Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Water & Western Development
Americans began to think of occupying the area between the coasts. The lingering image of
the Great American Desert, a myth propagated by explorers such as Pike and Long, had de-
terred agricultural settlers and urban development.
Water was a limiting factor as cities such as Denver began to spring up at the base of the
Front Range. Utopians such as Horace Greeley, who saw the Homestead Act of 1862 as the
key to agrarian prosperity, planned agricultural experiments on the nearby plains. This act
envisioned the creation of 160-acre family farms to create a rural democracy on the
Western frontier.
Government agents encouraged settlement and development in their assessments of the
region, but differed on how to bring these changes about. Two of the major figures were
Frederick V Hayden of the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and John Wesley
Powell, first of the Smithsonian Institute and later of the USGS. Hayden, who had surveyed
the Yellowstone River area and played a major role in having it declared a national park,
was so eager to promote the West that he exaggerated the region's agricultural potential.
Powell, a great figure in American history, made a more perceptive assessment of the po-
tential and limitations of the region. Famous as the first man to descend the Colorado River
through the Grand Canyon, Powell knew the region's salient feature was aridity and that its
limited water supply depended on the snowpack that fell in the Rockies. The 160-acre ideal
of the Homestead Act was inappropriate for the West. His masterful Report on the Lands of
the Arid Regions of the United States challenged the tendency toward exploiting the re-
gion's minerals, pastures and forests, and proposed distributing land according to its suitab-
ility for irrigation.
Powell recommended dams and canals to create an integrated, federally sponsored irriga-
tion system administered by democratically elected cooperatives. Unfortunately, his vision
collided with the interests of influential cattle barons. Nor did it appeal to real-estate specu-
lators. These interests united to undermine Powell's blueprint; what survived was the idea
that water development was essential to the West.
Twentieth-century development took the form of megaprojects, such as the Glen Canyon
Dam on the Colorado River, and water transfers from Colorado's Western Slope to the
Front Range and the plains via a tunnel under the Continental Divide. These, in turn,
provided subsidized water for large-scale irrigators and electrical power for users far from
their source.
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