Word: deserting
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
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...
...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 ¼ladder¼ 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...
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...
Some of the liveliest historical writing about the Old West (The Trampling Herd, Death in the Desert) is the work of an ex-cowhand and ex-Kansas newspaperman named Paul I. (Iselin) Wellman. All of it was done before Wellman went to the far West, all the way to Hollywood, in fact, where he became a scriptwriter. Now, in The Iron Mistress, a historical novel about Frontiersman James Bowie, he writes thus...