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Local Experience and National Policy in Federal Reclamation: The Shoshone Project, 1909–1953

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 April 2009

Robert E. Bonner
Robert E. Bonner
Affiliation:
Carleton College
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Extract

When the Newlands Reclamation Act was passed in 1902, it inaugurated an ambitious program of federal dam-and canal-building aimed at opening public land in the West to homesteading through irrigation. Ordinary Americans from all walks of life were to be given the opportunity to take out homesteads on land where the Reclamation Service had made water available; the land was free, but the cost of building the dams and canals was to be repaid to the federal government over a ten-year period. The overriding goal of federal Reclamation in the early years was to reinvigorate the agrarian tradition of America by making usable otherwise useless public land.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , July 2003 , pp. 301 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA. 2003

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References

Notes

1. Pisani, Donald J., To Reclaim a Divided W est: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 (Albuquerque, 1992)Google Scholar, offers the best single-volume account of the emergency of the federal Reclamation idea.

2. Standard modern accounts of the history of Reclamation include Warne, William E., The Bureau of Reclamation (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, and Robinson, Michael, Water for the West: The Bureau of Reclamation, 1902–1977 (Chicago, 1979)Google Scholar. Pisani's, Don second volume on Reclamation history, Water and American Government: The Reclamation Bur eau, National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, continues the national story, as the title implies, but includes an illustrative chapter on local experience in Idaho. Reisner's, MarcCadillac Desert (New York, 1986)Google Scholar and Worster's, DonaldRivers of Empir e Rivers of Empir e: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American W est (New York, 1985)Google Scholar are not accounts of Reclamation history per se, but they could be said to contribute to the mode of thinking of the bureau in terms of national issues. Hays, Samuel P., Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890–1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)Google Scholar, and Swain, Donald C., Federal Conservation Policy, 1921–1933 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963), both take the national view.Google Scholar

3. Coate, Charles, “Federal-Local Relationships on the Boise and Minidoka Projects, 1904–1926,” Idaho Yesterdays 25, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–9Google Scholar, is a good example. Pisani, Water and American Government, esp. 80–83, offers a slightly more complex account of conflict on the Minidoka Project. Smith, Karen L., The Magnificent Experiment: Building the Salt River Reclamation Pr oject, 1890–1917 (Tucson, 1986)Google Scholar, deals with political conflict on a project unlike any other, where all the land was owned and farmed before the Reclamation Service entered the picture.

4. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, esp. chap. 13. On conflict in conservation policy generally, see McCarthy, G. Michael, Hour of Trial: The Conservation Conflict in Colorado and the W est, 1891–1907 (Norman, Okla., 1977)Google Scholar, and Richardson, Elmo, The Politics of Conservation: Crusades and Controversies, 1897–1913 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962).Google Scholar

5. Donald J. Pisani, Water and American Government, esp. chaps. 5 and 10. Other significant publications that undermine the idea of the dominant federal conservation experts include Rowley, William D., U. S. Forest Service Grazing and Rangelands: A Histor y (College Station: Tex., 1985)Google Scholar, and Pisani, , Water, Land, and Law in the West: The Limits of Public Policy, 1850–1920 (Lawrence, Kan., 1996)Google Scholar, esp. “Forests and Reclamation,” 141–58.

6. Pisani, Water and American Government, 273.

7. Ibid., 77–95.

8. Worster, in Rivers of Empir e, 22–60, 281–85, acknowledges important debts to the work of political scientists Grant McConnell and Theodore Lowi in elaborating important elements of his model; he particularly credits Lowi with developing the model for the “iron triangle,” which figures in this analysis below. McConnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)Google Scholar, and Lowi, Theodore, The End of Liberalism: Ideology, Policy, and the Crisis of Public Authority, 2d ed. (New York, 1969).Google Scholar

9. Merrill, Karen R., “In Search of the ‘Federal Presence’ in the American West,” Western Historical Quarterly 30, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 455.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10. Lear, Linda J., “Boulder Dam: A Crossroads in Natural Resource Policy,” Journal of the West 24 (10 1985): 82–94Google Scholar; Kluger, James, Turning on Water with a Shovel: The Career of Elwood Mead (Albuquerque, 1992).Google Scholar

11. The Reclamation Service initially wanted to name the town Colter, in honor of John Colter, the first white American to traverse the Big Horn Basin. The CB&Q railroad, however, had already named one of their town sites Colter, so the Service gave the CB&Q two choices, either Powell or Newlands (Francis Newlands was the Senator from Nevada who was the chief sponsor of the National Reclamation Act), and the railroad chose Powell. The relevant correspondence is in the National Archives, Denver Branch, RG 115, E. 3, 271 (Shoshone), Box 1319.

12. See particularly H. N. Savage to F. H. Newell, 30 April 1912, RG 115, E. 3, General Administrative and Project Records, 1902–19, Box 899, Folder 448-A1. The editorial in the Powell Tribune of 24 June 1911 provides a highly colored local review of the town-lot controversy.

13. Correspondence among Powell leaders, the local project manager, the supervising engineer in Helena, and the director in Washington, D.C., is in RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1. Petitions from the town council begin as early as 8 February 1911.

14. Savage, having received several petitions, some forwarded to him through Congressman Frank Mondell, urged Washington to approve new lot openings in letters to Newell dated 2 November and 5 December 1911; see also Savage to Newell, 6 September 1912; RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1. In the fall of 1913 the Powell project manager invited local property owners to get together and help him decide what to recommend for sale; see Acting Director Davis to Secretary of Interior, 12 November 1913, in RG 48, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36, 8–3 (Shoshone). The Powell Tribune of 17 July 1914 commented on the sale of that summer.

15. Project Manager to Supervisor of Irrigation, 13 February 1914, and Supervisor of Irrigation to the Commission, 16 February 1914, in RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1.

16. Project Manager to Director, 11 May and 13 May 1914; F. H. Newell to Shoshone Water Users Assn., 9 July 1914; Supervisor of Irrigation to Mr. G. E. Gowey, 5 August 1914; Comptroller to Supervisor of Irrigation, 13 August 1914; N. P. Williams to Project Manager, 23 March 1917; RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1. There is an interesting election circular supporting the east-side vote for the 2 May election in the Powell Townsite papers, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

17. Project Manager to Acting Supervising Engineer, 17 May 1915; A. S. E. to Director and Chief Engineer, 28 May 1915; Project Manager to Chief of Construction, 12 June 1915; all in Powell Townsite papers, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. Sanford gives particular credit to Secretary Franklin K. Lane, whose visit to the project in 1913 led to the adoption of a more cooperative stance by the Reclamation engineers.

18. Project Manager to Mayor of Powell, 9 October 1915; Powell Townsite papers, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives; Project Manager to Director and Chief Engineer, 10 January 1917; RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1.

19. Newell expressed his views in a letter to H. N. Savage, 13 August 1912. A copy is in the Powell Townsite Administrative Papers in the Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. Newell's ideas about town site development generally are discussed in Donald Pisani, “Reclamation and Social Engineering in the Progressive Era,” Water, Land, and Law in the W est, 180–94.

20. I make no argument here that Powell is to be taken as typical of Reclamation towns. Indeed, there were so few towns actually created on Reclamation projects that the very idea of typicality seems inappropriate. Pisani's account of the government town of Rupert, on the Minidoka project in Idaho (Water and American Government, 82–89), presents a much drearier aspect than this one of Powell, but reveals in the telling a host of conditions that are so different between the two that comparing them seems idle.

21. Garfield's correspondence regarding his trip is in RG 115, E. 3, Box 899, Folder 448-A1 and RG 48, Department of Interior Central Classified File 1907–36, 8–3 (Shoshone); Powell Tribune, 10 July 1909, and 11 August 1911; Project Manager to Chief of Construction, 12 June 1915, Powell Townsite Papers, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives; Project History, 1921, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

22. In part, these obligations would have arisen from the promotional brochures put out by the USRS to attract settlers, promising light, sandy soils, free of alkali, of such fertility that nothing need be added but water “to change the bare brown desert into luxuriant green fields.” Taken from a 1909 brochure in the Shoshone Irrigation District Archives, Powell, Wyoming. See Thomas Means, “Report on Drainage,” Shoshone Project, November 1910, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. The tensions between the settlers and the USRS are chronicled in the annual Project Histories on file in the same archives.

23. Hendricks to Secretary of the Interior, 4 May 1911, in RG 48, Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36, Shoshone (8–3).

24. Newell to Frank Pierce, Acting Secretary, 25 May 1911, in RG 48, Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36, Shoshone (8–3); Project History, 1913, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives, Powell, Wyoming; Powell Tribune, 19 January and 3 February 1912. The letters in the Interior Department files regarding the decision to relieve the petitioners are too numerous to cite individually.

25. 5 February 1912, in RG 48, Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36, Shoshone (8–3)

26. Vance Hoadley to Secretary Fisher, 23 February 1912, RG 48, Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36, Shoshone (8–3).

27. Project History for 1913, Shoshone Irrigation District archives, Powell, Wyoming. Before the drainage program was completed, farmers on the earliest units had accepted a further charge of $12 per acre.

28. Pisani describes the 1913 conference in Water and American Gover nment, 116–17. The central achievement of the conference from the settlers' point of view was the extension of the repayment period from ten to twenty years.

29. Charles Coate cites evidence of Newell's peevishness and bureaucratic pettiness in “Federal-Local Relationships on the Boise and Minidoka Projects, 1904–1926,” Idaho Yesterdays 25, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–9. Don Pisani observes that Newell was fired in part because he was “insensitive to the complaints of the farmers his agency served”; “Reclamation and Social Engineering in the Progressive Era,” Water, Land, and Law in the W est, 180–95 n. 26.

30. F. G. Hart to Secretary Fisher, 6 May 1912; RG 48, Department of the Interior, Office of the Secretary, CCF 1907–36 (Shoshone, 8–3). The story of the bureaucratic trials of this period can be found in Robinson, Water for the West, 42–43, and Pisani, Water and American Gover nment, 96–122.

31. Carrol Van West, “Creating an Irrigator's Reclamation Service: I. D. O'Donnell, Civic Capitalism, and the U. S. Reclamation Service in the Yellowstone Valley, 1900–1930,” CD publication from the Bureau of Reclamation History Symposium, Las Vegas, 18–19 June 2002.

32. Reports of the Central Board of Review (Elwood Mead, I. D. O'Donnell, and W. L. Marshall) plus Mead's local board for the Shoshone Project are in the Elwood Mead papers at the University of California Water Resources Center Archives, Box 18, folders 1 and 11, Box 29, folders 1 and 2.

33. The examiner's seventy-page report, with more than sixty pages of appendices, contains records of interviews with nearly two hundred settlers; RG 115, General Administration and Project Records, 1902–19, Box 170, folder 314, General Inspection Reports, Shoshone.

34. Powell Tribune, 21 July 1916.

35. Acting Project Superintendent to Commissioner, 4 May 1924, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

36. The work of the Fact–Finders is chronicled briefly in Robinson, Water for the West, 44–48, and Pisani, Water and American Gover nment, 136–42. Cannon, Brian Q., “‘We Are Now Entering a New Era’: Federal Reclamation and the Fact-Finding Commission of 1923–1924,” Pacific Historical Review (05 1997): 185–211Google Scholar, provides a comprehensive and detailed study of the commission and its results. An example of the kind of detailed inquiry into local conditions that predates the Fact-Finders would be the “Economic Survey of Conditions on the Shoshone Project,” dated 23 January 1923, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

37. Powell Tribune, 11 February 1916.

38. Powell Tribune, 4 August 1927 and 6 September 1928.

39. Powell Tribune, 26 September 1929.

40. Elwood Mead, E. G. Hopson, and J. B. True, “Report of the Board of Review on Wyoming Cooperative Work,” October 1916, in Elwood Mead Papers, Water Resources Center Archives, Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California. The only biography of Mead is James Kluger's Turning on Water with a Shovel.

41. Cannon, “Fact-Finding Commission,” 201–2.

42. Lear, “Boulder Dam,” 85–86. Secretary Work claimed in 1927 that he had been appointed receiver for a bankrupt Reclamation program and he and his associates, especially Mead, had saved it; Powell Tribune, 4 August 1927. Kluger points out the importance of hydroelectric power development to Mead's bureau and says that failures in the traditional Reclamation program bothered Mead less as the bureau changed in the 1930s; Turning on Water with a Shovel, 121–29.

43. Hearing Before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations for FY 1930 (Washington, D.C., 1929), 16 November 1928, 387. See also memo from Project Superintendent to Mead commenting on an earlier, confidential memo from the Commissioner, 30 October 1928, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

44. Lear, “Boulder Dam,” 90–91, sees these changes in “the nature and direction” of the bureau, but he presents them as consequent upon the building of Boulder Dam, i.e., mid-1930s, and fathers them upon Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Kluger correctly understands them as pre—New Deal changes but fails to see the significance for the federal-local relationship.

45. Statutes at Large, 68th Cong., 2d sess., chap. 4, 1924.

46. The correspondence among Reclamation officers and the Shoshone Irrigation District of course is voluminous on these points. Most of it is to be found in RG 115, Gen. Admin. and Project Records, 1919–45, Shoshone Project Files, 1919—29, Box 990, folder 222. It is worth noting that some subordinate officers argued against Mead's contemplated action on the Shoshone Project. The commissioner stated his own personal view—that allowing power profits to pay the cost of irrigation indebtedness was a “vicious” policy—in a letter to Senator Robert Carey of Wyoming, 24 December 1931, in RG 115, Project Correspondence 1930–45, Shoshone Project, Box 1037, folder 225.07.

47. Act 4 March 1929, chap. 705, 45 Stat. 1562, cited in Federal Reclamation Laws Annotated (USDI, 1943), 373–74. Mead testified before the Appropriation committees of both houses of Congress in November 1928, and in December the District Counsel in Billings sent the language of the rider confidentially to the Superintendent of the Project in Powell; E. E. Roddis to L. H. Mitchell, 31 December 1928, in Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. The policy change also affected the Boise and Yakima projects.

48. Hearing before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, 16 November 1928, 401. I have put together a thorough account of the struggle over power plant revenues in “‘Law or No Law!’ Elwood Mead and the Struggle over Power Plant Revenue on the Shoshone Project,” CD publication from the Bureau of Reclamation History Symposium, Las Vegas, 18–19 June 2002.

49. House of Representatives Report no. 2865, 71st Cong., 2d sess.; Congressional Record—Senate, 1934, in re: S. 3375. Pisani suggests in Water and American Government, 219, that Congress was wary of allowing Reclamation to develop an income through power sales that would be independent of congressional appropriation.

50. Dixon to George Atkins, Secretary of the Shoshone Irrigation District, 11 March 1930, in Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. Official Reclamation historians, e.g., Warne, WilliamThe Bureau of Reclamation (New York, 1973)Google Scholar, have neglected entirely this change in policy. Warne states categorically (89) that Section 5 of the Act of 16 April 1906 (the Townsite Act) stood as the “basic pronouncement of power policy until the Reclamation Project Act of 1939.” Pisani, Water and American Government, 202–34, devotes most of his attention to issues of public vs. private power. He offers an enlightening discussion of the uses of power and power revenue during the years before Boulder Dam, but he does not discuss power income issues between the bureau and local projects.

51. Pisani, Water and American Gover nment, 111–13, describes the loan. Mead's testimony before the House Subcommittee on Appropriations noted above reveals his determination to keep the power money from the settlers regardless of laws then in force.

52. Mead to Rep. Marion Zionscheck, 29 July 1935, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives. This would appear to be an instance of the ancient political adage that when policy is in the balance it matters less where a man stands than where he sits.

53. Karen Merrill, Public Lands and Political Meaning (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2002), 110, contrasts Hoover's strong support of the bureau with his “tepid” attitude to the Forest Service. Pisani, Water and American Gover nment, 248, notes that Hoover “claimed to have ‘reoriented’ the Reclamation Bureau toward ‘great multiple purpose water storage dams … all with a by-product of hydroelectric power.’” Mead, of course, was already there before Hoover took office.

54. Act of 9 April 1938, chap. 132, 52 Stat. 210; Memorandum of the Secretary of the Interior to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, 15 September 1940, in Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

55. S. 2683 and H. R. 6893, 83d Cong., 2d sess. Copies are in power plant dispute files, Shoshone Irrigation District Archives.

56. This conclusion is in line with McCool's, Daniel discussion of the Bureau of Reclamation in his Command of the W aters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian W ater (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1987), 1–13 and 66–86Google Scholar. McCool does not discuss this particular policy departure. James Kluger, Mead's biographer, is silent on hydroelectric power except for Boulder Dam, and offers no insight into bureaucracy at all.

57. See, for example, the record of the Hearing Before the Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations for FY 1930 (Washington, D.C., 1929). Mead was obviously quite conscious of maintaining his good relations with Congress; Kluger, Turning on Water with a Shovel, 121–22.

58. See Clarke, Jeanne N. and McCool, Daniel, Staking out the Terrain: Power Differentials among Natural Resour ce Management Agencies (Albany, N.Y., 1985), 92–107.Google Scholar Clarke and McCool consider the bureau to be a “shooting star” as a resource management agency, by which they mean an agency that experiences a brief period of relative bureaucratic strength before falling victim to structural weaknesses. The period of relative strength for Reclamation began with Mead's term as commissioner.

59. See above, page 3. Of course, this response introduces considerations beyond those with which Hays was working.

60. Smith, The Magnificent Experiment. A different study might explore the differences among these three projects in terms of land tenure of the water users. The Salt River Project served land that was entirely in private ownership when the dam was built. Minidoka water users included both private owners and public land homesteaders. The Shoshone Project was rare in that it fit the Newlands Act perfectly: virtually every acre irrigated there was unentered public land when work began. Federal-local relations cannot have been unaffected by such a fundamental variable.

61. Mead also attempted in the early 1930s to capture power plant revenues on the North Platte Project in central Wyoming; Robert Bonner, “Law or No Law,” 15.

62. Swain, Federal Conservation Policy. Swain extended his study to cover the 1930s in an important essay, “The Bureau of Reclamation and the New Deal, 1933–1940,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 61 (July 1970): 137–46, and Linda Lear revised Swain in her 1985 article cited above. It seems significant in this context that the bureau chose Hoover Dam as the place to celebrate its centennial in June 2002.

63. Pisani, Water and American Gover nment, 233, credits Arthur Powell Davis, director of the Reclamation Service in the early 1920s, with conceiving of the idea of paying for a high dam on the Colorado with power income. Mead's imaginative achievement, of course, goes far beyond the matter of paying for a particular dam.

64. Water and American Gover nment, 283–84.