The Case of Uphill Flowing Water

"We all know that water runs uphill toward money," wrote Colorado governor Richard Lamm in 1976. "Other values are largely ignored." This adage continues to shape ideas about Western water, but how true is it? According to water writer John Fleck, in a blog post titled "Can we retire 'Water flows uphill toward money'?", the phrase should be, "Water sometimes flows uphill toward money, while at other times it doesn't, and we should think carefully about why it is or isn't the case here." He goes on to write that the idea is a "myth" that "gets in the way of sane water policy conversations."

I agree with Fleck. The idea that water flows toward money is a bad heuristic. Understanding water primarily as a way to develop land, as I do, will overlap in some important areas with the idea. But the points of divergence are important.

There are two questions here, both of which I intend to answer, if you'll bear with me. The primary one--what's wrong with this truism--should come after a characterization of the school of thought that has fleshed it out. In many cases, as Fleck acknowledges, money does have an uncanny knack for directing water toward itself. I am not disputing that. But I believe that there is something very important that this idea does not capture. That explanation will lead to the second question, which is: why does this idea continue to have so much purchase in contemporary water discourse?

The idea has been best articulated through the "iron triangle" theory. Political scientists in the 1960s identified a mechanism that was especially pronounced in federal reclamation, where agricultural interests in the West accessed large amounts of public spending. These special water districts--hardly known as powerful political players, seeing as how they were located in rural places and represented just a tiny sliver of their states' economies--represented one point on the triangle. By working with their congressional representatives (point number two), large water projects gained congressional approval so that the Bureau of Reclamation (point three) could build them. The farmers got water, the congressional reps made their constituents happy, and the Bureau became more powerful.

Marc Reisner's approach in Cadillac Desert, the most influential and popular book about Western water, is heavily informed by the iron triangle idea. "In the West, it is said, water flows uphill toward money. And it literally does," Reisner writes, going on to reference California's State Water Project and the Central Arizona Project. In both cases, the projects perform an enormous vertical lift of water, at considerable cost, into another hydrological basin where cities can make use of it. (Reisner's book focuses primarily on federal agencies, the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, though the State Water Project, as the name suggests, was not a federal project. It does, however, share some components with the federal Central Valley Project.)

In its most minimal form, there is little to object to in the iron triangle theory. It describes the political process through which federal reclamation operated. Even extrapolating a bit, as Reisner does, to demonstrate how the Bureau of Reclamation pursued projects that were not in the broader political interest, makes plenty of sense. The iron triangle theory is also known to political scientists as water "subgovernment," hinting at the way that planners operated out of the public eye. After all, no one would deny the influence that money has in national politics. Yet it is easy to overstate the case that Reisner makes, as Mark Hertsgaard does in an article for the Daily Beast from 2015, and difficult for those who are new to Western water to discern where the overreach occurs.

Hertsgaard recommends Cadillac Desert as the one book that readers should go to to understand water in the West, writing that "politics and money, not science or common sense, are what have always guided water policymaking in the West," and "sweetheart deals hatched in back rooms and rammed through state and federal legislatures" are responsible for our water woes.

Where to start. Let me begin by saying that Cadillac Desert is a good book. Reisner supports his main argument with a decade's worth of research and reporting. He doesn't slice the cake in the same way that I would, but I can't fault a talented writer like Reisner for making a big interpretation and convincingly backing it up. But while Reisner is not necessarily responsible for every reader's takeaways, it is easy to see how Hertsgaard arrived at this idea that "politics and money" have "always guided water policymaking," which is not true. Reisner gestures at big, eternal themes, opening the book with an account of the ancient Hohokam civilization in what is now Arizona. The Hohokam, according to Reisner, became overreliant on irrigation in the desert, leading to what archaeologists believe was a societal collapse. In this sense, Reisner seems to want to extrapolate some larger truth from a couple of decades when federal reclamation was at the height of its influence. Toward the end of the book, when he details President Jimmy Carter's attempt to defund the most extravagant Western water projects, Reisner characterizes Reclamation as so powerful that even the president cannot bring it down. Yet by the time the book was first published in 1986, Reclamation's influence was decidedly waning. In fact, in 1988, Reclamation declared that "the arid West essentially has been reclaimed," and the agency pivoted away from civil works. As one blogger puts it, Cadillac Desert "isn't accurate now (in fact, the book made itself obsolete)."

For a historian such as myself, change over time is important. So the idea that there is an "always" in water policymaking makes me raise my eyebrows. Again, Reisner is not responsible for a misreading, but the Reclamation Service struggled financially in its first three decades; it only became a powerhouse after World War II. The "subsidies" to farmers date back to the Reclamation Service period, but Congress put these into place because farming in the arid West was very difficult and the Service had a rather social Darwinian approach to success--farmers who couldn't overcome obstacles had no business being there. The Service extended repayment terms on interest-free loans and canceled construction repayment debts a number of times, mostly because farmers were simply in no position to make the required payments.

By the Bureau's heyday, these lenient repayment terms amounted to a subsidy for farmers, though it is important to note where those subsidies came from. For the most part, they came from urban hydroelectricity customers. The end to the Service's financial troubles came from building hydropower dams in the 1930s and 1940s. The original purpose of Reclamation, building single-purpose irrigation dams, evolved to include multi-purpose projects that delivered municipal and industrial water and provided hydropower and even recreation in addition to irrigation water. There is a subsidy from the general treasury--providing forty or fifty years' worth of interest-free loans, though that is a relatively small part of the support that farmers enjoyed. (And, yes, there were instances of "double dipping" in which farmers received Reclamation project water while also being paid by the federal government not to farm. Obviously I am not defending that sort of thing.) But urban ratepayers were largely the ones subsidizing irrigation projects, and they were happy to do so.

As for the "sweetheart deals hatched in back rooms," this is not entirely accurate either, though, again, one would be forgiven for taking that idea away from a reading of Cadillac Desert. Let me demonstrate how an idea along those lines has become conventional wisdom. In 1971, a Ralph Nader study group released a report titled Damming the West. The report was an influential critique of the Bureau of Reclamation, raising environmental concerns, (approporiately) exposing the dubious financial practices of the Bureau, and even pointing to the Bureau's neglect of the region's Native Americans. The report borrowed from the iron triangle framework and lent it a bit of muckracking flair--a precursor to Cadillac Desert.

But the authors are too quick to handwave away the support that Reclamation projects had among urbanites. They acknowledge that residents in Phoenix and Tucson supported the Central Arizona Project (a popular and worthy target of Reclamation critics), "despite the high project [municipal and industrial] water prices." But the authors write that "their support has not been altogether voluntary. Constrained severely by their inability to exploit, on their own, water supply alternatives cheaper than CAP, the cities have been forced to accept CAP as the answer to their future water needs. The state legislature could make things easier for the cities, but it seems unlikely to do so as long as agricultural interests retain a decisive influence within it." So, in other words, a million poor city dwellers, who supported the project despite higher water costs for themselves, only did so because they were at the mercy of agricultural interests. This intepretation is a stretch, and it should require quite a bit of substantiation that the authors do not provide. Whether or not the CAP was a good idea or that the cities made the right call is another question, but I have a hard time accepting the idea that their hands were forced.

Historian Donald Pisani takes issue with these types of characterizations. He writes, “Westerners supported water projects not because they had been duped or deceived, but because those projects stimulated economic growth in what appeared to be a ‘capital starved’ region.” Pisani critiques the approach of Reisner and historian Donald Worster, author of another influential book about Western water, Rivers of Empire, pointing out how their depiction of the Bureau of Reclamation as an agency that imposed its will on the region overlooks how enthusiastic residents were for these projects. The Central Utah Project, for example, was another multipurpose project that Jimmy Carter targeted with his "hit list." Despite the $300 million price tag for its Bonneville Irrigation and Drainage component, voters in the affected counties voted in landslides in 1965 and 1985 to approve the repayment contract. The second vote required that Utah take on a significantly higher portion of the costs, something which the voters approved. This is in addition to strong bipartisan support from politicians and institutions over decades.

We could also look at the Bear River Project proposed in 1962 as a counter-example to Reisner's depiction of Reclamation as an unstoppable juggernaut, or as an agency dedicated to making water run uphill. Originally devised by Utahns who sought the help of the Bureau (not the other way around), the project ran into obstacles when promoters overestimated its support, crucially among Idaho farmers. The matter of who exactly would benefit from the project plagued it through multiple revisions. Once Idaho farmers, whose land would be inundated under one or more dams, characterized the project as a Utah water grab, there was little hope in assuaging their concerns. By the end of the decade, even when the Bureau was at its most powerful, popular opposition killed the project proposal.

Or, we could ask why the Bureau of Indian Affairs was unable to avail itself of iron triangle politics, especially since the Army Corps of Engineers was able to follow Reclamation's lead in gaining approval for projects in the West, a region outside of its purview until the mid-twentieth century.The BIA even had a head start on Reclamation when it came to irrigation projects after all. To my knowledge, Dan McCool is the only one to have asked this question. His book Command of the Waters argues that the BIA did operate according to a version of the iron triangle, but that theirs was weaker than Reclamation's. My feeling is that this is more useful as a question to "how" than "why."

This is not to say that the Bureau of Reclamation built good projects based on honest accounting. But it complicates the picture of who exactly was taking advantage of whom. If you look carefully at the idea of water flowing uphill, a seeming contradiction appears. To go back to the Daily Beast article: "Agriculture uses 80 percent of [California's] developed water. Some have questioned whether a sector that accounts for a mere 2 percent of California's economy should be guzzling so much of its water." Or, as the author quotes former Reclamation commissioner Daniel Beard (now an outspoken critic of the Bureau), "Alfalfa irrigation is the single largest use of water in California," and we dry up rivers "so a hobby farmer can grow hay for his daughter's horse." Leaving aside the fact that California has, by far, the most valuable agricultural sector in the country, is there not tension in the characterization of a water system that benefits the rich and powerful while also supplying an industry that does not contribute enough to the economy? The switch-up is conspicuous in the introduction to Cadillac Desert. Reisner writes, "Barry Goldwater, scourge of welfare and champion of free enterprise, was a lifelong supporter of the Central Arizona Project, which comes as close to socialism as anything this country has ever done (the main difference being that those who are subsidized are well-off, even rich)(emphasis added)." We're in muddy waters already, but okay. He goes on in the same paragraph: "Alan Cranston, once the leading liberal in the US Senate, the champion of the poor and the oppressed, successfully lobbied to legalize illegal sales of subsidized water to giant corporate farms, thus denying water--and farms--to thousands of the poor and oppressed (emphasis added)." So which is it? Should federal reclamation subsidize water or not? It's a very small needle that Reisner presents us, which is not as concerning as the fact that few readers even attempt to thread it.

The explanation depends on the iron triangle theory--through these supposed backroom deals, water is priced too low and subject to waste as a result. The theory is necessary for a convenient shift in focus when rhetoric requires, from millionaire vegetable growers/landowners in California's Central Valley to hobby farmers around the region, though this monolithic view of agriculture obscures more than it illuminates. John Fleck raises a similar objection in his blog post, pointing to a situation in the Rio Grande valley where farmers who grow less valuable crops receive the most water. Money is an important factor, but it is not the only factor--law, politics, and geography also frequently come into play. And besides, with the Bureau of Reclamation no longer in the business of building big water projects, the iron triangle has no third point. Shouldn't millions of Western urbanites have rebelled against the "favored few" who get subsidized water by now?

The pricing of water does appear unusual, which contributes to the impression that Western water is rife with subsidies and waste. Again, not to defend the practice necessarily, but Western states claim ownership of their water, which they hold in trust and distribute essentially for free. The costs associated with irrigation water include fees that maintain the infrastructure and any construction debts that project water recipients must pay back. Thus, an acre-foot of irrigation water, or 325,851 gallons, can cost only $14 or so--admittedly a great deal for farmers. Treated water is much more expensive, but that reflects the costs of treating and delivering municipal and industrial water more than the price of water itself (except in the case of graduated pricing which disincentivizes excessive water usage). For economists, the fact that water is virtually free necessarily represents a misallocation of resources, and many rush to blame governments for interfering with markets by improperly pricing a good that could otherwise generate economic activity. In my mind, this says more about economics as a discipline than Western water. If I have access to a spring, am I misallocating the resource by simply enjoying it myself instead of bottling and selling it? Is there any kind of valuation we can place on an urban population having access to abundant, clean water in reasonable quantities for household use? Would it be better for a state and its residents to require municipal water districts to bid against private golf courses (or hedge fund speculators) for water? You can make up your own mind about that.

If the political process surrounding water has not been thoroughly corrupted, and water is not inexorably flowing uphill toward money, then we should need an alternate theory to explain how readily and lavishly the federal government has funded these special water districts. This is not as great a mystery as it appears, and it is less of a scandal than might satisfy everyone. During the period in question, the Bureau of Reclamation needed expansive, multipurpose projects to balance its budgets, and the country as a whole wanted, or at least had no serious objection to, investment in the West as a region. (Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire has a section about this, in which the congressional debate over the 1902 Reclamation Act saw a number of representatives endorsing the act primarily as a way for the nation to increase its wealth and prestige.) As Floyd Dominy, the villain of Cadillac Desert, put it during his tenure as commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, "Today's meaning of reclamation is the reclaiming and expansion of the economy of the West and through it that of the Nation." We can believe him on that point. And, an important aspect that gets lost in the iron triangle theory, the Colorado River Basin states that do not end in "-alifornia" were very eager about developing their shares of that water as quickly as possible. Doing so required the building of expansive infrastructure that could capture and redirect water, and only the federal government had a sufficient budget to bankroll these.

Because Reclamation had historically supported agriculture, and because these projects sometimes took shape over decades while their planning adapted to the rapid growth of the region, some of the proposed and completed components put large amounts of money toward the irrigation of relatively low value crops such as alfalfa. For example, during the decades-long debates over the Central Utah Project, a coalition of critics drew attention to the high cost of the irrigation components, leading to planners' incorporating their critiques into the final phase approved in 1992 and significantly drawing down the cost of the Bonneville Unit's irrigation system--in other words, farmers did not steamroll their opposition through their allies in government.

I also contend that when looking at growth in the region in stages, as was common in the nineteenth century, the amount of money poured into irrigation projects did not appear to planners as a taking of resources away from their priority of urban development. What I mean is that Western land development, then and now, has occurred largely, at some point, through the irrigation of farmland. After farmers have established a little village, and when they're ready to sell, city folks move in. This view may have resonated more with nineteenth-century planners, though in the twentieth century officials also had a motivation for viewing irrigation and urban water development as complementary. As historian Stephen Sturgeon points out, the way to get Colorado River water out of its basin to fast growing cities (like Salt Lake City) was for the Colorado River Storage Project to "provide new sources of water for agriculture so that existing water supplies could be diverted out of the basin." Developing irrigation water, in other words, could free up water for cities, which has long been the actual goal. I will stop here to avoid going too far into the weeds on this topic.

As for the reasons why the idea that water flows uphill toward money continues to be influential, I think the simplest answer is that the iron triangle theory and its various iterations provided a compelling answer to some genuinely head-scratching aspects of Western water. Even now that Cadillac Desert is nearly forty years old, there is something to be said for describing features of our water infrastructure that remain over time, even if they are not actively being reproduced.

I also think there's more to it. After half a century of umbrage over Western water politics, most people remain unaware of the scale of theft from Indigenous nations that lies at the foundation of our water systems. People here on the Wasatch Front, for example, are largely unaware that the Central Utah Project pipes stolen Ute water to Salt Lake City (though to be fair, many are also unaware that the Central Utah Project exists). There have not been any bestsellers written yet about this, which can account for much of the ignorance. (Nick Estes' The History is Our Future, which provides a throughline from the Pick-Sloan Project to the Keystone Dakota Access Pipeline, does deserve to be a bestseller.)

My feeling is that the "water flowing uphill" perspective relies, to some degree, on a sense that federal reclamation betrayed the Jacksonian/Jeffersonian democratic ideals of the US West. In a glowing recommendation of the book, the Property and Environment Research Center writes in a blog post from 2011, "[The] Jeffersonian ideal, ultimately, morphed into rank rent-seeking by wealthy growers, big engineering and construction firms and urban water departments--all of whom were adept at 'farming the government.'" (Again, note how the growers are "wealthy" in this case, yet later in the post, "agribusiness's water uses... account for a very small part of GDP.") The post goes on to commend the book for appealing "to audiences as diverse as the Sierra Club and the Tea Party." In another post, I wrote that at some point in the last half of the nineteenth century, the region became a blank slate where the rest of the country could imagine the renewal of American society. This view of the region would explain how Cadillac Desert appeals to both the Sierra Club and the Tea Party, similarly to how both pro-slavery and anti-slavery advocates employed the "safety valve" metaphor. I could also point to how Reisner adopted a conservative argument about unaccountable bureaucracy in order to throw it in the faces of Reagan Republicans.

This sense of injustice toward the mythical yeoman farmer also animates another classic about Western water, Donald Worster's Rivers of Empire. Worster examines the region's history through the lens of the Wittfogel thesis, a provocative idea from a lapsed Marxist German-American theorist. Karl Wittfogel argued that throughout history, tyrannical managerial regimes developed in desert societies that depended on sophisticated systems of irrigation. Worster's analysis largely affirms the thesis, and the book is a survey of the instances across the region which led to the development of the dominant Capitalist State: "increasingly a coercive, monolithic, and hierchical system, ruled by a power elite based on the ownership of capital and expertise." To be clear, Rivers of Empire is a classic book for good reason. But I found it interesting that in his analysis, focused as it was on a coercive and hierarchical system, the topic of Indian water appeared only on the margins, earning only about four or five paragraphs spread throughout the book, by my count.

The conclusion of Rivers of Empire, in which Worster imagines a different, better trajectory for the region, puzzles me. Where he introduces the book with a critical eye on a Henry David Thoreau mediatation about freedom and the West, Thoreau reappears in the conclusion without the critical distance. "Approached deliberately as an environment latent with possibilities for freedom and democracy rather than for wealth and empire, the unredeemed desert West might be an unrealized national resource," Worster writes. Doing this would likely require "redesigning the West as a network of more or less discrete, self-contained watershed settlements." What is so puzzling to me is that, in my reading, this is not radically different from how settlers and policymakers approached the nineteenth-century West. At one point, after typing these phrases from the book, I had to go back and read them in context to make sure I hadn't somehow mixed up Worster's dream for the future with a description of the past. To be clear, I have not missed, nor do I disagree with, the book's core argument: the Jeffersonian ideal of a common man democracy had much less impact on the actual development of Western water than we would like to admit. I simply find the desired reinvention of the region according to the same ideals that drove political discourse the first time around (whether or not it reflected conditions on the ground) to be unrealistic, and in my mind, this type of analysis confirms my suspicion that criticism of water in the West tends to implicitly measure what we have against the yardstick of Jeffersonian agrarianism.

In fleshing out this thought, Worster endorses the recommendation of John Wesley Powell that political boundaries be drawn according to watersheds. Then, hypothetically, "each of them was to be left responsible for its own development... territory was to be owned in common and managed for the public good... They would have to generate much of their own capital, through their own labor, just as the Mormons initially did in Utah." Then, "the resulting communities, relying on their own capital and their own knowledge, could free themselves from the distant, impersonal structures of power that have made democracy little more than a ritual of ratifying choices already made by others." Acknowledging that Worster has forgotten more about history than I've ever learned, I have a question: what if those industrious Western farmers did not want to free themselves from the distant, impersonal structures of power? What if the Mormons in the first decades of Utah Territory were constantly tempted by the dream of mining precious metals, and Brigham Young had to admonish them, in his role as church president and territorial governor, back to their fields in order to feed the community? (They were, and he did.) Subsistence farming is a hard life, and there are few people idealistic enough to put themselves and their families through its rigors for the sake of freedom from capital. We could also ask: what was wrong with the Indigenous democracies that Anglo settlement cleared away?

Something which plagued the Bureau of Reclamation throughout its history was the debate over the acreage limitation. The 1902 Reclamation Act did not allow farmers with more than 160 acres to receive project water. As with other legislation that doled out pieces of the public domain, the limit was hardly enforced--or enforceable. Farmers easily got through the loopholes that existed, leaving Reclamation open to critics who argued that these farmers were abusing the system and taking advantage of government subsidized water to enrich themselves (see where I'm going with this?). Congress attempted to close these loopholes, after eighty years, with the Reclamation Reform Act of 1982, which increased the limit to 960 acres. This confirmed the dubious nature of Reclamation subsidies to critics, while also failing to completely close the loopholes.

The 160 acre limit was based on the Homestead Act of 1862, as federal officials intended reclamation to provide opportunities for hard-working homesteaders--not for speculators. The Homestead Act was famously subject to all manner of fraud and abuse, and the Reclamation Act fared similarly. But while these acts could have maybe been written more carefully, a large part of the interminable debate resulted from inherent contradictions in the purposes of federal reclamation and a failure to be realistic about how settlers would use these acts. Floyd Dominy, in an oral history recorded after he had retired, said, "The ability to pay from a farm based on 1902 standards would have been subsistence agriculture. Those guys didn't think a farmer should have indoor plumbing or electric lights, for heaven's sakes. They didn't think their kids should go to college or to the dentist. They were subsistence farmers. That's all a farmer was supposed to do in 1902 was live, exist. Not prosper, but exist. That's the origin of the 160-acre limit and all that crap." Take Dominy's thoughts with a grain of salt, but he is correct here. He grew up as the son of poor Nebraska homesteaders, and he recognized how the Homestead Act was an opportunity for people--but along with that opportunity came the desire to improve one's station in life, not to have one's children and grandchildren stuck in subsistence farming.

If you don't trust Floyd Dominy, I understand. Here's Donald Pisani: "Federal reclamation did not follow a coherent philosophy... The question of whether the government should direct its effort at the urban proletariat, small businessmen 'crushed' by gigantic corporations, or poor eastern, southern, and midwestern farmers, was left unresolved. Reclamation had been sold to the nation as a way to provide homes and defuse urban tensions, but Congress did not provide money to help the homeless move west, nor did it provide teachers to instruct government settlers in the art of irrigation agriculture." Or, here's Donald Worster on the acreage limit, writing about the "contradiction in purpose" of the state, that had "the dual role of promoting the accumulation of private wealth through the increase of available water while maintaining social harmony in its distribution... The accumulative function by its nature tolerated, even produced, economic inequalities." When the acreage limit was raised, Worster writes, "A long-standing agrarian tradition and its powerful mystique were abandoned in 1982. For almost a century, it had been attached--granted, as rhetoric more than reality--to the western reclamation program. Now at last that program was revealed to be unequivocally an imperial one, aimed at the amassing of wealth and power." Worster comes down on the opposite side of the argument than Dominy, though both are dissatisfied with the disconnect between the ideal behind the acreage limit and the reality. Worster seems to hope that the agrarian tradition could become more reality than rhetoric, yet how exactly that was (is) supposed to happen is the burning question.

The 160 acreage limit, after all, was fairly arbitrary--it is a "quarter section," based on the township land survey consisting of a square mile, or 640 acres. The Desert Land Act of 1877 increased the acreage to 640 acres (before knocking it back down to 320) because 160 acres were deemed insufficient for conditions in the arid West. Homesteaders (meaning the relatively small number who availed themselves of free land through the Homestead Act rather than buying it) were small-scale speculators, if we want to think of it that way, because they wanted to be able to get into farming but also to get out of it if possible. They bought farm equipment, or they bought more land, to increase their wealth if they had the opportunity. The refusal to recognize farmers' basic motivation, or the tendency to respond to such with indignation, explains much about the way that we continue to talk about water in the West. Think of it this way. Suppose you had to write a piece of legislation that doled out a public resource in a way that encouraged investment but disallowed speculation. How would you do it? and would you be able to get a majority in Congress to agree with you?

Nearly everyone is unhappy with the way that water is allocated in the West. And, because the region is the site of the constant renewal of the American experiment, we all want to wash our hands of what exists and start over in a way that finally aligns with our ideals. It is easier and more hopeful than coming to terms with the fact that there is hardly a consensus about what those ideals actually are. I contend that this is a significant part of the problem, part of the root of the ideology that always looks for more free land in the West, like a young adult trying to escape their problems by moving to a new city. Ultimately I believe that the notion that water flows toward money, for many, reflects a desire to redeem the failed promise of western settlement. The remedy requires that we let go of the idea that the next frontier is where we will finally be free from society's contradictions.

References:

Richard D. Lamm, "Colorado, Water, and Planning for the Future," Denver Journal of International Law & Policy 6 no 3 (Jan 1976)

Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water (New York: Viking, 1986)

Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)

Richard L. Berkman and W. Kip Viscusi, Damming the West: Ralph Nader's Study Group Report on the Bureau of Reclamation (New York: Grossman, 1973)

Daniel McCool, Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994)

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

Donald J. Pisani, “Reclamation and Social Engineering in the Progressive Era.” Agricultural History 57 no 1 (1983): 46–63

Robert Parson, "'The Hardest Worked River in the World': The 1962 Bear River Project, Utah and Idaho," Utah Historical Quarterly 72 no 2 (2004)

Richard White, "It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own": A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991)

Stephen C. Sturgeon, "Just Add Water: Reclamation Projects and Development Fantasies in the Upper Basin of the Colorado Rvier," Reclamation: History Essays from the Centennial Symposium 2 (2008)

Floyd E. Dominy, transcript of interview, April 6, 1994 and April 8, 1996, Boyce, Virginia, National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland

Read more:

There is No Shortage of Water

A Short History of Water in the US West

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)

Boosters and Crusaders, Megacities and the Safety Valve: Iterations on the Oldest New Idea in the West (1891 - 2023)

Free-for-All in the Uinta Basin (1879 - 1920)

Race to the Bottom -- The Law of the River

The Sinful Rivers We Must Curb

Our Last Major Water Resource -- The Central Utah Project

The Second Treaty Era