Thinking Like a Watershed: Voices from the West

Politics of the Colorado River with Stewart Udall

91 < Jack Loeffler Politics of the Colorado River with Stewart Udall The degree to which we are shaped by cultural perspectives and mores during the present super-speed continuum of cultural evolution is incalculable. The mind-set of octogenarians seems ponderous to today’s youth. Each of the five or so generations spawned in America since the death of John Wesley Powell in 1902 have labored within an exponentially increasingly complex cultural milieu that in today’s world moves at the speed of light relative to days of yore. By the end of the nineteenth century, wave after wave of adventurous seekers of fortune had followed the advice of Horace Greeley by heading west. By 1900, the human population of North America was estimated at 75 million souls. The tone was set for the new century. Economics dominated the minds of entrepreneurs and elected officials. It was time to use the new technologies that were emerging from the Industrial Revolution of the last 150 years to make the twentieth century the greatest in human history. The United Stewart Udall, photo by Jack Loeffler < < Jack Loeffler 92 < States of America was now an empire that spanned the continent by right of Divine Providence according to Manifest Destiny. That was five human generations ago, and the population of the United States is now estimated at time of writing to be 312,652,657. In just 12,000 years since the end of the Pleistocene epoch, the population of our species has increased from an estimated 1 million to nearly 7 billion. And our expenditure of natural resources has grown proportionately. Bearing all this in mind, it is fascinating to try to imagine the cultural mind-set of a century ago when modern transportation was a train pulled by a coal-fired steam engine, modern media was to be found in daily and weekly newspapers, and modern communications were mostly limited to telegraph wires and the Morse code. Cars, aeroplanes, radios, and telephones were on the immediate horizon, but television wouldn’t become a cultural phenomenon till around 1950. The personal computer has now been with us for about twenty-five years, and the Internet even fewer than that. Those of us spawned in the first half of the twentieth century have born witness to enormous change. I have been greatly privileged to share friendship with a few notable fellow humans born in the twentieth century, that pivotal span of a hundred years marked on one end by horse and buggy transportation and instant worldwide communication on the other. The late Stewart Udall is one of these people. Over a span of more than four decades we engaged in conversation that greatly expanded my purview and allowed me a clear view into the political workings of midcentury America. I regard Stewart Udall as a man of enormous integrity with an evolved sense of ethics. In my mind, he was our greatest secretary of the interior, who ultimately battled the U.S. government in behalf of Navajo uranium miners and their widows and families after he left public office. He was a champion of Native American rights as well as the natural environment. He was born to a Mormon family in early 1920 and grew up on a farm in St. Johns, Arizona. His father was a highly respected judge who contributed greatly to Stewart’s understanding of politics and its role in shaping cultural standards of our country’s population. Stewart possessed a refined sense of history and while in office befriended great writers and interpreters of history, including Robert Frost, Alvin Josephy, and Wallace Stegner. Stewart was one of three people who provided me with a profound sense of << Politics of the Colorado River 93 < the role of history. He chided me for reading fiction to change the subject after a long day of conducting interviews or writing or pursuing research. I recorded many hours of conversations with Stewart over a span of twenty-seven years. The following is excerpted from a conversation I recorded in 2001 when I was producing a six-part documentary radio series entitled Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West. SU: You need a geographical perspective to really study the Colorado River. It has ended up as the most regulated, the most governed by detailed laws and so on. But the mountain West, the Río Grande . . . in some respects, it’s a long narrow river. It goes all the way to the Gulf Coast of course. It’s similar [to the Colorado River]. It’s a relatively narrow watershed. The Columbia River of course is a unique river. It’s the great hydroelectric river. It starts in British Columbia, western Montana, the Snake River. The amount of water in that river dwarfs the Colorado. It is sort of fascinating to me that the Colorado River has ended up historically as being the . . . most controversial, most regulated by law, and in another aspect, because southern California is not part of the river basin, is unique in the sense that the main benefit of the river historically has been California . . . The interesting thing to me about southern California and the Metropolitan Water District is that it is not part of the Colorado RiverBasin.ThesouthernCaliforniapeople,beginningwithwhat I think rightly could be called the rape of Owens Valley . . . had audacity. They were big thinkers, and some of them saw that that wonderful climate you have in southern California, not that it had an agricultural potential, although some of the original waterwentforagriculture,buthereyoucouldbuildagreatempire in terms of people. So now you have 16 million people and still growing in that area. When you look at what Los Angeles was in 1880 . . . San Francisco . . . northern California was the hub of California. Los Angeles was a cow town, a cow county, and that was a pretty good description of it. And then the growth began and of course it exploded in the twentieth century. It’s fascinating and it’s ironical, because it’s unique that much of the water to spur the growth and the sprawl and urbanization of California comes from outside the basin from the Colorado River . . . Jack Loeffler 94 < When the Reclamation Act was passed—big news for the West—in 1903 under Teddy Roosevelt, this set up the Bureau of Reclamation, and there would be projects built in various parts of the West. The Bureau of Reclamation would be running the show to a degree. They would be managing projects and advising Congress what to do and what not to do, although members of Congress ultimately made the opinions. The first big project, really magnificent project, under the Reclamation Act of 1903 was the Salt River Project in Arizona, harnessing the waters out of their mountains. And that project in the Phoenix area is of course still thriving today. It was a wonderful farming irrigation project finished in 1913. But as a result of the Reclamation Act, which was a broad act covering the West, you immediately encountered Indian water rights. And in a case in Montana, because that’s where one of the first projects was to be built, the Supreme Court handed down what’s called the Winters Doctrine, and that said in effect that when Indian reservations were created, that the law assumed that they would have sufficient water for whatever needs they had then or in the future in their little river basin or river system. That of course was a godsend to Indians. Not much was done to implement it, but it’s been there. That doctrine, I can tell you, in the 1960s when I was there [as secretary of the interior], we saw it as giving up authority to demand that Indian water rights be defined and protected and that Indian projects be pushed forward. We didn’t do enough, but that one lawsuit in many ways was more important than the Law of the River [Colorado River Compact of 1922] as they call it . . . The thing that has distinguished the management and control of the Colorado River from other rivers was the Santa Fe [1922 Colorado River] Compact. I don’t think in 1922, when that conference was held, there was any great feeling in the basin because there were small states, relatively lightly populated. Denver of course was beginning to grow. These were mountain states with the high Rockies. That’s where most of the water came from. And this was early in the period of building big dams. The dam building was not much on the agenda then although some people dreamed of big dams. Politics of the Colorado River 95 < California wanted the [Santa Fe] conference. Herbert Hoover [then secretary of commerce who presided over the meeting] served them well. I’ve never understood why he was there and what pressure he put on everybody because he was in effect California ’s agent in putting this through. They wanted an agreement that would enable them to go to Congress and build the Hoover Dam/Boulder Dam. That was a kind of forced marriage. It ended up with this strange thing that never happened in other basins of each state being allocated a certain amount of water. This is purely arbitrary. There was no rational basis for it. It wasn’t like the kind of river basin planning that we got started all over the United States in the 1960s when I was secretary of interior, saying now let’s look at the river, and what are the highest and best uses; let’s try to exercise foresight and look at the future. They just arbitrarily said, and I’m sure Hoover exerted pressure, that they had to have an agreement. That led of course to the construction of Boulder Dam. That enormous project was then, maybe it still is, the highest dam in the world—went forward in the depths of the Great Depression. This again showed the political power that southern California was exerting and the economic power, because it got the electric power companies involved, and this was in essence a California project. It wasn’t anything beneficial to the basin, and the water, other than that flowing down the river to the delta and flowing to the few irrigation districts like Imperial [Valley], huge users of water—the key water, rather good-quality water, was going to southern California through an aqueduct . . . The Santa Fe Compact simply divided waters and produced an interstate agreement, although Arizona refused to participate , and they fought it for twenty years because they saw it as California getting the upper hand and dominating the river. They were correct in my opinion in that assumption. But they had to have a law, and that became the Boulder Canyon Project, which would spell out what was going to happen if this big dam was built. And that was the beginning really of what they now called—this was a lawyer’s dream—the Law of the River, and lawyers in all these states had to become acquainted with the law, and then additional law was written. There’s a body of law called Jack Loeffler 96 < the Law of the River. This is not true in any other river basin in the United States, or to this degree. Law governs everything. JL: In 1944 the United States and Mexico entered into a treaty that talks about how much water Mexico was going to have gotten, because part of the whole concept within the 1922 Compact was that the Lower Basin receive 7.5 million acre-feet and the Upper Basin 7.5 million acre-feet, and Mexico was left out in the cold. So could you talk about what led up to this 1944 treaty? SU: The interesting thing . . . is Herbert Hoover in Santa Fe and the Santa Fe Compact they created is completely artificial. There’s no Upper Basin and Lower Basin; there’s a river basin. They divided it up and they left Mexico out. And then the Hoover Dam was built. So I don’t know the history of the 1944 treaty with Mexico, but it was during the war, 1944, and obviously [there] was an effort by President Roosevelt to mollify the Mexican officials. Of course they had the agriculture south of the Imperial Valley in Baja California. It was a rich agricultural area, and they wanted to protect their water. They said, ‘You divided up the river, but you left us out.’ So this treaty, they backed up in effect and guaranteed Mexico a certain amount of water. That was the 1944 U.S.– Mexico Treaty. It wasn’t a treaty with the states; it was the United States of America and the government of Mexico. JL: What’s interesting to me is that in 1922 it was thought that between 17 and 18 million acre-feet of water came down the Colorado River in a year, which proved to be a fallacy. It’s somewhere between 13.5 and 15 million acre-feet a year. So with the allocation within what was then determined to be the Upper and Lower Basins plus Mexico, the river has become very overallocated and that led to many future events. Actually one of the events that that led up to was the 1956 Colorado River Storage Project Act. I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. SU: One of the interesting things and shortcomings of the famous Santa Fe Compact between the states was not only that they allocated each state to have a certain amount of river water and left Mexico out, but also one of the big mistakes they made, Politics of the Colorado River 97 < because they arbitrarily, based on this rather short history, had to decide how much—they shouldn’t have been so rigid, and they shouldn’t have made an assumption of this kind. It wasn’t rational in my opinion. So they had to back up and consider the fact that the flow of the river was less; that Mexico had been left and adjustments had to be made. The Upper Basin states—this is interesting—it wasn’t until almost twenty-five years after the compact that they decided they had to have an interstate compact to govern their relationships and they did this. . . . Congress has to approve it, but they had a compact between the states to set some ground rules. . . . What the Santa Fe Compact did was make what could have been a simple solution a complex solution that had problems, problems, all the way down the line. JL: The Colorado River Storage Act was what really resulted in the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam. SU: That came out of the [Upper Basin] states’ compact. After World War II, the Upper Basin states, as they were called, decided— California had its big project, Hoover Dam . . . they decided that they wanted to begin projects—dams, irrigation projects, hydroelectric dams—primarily to provide benefits and uses of water. They would tell the Bureau of Reclamation, ‘Go study where hydroelectric dams should be built. Go study and tell us how to control the river so we can keep some of the water in our states.’ I’m talking about the northern states, the Upper Basin states. And the Bureau of Reclamation would do this, and they put together what was called the Upper Colorado River Storage Project. JL: Arizona and California have been at loggerheads over the way the water would flow since basically they became states, basically aware of themselves in juxtaposition on either side of the Colorado River. Could you talk about the history of the whole Arizona versus California decree of 1963? SU: Well, you have to historically look at what became the biggest water fight in the West between big California and little Arizona. Neither of these states contributed a great deal of water Jack Loeffler 98 < to the river. The main contribution from Arizona was the Gila River, which originates in the mountains in Arizona and New Mexico. And yet Arizona, although they walked away from Santa Fe, they didn’t agree, they were given a pretty good allocation of water. But afterward when you got to the 1940s, California already had its aqueduct on the river, and Hoover Dam had been built, and Arizona wasn’t getting much benefit. So Arizona wanted to have its big project [Central Arizona Project (CAP)], and they had the Bureau of Reclamation study various alternatives , what should be done. When they brought that to the floor of Congress in 1951 and ’52, Arizona senator Carl Hayden, who was a very powerful figure on the [Senate] Appropriations Committee, Arizona then had for two years the Senate majority leader. They passed it right through the Senate, they just whipped it through. California blocked it. That was their strategy. The longer they could keep Arizona off the river, the longer they could use water they weren’t entitled to, you see, and that was what created a lot of enmity and a lot of suspicion in Arizona. They [California] blocked the legislation in the House. Arizona had the chairman of that committee. California was throwing its weight around and said no, Arizona’s water internally hadn’t been qualified, and there were disputes with California. They had to go to the Supreme Court. Well, that was a nice strategy because it bought eleven years of delay. That was finally resolved by the Supreme Court confirming Arizona’s contention in 1963. Then Arizona’s project [CAP] could start to move forward. JL: One of the determining factors within the way the water has been allocated and continues to be used is the concept of the best beneficial use. Could you talk about how that concept has evolved, especially within your tenure as secretary of interior? SU: The idea of water rights, Powell saw this early, that the West was an arid—semiarid—region. It had high mountains and a lot of water would flow out, but if you’re going to use it you had to build reservoirs. Powell was a dam builder. . . . You had to develop projects to use it [water]. Hydroelectric power was a big thing back at the turn of the century and later on. Hydroelectric Politics of the Colorado River 99 < power is clean. It’s a marvelous resource. So harnessing the rivers was the language. But in terms of water use, when you got to the West, unlike the eastern part of the United States, which is water rich and you had riparian water law, the idea was established early in various states, and then it became rather general, that the first person to start using water had a prior right, and that became and still is a central part of this region, which is dry and semiarid and water is very precious. So how do you determine who has the right to use water? Within states, each state had a certain amount of water allocated. They had to work within that limit, but they could decide by state law what the priorities were. They’re still wrestling with this in some of the states. JL: After the Upper and Lower Basins were established within the framework of the Law of the River, the secretary of the interior was granted the mayordomoship of the Lower Basin. Could you talk about that? SU: In working out the Santa Fe Compact, I think it became clear in this river basin [Lower Basin] where water was limited and there would be controversies between states that you had to have an authority who could make important decisions, who could force the states to take certain actions. And they selected the secretary of interior, and this is written into the laws, the Boulder Canyon Project and so on. The secretary in effect became the water master of the river and could make very important decisions. For example, as dry periods developed, you have water shortages, and you’re shifting water down the river. As Marc Reisner pointed out [in Cadillac Desert], the whole river is a big plumbing system, and releasing water at certain points and certain times became very crucial. The secretary of the interior was given a major role as the water master. JL: In the Upper Basin it’s a different situation. It’s my understanding that the states themselves have autonomy in the way the water is used within the states, and the agreements are between the states rather than under the direct control of somebody outside the states. Jack Loeffler 100 < SU: Naturally when you allocate water to Colorado, to Utah, to New Mexico, it was left to the states to have primary authority to decide how they were going to use their water. This is what apportionment meant: that’s their water and they can decide how to use it. Still there were conflicts. This is a river basin, the river’s flowing. And the states encountered problems between themselves and they had to work this out. In some instances they had the authority, and the secretary of interior simply was there to regulate if there were disputes that arose. JL: One of the things that became more apparent as time wore on throughout the whole twentieth century, there was the evolving sense that the Lower Basin states, especially California, were using water that was supposed to have been allocated to the Upper Basin states but had thus far gone unused. So within the Upper Basin was a growing concern that California might indeed get more and more of the Upper Basin water. SU: You see, what happened with the Boulder Canyon Project and the building of Hoover Dam is an established fact. California not only tapped the river for southern California’s water use through the aqueduct, but it also confirmed the water rights for the farmers on down the river. But here’s a big river system, and this Upper Basin/Lower Basin idea didn’t have much rational meaning to the river because rivers don’t obey Santa Fe [1922 Colorado River] compacts. They flow. As long as the Upper Basin states didn’t have major reservoirs to hold water. . . . There was plenty of water for this incredible delta at the end there [Sea of Cortez]. And Arizona was sitting there watching the water flow by, and the only projects they could get started were a few on the Gila River and some small projects for Indians right adjacent to the river itself. So naturally the Upper Basin states, they were very loud about this in the 1950s. Well, we’re not using our water, and unless we can have projects it all flows down to California. [This thinking resulted in the Colorado River Storage Project of 1956 that shortly led to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam and the enormous reservoir named after John Wesley Powell. This allows the Politics of the Colorado River 101 < Upper Basin states to control the amount of water to be released to the Lower Basin states and Mexico (JL).] JL: Could you talk about the Salt River Project in southern Arizona in the early twentieth century? SU: The Salt River Project in my view was not only one of the pioneering western irrigation projects, large scale, but one of the most successful. That dam was completed in 1913. The Salt River Project is an irrigation project. They divided the land at that huge farming area near Mesa, Arizona, and the surrounding area. The farms fed off the canals that came out of the Roosevelt Dam and even on into Phoenix itself and Glendale. Those huge canals were taking this water, and these were very productive farms. What the Phoenix metropolitan area has ended up doing is what California did. For most of the farms, the land was [monetarily] more valuable for developing subdivisions [contributing to] this enormous growth of Phoenix trying to be another Los Angeles. The farmers, it was so attractive they sold out, and they tore down the citrus groves and the cotton fields. You see now this huge glob of urban sprawl. That was one of the most successful irrigation projects. They also developed hydroelectric power and provided power for people. It transformed the Phoenix area, the Salt River Project. JL: Then the Central Arizona Project—do you think that the Salt River Project provided the model of thinking for the early forms of the Central Arizona Project? SU: The early concepts—I’m talking about the 1940s and early ’50s when they first developed the Central Arizona Project, which Arizona congressmen and senators wanted—the model was the Salt River Project of 1913. And we told Congress—I testified many times as secretary of interior—that this was going to be based on the success of the Salt River Project, and the water being brought in would be used for farming. That was the primary use that we had in mind. Well, by the time that the project was finished, it was so costly, the farmers couldn’t afford the water. Jack Loeffler 102 < And the primary use of the water now is for urban use, and it may end up rescuing Tucson, which has grown too far [large] and too fast. JL: Could you talk about the actual evolution of the Central Arizona Project [CAP], the history of it and how it gets its water? SU: Well, Arizona with its water, the portion under the Santa Fe Compact [1922 Colorado River Compact]—see, Arizona walked away. They didn’t ratify the compact. We had a governor in 1944 who said, ‘Well, if we’re going to get a project we can’t do it ourselves.’ There was a lot of ‘We’ll do our own project. We’ll finance it ourselves.’ But that never materialized. So they [Arizona] finally joined the [Colorado River] compact. You had to have a project, and the Arizona people wanted to bring the water into central Arizona, into the Phoenix area for farms, into Pinal County, the big cotton farms, very productive cotton farms. My brother then said later on let’s take the aqueduct all the way to Tucson, and it’s going to prove ultimately to be the salvation of Tucson, I suspect, as a source of water. By the time this original project was proposed or put together in 1950 and 1951 and presented to Congress, the Senate approved it. By the time you got this huge project ultimately built you’re on into the 1980s. And it was very costly, and by then this massive urbanization had begun and the farms were being converted into subdivisions in the Phoenix metropolitan area. And the other farmers who had overpumped the underground water in Pinal County south of Phoenix, the [CAP] water was so expensive most of them couldn’t afford it. So the project [CAP] has ended up as an urban water supply project with some agriculture, not a great deal. In subsequent conversations, Stewart Udall revealed that he was gravely disappointed that CAP water proved too costly for farmers and has ultimately contributed to the too-rapid growth of Phoenix and Tucson. He had grown up in a Mormon family in the small farming/ranching community of St. Johns, Arizona. As a teenager during the Great Depression, he worked part time as a cowboy. During World War II he served as a << Politics of the Colorado River 103 < belly gunner on a bomber and survived at least fifty combat missions over Europe. He ultimately attained a law degree from the University of Arizona and married Ermalee Webb from Mesa, Arizona. Stewart and Lee Udall raised six children. As a politician, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he served from 1955 till 1961 when he was appointed as secretary of the interior by President John F. Kennedy, a post he held for eight years. He worked vigorously in Arizona’s behalf to claim the state’s “rightful” apportionment to Colorado River water that had seemingly been thwarted by California politicians for four decades, a water war that greatly shaped his political perspective. Stewart Udall was one of America’s greatest environmentalists. During his tenure as secretary to the interior, he oversaw the addition of four national parks, six national monuments, eight national seashores and lakeshores, nine national recreation areas, twenty national historic sites, and fifty-six nationalwildliferefuges.HecontributedtotheCleanAirAct,theEndangered Species Act, and other acts designed to protect our environment. It was on his watch that the Wilderness Act of 1964 was signed into law. Stewart Udall died in the first minutes of spring 2010 at his home in Santa Fe. President Barack Obama stated, “For the better part of three decades, Stewart Udall served this nation honorably. Whether in the skies above Italy in World War II, in Congress, or as secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall left an indelible mark on this nation and inspired countless Americans to continue his fight for clean air, clean water, and to maintain our many national treasures.” ...