9298

• UCREFRP Catalog Number: 9298
• Author: Water Education Foundation.
• Title: Colorado River Project
• USFW Year: 1999.
• USFW - Doc Type: Symposium Proceedings.
• Copyright Material: NO

REFLECTIONS
OF AN
ADVENTURER
ANDA
VISIONARY

seems to me, a fair amount of cultural yielding on
behalf of the Indian peoples if they wish to maintain
their biological integrity. That was my view from own
time at least.
Let me turn finally, before taking questions from
you, to my Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of
the United States, which is the most important book
that I ever wrote and certainly the one that pertains
most to what brought you to this gathering in the late
20th Century. I studied this endlessly and was slow in
producing this report, it was finally published in
1878. I expected it to be a revolutionary document. It
is, I suppose, a revolutionary document, but it was
almost entirely ignored in my lifetime and it has been
almost entirely ignored since. This is too bad because
I lived at a time when the
frontier was moving 30
miles per year. In other
words, most of the land
beyond the 100th
meridian was still
undeveloped. Most of it
was still in its primordial
existence. It's a land, the
Colorado plateau, a land
the size of France, and yet, it had not been inscribed
with white European civilization yet.
And so we had it in our power to plan for the
future of this district and to bring to it institutions
that would pay respect to its capacities, to its rainfall,
to its contours, to its carrying capacity as a landscape.
It seemed to me the worst thing we could do as a
nation, is the thing, of course, that we then went on
to do and that is to try to carry humid agricultural
institutions to an arid and rugged landscape. Nothing
could be more ruinous than trying to impose Mr.
Jefferson's pastoral dream, which works brilliantly in
Ohio, on the Great Basin. And so I gave myself over,
beginning in 1875 to the end of my career, to
persuading the American people to do this rationally
and sensitively, sensitive to the peoples who live there,
the Numa, the Great Basin peoples, sensitively to the
landscape that was there.
Here were my suggestions. Abraham Lincoln, the
greatest American, did not understand the far west
and his Homestead Act with 160 acres per family is
ruinous beyond the 100th meridian. If we are going
to have a pasture farm, that is a ranch, beyond the
100th meridian, the minimal allotment should be
four sections. It should never go in anything less than
that, 2,560 acres should be the minimal allotment
beyond that district.
I am in favor of irrigating every irrigable place in
the American West. I believe fundamentally that any
cubic inch of water that finds its way to the sea has

I am in favor of

irrigating every

irrigable place in
the American West.

SYMPOSIUM
PROCEEDINGS
SEPTEMBER 1999

o

been wasted, that it is in our interest as a people to
lift every cubic inch of water above the river basins
and onto the plateaus and tablelands above and to
irrigate. I am not antagonistic to irrigation in any of
its forms. I have opinions about how it should be
adjudicated, but that's another question. I believe that
any water that reaches the sea, has been mismanaged
by the United States government or by the peoples
who live in the district.
At any rate, if we have an irrigation farm, which I
strongly support, 160 acres is, in my opinion, too
large, and so I wanted irrigation farms to be limited
to 80 acres and pasturage farms to a minimum of
four sections. But there would never again beyond
the 100th meridian be 160 acres allotment. And I
would be very rigid about keeping irrigation farms to
that maximum size.
Secondly, I believe that no parcel of the American
West should ever be alienated, ever be sold, without
water rights inherent in the title. In other words,
when you buy a piece of ground, you buy its water
rights and they can never be separated, they can never
be alienated.
Furthermore, and this begins to enter a slightly
more controversial area, I believe that Thomas
Jefferson's rectangular survey grid system should be
abandoned beyond the 100th meridian and it should
be replaced by a topographical grid system which
pays respect to the water courses. You don't need to
pay respect to the water courses in Mr. Jefferson's
Virginia or in Ohio, but if you don't pay respect to
the water sources in Utah or Nevada, then you set
people up for disaster. So no allotment should ever be
provided to any citizen without water coming with it.
Mr. Jefferson's system of square miles and town-
ship simply won't work because if I buy section six
and it has the creek in it, then all of the other people
who have all of the other sections will be left without
water and I'll have a local monopoly, so we mustn't
use that system. I would suggest we replace it with
something of the French long lot system, or perhaps
the Pueblo system of the ingenious Pueblo of the
southwest, or even the Mormon cooperative system,
but I would have long balloon-like plots so that every
farm has at least 20 acres on a water course of some
sort. When you buy a farm or have one allotted to
you, it has 20 acres of waterfront and if it doesn't
have that, it cannot be alienated from the public
domain. So this would require an immediate aban-
donment of Mr. Jefferson's grid system.
I would go further, I think Mr. Jefferson's blockish
states, which he proposed in his famous 1784 land
order, should be abandoned. And in the American
West, it seems to me that we should develop water-
shed commonwealths. In other words, every river