The Bureau of Reclamation is best known for its great dams and powerplants. They stand astride the major rivers of the American West, monuments to a nation’s ingenuity and spirit of enterprise-–Hoover Dam on the Colorado River; Grand Coulee on the Columbia near Spokane, Washington; and Shasta Dam in California’s Sacramento River Valley. While these are among the most famous, they are only three of 475 dams maintained today by the Bureau of Reclamation, a unit of the U.S. Department of the Interior. While the dams give a face to the Bureau of Reclamation, it is the water stored behind them that goes to the heart of the Bureau’s core mission: managing, developing, and protecting water resources in the West.Since 1902, the Bureau of Reclamation, or Reclamation in common usage, has played a central role in the settlement of the American West, a land so arid that parts of Nevada see fewer than 5 inches of rainfall a year. Irrigating the parched land was the earliest mission of the Bureau, established by the Reclamation Act of 1902. The act committed the Federal Government to construct permanent works--dams, reservoirs, and canals--to irrigate arid and semiarid lands in 16 western states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming). (Texas was added in 1906.) As the West has grown, so has Reclamation’s mission. Today, it is the West’s largest supplier of water and its largest producer of hydroelectric power, an agency truly “Managing Water in the West.”. As great cities rose from the Western deserts during and after World War II, from Phoenix and Tucson to Las Vegas and Los Angeles, it was clear that the Bureau of Reclamation served the West far beyond its original rural vision. Today, Reclamation’s responsibilities extend not only to irrigating the arid West, but to generating hydroelectric power, delivering reliable and clean water supplies to municipalities and industries, regulating river flows for navigation, protecting lives and property from floods, and exploring ways to improve water quality and preserve wetlands and habitation for fish and wildlife. Reclamation’s huge reservoirs, from Lake Mead in Nevada to Belle Fourche in South Dakota, have created oases for outdoor recreation and extended Reclamation’s mission to working in partnership with non-profit organizations and cooperating groups such as Ducks Unlimited and the American Outdoors Association.Today, as the West’s largest supplier of water and the largest wholesaler of water in the United States, the Bureau of Reclamation maintains 475 dams and 348 reservoirs with a total storage capacity of 245 million acre feet of water. (An acre foot equals about 326,000 gallons, enough to serve two average families for one year.) Reclamation projects bring water to more than 31 million people, and provide 140,000 farmers (one of every five in the West) with irrigation water for 10 million acres of farmland. Those lands produce 60 percent of the nation’s vegetables and 25 percent of its fruits and nuts. Reclamation also manages 289 recreation areas with a total of 350 campgrounds. As the largest producer of hydroelectric power in the American West, Reclamation has 58 power plants online, producing enough electricity to serve 3.5 million homes.