Endless Frontier

"Information for Settlers," says the sign over a door of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation headquarters in fast-growing little Ephrata, Wash. (1950 pop. 4,584). The word settlers, as used there, is no nostalgic recall of old frontier days. Inside the door sit the 1951 settlers themselves, sun-weathered men & women who have come to Ephrata in search of a new frontier--the irrigated farmland created out of sagebrush desert by Grand Coulee Dam. They ask sober, practical questions, but in their eyes glows the same high excitement that built the U.S. The bureau believes that they are only forerunners of millions or tens of millions who can be given farms and homes in what is now desert.

The new frontier has new sounds: the hum and roar and clatter of powerful machines; for the sagebrush country around

Ephrata was not readymade for man. It was made ready for man by spectacular engineering, and now men are moving in. More than a million acres are being prepared for the settlers, land so productive that 50 acres or less will support a family comfortably.

New Province. As soon as the settlers are in, the whole parade of U.S. life will march in behind them. The villages in the sagebrush will grow into fair-sized towns. They will need houses, stores, schools, churches and skilled workers. The U.S. will gain not merely new farmland; it will add a whole new province as productive as one of the lesser states.

This is only a sample, says the Bureau of Reclamation, of what its new machines, methods and concepts can do for desert country. Encouraged by recent successes, irrigation experts are now convinced that the rapidly growing U.S. can expand almost indefinitely within its present boundaries. West of the Rockies alone, they believe, 50 million acres can be watered into life. This would be like adding to the U.S. a new country comparable in agricultural productivity to France or prewar Germany.

New Tricks. The bureau's early projects were dams that watered lands downstream through canals flowing by gravity. Such "gravity sites" are almost gone, so the bureau has developed new tricks. Last week three of its greatest projects were close to completion. Each of them has a different trick for making rivers behave, and the three tricks combined form the engineering strategy that can give the U.S. new frontiers in the arid parts of the West.

Grand Coulee Dam is the biggest dam anywhere. Viewed from the gorge below, it looks like the biggest thing on earth. Over its spillway, 1,650 feet wide, the great Columbia River sweeps majestically, a curve of green water up to 17 feet thick. It falls so far (320 feet, twice the height of Niagara) that it seems to fall slowly. The roar of the falling water, though loud, is as smooth as the sound of surf on a distant beach.

Viewed from the canyon's high rim, the dam looks too small to create, as it will, a patch of mottled green land nearly as big as Connecticut. But all modern irrigation dams look small when compared with what they do. They accomplish their ends by geographical judo, playing on the weaknesses of their rivers.

The weakness of the Columbia dates from the ice age, when a glacier blocked its deep canyon and forced it to cut a new channel. The river returned to its old bed after the glacier retreated, but the temporary channel (the Grand Coulee) is still there, a spectacular, steep-walled dry valley that leads to a cluster of level, irrigable plains.

Displaced River. A dam high enough (more than 600 feet) to turn the Columbia directly into the Coulee would have backed the water far into Canada. So the dam was built to raise the water level about 350 feet. A small part of the electric power that its turbines generate is used to pump part of the river the rest of the way (280 feet) and spill it into the Coulee. This turbine-pump combination, using a river's energy to raise part of its water over its own high banks, is the key engineering trick that frees irrigation from gravity. Its efficiency is about 80%, i.e., one cubic foot of water falling 100 feet generates enough electricity to pump another cubic foot 80 feet above the reservoir.

Eventually Grand Coulee will have twelve pumps, housed in a long, tall room with the proportions of a cathedral nave. Two are already installed, driven by the most powerful (65,000 h.p.) motors in the world. Each can pump enough water (one billion gallons a day) to meet the needs of New York City. All twelve pumps together will lift 16,000 cubic feet per second--close to the average flow of the Colorado River.

Displaced Rattlers. Last week one pump was running, slowly filling a 27-mile lake in the desert-bottomed Coulee. As the water advances, it pushes ahead of it a wave of displaced rattlesnakes. One bu-reauman killed 51 in a morning.

When the water has filled the lake, it will creep through branching canals that lace like arteries through the plains. It is mournful country now, far more depressing than self-respecting desert. In rainy years, some parts of it produce a fair crop of wheat; successive waves of settlers have tried to make a go of wheat farming. Nearly all have failed and fled. Their houses stand empty, surrounded by grey-green sagebrush, symbols of desolation.

The present wave of settlers, the bureau is sure, will not fail. Next spring, Grand Coulee's water will ripple down the ditches, bringing dependable "rain" to 87,000 acres. Each year thereafter, more blocks of land will get water, until the whole million acres have turned green.

Moist Magic. It will be very green, for irrigated land outproduces most land that is only "sky-watered." Desert soil has not been leached by heavy rain of its soluble plant nutrients. The sunlight keeps plants awake and growing. Most important of all, a skilled irrigator can give his plants just the right amount of water. Natural rainfall seldom does this; most seasons have wet or dry spells that check plant growth.

Out in the sagebrush, the bureau's experimental farms, now watered from pumped wells, look like green postage stamps pasted on brown paper. One acre of their pasture supports three head of cattle. The bureau's farmers have harvested 160 bushels of grain sorghum per acre, five tons of alfalfa hay, 32 tons of sugar beets. The U.S. average is 23.1 bushels of sorghum per acre, 2.23 tons of alfalfa, 14.8 tons of beets. Figures like these excite the settlers, who clamor for many times as much land as can be watered next season.

Family Farms. If the Bureau of Reclamation has its way, the settlers will not be fleeced by land speculators. Large landowners will not be forced to sell, but if they want the bureau's water (financed by U.S. taxpayers) on their almost worthless dry land, they must "join the project." Then each may have water for, at most, 160 acres, provided that they sell the rest of their land at the appraised dry-land price, about $7.50 per acre. This is the price that the settlers will pay, and they may not resell at a higher price for five years.

The bureau's experts will divide the land into "farm units" (40 to 160 acres according to the quality of the soil) big enough to support a family comfortably. No buyer may have water for more than one unit. If Congress continues this policy, * the bureau hopes to see the whole area divided into prosperous one-family farms, with none of the gang-worked "factories-in-the-field" so conspicuous in other irrigated parts of the West.

Water Exchange. A great new project in California illustrates another new trick: "water exchange." California's Central Valley, 500 miles long and 100 miles wide, is one of the world's prize chunks of real estate. When irrigated properly, its rich, level land produces exuberant yields. But the southern part, the San Joaquin watershed, has two-thirds of the irrigable land and only one-third of the water. The northern part, the Sacramento watershed, gets more rain. It has one-third of the land and two-thirds of the water. So San Joaquin is chronically strapped for water, while floods roll down the Sacramento every spring and go to waste in the Pacific.

It would be possible to lead Sacramento water directly to thirsty Bakersfield at the distant southern end of the Central Valley, but there is an easier way. If farmers on the lower San Joaquin are given Sacramento water, they will not need the San Joaquin water that they use now. Then the main flow of the San Joaquin can be diverted well upstream and used as far south as Bakersfield. This is "water exchange."

Moving the Rain. Shasta Dam, second highest in the world, now blocks the upper waters of the Sacramento, storing 4,500,000 acre-feet * of water. During the almost rainless summers, this water will be fed into the Sacramento. When it reaches the delta where the Sacramento and the San Joaquin join, it will be led across the lowlands to a pumping plant at Tracy, in the foothills of the Coast Range. There it will get a boost from six huge pumps to lift it 200 feet into a canal. The pumps run on power from Shasta Dam. At Tracy, as at Grand Coulee, a river is made to raise part of itself above its own bed.

From Tracy, the boosted Sacramento water will wind south 117 miles and spill into the San Joaquin at Mendota Pool. Then it will run down the San Joaquin, irrigating downstream lands. The payoff comes at the extreme southern end of the Central Valley. Friant Dam will divert San Joaquin water that would otherwise be needed downstream and send it through a 153-mile canal to drought-plagued Bakersfield. No Sacramento water will actually get to Bakersfield, but the effect will be just the same. As the bureaumen put it: "The rain will move 500 miles south."

"Rain" to the Rescue. The "rain" will come none too soon; the project is a rescue job. Californians have long been cultivating more land than their local rivers can irrigate. In years of low water yield, hundreds of thousands of acres revert to desert.

Next month a full-dress celebration will greet the Sacramento water as it marches south, but desperate farmers are already using the trickles raised to test the pumps. Next year many of them will see the end of their water troubles. The bureau figures that the Sacramento water will bring 500,000 desert acres under cultivation and give crop-saving supplemental water to 500,000 acres more.

Water Export. Such water exchanges will be used in many future projects, but the bureau believes that an even more radical trick, "water export," will have to be used before the rivers of the West can do their full duty.

Rivers, the experts say, fall into two classes: 1) those with more water than can be used profitably in their own basins, and 2) those with more irrigable land than the river can water. Obviously, water should be exported from basins with a water surplus.

One big project, now partly in operation, already exports water from one basin to another. Within the state of Colorado, the Colorado River is a "surplus" stream. The parched states lower down the river could use more of its flow, but by interstate agreement Colorado is entitled to more water than it can use in its share of the Colorado watershed. So the Bureau of Reclamation has built a complex system of dams, reservoirs, pumps and tunnels to lead part of the upper Colorado through the Rockies and spill it down the eastern slope near Denver.

Through the Tunnel. Granby Dam catches some 450,000 acre-feet of the Colorado's water. A pumping station (18,000 h.p.) lifts it 181 feet and pushes it under the snow-capped Continental Divide, 12,000 feet high, through a tunnel 13 miles long. When the water finally reaches the edge of the dry Great Plains, it gives supplemental irrigation to 600,000 acres of scantily watered land. Water export of this sort, the bureau believes, can be used in many parts of the West to make water-rich basins help water-poor ones.

Some years ago the bureau's top strategists began to study the western half of the U.S. as a hydrographic whole. What they saw was not novel, but as viewed in their recently raised sights it took on new importance. A project that had been a dream is now a real possibility: to bring the water of Oregon into the dry Southwest.

Across the Pacific Coast at the latitude of San Francisco runs a natural boundary (see map) that does not show on any ordinary map. Northwest of it, the country gets more water than it needs and the coastal mountains are clothed with dripping evergreens. Short, steep rivers gush like fire hoses. South of the boundary, the country changes abruptly. The forests dwindle and thin out; the rivers are poor, weak things that usually go dry in summer.

That sharp hydrographic boundary between the rain and the desert looks to the bureau's engineers like the most important fact about the Western U.S. They long to punch a hole and let the water of Oregon flow south through graceful canals. In 1948, the bureau got congressional authority to make a "preliminary reconnaissance," which has now produced a fat printed report packed with figures, maps and diagrams. It has not been made public, probably because California is afraid of the effect the report may have on its struggle with Arizona for the last dribbles of water in the lower Colorado River; it may point out too clearly that California can always draw on the water of the northern rain country, while Arizona's future growth must come from the Colorado. The report itself pays no attention to political bickering. With scientific detachment, it estimates what the new tools of irrigation engineering could do with (as a starter) the Klamath River, which rises in Oregon and enters the Pacific just south of California's northern boundary.

Under the Bully Choops. The Klamath does not look like much on a map, but its annual flow is 10 million acre-feet, about equal to one of the poorer years of the Colorado. According to one plan, an 813-ft. dam at Ah Pah, near the mouth of the Klamath, will back it far up its southern tributary, the Trinity. A tunnel 60 miles long under the Bully Choop Mountains will export 6,000,000 acre-feet into the Sacramento. After getting a boost from a battery of pumps, the water will follow a canal to Bakersfield. Then another tunnel under the Tehachapi Mountains will take it to Los Angeles, and to needy areas from Santa Barbara to San Diego.

Three water exchanges will spread the benefit of the Klamath water. About 100,000 acre-feet of it can take care of farmers with claims on the American River. Then some of the American's upper tributaries can be used for irrigation in bone-dry Nevada.

Near Los Angeles the Klamath water can replace 300,000 acre-feet now drawn from the Owens Valley. Then the Owens water can be turned into the flat and potentially fertile Mojave Desert. The biggest exchange will be with the Colorado, for Klamath water can replace one million acre-feet of Colorado water now consumed by Los Angeles, and this could be used in Arizona. Part of it might be diverted from a Colorado tributary, the San Juan, and turned into the Rio Grande watershed for desperately water-short New Mexico. It might be exported to eastern Colorado, or to the Bonneville Basin around Great Salt Lake, where the growing industries of Utah are screaming for water. Thus the abundant flow of the Klamath could bring new life to dry lands more than 1,000 miles away.

Defense for 20 Days. The Klamath has been studied in detail; its total cost would be $3 1/4 billion, less than the defense cost of 20 days of the cold war as it is planned for 1952. In return, the U.S. would get at least 2,000,000 acres of new land, as productive agriculturally as a middle-sized state.

The Klamath is only a beginning. North of it, on the coast of Oregon, run other short, fat rivers (the Rogue, Umpqua and Smith) that could be made to flow southwest at slightly greater cost. They would yield about 6,000,000 acre-feet and bring another 2,000,000 acres into production, perhaps in the Mojave Desert or the Imperial Valley. And above this 1/4ladder 1/4 of rivers, as the bureaumen call it, lies the Columbia, the biggest prize of all. Its basin and adjacent "water surplus" areas now waste into the sea 300 million acre-feet a year. One-fifth of its flow would fill all needs of the Northwest, leaving an exportable surplus of 240 million acre-feet.

When the bureaumen are asked what they would do with the Columbia, they go into engineering ecstasy only slightly tempered with apology. Few parts of the West, they say, are wholly inaccessible to the water of Oregon.

Food for 75 Million. To reach such dry areas as the Lahontan Basin of Nevada or the Mojave Desert will be a long, costly job. But the Bureau of Reclamation is forced by the nature of its job to look far ahead. It takes years of exploration, surveying and figuring to find the best course for an artificial river. More years are needed to design and build the dams and pumps. So the bureau feels that it should plan for a time perhaps 50 years hence when the growing U.S. population will really need more food and will pay as much as the cost of a small war for new land that can produce it.

Bureaumen believe that eventually 50 million more acres can be irrigated west of the Rockies, and that this would feed an additional 75 million people. Even after that, there is plenty more. East of the Rockies lie large areas of semi-arid land that could increase their production mightily. It would be quite a job to pump the Mississippi into Texas and Oklahoma, but the more enthusiastic bureaumen believe it could be done. 1/4We and our contractors, 1/4 they say, 1/4enjoy pushing rivers around. 1/4

* The policy of favoring family-size farms dates from the Homestead Act of 1862 (President Abraham Lincoln) and was reaffirmed in the Reclamation Act of 1902 (President Theodore Roosevelt).

* An acre-foot equals 43,560 cubic feet of water, enough to cover one acre one foot deep.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.