Irrigation, Water Rights, and the Betrayal of Indian Allotment

Abstract

new conservation section of American Heritage magazine. The essay, Here in Nevada a Terrible Crime . . . , was a tract for the times. Pyramid Lake, the second largest desert body of water in the United States and one of the nation's natural wonders, was drying up. NonIndian farmers had systematically diverted more than half of the Truckee River, the lake's major source of water, into the Truckee-Carson Irrigation Project sixty miles east of Reno. Unlike nearby Lake Tahoe, already a sacrifice to the gods of gambling and tourism, Pyramid Lake was seldom visited. Nestled among stark, austere, forbidding mountains, it offered solitude and contemplation. The story would have been sad enough if nature had been the only victim. The declining water level threatened to create a land bridge to Anaho Island, a 750-acre National Wildlife Refuge, thus exposing the largest colony of white pelicans in North America to a host of hungry predators. But the lake was also the heart of a Paiute Indian reservation, and in 1967 almost 70 percent of the reservation's residents were unemployed and more than half of its families earned less than $2,000 a year. The poverty of the Indians, Josephy emphasized, did not result from laziness or inadequate resources, nor were the Paiutes simply human relics or prisoners of an outmoded culture. They had been betrayed