Reclamation

RECLAMATION

RECLAMATION of arid lands by means of federally assisted irrigation began when Congress enacted the Desert Land Act of 1877. This law encouraged reclamation by offering 640 acres at $1.25 per acre to those citizens who would irrigate one-eighth of their newly purchased holdings within three years. Although 10 million acres passed from government ownership under the provisions of the act, widespread fraud limited its effectiveness. Some-what more positive were the results of the Carey Act of 1894, which granted 1 million acres of the public domain to each of the western states on the condition that they irrigate them and sell them to settlers in maximum tracts of 160 acres. Under the provisions of that act, participants reclaimed 1,067,635 acres, 75 percent of them in Idaho and Wyoming.

By the middle of the 1890s, it was becoming apparent to westerners that the federal government needed to provide more positive assistance for constructing larger reservoirs and canals. In 1896 Congress appropriated $5,000 for a survey by the Corps of Engineers of reservoir sites in Colorado and Wyoming. Capt. Hiram M. Chittenden led the survey, and when he recommended the following year that the federal government construct the reservoirs, westerners under the leadership of George H. Maxwell organized the National Irrigation Association to champion the recommendation. On 26 January 1901, Rep. Francis G. Newlands of Nevada introduced a bill into Congress to provide for federal reclamation. With the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, it passed in a revised form and on 17 June 1902, became law.

The Reclamation Act of 1902 authorized the secretary of the interior to construct irrigation works in the sixteen western states and to pay for them from a revolving reclamation fund accumulated from the sales of public lands in those states. It stipulated that the reclaimable lands were to be disposed of under the Homestead Act of 1862 in tracts of 160 acres or fewer and that the settlers repay within ten years the costs of constructing the irrigation dams and canals. Ethan Allen Hitchcock, the secretary of the interior, did not delay implementation of the act. He created the Reclamation Service, with Frederick H. Newell of the Geological Survey in charge, and within one year had authorized the construction of three projects: the Newlands in Nevada, the Salt River in Arizona, and the Uncompahgre in Colorado.

As water became available to these and other projects, problems arose. Construction and land-acquisition costs were higher than anticipated, as were the expenses of settlement and the preparation of farms for irrigation. Consequently, settlers began to complain that they were unable to make their payments and petitioned the government for relief. Congress responded with the Reclamation Extension Act of 1914, which extended the repayment time from ten to twenty years.

When the postwar depression hit the settlers in 1920, they renewed their appeals, and Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work replied by appointing a fact-finding committee in 1923 under the chairmanship of Thomas E. Campbell of Arizona. It studied the situation and recommended reforms. In 1926 Congress extended the repayment period to forty years, and later it allowed even longer periods of time for some projects.

On 20 June 1923, Work renamed the Reclamation Service the Bureau of Reclamation and the next year appointed Elwood Mead its second commissioner. Under Mead's leadership, the bureau began to design multipur-pose projects to provide, in addition to water for irrigation, flood control, hydroelectric power, municipal water, and recreational opportunities. The first of these projects was the Boulder Canyon project, with its 726-foot Hoover Dam and Lake Mead reservoir, designed to provide water for crops in Arizona and California and 1,344,800 kilowatts of electric power. After its authorization in 1928 by Congress came authorizations of the Columbia Basin (1935), Central Valley (1935), Colorado–Big Thompson (1937), and Colorado River Storage (1956) projects, to name four of the larger ones.

By 1970 the bureau and its predecessor had built 276 storage reservoirs, which provided water for 8.5 million acres, producing nearly $2 billion worth of crops per year and water for an expanding urban population. In addition, they had constructed forty-nine hydroelectric power plants with sixteen thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines to provide electric power for the industrialization of the western states, including the defense industries of California.

Another government agency involved in reclamation is the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which in 1962 supervised projects irrigating 837,000 acres and producing crops valued at $67.3 million. Reclamation by this agency began with a congressional appropriation of $30,000 in 1891 for use on reservations in Arizona, Montana, and Nevada.

Despite the hydroelectric power and the water for agriculture and household use that these dams provide, reclamation of arid lands in the American west has proved a mixed blessing. As the population of the western United States continues to boom, debate over how best to allocate scarce water brings various interests into conflict. Although the myth of the west has always suggested that the area's natural resources are plentiful, land reclamation projects use water more quickly than natural processes can replace it. Much of the plains states' wheat industry depends on water for irrigation drawn from the subterranean Ogallala aquifer, a source that some experts believe will completely disappear within the next few decades.

Furthermore, the question remains of who deserves the water more. Should preference go to growing desert cities, such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas,or to western farmers and ranchers? How can the United States balance its needs for water with those of Mexico, into which many important western rivers eventually flow? Damming rivers for irrigation also interferes with salmon reproduction, limiting the availability of a natural resource especially important to American Indians. Of course, the complete cessation of reclamation would severely limit the economic livelihoods of western farmers, cut American agricultural production, and deprive many western regions of affordable electricity. Thus, an effective solution to these difficulties must consider both the needs of the American west as an ecosystem and of those Americans who use that ecosystem.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fleck, Richard F., ed. A Colorado River Reader. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000.

Kromm, David E., and Stephen E. White, eds. Groundwater Exploitation in the High Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992.

Lowitt, Richard, ed. Politics in the Postwar American West. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995.

Miller, Char, ed. Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2001.

Opie, John. Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

Tallmadge, John, and Henry Harrington, eds. Reading Under the Sign of Nature: New Essays in Ecocriticism. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2000.

Wolf, Donald E. Big Dams and Other Dreams: The Six Companies Story. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996.

Robert G. Dunbar / a. e.

See also Climate ; Hydroelectric Power ; Interior, Department of the ; Irrigation .