Foreword

The Bill Lane Center is pleased to publish “‘The System of the River:’ Francis Newlands and the Improbable Quest to Irrigate the West.” This work is a labor of love by my good friend and colleague, William Lilley III. A founding member of the Center’s Advisory Council, Bill originally drafted portions of this work for his doctoral dissertation at Yale in the 1960s, where he was classmates with Lane Center director emeritus, David Kennedy.

This biography of Francis G. Newlands (1848-1917), Congressman and Senator from Nevada, remains deeply relevant to the Center’s work on issues of environmental governance and public land management in the American West. Newlands, as Lilley notes, moved in the same circles as many major figures of the 19th-century West, including Newlands’ photographer Carleton Watkins and Newlands’s father-in-law William Sharon.

Lilley details Newlands’s career, up to and including his greatest accomplishment: drafting and passing the National Reclamation Act (known as the Newlands Act). This law, which Lilley describes as “behind only the Homestead Act in its significance to the settling of the West,” was unique in its regional approach to water management in the West. Newlands’ plan transferred control of all aspects of irrigation in the West to the federal government, allowing for comprehensive regional irrigation plans that transcended the powers of the individual states. The need for regional management of water remains one of the most salient issues in the West, and one that the Center continues to study with enthusiasm.

I am grateful for Bill’s tireless work to help students, academics, and members of the public understand the historical roots of regional water management in the West during a rare moment in time when the federal government envisioned the West as one region.

Bruce E. Cain, PhD
Spence and Cleone Eccles Family Director of the Stanford Bill Lane Center for the American West
Charles Louis Ducommun Professor in Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science