The westward expansion of the United States accelerated considerably with 1862's Homestead Act. But by the following decade, the movement of the frontier had slowed to a crawl. Settlement had crossed the 100th meridian, west of which there was not enough rainfall to support crops. The Interior West was largely made up of the formidable Great American Desert, and the destiny of an American republic based on agriculture from coast to coast began to look uncertain.

The difficulty of irrigating the Far West, ultimately, did not sway Congress from its attempts, though it did force policymakers to abandon their preferred methods of doing so. Congress first hoped that it could meet the challenge of the arid West by tweaking the existing homesteading model. When the federal government, rather reluctantly, took on the task itself of building water storage and irrigation infrastructure, it still faced an enormous task and risked failure. Government agencies were not the only ones that faced bankruptcy--many settlers tried their hands at establishing successful farms and failed in the attempt. In some cases, settlers simply abandoned those pieces of land, and in others, a second or third wave of farmers were finally able to succeed. Only about half of nineteenth-century Western towns still exist. Today, after over a century of dam building and with 50 dams managed by the US Bureau of Reclamation, only between two and three percent of Utah land is irrigated.

The Desert Land Act of 1877 was a significant step in the federal government's attempt to promote the settlement of arid lands. It was largely a failure. The Secretary of the Interior criticized it sharply, and the commissioner of the General Land Office called for its repeal as soon as it had passed. The law expanded the amount of land that homesteaders could claim, provided they succeeded in irrigating it. But one of the notable results, contrary to its intent, was that of ranchers' using it to claim watering holes. In fact, governors of Western states supported the act because of this reason: it promised to help Western ranching become competitive with the industry in the East. As with the Homestead Act of 1862, the implementation of the Desert Land Act was rife with fraud and abuse.

Even if all the loopholes had been sewn shut, the Desert Land Act displayed Congress's lack of understanding of the conditions in the Far West. Increasing the potential plots of land to 640 acres--a full section, or one square mile--was an acknowledgment that Western lands were more unforgiving, though the requirement that a single household irrigate that much land in three years was practically impossible. It was also nowhere near enough land for a herd of cattle, should the homesteader try to raise livestock. Additionally, sources of surface water were scarce, and developing that water, ie with dams and reservoirs, was not an individual effort.

John Wesley Powell was among the critics of the Desert Land Act. In 1878, he published his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, drawing on years of exploration and fact-finding that included two unprecedented rafting excursions down the Colorado River. The report, which encouraged continuing settlement, outlined a realistic path for doing so. Powell estimated that nearly all of the easily irrigable lands had already been claimed. Making use of the remaining marginal lands should be done with political districts based on watersheds, which would set different priorities for water consumption. The most important uses, such as growing food, would always get their full share. In dry years, lower priority uses would go without. Powell was partially inspired by the Mormon irrigators in Utah Territory, whose church played a central role in managing water and land and distributing the products. That is to say, Powell outlined a community-minded approach to settlement.

Policymakers ignored Powell's recommendations. There were two major implications in his report: one was that the Western landscape would scarcely tolerate free-for-all individualism. The second was that, as Western settlement was just getting started, it might be winding down. Both suggestions were anathema to American ideas about Manifest Destiny.

Land policy during this period was also seemingly allergic to the sort of orderly planning that Powell recommended. The Homestead Act, and other legislation that made freely available the storehouse of resources in the West, were not only subject to widespread fraud. Congress had begun to pass a series of updates and new laws that complicated and contradicted existing ones without significantly addressing their shortcomings.

By the time Congress passed the Carey Act of 1894, it had partially accepted the difficulty of settling the West through individual homesteads. The Carey Act offered large grants of land to the Western states for the purpose of developing water sources with private investment. This act, like the Desert Land Act, had very limited impact. The states did not have the resources to make full use of the legislation--and private capital was rightfully dubious of the prospect of getting a return on any investment in irrigaton works.

The 1890s saw the formation of the irrigation movement, a consortium of Western boosters and land speculators who hitched specious information about Western soil to the ideals of Manifest Destiny. (I'll write more about this in a separate post.) The movement helped lead to the establishment of the Reclamation Service in 1902.

With the Reclamation Act, or Newlands Act, the federal government signaled its intent to follow through with irrigating the West. Yet for the next three decades, the service faced extraordinary rates of default from the farmers who were supposed to pay back the construction costs for its dams and canals. Congress responded by loosening the terms for repayment--eventually allowing a payment schedule that typically extended to fifty years with no interest, and that was based on the farmers' ability to pay. Western reclamation, nominally intended to provide land for poor smallholders, began to cater to large, established farming operations because they were at least able to make their payments. Still, Reclamation's debts mounted, and the agency faced an increasingly hostile Congress.

Reclamation (now the Bureau of Reclamation) would only become solvent in the 1930s. The newly powerful federal government of the New Deal era could tackle ambitious projects with a bigger budget--and it could sell a plentiful, reliable source of hydropower from the dams to growing Western cities. Urban electricity consumers had become the paying customers for reclamation projects, effectively subsidizing some of the farms of the West.

But while the federal government would go on to play a hugely significant role in the West in the mid-twentieth century, the actual operations of the Reclamation Service in its first couple decades of existence were relatively small. Private and state efforts to develop irrigated acreage far outpaced Reclamation during this period. The Reclamation Act of 1902, seen this way, was the federal government's commitment to open up new land by putting water on it--a necessity for any practical use of the land. The frontier had not closed, and America would not allow it to as long as open land existed.

This is fairly complex history, inasmuch as some of these points are fairly nuanced. John Wesley Powell's depiction of the arid West was accurate. His bearish outlook for Western settlement, set against the endless optimism of boosters, now seems prophetic to many. Yet the population of the West did continue to grow, largely because of irrigation works constructed by private mutual irrigation companies. Several things are true: the federal government provided generous opportunities for poor (mostly white) people to own land, the disposal of the public domain overwhelmingly went to wealthy people, and homesteading was a difficult life with a high rate of failure. These two things are also true: the best lands were claimed by the 1880s, and there were more homesteading entries in the twentieth century than the nineteenth century. The overarching point is that agriculture in the West, already very difficult, only became more so as time went on. Rather than retreat, the federal government remained committed to its goal of Western settlement--to its goal of extending the frontier--even as the lands became more marginal and more expensive to develop. By contrast, the efforts of private irrigation and even federal Indian irrigation projects to open new lands flagged by the end of the 1800s.

The establishment of the Reclamation Service speaks to the federal government's practical aims as well as ideological ones. Regardless of the goal, policymakers tended to treat water as an infinite resource. By the end of the twentieth century, Reclamation would begin to reevaluate the practicality of dam-building, as suitable dam sites dwindled and post-war budgets tightened. Water continues to fuel the ideological functions of the US West into the twentieth century. I will continue to explore this point in future posts.

References: Donald Pisani, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bureau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902-1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

Read more:

The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)

How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)

Boosters and Crusaders, Megacities and the Safety Valve: Iterations on the Oldest New Idea in the West (1878 - 2023)

Free-for-all in the Uinta Basin (1861 - 1922)