Turning on water with a shovel
Subtitle: the career of Elwood Mead
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Published: 1992
Place of publication: New Mexico, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 218
ISBN-13: 0826313825
Description: Elwood Mead (1858-1936), an engineer who pioneered western water law and development, worked tirelessly for over fifty years to ensure that water went to its best use. Ever the idealist, Mead consistently held to his nineteenth-century view of agrarian life based on the individual farmer living on a small, irrigated plot. This account of Mead's public life describes his key role in creating water policy and overseeing reclamation projects. His career spanned the history of irrigation from the first corporate ditch enterprises in Colorado in the 1880s through the construction of Hoover Dam a half-century later. In all his endeavors, whether serving as state engineer in Wyoming, investigating irrigation use for the Department of Agriculture, developing model rural communities in Australia and California, of administering the Bureau of Reclamation, Mead always sought to give the benefits of water to small farmers and average citizens. One of Mead's greatest achievements - the construction of Hoover Dam - was completed just as he died, and Lake Mead is named for him.