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Book Review: Report on the Lands of the Arid Region

by Linda Ziedrich

‘Science for the People’ Vol. 15, No. 4, July-August 1983, p. 33

Linda Ziedrich is a long-time Science for the People member.

Report on the Lands of the Arid Region by John Wesley Powell, Harvard Common Press, Boston, MA 1983 

“All values inhere in the water,” wrote John Wesley Powell in his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region. This statement was no less than revolutionary in 1878, when his report was first issued by the U.S. Government Printing Office. A bearded, one-armed explorer who had made his name surveying the Colorado River, Powell raised a lone voice of reason against the heedless development of the West. He thus undertook a desperate struggle against a powerful coalition of government and private interests–a struggle that lasted his lifetime and continues today. Reissued this year, John Wesley Powell’s Report remains as important and pertinent to the water problems in the American West today as it was in 1878. 

The boomers and boosters of the West in Powell’s day included both government officials and railroad interests. Having been given vast acreage by the government, the railroad barons wanted to exploit these lands for profit. They renamed the Great American Desert “the Garden of the World” and assured skeptics that rain follows the plow. The government divided the land into neat square tracts and enticed poor but ambitious easterners with this offer: anyone who could “prove up” a claim to 160 acres of federal land in five years would own it forever. With the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, said Sen. William E. Borah, “the government bets 160 acres against the entry fee…that the settler can’t live on the land for five years without starving to death.” More often than not, the government won its bet. 

During his eight-year survey of the Plateau Province, John Wesley Powell had amassed an enormous quantity of scientific information on the Arid Region–an area that makes up over four-tenths of the United States, excluding Alaska. He had mapped canyons and rivers, studied native peoples, climbed mountains, run rivers – and watched settlers starve. Though the report that resulted from this expedition consisted mostly of geological and geographical abstracts on the Utah Territory, its first two chapters comprised proposals for land reform so radical that if even half of them had been adopted, the history of the West–and the entire United States–would have been completely transformed.

Without irrigation western farmers were doomed to fail, Powell wrote. The current approach to water use, moreover, would inevitably lead to monopolization of land, since those claiming upstream parcels could control access to water by their neighbors downstream and for miles around. Powell proposed, therefore, that the government scrap the century-old system of square tracts and fashion streamside units as irregularly as necessary to provide each with equal access to water. He recommended that the size of an irrigated farm be reduced to eighty acres, since a single family couldn’t cope with more, and that irrigable farms be differentiated from parcels suitable only for grazing, which should be no smaller than 2,560 acres. He advised the government to encourage the formation of co-operative organizations among western settlers; ranchers’ co-ops could eliminate fencing between members’ parcels, thus preventing overgrazing, and farmers’ co-ops could both control the distribution of water among members and finance the construction of needed dams and ditches.

To anyone who believed the government’s true intent was to provide land for the landless, these proposals must have seemed entirely sensible. But the boomers were outraged at Powell’s report, and Congress simply ignored it. A master bureaucrat, Powell attempted to realize some of his proposals over the next few years by engineering the creation of the Public Lands Commission, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Bureau of American Ethnology. Eventually the boomers could no longer hide the fact that farmers were perishing on their desert plots; between 1891 and 1901 they held International Irrigation Congresses almost annually, and representatives from all over the West cried out for “forty million forty-acre farms.” Again they refused to listen to Powell, who warned one such congress: “There is not sufficient water to irrigate all the land which could be irrigated, and only a small portion can be irrigated…I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict…for there is not sufficient water to supply the land!” 

But the boomers kept demanding, and their demands resulted in the passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, the year of Powell’s death. Thus was created the Reclamation Service (later renamed the Bureau of Reclamation), which has since dammed the Colorado, the Rio Grande, and many more western rivers. The act contained one provision, however, of which Powell would have at least partially approved–the 160-acre limitation, by which water from reclamation projects would be delivered only to farms of 160 acres or Jess (320 or less for a married couple). But the boomers have blocked enforcement of this provision over generations, to the benefit of the large corporate farm owners who now exert monopoly control over much of our food supply. Finally, under an administration that makes no bones about its aim to stick the poor, the boomers got rid of the provision altogether: last fall Congress passed a bill that increased the 160-acre limitation to 960 for “small” corporations and 640 for large, and granted free leasing privileges to all. Though ignored since its writing by those with the power to change the course of western development, Powell’s report stands as a classic among books on water politics and the American West. Long out of print, it is now available in a facsimile of the second edition (1879), with a lively introduction by T.H. Watkins. Those active in the struggle for environmental protection and land reform will not want to miss it.

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