WESTERN GOLD: WATER

ALL THE GOLD ever mined in California is not worth a single year's rainfall," said California's onetime Governor Earl Warren, now U.S. Chief Justice. To many Westerners the Federal Government's chief reason for existence is to provide water. The Government, in this instance, means Secretary McKay's Interior Department, which is responsible for reclamation.

Almost everywhere in the U.S., water is delivered free with every rain, but not west of the 100th meridian, where the Great Plains begin. Westward of the line, rainfall rates drop from 100 inches a year to 20 or 10 or even less. Old maps labeled the area: "The Great American Desert (Uninhabitable)." But in irrigated areas the Great American Desert is blooming like a rose. Brigham Young's Mormon pioneers built the West's first modern irrigation project in 1847. Now, more than 25 million once-arid acres of the Western states produce an incredible profusion of fiber and grain, vegetables and fruits because of water dammed, sluiced, pumped and channeled from the Colorado, the Columbia and the West's other great rivers.

For 2,000 miles the Colorado cuts across the West, drains 246,000 square miles and--thanks to reclamation projects like Hoover Dam--makes faucets flow and deserts flower. The Interior Department is presently planning to irrigate the vast Upper Colorado Basin with two more great dams. In all, another 15 million acres of the waterless West can be economically reclaimed. The rest may forever remain lunar landscape, like Green River's grotesque canyon and Monument Valley's stark buttes (see color pages).

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