A Short History of Water in the US West
The current era of water in the US West begins with Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, though irrigation practices from the Spanish settlement period still guide water management to this day in some places. The Mormons' view of water and land, held in common under church stewardship (and decisively not subject to Ute and Shoshone territorial customs), governed resource usage until Utah Territory's county court system began administering water rights in 1852. (Land was not officially privately owned in the territory until 1869.) Around this same time, in 1848, gold mining in the Sierra Nevadas played an impactful role in Western water. Settlers implemented the principle of prior appropriation organically in hydraulic mining in California and on farms in Utah, and the Western states have, for the most part, codified the doctrine into state law independently. The prior appropriation doctrine, for example, is sometimes known as the Colorado Doctrine, after the state's Supreme Court affirmed it in a court case in 1882. The doctrine differs from riparian rights, common in the East, in that water rights can be claimed for lands distant from the water source, based on the seniority of claims and dependent on being put to "beneficial use." (California is the exception among Western states, as riparian rights have higher priority, but its Water Commission Act of 1913 outlined the cases where appropriative rights can be applied.)
Over the course of the 1800s, informal and ad hoc use of water developed into more formal systems. Particularly, the partnering of neighbors to build crude earthen or even wooden dams, for flood control or to capture spring runoff, evolved into the formation of mutual irrigation companies or irrigation districts. These consisted of stakeholder farmers, who pooled money and resources to build lasting dams and assign water rights. These efforts laid the foundation of Western irrigation systems well into the twentieth century. Until the Carey Act of 1894, private efforts, guided very loosely by state or local laws, comprised the entirety of irrigation projects, with one exception.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs pursued the first irrigation project on federal land in the West. The Colorado River Indian Irrigation Project was approved in 1867 but quickly ran over budget and was never completed. This represents a very early federal irrigation project, and is rather early in terms of Western irrigation more generally. Further Indian irrigation projects did not proceed until the 1890s, after the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887. The purpose of Indian irrigation, at that point and prior, was to assimilate Native Americans into Anglo society through private property and agriculture.
Aside from Indian irrigation, federal efforts at addressing the aridity of the far West began not long after the Homestead Act of 1862. These efforts were largely failures. The Timber Culture Act of 1873 promoted the planting of trees on the plains in the (false) belief that forests would influence the climate. Around this time, a number of wet years that coincided with the cultivation efforts of homesteaders on the Great Plains led many to accept the pseudo-scientific idea that “rain follows the plow.” The Desert Land Act of 1877 was an attempt to adapt the Homestead Act to the arid West, though prominent officials critiqued the act for being ineffective immediately upon its passage. The act enlarged the amount of land that could be claimed from 160 to 640 acres, provided that the claimant irrigate the land within 3 years. The act was widely abused by ranchers, who used it to secure watering holes for their herds. Among the Desert Land Act's critics was John Wesley Powell, who argued in his 1878 Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States that settlement of the Western US should be based around the availability of water. Powell's report ran counter to many assumptions of the time, as well as a number of financial interests; only by the mid-twentieth century would Powell's recommendations be vindicated.
The Carey Act of 1894 offered grants of federal land to Western states so long as they could finance the construction of water storage projects. Idaho made substantial use of the act, though it was the exception among the Western states. Large irrigation projects were expensive and required engineering expertise, and the states lacked funding. Private sources of funds were (appropriately) skeptical of earning a return on their investment.
The federal government passed the Reclamation Act, or Newlands Act, in 1902, bolstered by a push from the irrigation movement of the 1890s. This established the Reclamation Service, which constructed some notable irrigation projects but also faced severe budget shortfalls that threatened the longevity of the agency. The Service depended on farmers to pay back the costs of construction for irrigation projects, though many farmers floundered in the dry, high-elevation region. Private and state efforts irrigated more new acres than the Reclamation Service during this period. The Bureau of Indian Affairs also started its own engineering corps in 1913, though it lacked funding to complete its projects. Additionally, (incomplete) Indian irrigation efforts, largely because of the continuing allotment of reservation trust lands, served more settler farmers than Natives. The Reclamation Service assumed responsibility for the three largest Indian irrigation projects between 1907 and 1924.
In 1922, the seven Western states in the Colorado River Basin met to negotiate the Colorado River Compact. Each state except Arizona ratified the Compact that year, which divided the Basin (along political, not hydrological, lines) into an Upper Basin and Lower Basin and allocated 7.5 million acre-feet (MAF) per year to each. The original Compact notably excluded Mexico and all Native American Tribes within the Basin. A subsequent negotiation in 1944 allocated 1.5 million acre-feet to Mexico, which would only come out of the US states' allocations in a period of scarcity, though the negotiations continued to exclude Native American Tribes. Arizona ratified this updated version, though legal battles between Arizona and California would continue for decades. The Upper Basin divided up its 7.5MAF allocation by percentages in the Upper Basin Compact of 1948. The original Colorado River Compact overestimated the average annual flows of the Colorado River System by a considerable amount, and future updates failed to acknowledge or address this. The river system continues to be overallocated based on the original faulty estimates, though the ability of Western states to use their full allocations has depended on the building of infrastructure to divert and store water from the Colorado and its tributaries.
The Reclamation Service became the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923. Financial troubles plagued it until the “high dam” era of the 1930s and '40s. New Deal politics embraced massive concrete dams on Western rivers as a symbol of humanity’s triumph over difficult circumstances as well as a novel source of electricity. Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam, and the Grand Coulee Dam forged a way forward for the struggling Bureau. Selling hydropower to urban customers became a subsidy for the irrigation projects whose farmers needed lenient repayment terms. In this way, the Bureau pivoted from its original, single-purpose irrigation dams to multi-purpose projects---often designed as systems with multiple dams that would provide electricity, municipal & industrial water, and recreation.
The 1950s and '60s marked the height of the agency’s power and influence. But the agency also started to attract new critics. Environmentalists organized to stop the Echo Park Dam proposal, part of the original Colorado River Storage Project Act that passed in 1956, without the dam. The proposed Echo Park Dam, in Dinosaur National Monument, and the Glen Canyon Dam became matters of national concern. Environmentalists publicized the loss of scenic landscapes as well as the impacts of dams on wildlife, particularly fishes.
In the 1970s, researchers began to uncover the Bureau’s dubious methods of accounting. Budget proposals regularly omitted costs and overestimated repayments. Major projects received congressional approval only to use up their budgets well ahead of schedule, at which point the Bureau would go back to Congress and voters for reauthorization. Frustrated with the costs of these Western water projects, President Jimmy Carter drew up a “hit list” of reclamation projects that he wanted to defund. The move cost him considerable political capital but also served to chasten the Bureau.
By this point, Reclamation engineers began to voice concerns about a lack of good dam sites for future projects. Idaho’s Teton Dam failed in 1976, claiming 11 lives and raising doubts about the future of federal reclamation. In 1988, the Bureau declared that the "arid West essentially has been reclaimed" and began its pivot from a civil works agency to a water management agency. In 1990, the Lower Basin of the Colorado River System used its full 7.5MAF allocation for the first time. Major water projects that had already been approved continued construction, though the development of surface water in the West was reaching its completion. Some states continue to plan for the development of additional surface water sources, though these projects are expensive and increasingly unpopular as the public becomes more opposed to their environmental impacts. Today, 20% of farmers in the West receive some amount of water from a federal reclamation project. While this speaks to the centrality of the Bureau of Reclamation in the contemporary water landscape, it also underscores the distributed nature of private and state efforts, many of which date back to the nineteenth century, which provide the other 80% of irrigation water. Prior appropriation continues to govern Western water, meaning that the oldest water right claims continue to have priority.
In 1963, the Supreme Court ruled in a case between Arizona and California that Indian reservations in the Lower Basin held a water right under a 1908 Supreme Court ruling in Winters v. United States. This was further affirmed in another Arizona v. California case in 1983. These rulings brought a number of Tribes in the Colorado River Basin to the table in water negotiations, though this has only been the beginning of the process for the Tribes to turn "paper water" into "wet water." Their ability to use their water rights (or "Winters rights," after the 1908 Supreme Court case) is dependent on infrastructure. The Bureau of Indian Affairs has never completed an Indian irrigation project. Many Tribes have opted for settlements rather than costly lawsuits that lead to uncertain futures. These settlements have typically involved the trading of some water rights in exchange for the promise of an infrastructure project. Winters rights fall under the category of federal reserved rights, which exist in tension with the Western states' doctrines of prior appropriation. Rights defined under prior appropriation are dependent on being put to "beneficial use," while reserved rights are more open-ended. The most likely path for Tribes to realize their Winters rights is for those rights to first be quantified, a process which is still incomplete for some Tribes.
As the region has continued to grow, residential development converts much farmland into housing. Because urban centers use much less water per capita than agriculture, overall water consumption has tended to plateau or drop as urban populations grow, especially as Western cities emphasize conservation practices. Las Vegas, for example, has pursued aggressive conservation measures, leading to a net drop in water consumption as the population has continued to grow. Advanced drilling and pumping techniques have allowed more Western farmers to tap groundwater for irrigation as sources of surface water have gone increasingly toward municipal and industrial uses. While a century's worth of inefficient irrigation practices, such as flood irrigation, had charged the region's aquifers to excessive levels in some cases, these aquifers are currently being depleted rapidly.
By about the year 2000, the West was in a megadrought--a long term trend toward a hotter and drier climate caused by global climate change. By 2022, the effects of this megadrought became impossible to ignore. Great Salt Lake hit a historic low, and the Bureau of Reclamation announced that it was considering the unilateral curtailment of water rights in order to preserve the functionality of the Colorado River System as a whole. While water levels at Great Salt Lake, and in reservoirs across the West, have since recovered, difficult decisions await the future of water in the West.
Read more:
The Agrarian Foundations of the Western Water Crisis (1620 - 1902)
The 100th Meridian: Where "Free Land" Requires "Free Water" (1862 - 1923) How (Not) to Make the Desert Blossom as the Rose (1847 - 1860)Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)
"The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb" (1891 - 1945)