48 pages • 1 hour read
Marc ReisnerCadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1986A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 2-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Red Queen”
Chapter 2 details the water disputes between Los Angeles and the residents of Owens Valley in eastern California over access to the Owens River. In the mid-1800s, Los Angeles was a “torpid, suppurating, stunted little slum” (52). It had limited access to water due to its location in an arid coastal basin. Thanks to the arrival of the railroad, the city’s population exploded. The scarcity of water became even more pronounced, as the city’s only water source, the Los Angeles River, became strained under this new demand.
Few understood the water scarcity issue better than Fred Eaton, who was a native Los Angeleno, former superintendent of the Los Angeles City Water Company, and a politician. Eaton, recognizing that there were no sources of water nearby that could sustain the city’s growing population, turned his attention to the closet water source: the Owens River, which was 250 miles away. As Reisner notes, the only drawback to this water source was “that the city might have to take the water by theft” (61). After touring the Owens Valley with Joseph Lippincott, who was head of the Bureau of Reclamation’s California project and who became an ally, Eaton and his good friend (at the time) William Mulholland, chief engineer of the Los Angeles City Water Company, hatched a plan to build an aqueduct between the Owens Valley and the San Fernando Valley.
The chapter goes on to detail this plan. According to Reisner, “Los Angeles employed chicanery, subterfuge, spies, bribery, a campaign of divide-and-conquer, and a strategy of lies to get the water it needed” (62). Under the false pretense of serving as a consultant for the Bureau of Reclamation, Eaton began purchasing land from ranchers and farmers in the Owens Valley. Eaton and Mulholland also ensured that newspaper publishers, such as Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times, pumped the public with misinformation. Specifically, the city was on the verge of a water crisis, and securing water rights in the Owens Valley was the only way to prevent this. Through this misinformation campaign, Eaton and Mulholland ensured there was civic support for the project.
Mulholland designed and supervised the aqueduct’s construction. Once it was completed, water from the Valley would not reach Los Angeles for 20 years because water initially went to crop irrigation in the San Fernando Valley. During the 1920s, the city experienced its first cycle of droughts since the aqueduct’s construction. The droughts, coupled with the demand from irrigation and further population explosion in Los Angeles, strained the Owens River. This led to Mulholland’s decision to “dry the Owens Valley up” (89). The people of Owens Valley were furious and began attacking the aqueduct, dynamiting some sections and letting water flood the valley. This conflict would become known as the Owens Valley Water Wars.
To help combat these water wars, Mulholland built a series of reservoirs to provide Los Angeles with reserve water. One such reservoir, the Saint Francis Dam, collapsed, killing an estimated 450 people. This disaster broke Mulholland. His crowning achievement, the aqueduct, similarly economically and environmentally destroyed Owens Valley. Reisner concludes by noting that Los Angeles has never stopped seeking water since Owens Valley.
Chapter 3 Summary: “First Causes”
To Reisner, the United States’ obsessive drive to build “dam after dam after dam” has its roots in the 1880s (105), a decade that included a blizzard followed by a drought followed by a flood in the American West. The drought that struck the West did not affect many of the eastern states. Instead the eastern states faced a deluge of rain for weeks. One dam, built by a private company, collapsed in Pennsylvania, killing thousands of people. In the 1980s, when Reisner wrote Cadillac Desert, it was still one of the worst disasters in American history.
These natural and man-made catastrophes played a significant role in the rise of the federal irrigation movement. By the 20th century, both private companies and states had failed badly at reclamation projects. These failures opened the door for the passage of the 1902 Reclamation Act, which established the Bureau of Reclamation. President Theodore Roosevelt supported this legislation and helped ensure its passage. The American West infatuated Roosevelt, who was an admirer of John Wesley Powell. Roosevelt was also deeply concerned that the underpopulated Western region was vulnerable to foreign threats. Through federally funded water supply projects for irrigation, which were at the heart of the legislation, the West’s population could increase. This population growth, in turn, would mitigate such threats.
From the beginning, greed, corruption, and arrogance haunted the federally funded reclamation projects. Congress began writing “‘omnibus’ authorization bills” (116). These bills package many smaller bills together into one larger single bill that Congress then votes on. This practice enabled Congress to throw in bad projects with good ones and get them passed quickly. The president cannot veto the project without vetoing the whole bill.
During the early 1900s, the Reclamation program underwent reforms, including extending project repayment periods for farmers, setting water prices according to what farmers could pay (which meant the water prices were ridiculously low), and subsidizing irrigation costs via revenues generated from hydroelectricity. These reforms, according to Reisner, resulted in the American West becoming “the first and most durable example of the modern welfare state” (111).
Chapter 4 Summary: “An American Nile (I)”
This chapter examines how the Colorado River became “the most legislated, most debated, and most litigated river in the entire world” (120). This legislation began in 1922 with the Colorado River Compact, which negotiated water allotment and dam projects between the Colorado Basin states. The Colorado Basin states were concerned about their share of the river’s water, particularly since California’s population continued to grow. The other basin states feared that California, which contributed the least amount of runoff to the river, would establish priority rights to the river’s water as a result of the prior appropriation doctrine. Six of the seven states ratified the Colorado River Compact, with Arizona refusing to ratify for another 40 years.
One of the first of these dams built on the Colorado was the Boulder Canyon Dam (later renamed Hoover Dam). After the building of Hoover Dam, the Bureau made sure hydroelectric projects became a major feature of many of their reclamation projects because they provided a source of revenue for repaying the project’s cost. Hence, these projects are known as cash register dams. The Bureau, which as an institution disliked irrigation projects, loved cash register dams because they provided the rationale to continue building dams, even if the dams were economically senseless.
The upper basin states argued that the Bureau had built Hoover Dam primarily for California’s benefit. Out of fear of California “borrowing” their share of the river that they were not able to use yet, they wanted to develop the Colorado as fast as possible. The cash register dams made such development a reality. However, because these dams would need to be large, they would be expensive. Fortunately for the upper basin states, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Michael Straus as his Commissioner of Reclamation. Straus loved building dams. Reisner notes that “in eight years as Commissioner of Reclamation, he would become responsible for as many water projects as any person who ever lived” (137).
One such project conceived by Straus was the Colorado River Storage Project, which included a series of dams in the upper basin. These dams would have a combined storage capacity of 48.5 million acre-feet. The project’s uniqueness stems from how it linked irrigation and power production. Money generated from the power would be used to subsidize high-altitude desert farmers in the upper basin growing crops that other farmers in the United States were being paid not to grow (the country had a serious crop-surplus problem at this time). The subsidies would eventually equate to as much as $2 million per farm, which was five times a farm’s actual worth. The Bureau’s water development projects in the Colorado basin ensured that the river became the life blood for more people, businesses, and economies compared to any other river worldwide.
Chapters 2-4 Analysis
In these chapters, Reisner begins to address what led to the United States’ obsession with building dams. It is largely tied to humanity’s desire to control nature, particularly after several severe climatic events during the late 1800s. First, there was the great winter of 1886, when between 35% and 75% of cattle died in the region. This equated to enough cattle to feed the nation for several years and resulted in the cattle industry’s financial ruin. A decade-long drought followed this winter. Over 50% of the homesteaders moved back East. The drought did not afflict the eastern region, which instead saw rain for weeks. Due to endless battering by rain and the rise of waters, a dam in Pennsylvania, constructed by a private company, suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in thousands of lives lost. Because of these three catastrophes, many felt the “only way to prevent more cycles of disaster was to build a civilization based on irrigated farming” (111). This notion resulted in the rapid rise of federal irrigation programs, which forever transformed the natural landscape of the American West in a way that no other desert civilization has done.
There is a second key claim in these chapters that Reisner will frequently return to throughout the book: Politics and money, rather than good sense, guided water policy in the West. From the water development perspective, it makes more economic sense to build dams and irrigate in warmer climates rather than cold and dry ones. For example, in the Colorado River basin, irrigation should occur in the lower basin and not the upper basin. The latter was too cold, dry, and high in elevation. However, because of the Colorado River Compact, the upper basin states immensely feared California stealing their share of the river. As such, they pushed the Bureau to help them develop their portions of the Colorado as quickly as possible. Through expensive public power, taxpayers were subsidizing farmers to grow alfalfa in high-altitude desert conditions (where alfalfa does not naturally grow) to feed the surplus of cows in the country. In other US regions, farmers were being paid not to grow these crops due to this surplus. Clearly, politics, and not economic sense, drove water development in upper basin states.
One notable aspect of these chapters is the discussion on California, and Los Angeles specifically. Reisner points out that California is thought of as a lush and abundant land. It is mainly arid desert, however, incapable of sustaining life without man-made intervention. Since Owens Valley, which was supposed to end the city’s water famines forever, Los Angeles, and its city-fathers, constantly seek new water sources. Each new water source is supposed to be the last, yet it never is. Just as Los Angeles ruined Owens Valley, Owens Valley also ruined Los Angeles.
