num_pages: 487
description: In the nineteenth-century American West, water served many purposes. It was a way to wealth, but it was also a tool to build model communities and to escape from the boom-and-bust economy associated with extractive industries, such as mining, stock-grazing, and lumbering. By the 1890s, it also promised great national benefits by providing homes for the landless residents of eastern cities, thus shoring up republican values and institutions. Unfortunately, economic conditions varied as much within the West, and the federal and state governments provided so little central direction and coordination, that water was parochial, fragmented, and short-sighted.Beginning with fights over water in the California gold fields, this volume carefully shows how for fifty years the West became a great laboratory in water management. Policy initiatives came from many quarters. Given limited state revenues and the size of the public domain, some westerners believed that the central government should develop the region. Others assumed that any national program would be corrupt, inefficient, and unresponsive to local opinions and needs. Some states would benefit at the expense of others, and if an arbitrary bureaucracy in Washington removed control over water from the states, property values would plummet. For that reason, a third group favored government initiatives to stimulate private enterprise or "mixed enterprise." Still others—particularly grazing interests—wanted no policy at all because planning threatened the status quo. By default, policy was made by those who first put water to use, not by public officials.This is a study in government as wall as the relationship between law and economic development. It recognizes the often-overlooked importance of federalism in western history and the need to look at policy formation from the ground up rather than from the top down.
language: English
title: To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902
titlecomplete: To Reclaim a Divided West: Water, Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902 (Histories of the American Frontier)
characters: Francis G. Newlands, William Hammond Hall, John Wesley Powell, W. E. Smythe, Robert Maitland Brereton
ratings_count: 5
awards: awardedAt: 694252800000
name: Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award
publisher: Univ of New Mexico Pr