, the Winters doctrine has provided few benefits to the tribes. Winters was common knowledge, but it was ignored, subverted, and circumvented. Water developers detested any rules outside of their tightly controlled state systems. Taking the cue, state officials effectively read Winters out of existence through a business-as-usual approach of granting state water rights and allowing diversions that directly conflicted with Indian rights. Federal officials, supposedly bound to act as trustees for Indian rights, were, if anything, worse. They pushed for federal subsidies for non-Indian projects on Indian rivers and ignored potential Indian projects. There were almost no exceptions... "(490)

"On the other hand, even an ancient priority can be insufficient to guarantee social equity. An Indian water right, like that of the Jicarilla Apaches, with an 1887 priority date, gets a tribe little or nothing when there is a competing project on the same river, built and subsidized for non- Indians under the 1902 Reclamation Act. Even after a long decade of re-examination and some impressive paper laws, most wet water is still allocated to the beneficiaries of the classic prior appropriation doctrine. It is still mostly business as usual. " (490)

Limerick, Denial and Dependence

"In the early develpment of the Far West, five principal resources lay ready for exploitation: furs, farmland, timber, minerals, and federal money. Territorial experience got Westerners in the habit of asking for federal subsidies, and the habit persisted long after other elements of the Old West had vanished." (82)

"Nothing so undermines the Western claim to a tradition of independence as this matter of federal support to Western development. The two key activities--the control of Indians and the distribution of land--were primarily federal responsibilities, at times involving great expense....Failing to restrain or regulate access to the public grazing lands or to the timber lands, the federal government in effect subsidized private cattle raisers and loggers with unlimited access to national resources." (82)

"Western dependence on federal resources did not end with the territories. Neither did the accepting of help--with resentment. Far from declining in the twentieth century, federal participation in the Western economy expanded. The Reclamation Act of 1902, which created the Bureau of Reclamation, put the national government in the center of the control and development of water, the West's key resource....The Taylor grazing act of 1934 finally centralized the control of grazing on public domain. Beyond the Taylor Act, many New Deal measures framed to address the national problems of the Great Depression were especially rewarding for the West." (87)

"Of all the meaning assigned to Western independence, none had more emotional power than the prospect of becoming independent of the past. But Western Americans did what most travelers do: they took their problems with them." (90)

Western Denial

"Especially in the American West, where the federal government, outside capital, and the market have always been powerful factors of change, the limits of personal autonomy do not seem like news. And yet humans have a well-established capacity to meet facts of life with disbelief. In a region where human interdependence has been self-evident, Westerners have woven a net of denial. That net, it is clear in our times, can entrap as well as support." (95-96)