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Reviews
Fluid Arguments: Five Centuries of Western Water Conflict
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Edited by Char Miller
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University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 2001. Maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 384 pages. $45.00 cloth.
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Reviewed by William L. Lang
Portland State University, Portland, Oregon
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Nothing in the history of the American West is as contentious or
as overflowing with litigiousness as water use and development.
The sixteen articles in Fluid Arguments underscore how critical
water policy and disputes over the use of water have been in the
history of the West, from water rights in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Spanish colonies to ongoing fights over water use between urban
residents and agriculturalists that make today's headlines. The
book leads off with a helpful and ranging introduction by the editor,
Char Miller, and then divides the topic into four chronological
sections that address New Spain's lands in the American Southwest,
Indian water rights, agricultural water use in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, and the era of dam-building. As in most collections
of this sort, the articles are uneven in quality. Some are more
descriptive than analytical, but each contributes to a better understanding
of the role of water in western history.
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Studies by Jesus F. de la Teja, Shelly Dudley, and Sandra K. Mathews-Lamb explicate the role early irrigation efforts played in Spanish colonization efforts in the Southwest, with emphasis on irrigation as a foundation for successful colonies. Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Donald Pisani, Alan Newell, and Daniel McCool treat the often-neglected role that irrigation and water rights have played in Native American history and how Indian water rights affect water use, an important subject in the larger history of water in the West. Irrigation on reservation land, as Pisani points out, consistently favored white agricultural interests over Native interests and became "perhaps the biggest obstacle to Indian agriculture" (p. 87). Water also provided Indian tribes with an unexpected lever, Newell argues, in the Supreme Court's establishment of the so-called Winters Doctrine in 1908, which "inserted the United States into state water proceedings" because the federal government acted as trustee for the tribes (p. 96). McCool's history of the Winters Doctrine as counterpoint to the Anglo doctrine of prior appropriation focuses on a series of court cases during the twentieth century that has led to Indian water settlements, a new approach that McCool calls a "second treaty era" (p. 125). |
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The issue of Indian water rights reaches furthest into history, but the majority of litigation and disputes — and the majority of this volume of essays — deals with water development during the industrial era. Particularly noteworthy are articles by Brad F. Raley, Thomas C. Schafer, John Opie, and Mark Harvey. These historians emphasize the inherent connections among water development, environmental conditions, and the larger political and social purposes addressed by twentieth-century projects. Raley points out that local irrigation schemes in the West did not always lead to control by eastern financial interests and that local elites often "played active roles in determining their future" (p. 174). Schafer and Opie direct attention to groundwater use on the Great Plains and its relationship to twentieth-century market agriculture's reliance on mono-culture. Schafer documents the powerful effect that center-pivot irrigation had on shaping both the agricultural landscape and the significant diversification of market crops grown on the Great Plains. Opie argues for a new understanding of the region based on a sustainable agriculture that links land use to groundwater supply, a viewpoint that he believes proves "John Wesley Powell was right" (p. 223). Harvey argues that the era of big dam-building owed as much to political imperatives as economic results and that the end of that era also reflected a change in political interests from Cold War ideologies to a new environmentalism more than changing economics. "To look at a dam," Harvey writes, "is to discover a substantial amount of history and to recognize that the past constantly affects the present" (p. 297). |
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The histories in Fluid Arguments document Harvey's point by underscoring the divisive character of water rights, water projects, and water use over the several centuries of human life in the arid part of the continent. The authors draw different conclusions, but all agree that in the American West economic gain, political power, and social wealth are ultimately tied to water. As Hal Rothman argues in the book's last essay, the West's new industries — tourism, hi-tech manufacturing, and urban services — will be no less tied to water and how water is allocated. The new allocation will create a "world different than the one we currently inhabit, complete with a new set of winners and losers" (p. 338). |
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