The Yuma Reclamation Project: Irrigation, Indian Allotment, and Settlement Along the Lower Colorado River

Notes

1 . t h e f i n a l f r o n t i e r 1. U.S. Statutes at Large 32 (1902): pt. 1, 388. 2. See, for example, Mark Fiege, Irrigated Eden: The Making of an Agricultural Landscape in the American West; Nancy Langston, Where Land and Water Meet: A Western Landscape Transformed, 1–62; and Robert A. Sauder, The Lost Frontier : Water Diversion in the Growth and Destruction of Owens Valley Agriculture. Fiege discusses how an irrigated landscape came to be in the Snake River valley of southern Idaho, Langston describes how ranchers and homesteaders transformed the wetlands ecosystem of the Malheur Lake Basin in their attempt to settle this dry region of Oregon, and Sauder focuses on the development and destruction of irrigated agriculture in the Owens Valley of California. 3. For a general overview of federal irrigation policy and the problems related to it, see, for example, Augustus Griffen, “Land Settlement of Irrigation Projects, With Discussion”; Alvin Johnson, “Economic Aspects of Certain Reclamation Projects ”; Dorothy Lampen, Economic and Social Aspects of Federal Reclamation; Elwood Mead, “Present Policy of the United States Bureau of Reclamation Regarding Land Settlement, With Discussion”; F. L. Tomlinson, “Land Reclamation and Settlement in the United States”; U.S. Congress, Senate, Federal Reclamation by Irrigation ; Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, First Annual Report of the Reclamation Service, From June 17 to December 1, 1902, 15–75; Department of the Interior, Fourteenth Annual Report of the Reclamation Service, 1914–1915, 1–25; Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Twenty-third Annual Report of the Bureau of Reclamation, 1–10; and John A. Widstoe, “History and Problems of Irrigation Development in the West, With Discussion.” 4. Donald Pisani, Water and the American Government: The Reclamation Bureau , National Water Policy, and the West, 1902–1935, 154; Donald Pisani, “Irrigation , Water Rights, and the Betrayal of Indian Allotment,” 172. 5. Pisani, “Irrigation, Water Rights, and Betrayal,” 158, 171; Daniel McCool, Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water, 13. 6. Pisani, Water and the American Government, 154. 7. McCool, Command of the Waters, 112. 8. Pisani, “Irrigation, Water Rights, and Betrayal,” 158. 9. Ibid., 160–61. ij Notes 10. For background on how irrigation impacted other Indian groups, see, for example , Lloyd Burton, American Indian Water Rights and the Limits of Law; Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart, As Long As the River Shall Run: An Ethnohistory of Pyramid Lake Indian Reservation; Barbara Leibhardt, “Allotment Policy in an Incongruous Legal System: The Yakima Indian Nation As a Case Study, 1887–1934”; David Rich Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog: American Indians, Environment, and Agrarian Change; Thomas R. McGuire, William B. Lord, and Mary G. Wallace, eds., Indian Water Rights in the New West; Pisani, “Irrigation, Water Rights, and Betrayal”; Pisani, Water and the American Government, 181–201; and John Shurts, Indian Reserved Water Rights: The Winters Doctrine in Its Social and Legal Context, 1880s–1930s. 11. Pisani, Water and the American Government, 200. 12. Robert L. Bee, Crosscurrents Along the Colorado: The Impact of Government Policy on the Quechan Indians, 160. 13. Emily Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act, 11, 153. 14. Lewis, Neither Wolf nor Dog, 3. 15. Flood recession agriculture dominated the domesticated landscapes along the lower courses of many rivers in the far southwestern corner of North America from the lower Yaqui River in southern Sonora, Mexico, to the lower Colorado River in Northwest Mexico and the Arizona-California border area, although evidence of its precise distribution is limited because this form of irrigation did not require any permanent landscape modifications that would provide archaeological relics for study (William E. Doolittle, Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America, 414– 15, 427). 16. Jonathan B. Mabry and David A. Cleveland, “The Relevance of Indigenous Irrigation: A Comparative Analysis of Sustainability,” 227; Doolittle, Cultivated Landscapes, 4. 17. Michael C. Robinson, Water for the West: The Bureau of Reclamation, 1902– 1977, 2. 18. Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West, 35. 19. Some present-day Native Americans in the Southwest, such as the Tohono O’odham (Papago) and the Pima, have learned from their ancestors’ mistakes, surviving in the desert “with a lighter touch” aimed at achieving a secure coexistence and a thrifty subsistence. Today these groups practice flood recession farming by locating their fields at the mouths of the arroyos of small...