All Waters Run Deep

Let’s judge a book by its cover. The title word “water” is huge, boldface black, and stretched across the entire top third of the dust jacket. A black and white photograph, circa the end of the last century, depicts water: the gentle elbow of a river’s turn paralleled by the engineered precision of a brimming canal, which is perhaps bringing water to a Rocky Mountain mining operation of some sort. There, across the river on the other side, is a thin band of railroad tracks that follows the river’s gentle bending.

Evaluating the merits of this book is not really the aim of this moment’s perusal of its cover. But I will urge my students to pay attention to this imagery and what it might tell them about the book or about certain aspects of the history of the American West, for it does get a conversation going. We suspect, rightly, that the book is to be weighted toward discussion of water. We might also guess that such a discussion would be complicated. Why? Look at the photograph. This ribbon, the river at the center flanked by a canal on one side and railroad on the other, appears placid, each feature virtually complementing its companions, in presence as much as in geometry. Yet we know better than that. What may look like separate and parallel landscape curves—river, railroad, canal—are really intertwined, entangled, overlapping, anything but complimentary. Think of the most obvious questions we would all ask students to ponder as they glance at this cover. Who owns the canal? Who owns the land? Who owns the river? Who owns the water?

My students will read this book, cover to cover, more than once. They will learn, in part, that photographs like this one can be misleading. Such images of tranquillity aside, the history of “water, land, and law” in the American West is a woefully tangled tale. Interpretation, much less explanation, of such a complex subject demands two scholarly traits: archival exhaustion and clarity of expression. Here we have both. Donald Pisani has been to the sources of, especially, western water, gathered them up, and labored long and hard to render them meaningful and understandable.

Every one of the ten chapters in this book has been previously published as a scholarly article. Like the features in the cover photograph, they seem at first to be separate entities, each devoted to a specific stream of historical investigation. Six, at least, deal predominantly with water: it is at the center of such themes as federal policy implementation, Native American history, and the evolution of legal doctrine. The remaining essays assess land monopoly, land policy, and conservation. But the ten pieces are not so disparate as they might seem. All overlap in one way or another. The book’s subtitle attempts to pull the essays together thematically as suggestive of “the limits of public policy,” neatly bounded by the arbitrary precision of a seven-decade bracket. But there is more to it than that: the essays, with perhaps one or two exceptions, share far more than this nod to thematic convenience or convergence would suggest. They have, as the author notes, “much in common” (p. xi). The chapters explore the fundamental aspects of western American resource exploitation in, especially, the nineteenth century. And they do so with full appreciation of the cultural, economic, and legal depth of that exploitation. Since publication of his first monograph in 1984, Donald Pisani has been recognized as one of the most thorough and perceptive students of western American history. ¹ His investigations of western water history, particularly devoted to irrigation, as well as broader investigations of legal history and the rise of western conservation, are critical studies. With this book of essays, a case of the whole being more than the sum of its parts, Pisani presents a coherent case-study discussion of the immensely complicated and intermingled...