Chapter 7 - Alkali Exile

“After the sage-brush and alkali deserts of Washoe [Reno], San Francisco was paradise to me,” Twain wrote in Roughing It.[1] Thanks to his father-in-law’s peccadillos, Newlands would live Twain’s trajectory in reverse, trading the paradise of San Francisco for the sage brush and alkali of Reno. Still, while Newlands may have decamped for Nevada not entirely by choice, he made the most of his adopted state.

Newlands began all over again in 1888. His beloved Clara had died years earlier, in 1882, and Newlands remarried to Edith McAllister, a childhood friend of Clara’s. Edith turned out to be a political force in her own right. When the couple met, she was 28 and he was 39. Edith was good looking, fluent in four languages, and ambitious. She was also well connected: her father, Hall McAllister, was the dean of the San Francisco bar, and her uncle, Ward McAllister, the arbiter of New York society. Soon letters were flowing within the family that Newlands was “a new man.”[2]

Newlands also acquired a new political companion, meeting frequently with Nevada’s renowned senior senator, William M. Stewart. The amply-bearded Stewart was a politician from Nevada’s territorial days, the legendary first senator of the state. It was to Stewart’s Senate seat that Sharon had ascended for his undistinguished single term in Washington. Since the beginning of his public life, Stewart had engaged in lawsuits and quarrels, and he continued in that style. He loved mixing in the state’s rough-edged politics, and he loved making local business deals. Always, Stewart seemed to end up with his own piece of any deal in which he participated.[3] In one such deal, Newlands and Stewart created Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park as a national park in 1890. To get the deal done, Newlands paid Stewart with stock in the Chevy Chase Land Company, as the creation of the park removed land from the Washington-Chevy Chase real estate market.

The Stewart-Newlands relationship was a win for each man.[4] Newlands had begun to set his sights on the Senate himself, and Stewart was the state’s most prominent politician. Newlands also wanted to develop the many Nevada properties held in the Sharon estate. Stewart could help Newlands access the right people to get both jobs done. Stewart, meanwhile, saw in Newlands his richest constituent. Stewart always wanted to broker a campaign for a wealthy candidate.

In 1888, Stewart and Newlands were caught up in the mini-boom for development of irrigation facilities in the arid West. The boom was short-lived, spanning only 1887-1893, and cut short by the depression of 1893. But it brought to the western stage some new players who never left it.[5]

One of those players—perhaps one of the most remarkable characters in the boom—was George Maxwell. Always fervent and seemingly ubiquitous, he came on the stage in 1887 and stayed there into the 20th century. Born in California in 1860, Maxwell put himself through law school to become an early specialist in water rights law. He made a small fortune representing bondholders in California irrigation districts that had filed for bankruptcy.

In 1891, Maxwell created the first irrigation lobby, the National Irrigation Congress, with Newlands as a founding member. As the paid irrigation lobbyist for the railroads, he became an ally and beneficiary of Newlands as well as of President Theodore Roosevelt. A fierce lobbyist, Maxwell saw the world in black and white; the few people in the irrigation movement who disagreed with him he never forgave. His lifelong passions were the family farm, irrigation of the arid West, and the agricultural potential of California’s Central Valley.

Fueled by characters like Maxwell, the boom began in 1887. Previously, farmers had accessed readily available water sources using ditches and small-scale water storage facilities. Financiers and engineers had not then been needed. But with many of those streams tapped out by 1887, now they were. The construction of dams, reservoirs, and diversionary ditches required capital. Capital required financiers. Engineers were needed to manage the complex ditch network serving multiple users.

Introducing financiers and engineers to irrigation changed it entirely. The irrigation business in the 1880s was undergoing the same revolution that the silver mining business did in the 1860s. Just as Sharon had mastered the changes in silver mining—bringing to the Comstock banks and 500-foot-deep shafts—Newlands and Stewart were positioned to take advantage of the irrigation transformation.

The revelation that Stewart and Newlands were meeting—which Stewart leaked to the press—signaled that a newcomer with new money was entering state politics. The news shook Newlands’ in-laws, who remembered the ridicule and reproach heaped on Sharon as Senator. Newlands promised the family that he would not repeat the Sharon mistake, insisting that he did not intend to become “a Nevada politician” but rather wanted “to identify [him]self with matters relating to the Sharon estate.” He hoped, Newlands said, to be “called” to a Senate seat “by an enthusiastic national following.”[6]

Newlands was splitting hairs but he was not untruthful. He intended to mobilize the Sharon estate behind an effort that would put Nevada into the irrigation boom. Newlands was one of many smart people who thought that economic and political success lay in joining the irrigation boom—if you identified the right place and the right approach when you joined.

It is difficult to get a handle on just how big the boom was. There must have been a number of irrigation project startups, because there were a number of failures. Many irrigation districts in California went bankrupt, turning to lawyers like Maxwell for assistance. The boom was also stymied by the depression of 1893, which halted irrigation development and other economic activity. Nevertheless, the boom had its successes.[7]

William E. Smythe’s 1906 book, The Conquest of Arid America, promoted the success of irrigated agriculture in California, which was the poster child of the boom. Smythe made much of how irrigation projects gave California a monopoly on oranges, raisins, olives, and nuts—formerly rare, but now commonplace in the East.[8] Smythe’s book was designed as a report card on how well the arid states did during the boom. California earned an “A,” as did Colorado. Smythe called Colorado “the crown,” because the promise of irrigation had lifted land prices sharply.[9] Smythe was pro-developer, and developers liked rising land prices.

The Smythe book also gave report cards to the states for the steps taken to update water rights laws and regulation of irrigation facilities. A basic premise of the book was that irrigation had been ushered into the West on an industrial scale, and state laws needed to adjust accordingly. For its irrigation reforms, Wyoming received an A+. Nevada received an “F”—the only one of the arid states to score so poorly. The Silver State, Smythe noted, had done little new irrigation work and had regressed administratively.[10]

One man deserves special credit for the irrigation reforms in Wyoming. His name was Elwood Mead. A self-described “professor, politician, and engineer,” Mead was one of the first of a new breed of reformer on the American political landscape—the scientific expert. Born in 1858 in Indiana, he studied engineering at Purdue. Mead worked in the field of irrigation his entire life, becoming one of America’s longest-serving and most admired scientific bureaucrats. He was a designer of the monumental Hoover Dam; Lake Mead, the dam’s reservoir—the largest in the United States—is named in his honor.[11]

Starting in Colorado as an assistant in the state engineer’s office, Mead moved on to Wyoming, where he drafted laws to create a powerful state engineer’s office. He carved Wyoming up into four “hydrographic” basins—rivers and their drainage basins—and assigned a “basin engineer” and two assistants to each basin. Until Mead’s innovation, western water had been allocated according to a so-called system of “prior appropriation,” meaning that, once granted, the amount and use of water were fixed and could not be adjusted to changing conditions. This inflexible system proved problematic if, for instance, a farmer wished to rotate crops or use more or less water in a given spot. The crux of the Mead system was to empower the basin engineers to determine annual approval for how much irrigated water could be appropriated and for what beneficial use. By making the “prior appropriation” system adjustable, Mead solved the weakness of the existing approach. According to Smythe, Mead’s reforms made Wyoming “Law Giver of the Arid Region.”[12]