Chapter Two
Winter
Poems Along the Rio Grande
Sometimes
I stand on the river bank
and
feel the water take my pain,
allow
my nostalgic brooding
a
reprieve.
The
water flows south,
constantly
redrafting its story
which
is my story,
rising
and lowering with glimmering meanings—
here
nations drown their stupid babbling,
bragging
senators are mere geese droppings in the mud,
radicals
and conservatives are stands of island grass,
and
the water flows on,
cleansing,
baptizing Muslims, Jews and Christians alike.
I
yearn to move past these days of hate and racism.
That
is why this Rio Grande,
these
trees and sage bushes
the
geese, horses, dogs and river stones
are
so important to me—
with
them
I
go on altering my reptilian self,
reaching
higher notes of being
on
my trombone heart,
pulsing
out into the universe, my music
according
to the leaf’s music sheet,
working,
with a vague indulgence toward a song
called
we
the people.[1]
Rio
Bravo Del Norte the Spaniards first called it, meaning the swift river of the
North, but it finally came to be known as simply the Rio Grande, the great
river. The name testifies to its regional importance and its hold on the
imaginations of men for it is not a great river in anything except its length.
Sometimes, worn thin by drought and bled by irrigation, it is not a river at
all but only a wide strip of white sand baking and glaring in the sun.[2]
Harvey
Fergusson’s Rio Grande (1945) reads like many early tomes of southwestern lore.
The book is part adventure tale, part historical account, and partly a document
replete with racist, gendered and classist observations about the peoples and
cultural practices in the region. New Mexico is prolific place, writes
Fergusson, filled with legends and myth. It is a place where lands are made
fantastic by light and distance. To the unwary he warns that it is a place
ruinous of men. It is a place that will unmoor a traveler from memories and
social convention of other societies. Above all, he writes, it is a place where
“water has always been scarce and therefore precious, a thing to be fought for,
prayed for and cherished in beautiful vessels—a land where thunder is sacred
and rain is a God.”[3] Fergusson takes great pride in his
birthplace, evidenced by his autobiographical account of his ‘home in the west,’
and numerous other works set in the region. His father, Harvey B. Fergusson,
moved to Lincoln County in 1882 and served New Mexico as a Territorial Delegate
and later as Congressman. The younger Fergusson was a newspaper writer, author
and eventually a well-known screen writer. Many of Fergusson’s literary and
screen works are set in a fictionalized New Mexico where colonial histories, native
populations as well as the physical landscape are celebrated as forces which
both challenge and make men out of those brave enough to come to its
uncivilized and exotic shores. The familiar tropes of a vanishing time are
ever-present—the encroaching forces of civilization loom on Fergusson’s
horizons.
The poetry collections of Jimmy Santiago
Baca offer a sharp contrast to Fergusson’s depictions. The differences are as
stark as their place in society as young men. Santiago ran away from an
orphanage as a teen and entered the prison system at 21. This is where his work
as an acclaimed writer began, and where by his own accounts he spent years in
isolation for his dangerous aspiration to educate himself. Despite the contrast,
there is a collision between the works. This collision is the element of
desire—to be in the landscape, to know something of its histories, to write it.
It is a desire that marks the place histories of the region. This is true of
many place narratives. The ways we seek to name, categories and describe the
physical world, the way place, physically or in ranking or standing, speaks
continuously to this desire. Like the ‘power of place,’ this desire can be
dangerous, obscuring the landscape as much as it can illuminate. The place
reverence in the excerpt of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Winter Poems Along the Rio Grande speaks to these longings that
have shaped the river’s narratives as much as the river has shaped the land.
Santiago’s desire to understand something about the storied landscapes, a
landscape that holds so much history, is a path to self-knowledge. There is
pride here too, but it is tempered, thoughtful and reflective. The legacies of
the Rio Grande are centuries old and continuously being retold and reimagined,
as seemingly eternal and swiftly changing as the river.
This chapter is mainly concerned with
exploring place narratives that emerged with the reclamation in the Southwest
region. It is an exploration of the ways that the visions of champions of
western reclamation shaped the place narratives that defined the region in the
imagination of so many individuals in the westward movement of the Unites
States. The narrative ventures far and wide, however, to explore reclamation,
especially in looking at the land systems in the region, before returning to
the town at the center of the study. This chapter then moves to an introduction
to a small settlement first called Palomas, New Mexico, that grew up along the
banks of the Rio Grande. The town,
roughly 13 square miles populated with around 7000 people today, was at its
onset a settlement of squatters on land designated as a reclamation
reservation. Mostly swamp and bosque, the area was avoided by the Spanish for
both the wagon-sinking landscape and the strong Apache presence, and remained
unsettled by American colonists for much the same reasons. Yet the hot mineral
springs had, at the turn of the 19th century, already attracted a few stragglers
in addition to the John Cross Ranch cowhands who are said to have built the
first somewhat permanent bathhouse from the 1882. A few miles upriver, however,
the building of the Elephant Butte Dam that commenced in 1906 marked the first
small population boom for the town. The Reclamation Bureau claimed the nearby
area as a reclamation reservation, which precluded homesteading. This situation
did not deter squatters who hoped to profit from the nearby work camp. There
were approximately 3000 workers at the camp. The camp, with its neat rows of
identical houses and alcohol prohibition, under mandate by the US government to
build the nation’s greatest technological wonder, was a far cry from the
hastily erected temporary tents over hot mineral baths erected in the nearby
squatter’s settlement. The baths, soon to be joined by salons, gambling and
other entertainment, were a draw for the camp’s workers. The dam created the largest
reservoir in the world and the second largest dam in the world upon its
completion in 1916. Quickly eclipsed, it remains a powerful monument on the Rio
Grande to the ways that the place making took shape at the turn of the 19th
Century. The incorporation of the town in 1916 marked the end of a still rapidly
growing squatter’s camp into an actual town under law. By then the reclamation
camp was submerged under the waters of the Rio Grande.
The historical period this work ranges
century to the present, and although the title makes claim to ‘Modern New Mexico,’
I do not bracket the modern as having either beginning or end in this period. I
argue in the introduction that the theoretical scope of modernity I find most
useful to the study of ‘modern’ place understandings spans several more
centuries, and even this categorization remains troubled. The ways modern is
expressed in various place understandings from this particular era and remains
intelligible to the people I interviewed in the town and in contemporary place
narratives allow a more nuanced understanding of how various forces, including
intellectual ones, coalesce. Place and the idea of modernity, especially at the
conjunction of progress, are the primary considerations of this chapter,
especially in the ways that landscape conceptualized. Central to these themes
is the overarching idea of empire. The control and manipulation of landscapes
through science and technology, hallmarks of progress and modernity were powerful
reclamation place narratives. The place narratives extolled by the reverent and
fervent supporters of reclamation in the region and the landscapes they sought
to create did not accord with New Mexico’s landscapes. The regular delivery of
water to established farms and communities centuries older than the newly
established nation was not mapped onto the narrative of blooming of a desert
Eden out of forsaken desert. Mapping empire Creating places from te . that already
in existence were reclamation’s of New Mexico . Irrigation waters were more
likely to flow across These ideas provide the parameters to the
exploration of reclamation’s geographical place understandings and place
narratives.
Part One: A Question of
Land
The
approximate center of downtown Truth or Consequences, near the town’s original
bathhouse, is located at Township 13 S Range 4W and Section 20. These are the
United States Public Land Survey System (PLSS) coordinates at any rate, and a
good way to begin the exploration of the juncture between place narrative and
place making in the United States. The National Register of Historic Places
Inventory Nomination for the Public Land Survey Systems ‘starting point’
describes the survey as “the first mathematically designed system and
nationally conducted cadastral survey in any modern country.” What constitutes a modern country is not
described, although the idea that implementing this system lends itself to
creating a modern nation is strongly implied. To this end the nomination
includes the assertion that this modern land survey system has been the “object
of study by public officials of foreign countries as a basis for land reform.”[4] Exploring
reclamation’s inception and developed, as well as its fervent supporters in the
southwest demands a rudimentary understanding of this system. Stanford
conferred its first Ph.D. in History to Payson Jackson Treat in 1910 for his
dissertation, The National Land System, 1785-1820. Treat prefaces his research
with the assertion that a large part of history of western movement, and thus the
history of the nation, is “written in the land.”[5] The questions about the distribution of
public lands emerged almost simultaneously with the end of the Revolutionary
War as a possible way to pay off the fledgling nation’s enormous war debts.
Prior to colonial independence, various
systems of ownership, land disposal and tenure had developed within individual
colonies. The expansive territorial claims strategically asserted by colonial
governments during the conflict became a point of contention between the newly
independent states at the war’s end. Treat uses as an example the “sea to sea” claims
based on “ancient charters” held by six of the original colonies.[6] This
thesis is premised on the legitimacy of English charters of ownership. Treat
notes even if denied right in law, however, the mere assertions of colonial
ownership in themselves created the conditions necessary for successive
colonial land claims by the new government. A necessary condition, in other
words, for title. The negotiated cessation of claims by individual states
between 1780 and 1800 laid the foundation for the first national system of
lands. “Too much importance can hardly
be attached,” Treat argues, “to extending regular settlements into the
wilderness, and establishing sound title for all time.”[7] The Ordinance of 1785 demanded survey before
sale, a system he claims was of “inestimable value in the orderly settlement of
the great west.[8] The twin themes of imposing order on the
wilderness and settling the land in an orderly manner are continually
reinforcing each other in this narrative. Treat moves from legislation to the
extension of the land system which he argues was premised on three conditions.
The “extinguishment” of Indian claims, followed by the slow and arduous process
of survey and public notice of sale made the public domain necessary.[9] Indian cessions by treaty, the transfer of
Indian title to land, are covered sparingly and without detail although they
are mentioned often. The recognition of Indian land deeds was necessary for
legal sale and title. “The year 1805 has been rich in Indian cessions,” Treat
writes by way of example. “Nine treaties had been concluded covering territory
in all parts of the public domain save the far northwest.” He continues that
the “next year saw but a single treaty,” before moving on.[10] A
simple map depicting the land from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Florida, the
whole of the north and south, narrates a profound story of loss. “Indian Cession”
lands, marked in stripped lines to differentiate three periods from 1785-1829,
take up almost the whole area.[11]
Public lands entered the national imagination,
despite the fact that only a relatively small portion of people were settling
on actual public land. “Fully one half had taken up land in regions which never
had come under the land system,” writes Treat, lands that fell mostly “under
foreign titles,” or were the remainder of Indian lands whose title had not been
extinguished. Foreign land titles prove more difficult, necessitating a period
of confirmation that delayed survey and sale. A whole dissertation could be
written on foreign lands alone Treat claims, given the complexity of a system
that lacked uniformity, was governed by historical systems that included
British, French, Spanish, Mexican title, and was beset by corruption, land
speculation and an almost complete lack of oversight.[12]
In the “old Southwest,” Congress did establish a system that created a set
period for land claims with legally-empowered commissioners to pass final
verdict, but even in this, “the first carefully-drawn act for the confirmation
of foreign title,” claims remained undecided.[13]
Because Congress was mired in details of particular claims, rather than passing
general acts, speculators and false-witnesses triumphed, and “respectable
settlers had been forced to become squatters.”[14]
The tension between the idea that land
was so plentiful that survey of new lands could hardly keep track with
acquisition against the narrative that the best lands were disappearing or
already settled is apparent in Treats accounts. This tension, he claims, drove
the “squatting evil.”[15] This narrative is perhaps the most
interesting to this particular history for two reasons. The connection to the
town that became Truth or Consequences which began as a squatter settlement is
obvious. What is more interesting in terms of place narratives in general is
the tension that adheres to the idea of squatters. Treat does a fair job
capturing this tension. Treat notes the first instance of the use of squatters
in the Congressional record in early 1806. The squatter, “a most interesting
character whose position was gradually changing throughout these years during
the course of the years,” who had just a few years before counted as a
land-hungry settler denying the new government revenue, “were law breakers to
be sure, yet in many cases they were estimable criminals.”[16]
Treat argues it was circumstance that drove this habit of claim without deed,
title, warrant or survey. The delays resulting from private land claim arising
from foreign title and the slow pace of survey, coupled with the hope of preemption
and eventual claim for lands quickly disappearing proved a good bet for
squatters despite Congressional warnings. Eventually lawmakers capitulated to
the ownership claims of squatters says Treat, as the goals of the nation
shifted from generating revenue to encouraging settlement. “So during the half
a century of land legislation, the squatters developed from a trespasser, a
violator of the laws of the Union, to a public benefactor, a man whose bravery
and sacrifices opened up great areas to peaceful settlement and who merited
well of the nation.”[17] The Bureau of Reclamation held rights to the
land as a Reclamation Reservation where the town of Palomas began before
incorporation in 1916. It was a squatter settlement, unlike the towns in
Northern New Mexico where Spanish laid down streets and plazas in accordance
with the 1942 Law of the Indies, although these were squatter settlements in
their own right. These histories are explored in Chapter Three.
In the final assessment, Treat claims
that the new land system “rendered the settlement orderly and afforded sound
titles for all time.” Cheap land and credit afforded settler titles and drove
speculation. The system offered squatters the choice between becoming a settled
citizen or moving on “in advance of the civilization he could not endure,” and
brought order to the wilderness.[18] The
notions of order and disorder are the most common themes in this narrative of
land settlement and survey. Order is found, he argues, in regular gridded
survey, in clear deed and ownership, in the slow and steady expansion of the
nation. Disorder is found in the haste to settle, in squatters, in foreign
systems of ownership, in land speculation and corruption, and in policy. It is
order imposed from the political center on the periphery, a supposedly rational
mathematical order imprinted without recourse to local knowledge into areas
where chaos and confusion reigned. But it is also order that is the charge of
bureaucrats, appointed and elected officials and others who are in the
periphery themselves, paradoxically the cause of much of the disorder. The
Public Land Survey System set down fixed coordinates on the landscape without
regard to either the physical landscape or other previous systems of order.
As place philosopher and historian Casey
S. Steven's observes, the United States adoption of land mapping was prolific,
and as “imperialistic as Rome in its attitude toward the uncharted territories.”[19] Public
land scholar Paul Gates notes, although “the power to own, manage, grant, and
otherwise dispose of the public lands was to be one of the most nationalizing
factors in the life of the federal republic, that power received slight
attention in the new con-situation of 1787...confined to twenty-six words in
Article IV, Section 3: ‘The Congress shall have Power to dispose of and make
all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property
belonging to the United States .. .’”[20] While
land policy might seem straightforward to the uninitiated, Gates claims, the reality
is different. “Never was an important land law adopted,” he writes, “that was
not subject to varying interpretations by officials in the General Land Office,
the local land officers, and by the courts.”[21] D.W.
Meinig writes in his voluminous first tome on 500 years of shaping the American
landscape that “few, if any choices and decisions are more permanent or
prominent in the cultural landscape,” than the act of boundary setting. Meinig
continues to note that “few, if any decisions of this kind were so free of
local precedents and constraints,” that the public land survey of the western
state, “especially given an almost complete disregard for the recognition of
indigenous order on the land.” [22] Meinig identifies three dominant land
ordering types existing in the colonies prior to the wide-spread adoption of
the rectangular grid for western land that Treat so admired. Metes and bounds
land disposal established quantity or claim, but was not bound by predetermined
location or marker. This meant the freedom to carve out boundaries on unclaimed
land with respect to topography, resources, neighboring boundaries or other
claims. While on a map these might seem to be without pattern, Meinig remarks,
in the field they make far more sense of the landscape. He notes that this
system can reflect local and communal use systems, kinship bonds, and
historical settlement patterns.
At the opposite end of metes and bounds
were regularized surveys like the grid systems, where land was marked off in
uniform blocks prior to allocation and often without respect to the quality or
quantity of natural resources or access to necessary resources. These were the
dominate methods of the south and north respectively, although there was a
great deal of variation within these systems. The third type was a system of
long lots. Land in this system is divided into strips along waterways, a
practice that eventually, as larger lots are divided among heir, creates thin
strips of land that each has access to irrigation or navigation water. Meinig
claims this system builds in an unusual degree of access equality that is
impossible to achieve in other systems. The long lot system created the land
use patterns and cultural landscapes common in the Hispanic Southwest. There
are also some instances in French colonies such as Louisiana. Long lots are
singular in this quality of access equality and resource sharing, but they are
also generally embedded in a cultural landscapes were community economic and
political practices promote resource sharing. The quality of lots and the
scarcity of resources are still a factor, but this system is a radical
departure from both metes and bounds and grid systems. Communal lands are not
mentioned in either text, nor does either text take this cultural landscape as a
radical departure in terms of political and economic considerations, never mind
the environmental appropriateness of this structure in scarcity. New Mexico
troubled the emergent and existing ideas of modernity and progress in the
creation of the place narratives of reclamation, which will be taken up
shortly, because of its extensive settlement, its prior colonial occupation,
and its extensive foreign title. Systems of communal lands and land grants,
long lot land allocation and thriving centers already hundreds of years old had
an established order that did not take readily to the ordering the new colonial
settlers sought to impose on the region. The pueblos and plazas of New Mexico
did not accord with the geographical place systems being crafted in the east
for the west. The Public Land Survey System was adopted extensively in areas
not yet under metes and bounds or long lot division. New Mexico created
tensions in these geographical place narratives that made claims to the
wilderness of unsettled lands.
In a land where systems of equality were
built into the landscapes by long lots in the north, and where for centuries
irrigation had thrived in established settlements along the Rio Grande, reclamation’s
place narratives nonetheless triumphed. The Public Land Survey System (PLSS),
coupled with the ideas already put forth in the ‘great surveys’ created the
circumstances that allowed reclamation’s place narratives to triumph. The general
system adopted by the PLSS ordinances was first proposed by Thomas Jefferson as
chairman of the committee charged with figuring out what to do with the land
disposition. The plans of the committees, known as the Land Ordinances of 1784
and 1785, laid the political foundations for the rectangular grid system. As
J.B. Jackson notes in American Space, the development of the American landscape
in the decade following the civil war represented a monumental shift in
attitude as well as method. The relationship between Americans and their
environments shifted. “reverence for the past and the beauties of unblemished
nature,” might still be virtues, but was governed by “less emotion and more of
calculation.”[23] Admiring the richness of the land was no
longer enough Jackson claims, “there were practical matters to take into
account.”[24]
Fueled by exponential growth, land speculation and mechanization, the movement
to develop new lands had tremendous momentum. The grid, claims Jackson, served
the nation well in its expression of political and economic virtues of equality
of opportunity as land ownership as a bases of citizenship. The rectangular
grid, however, did not express these virtues on the ground west of the 100th
meridian, where the “square of 160 acres, so reassuring in the more humid East,
had no value on the Plains; often it does not suffice to feed a half dozen
cows.”[25] This is how lands began to be classified
according to natural and physical characteristics such as forest, mining,
farming, grazing and other typologies. But the grid persisted, despite its divergence
from the Jefferson’s vision of yeoman farmers. Jackson comments on the ways
that Americans shaped the postwar landscape through expression of their
“preference for ‘natural’” boundaries” such as those that defined the design of
parks, gardens and suburbs emerging in the east and the layout of farms and
ranches in the west, a preference that “ran counter to the American tradition
of artificial or man-made boundaries.” [26] The
“disregard of topography,” that the grid represented did not stop it relentless
march across the western landscape.[27]
The United States made its first forays
from the east in to survey, grid, map and lay claim to the vast territory west
of the one hundredth meridian after 1865. Three of these surveys were directed
by civilian geologists. They included a geological survey of the 40th Parallel
from 1867 to 1878 by Clarence King, a geological and geographical survey of the
territories from 1867 to 1879 led by Ferdinand Hayden, and the most widely
known survey led by John Wesley Powell in 1870 of the Colorado River. The forth
was led by Lieutenant George Wheeler, a topographical engineer of the U.S.
Army. These surveys were robustly declared as scientific investigations. The goal was to map the natural resources and
geology of the West in order to promote settlement and assess the potential
wealth of the nation’s lands. In addition to the basic survey, the land
ordinance required that surveyors record remarkable and permanent things and
the general quality of the lands, as well as keeping narrative journals to
record other observations. There is an almost reverent fascination with the
idea of epic adventure however, plainly evident in the Richard Bartlett’s 1962
recounting of these expeditions. The risk of replicating the ‘great man’
adventure narratives that define so much of the literature of the west and
southwest is always present in looking at these place narratives. John Westley
Powell was one of these figures. His prominence in this history is
indisputable, but what is far more valuable in this work are the ways that
Powell exemplified the tensions that emerged in the push for reclamation in the
region. As Jackson notes one result of Powell’s seven-year survey of the “Rocky
Mountain Region,” was the recognition of topographical taxonomies that began to
define public land in the west in terms of characteristics such as forest or
mining rather claiming all land as agricultural. As Jackson notes, Powell’s Report on the Arid Region of the United
States is considered one of the most significant and seminal books ever
written on the west. At the time of its publication, however, “all of the
recommendations it contained were rejected by Congress and many of his
judgments were bitterly resented by Western publishers and politicians.”[28]
David Worster’s sweeping biography of
Powell offers a great deal of insight into the forces shaping place narratives during
Powell’s time.[29]
The most powerful was the ways that narratives of nature changed. Powell
identified himself as a ‘naturalist’ to the census taker for the 1860 census,
no small matter coming from an evangelical family. This largely overblown claim
from the 16 year old Powell reflected Wesley’s intellectual and professional
desires, but more importantly reflected his desire to be identified with ideas
espoused by ‘naturalists’ such as Thomas Jefferson and Henry David Thoreau. The
most prominent part of this paradigm, ideology and affiliation was that the
natural world, properly understood, contemplated and studied, would show
evidence of an ordered universe. The first step was to take stock of the stock
of nature, a monumental task of documentation and recording. The work of cataloging the nation’s natural resources at the time was carried out by the
Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, although the call to individuals to take
an active role in this endeavor was present across popular literature and
magazines. The Corp, established in 1838, “was perhaps the single most
important federal expression of enthusiasm for science,” writes Worster.[30] Mainly
charged with military map-making, the Corp also took along naturalists on its
survey expeditions. This not only established the role of science in the
advancement of military order, it laid the foundation for the narrative of
modern nation-building as a process where the new sciences, emergent technology
and mapping ‘nature,’ were seamlessly joined. The Pacific Railroad surveys
carried out by the Corp included seventeen volumes of official reports. Henry
Beers describes the mission of the corps in a brief 1942 history. These duties
included the charge "to make such surveys and exhibit such delineations as
the commanding generals shall direct; to make plans of all military positions
which the army may occupy and of their respective vicinities, indicating the
various roads, rivers, creeks, ravines, hills, woods, and villages to be found
therein; to accompany all reconnoitering parties sent out to obtain
intelligence of the movements of the enemy or of his positions; to make
sketches of their routes, accompanied by written notices of everything worthy
of observation therein; to keep a journal of every day's movement when the army
is in march, noticing the variety of ground, of buildings, of culture, and
distances, and state of roads between common points throughout the march of the
day; and lastly, to exhibit the positions of contending armies on the fields of
battle, and the dispositions made, either for attack or defense."[31]
The practice of journal keeping
illustrates how narratives of places were considered necessary accompaniments
to the details recorded about the physical landscapes. This included cultural
observations. Poorly imagined as they might have been as literary accounts,
they nonetheless illustrate narratives where place is conceived as the
coalescing of physical and other forces such as people and the phenomenological
experiences of the observer. An excerpt from a journal illustrates these ideas.
Written by John Ives of the Corp, Ives transmits his journal of the survey and
mapping of the Colorado despite what may appear to be extraneous detail, the
every-day incidents of travel that convey a general idea of a country that can
scarcely, he writes, be imparted in any other way.[32]
Descriptions of the beauty and scale of the landscape abound, as do references
to possible routes of travel. Away from the river, Ives writes mostly about
water. Some hundred pages into his journal caps mark “crossing the dessert,”
and “long travel without water.” Ives
writes briefly about the troupes guides who lead his expedition. “Some of the
Indian tribes, of whom little has been known are subjects for curious
speculation,” he writes, but does not speculate, perhaps because the
interaction is short. Ives notes that the “The Ilualpais guides,” in the
presence of snow runoff in a ravine, “seated themselves upon the ground as
though they had made up their minds to camp.” When questioned through some
manner of communication not detailed, the guides “assured me that no more water
would be found for three days.”[33] The
guides leave during the night, however, and although they take their blankets they
do not, as Ives imagined they would, take the company livestock. Ives does not
venture to guess why the guides departed, but does write that it was a sorry
thing, “for the presence of some one that could be relied upon to point out the
watering places had prevented a great deal of anxiety…being for the first time
without the guidance of those who were familiar with the country, and what was
more important, in this arid region, with the whereabouts of watering places.”[34]
The practice of reflective journal
narratives on the landscape largely disappears at the turn of the 19th
century in reclamation narratives, replaced almost entirely by technical
language and the practice of quantifying landscapes. It is as though the case
for reclamation, having been won, can dispense with the poetic and reverent,
the lyrical and the exalted. Narrative accounts are mostly absent in the
official Bureau of Reclamation archives recounting the actual construction of
Elephant Butte Dam, replaced by detailed accounts of concrete, measurements,
and, later, by records of water allocation. Debt relief debates see a return of
some early narratives celebrating the toil of man and appeals to a greater good,
but mostly through the political speeches. The task of creating qualitative
narratives falls to boosters and town leaders, advertisers and elected
representatives. The men charged with the task of building the modern landscape
of reclamation dispense with these practices.
This theme will be explored in more detail after a discussion of the
reclamation movement at the turn of the 19th century.
Water holds a central place in the
narratives about the Southwest. It is a curious narrative, as much about the
fitness of the land for American settlement about physical conditions. Worster
writes that “malicious rumors in the older states suggested that much of the
western country was a grim desert that could never support so many people.”[35] This
was not a narrative about the possibility of settlement in and of itself, but
the possibility and even desirability of immediate large-scale settlement. Powell
came to believe that large-scale settlement could not be sustained. Technical
expertise was not the answer. Adhering to existing systems and careful resource
management was the only way to increase population, and even that would be
limited. These ideas would lead to Powell’s break from his greatest champions
and supporters in the reclamation movement and his eventual push out of
government leadership. As a lesson in comparison, Worster looks to William
Gilpin, who in the early 1940s, accompanied John C. Frémont, a second
lieutenant in the Corps of Topographical Engineers, on an expedition through
the Western territories. Gilpin, an incorrigible believer in Manifest Destiny
and a quixotic advocate of massive Western settlement, served as the first
governor of the Colorado Territory. Although forced out of office by scandal,
and proceeded to assess a large fortune in the engaged in the systematic theft
of Hispanic land grant holdings in New Mexico. Worster explores Gilpin’s almost
evangelical celebration of narratives Western empire and greatness. Powell at
the time was convinced that the west would maintain dense and productive
populations, but only as the government amassed scientific knowledge of
nature’s great bounty. Gilpin loudly protested this claim, countering it with
his own claim that mirage of desert that vanished on arrival when water was
drawn off of the abundant rivers, coupled with untold mineral wealth in the
mountains. If the West had a common ideology, argues Worster, it was this
extolled potential for settlement and growth. Worster brings in Gilpin to
contrast this common ideology with the ideas that took hold of Powell later in
his career. Powell departed from the dominant regional place narratives in
radical ways. Powell broke ranks with the reclamation movement’s embrace of the
grand narratives of progress despite keeping faith with the methods, practices
and conventions of the scientific model that was driving the machinery of
government forward with large-scale reclamation projects.
Powell argued that scientific facts lent
support to a system of pragmatic regional planning model, slow growth as well
as a reliance on traditional models of irrigation well-established in the
region. Powell found himself suddenly at
odds with reclamation’s fervent believers. Prior to these pronouncements, and
the very public break between Powell and the National Irrigation Congress,
Powell has been the regions greatest champion. He was also held in great esteem
in Washington, and the great fame of his first western incursion eroded quickly
when Powell sought to promote this new body of ideas. His pronouncements concerning
the limits of western expansion, coupled with his public statements of respect
for the regions longtime inhabitants, created a counter-narrative of place at
odds with both the rhetoric and the plans for the region. The counter-narratives
of slow growth and calls for not only the protections of traditional systems but
their wide-spread adoption may be much-lauded in the contemporary narratives of
Western water use but had little support in the early 19th century.
It was Powell’s early survey and mapping work, however, the work that profoundly
shaped the region’s imagined place geographies that remain Powell’s greatest
legacy. The most authoritative map of the western region came from the Volume
11 of the 1855 Army Corps of Topographical Engineers Pacific Railway Reports,
where, “blazoned in the middle of its four-foot expanse was that word
‘unexplored’” a gap that Powell had proposed to set right. Early Corps expeditions built on a multiple
methods to capture the geographical landscape. This reflected the idea that art
and science were twin expressions of nature, and idea that had eroded by the
early 900s. American perceptions of nature had a new authority in science at
the turn of century. This sentiment bordered on simple faith. The old ways of
knowing the world would have to make way for the new, and the new ways of
imagining and knowing the world were quite literally capable of re-making the
landscape.
The grid laid down by Jefferson was,
according to Powell, incapable of being settled until the question of
irrigation was considered. Powell’s 1878 Report
on the Lands of the Arid Region broke ranks with reclamation supporters.
Powell proposed basing irrigation rights and responsibilities in organized
irrigation districts with boundary-crossing watershed areas. Powell imagined
communal landscapes like those that already existed in the region, with limited
ranching, farming and growth. As Jackson notes, two points are made a number of
times in Powell’s report. He quotes Powell’s assertion that the “division of
these lands should be controlled by topographic features, and that the “people
settling this land…should not be hampered with the present arbitrary system of
dividing land into rectangular tracts.”[36] Powell’s basecamp in Kanab, Utah, had much to
do with this vision, and greatly influenced his later proposals about land and
irrigation. Mormons had been to Santa Fe to both trade and observe the
irrigation practices of Hispanic New Mexicans. In addition to the ideas that
water must be shared for the common good and belonged to the community, the
Mormon’s became convinced of the superiority of “time-tested methods of
building community ditched, or acequias, brought from Spain to the new world
and merged with native American techniques.”[37] The ways the cultural landscape had been
fashioned by long established communities in the Southwest, especially in New
Mexico, was being unsettled by settlement. Powell’s community and
watershed-based ideas did not take hold, and were, in fact, resolutely rejected
by the politicians, capitalists and boosters who would soon come to dominate
the reclamation’s place narrative.
Part Two: A Problem of
Water
John Baxter’s slim history of water
administration from the Spanish colonial period to New Mexico’s statehood
argues that water administration during both the Spanish colonial and Mexican
eras focused on reconciliation rather than legal enforcement. The emphasis was
on access to resources rather than law or property right. The right of prior
appropriation, he argues, was a system instituted to further the value of
shared resource equity. New Mexican settlements along the Rio Grande were
vulnerable to floods and drought, as well as and Indian attack, and the
settlement and resettlement of the land created a system where local resolution
of claims to land and water sought to ensure that all parties involved, even
newcomers claims Baxter, has some access to water. The federal officials and
land speculators drawn promise of abundant water claimed by reclamation
supporters changed these patterns of conflict resolution to a legal model.
Large‐scale irrigation
schemes were given right to enter private property and condemn any lands needed
for right‐of‐way through the
incorporation act of 1887, and gave way to systems where water was measured in
quality by scientific systems, often allocating additional water that existing irrigation systems could
not sustain. The 1907 water code shifted even more power to incoming
speculators.
The public land survey grid belied the
physical contours and content of the land on one hand, and on the other belied
the extensive settlement of the southwest. This projection of order onto empty
or wild places became a particularly entrenched imaginary. Land surveys established
the foundations of what would become an extensive bureaucracy of technical and
scientific expertise at the behest of conquering the ‘arid’ west, also a means
by which order and rationality could come to govern the region. This was a
system that may have been peopled by engineers and other experts in Washington,
but was run on the land officers and officials on the ground, a system at best
chaotic and at worst deeply corrupt. These ideas illuminate the paradox that
underlies reclamation’s place narratives. Reclamation emerged from a land
tenure based in a rational mathematical system that is often deeply irrational
on the ground. While only applicable in theory to public land, these land
systems ignored the extensive settlement and use patterns that prevailed in the
region. Reclamation, as a result, extended these practices in symbolic and
material ways. While the grid anchored down land coordinates, the land itself
became unanchored to physical, social, political, economic or cultural markers.
Here, however, is the genius of
early reclamation champions. Recognizing that public land in the West at the
turn of the century appeared to contain great sweeps of unsettled areas because
of the ways that populations were concentrated in small areas that afforded
access to both physical resources as well as other resources made it easier to
sell the idea that the land was wide open to settlement because the land had
already been settled. Champions of reclamation claimed water as the solution
for the placelessness of vacant federal land. Reclamation’s place narratives
are run through with exaltation's of land abundance and water scarcity made possible through science and men’s rugged ingenuity. This regional geographic
place imaginary of a nation is a fitting turn of the century narrative. The
story here highlights the tensions and anxieties coming out of the economic
depression of 1893 with visions of unfettered and boundless economic prosperity
through the order and craft of technology and rational science.
Reclamation’s place narratives created a
vision of American that was as bound to fictional place geography as a physical
one. Douglas R. Littlefield remarks in his excellent social, political and
economic history, Conflict on the Rio
Grande: Water and Law, 1879-1939, that “writing a book on the history of
water conflicts on the Rio Grande was a little like most water disputes in the
American West—it seemed to go on forever.”[38] The
histories of western and southwestern water survey, development and
distribution are enormously far-ranging. The purpose here is to illuminate
specific ideas about place in reclamation narratives. These ideas formed the
building blocks of both the idea of American empire and the hope of reclamation
supporters that irrigation would be the foundation of a new western empire. Empire
in this narrative is wrought from science and technology. According to reclamation
champions, irrigation will bring modernity and progress to the southwest, a
modernity that was supposed to travel with the railroad but could not be
realized without agricultural development. Agriculture, moreover, was the path of
a modern region, a narrative quickly overtaken by industrialization, but
foundational to the formation of place at the turn of the 19th Century.
I begin with a brief comparison of a two prominent works on water in the
region, highlighting themes that illuminate the ways reclamation’s place
narratives envisioned the region. I then turn to one of reclamation’s earliest
projects in the newly recognized state of New Mexico, the Rio Grande Project
and building of Elephant Butte Dam. Laying a few miles upstream from the town
of Hot Springs, New Mexico, the dam marked the first boom of what is now the
town of Truth or Consequences. The place narratives that defined the
reclamation movement were markedly different than the ones that eventually
characterized reclamation’s first place making project on the Rio Grande. Much like
the squatter’s settlement of tented bathhouses and temporary dwellings scattered
along the hot springs on the hillsides overlooking the dense bosque below
verses neat and precisely laid camp built for dam workers that directly fronted
the riverbank only a few miles upstream, the contrasts are sharp. In the contrasts
and tensions between reclamation’s place narratives and a specific reclamation project,
and between two towns that seemed equally at odds, it is possible to explore some
of the most interesting characteristics of both the place narratives and the
place making projects that defined the region at the turn of the 19th
century.
In To
Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902 (1992) Donald
J. Pisani argues that a fragmentation model of collusion, cohesion and contest
best illustrates the broad themes of reclamation. Pisani remarks that before “historians can
treat the West as exceptional, they will have to make direct comparison between
different regions and explain why irrigation is more important than flood
control or the reclamation of wet lands.”[39]
Fragmentation speaks to diverse geographical places, competing interests,
sub-regional competition, and a history exemplified by nonlinearity and
complexity. In contrast, Donald Worster argues that reclamation illustrates an overarching
coherency of ends in Rivers of Empire:
Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (1992). Worster looks
to the broader context of global water use in order to explore the significance
of American irrigation and reclamation practices and, more broadly, ideas of
nature. Worster bases his argument about the arid west on the idea of hydraulic
societies, a term he borrows from a scholar of empires built on arid
irrigation. Worster argues that subjugation of nature to this extent depends on
centralized bureaucracies, extraordinary human and natural costs, and a very
uneven reaping of benefit. Nineteenth century American myths were used to
create a place imaginary of the western region in order to garner support for massive
reclamation projects claims Pisani. These myths included everything from
opportunity to liberty to freedom. Reclamation was no less than the American promise
fulfilled. The promise, however, was fulfilled through the conquest, domination
and exploitation of nature on a grand scale, despite the fragmentation and
nonlinear trajectory of his thesis. Pisani develops his arguments through an exploration
of historical convergence. The historical currents he identifies as preceding
the passage of the Reclamation Act include the 1893 depression, a new type of American
nationalism, immigration fears coupled with rapid population growth in cities,
anxiety over the future of rural areas, the declining influence of agricultural
interests, growing influence of Western politicians, railroad company desires
to sell land, and the accession to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt. This
vast scope of cultural, political and economic issues impacted far more than
western reclamation, but each had a particular impact on reclamation’s place
narratives. Reclamation was a national project, rather than a regional project,
and despite the larger scale, it was the national scope of reclamation that
allowed for the incredibly fragmented nature of reclamation on the ground. Pisani
dismissed Worster’s claim of regional empire, claiming not only the lack of a
regional coherency, but a lack of the cohesion between the bureaucratic agents
of empire that Worster claims made reclamation possible. Despite being offered
as a counterargument, the text converges with Worster's text in important ways
that illustrate reclamation’s place narrative and the place making that came to
define the physical cultural landscape as well as the place imaginaries built
by place making projects.
How do reclamation’s place narratives that
collude in these two texts? On one hand is Worster’s idea of a cohesive and
regional hydraulic empire and on the other is Pisani’s idea of local fragmentation
fraught with conflicting authority. Empire
ties both of these arguments together, and is also one of reclamation’s most powerful
narratives. The assumption that Worster’s hydraulic society argument is juxtaposed
to Pisani’s claim that fragmentation was the hallmark of reclamation misses the
more subtle means and ends of empire evident in both texts. I certainly agree
with Pisani’s charge that the west as a region was not exceptional, even as I
long to note the how very exceptional it was in its world fame, but this is an
argument for later chapters. The forces that
coalesce to create place are deeply connected to empire and colonialism across
the globe, and the southwest is certainly not exceptional in this regard. Empire,
however, was an imaginary that celebrated the exceptionality of the nation, and
the power of the nation to harness the forces of progress and technology to
create a modern and powerful region. These are the If empire is understood as a
fragmented and often contradictory phenomenon, then both texts converge on this
set of ideas. While power generally coalesces at the center of empire, the
place identified as the main seat of empire, it is most-often enacted the periphery.
Regional or local, empire demands fragmentation as much as it does cohesion. José
E. Limón’s excellent understanding of
critical regionalism in cultural studies Jose
Limon rather than the cohesive ends of a integrated and regionally and exceptionalism is
understood as a history of specificity, albeit a troubled specificity, the
contours of empire and exceptionalism become far ubiquitous and the boundaries
more fluid. In other words, the commonality our stories and convergence of
analytical categories yield shared place narratives. Woven into the collective
of federal reclamation, these persistent narratives collude to create a
forceful regional place imaginary. This is a matter of degree, however, and not
kind.
I return for a moment to Walter
Mignolo’s use of Glissant’s imaginary, as “all of the ways a culture has of perceiving
and conceiving of the world.”[40] A place imaginary, then, is all of the ways a
culture had of claiming, contesting and narrating the relationships between
people and places. Pisani takes Worster to task for his regional water
imaginary, but it is a far more fruitful exchange for this work to set both of
these arguments together to explore the ways that the categories of analysis
used to explore reclamation collude in reclamation’s place imaginary. A
regional and national idenity are simultaneously foundational to and reflective
of the regional and national place imaginary of reclamation. The “imaginary of
the modern/colonial world is self-description, the ways in which it described
itself through the discourse of the state, intellectuals and scholars,” writes
Mignolo.[41]
Perhaps this is why Turner’s frontier thesis had such a profound impact on the
place imaginary of the nation, because it grounded national imaginary of identity
in place, but in a continually shifting place that could be infinitely
re-worked to suit whatever narrative was being put forth. Worster’s arguments
collide with Pisani’s, however sharply they may seem to contrast. Aridity may
be too overarching a theme, which is Pisani’s central criticism of Worster’s
Rivers. It is a very legitimate criticism. Singular places, shifting regions,
international narratives, mercantilism, ancient histories and modern marvels,
however disparate, come together to form an analogous place narrative that runs
through reclamation’s place narratives about the power of modernity and the
endless possibility that the control of nature affords. It is perhaps, as .
Reclamation’s place narratives of empire and exceptionalism are deeply
intertwined with ideas of modernity. Explored at length in other parts of this
work, the modern is defined here as both a historical category of time and a
set of ideas. Historically it is marked as beginning with the arrival of the
Spanish empire in North America and the subsequent colonizing of people and
places by Spain and successive empires in the southwest and United States. It
is also understood and defined here as a set of ideas and processes celebrates
rationalism, science, progress and technology as markers of what it means to be
a modern people and nation.
[1] Jimmy Santiago Baca, Winter
Poems Along the Rio Grande (New York: New Directions, 2004), 45.
[2] Harvey Fergusson, Rio Grande
(New York: Tudor, 1945), 3.
[3] Ibid, 3.
[4] Joseph S. Mendinghall,,
“National Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination: Beginning Point /
Beginning Point of the U.S. Public Land Survey” (National Park Service,
December 27, 1974).
[5] Payson Jackson Treat, The
National Land System, 1785-1820 (New York : E. B. Treat & company,
1910), .
[6] Ibid, 2.
[7] Ibid, 92.
[8] Ibid, 179.
[9] Ibid, 162.
[10] Ibid, 185.
[11] Ibid, 164.
[12] Ibid, 200.
[13] Ibid, 210.
[14] Ibid, 229.
[15] Ibid, 372.
[16] Ibid, 388.
[17] Ibid, 386.
[18] Ibid, 390.
[19] Edward S. Casey, Representing
Place: Landscape Painting And Maps, 1 edition (Minneapolis: Univ Of
Minnesota Press, 2002), 156.
[20] Paul Wallace Gates, History
of Public Land Law Development (Washington: Zenger Pub, 1968), 45.
[21] Ibid, 52.
[22] D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of
America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Vol. 1: Atlantic
America, 1492-1800, Reprint edition (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1988), 127.
[23] John Brinckerhoff Jackson, American
Space: The Centennial Years 1865 - 1876, 1st edition (New York: W W Norton
& Company, Inc, 1972), 19.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Ibid, 26.
[26] Ibid, 25.
[27] Ibid, 26.
[28] Ibid, 27.
[30] Donald Worster, A River
Running West: The Life of John Wesley Powell (Oxford University Press, USA,
2000).
[31] Henry P. Beers, “A History of
the U.S. Topographical Engineers, 1813-1863,” The Military Engineer 34
(July 1, 1942): 348–52, 349.
[32] United States Army, Report
upon the Colorado River of the West,:
Explored in 1857 and 1858/ by Joseph C. Ives., 2005,
http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ADU2374.0001.001.
[33] Ibid, 103.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Worster, A River Running
West, 100.
[36] Jackson, American Space, 28,
quoting Powell, no page citiation.
[37] Worster, A River Running
West, 352.
[38] Douglas R. Littlefield, Conflict
on the Rio Grande: Water and the Law, 1879-1939 (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 2008), xi.
[39] Donald J. Pisani, To Reclaim
a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public policy,1848-1902, 1st ed
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), xv.
[40] Mignolo, Local
Histories/Global Designs, 23.
[41] Ibid.
