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When Rivers Run Low in the American West
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For William E. Smythe, the future of the West was clear. At the turn of the 20th century, long before low snowpacks and the climate crisis, before tens of millions of people moved westward, the New Englander turned western settler understood that water defined how life could be lived in the region. Unlike other parts of the country, much of the West was uniquely arid and would have to be irrigated to support further growth and development. People “will prosper or languish, create high conditions of social life, or lapse into semi-barbarism, in sure response to the manner in which the water supply is owned and administered,” Smythe wrote in The Atlantic’s November 1900 issue.
As he traveled through the western states, Smythe saw how early settlers failed to imagine a world where their water needs could not be met. Even in fertile California, the natural cycle of the West surprised settlers: Dry years turned flowered foothills dusty and barren. “The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away,” John Steinbeck wrote of the Salinas Valley, a California agriculture hub, in East of Eden. “And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
Almost every major waterway in the West was overappropriated by the early 20th century. Farms were built without a complete accounting of how much water was available. Later generations realized that water was finite and perhaps more valuable than the precious metals they mined, and battles to control its flow began. Farmers in Texas and the Territory of New Mexico threatened violence against Mexican communities who had relied on the Rio Grande for centuries. Upriver residents siphoned water, leaving those downstream without enough. In 1901, Kansas sued Colorado for depriving it of access to the Arkansas River—a legal conflict that would continue, in various forms, for more than a century. “The present consequences of these conditions are as nothing compared to their future effects as the settlement of the country progresses,” Smythe wrote. “What has been merely misfortune will become disaster unless the evil tendencies are soon corrected.”
That disaster started to unfold much sooner than Smythe imagined. Like the mines that drew people out West, irrigation opportunities sparked farming boomtowns too. Equally devastating busts followed. Arthur H. Carhart, a former U.S. Forest Service official, wrote in 1950 that at the start of the 20th century, settlers in the Pecos Valley, around Roswell, New Mexico, had begun drilling nearly 500 artesian wells into what was believed to be an “inexhaustible” basin to service farms. After roughly two decades, the settlers reportedly abandoned more than $5 million worth of farms and wells when the wells ran dry, raising the price of water in the region.
Despite the warning signs, water mismanagement continued in the pursuit of irrigation. Eventually, the federal government decided to intervene: In 1922, seven western states negotiated the Colorado River Compact, which allocated equal amounts of water between the upper basin (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming) and the lower basin (Arizona, California, and Nevada). Federal projects, namely the Hoover Dam and Glen Canyon Dam, which formed Lake Mead and Lake Powell, respectively, offered better irrigation, hydropower, and flood control.
These developments were proposed as a magic bullet to the West’s water problems, Carhart wrote in this magazine. But even then, engineers warned that the dams were not a permanent solution. Lake Mead, for example, would become a mudflat range in 50 to 150 years as more silt piled into the reservoir, Carhart explained: “Now flourishing communities of southern Arizona and California depending on water from Lake Meade for a major part of their existence must face the possibility of progressively moving toward the status of ghost towns.” Since then, dams have been losing hundreds of billions of gallons of water each year to evaporation and leaks. The shortfall has seeded even more conflict in the West, as upstream states try to capture enough water to support themselves at the expense of their downstream neighbors.
What Smythe and Carhart couldn’t have known then was how life in the region would reshape our climate. Water powered the agriculture industry, which over decades released billions of metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The world continues to get warmer, and heat-driven drought has plagued the Southwest for nearly three decades. Cities such as Page, Arizona, near Lake Powell, are losing tourism and hydropower because of low water levels, and jobs in the area will likely soon follow.
Recently, states have continued to struggle to share water fairly while maintaining their way of life. Localities are restricting water use earlier and earlier each year, and farmers in states such as California, Oregon, and Arizona, have been told on occasion that they will not receive any water for their crops. After decades of overappropriation, the Interior Department announced major water-allocation cuts to the Colorado River’s lower-basin states in August, slashing their allotment for next year by about one-fifth. Arizona and Nevada are suing the federal government over the plan, which they say threatens their survival. They are now seeing what Smythe foretold more than a century ago: When water becomes scarce, society will languish.
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