To Reclaim a Divided, West: Water; Law, and Public Policy, 1848–1902 by Donald J. Pisani

Abstract

TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 871 adoption, adaption, and diffusion of new technology will find litde about these processes here. (However, an appendix addresses the technology of papermaking.) The author’s economic approach overlooks questions such as why American producers were comparatively late in starting the production ofsulfate pulp and kraft paper. In Scandinavia, the production ofsulfate pulp started in the 1880s and the production of kraft paper in the 1890s. In die United States, sulfate pulp did not get started until about 1910, according to Ohanian. In spite of its shortcomings as technological history, the book nonetheless contains accurate and detailed informa­ tion about industry structure during a crucial period in the history of the American pulp and paper industry. Eli Moen Ms. Moen is a research fellow in the History Department of the University of Oslo. She is the author of “Norway’s Entry into the Age of Paper,” in Technology Transfer and Scandinavian Industrialisation, ed. Kristine Bruland (Oxford, 1991). To Reclaim a Divided, West: Waler; Law, and Public Policy, 1848-1902. By DonaldJ. Pisani. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992. Pp. xx+487; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper). In the past two decades, western water has become a highly active subject ofAmerican historical inquiry. A host of scholars have used this topic as a point of departure to set a great deal of the agenda for environmental studies and to pose fresh perspectives on the transMississippi West. Since the control, use, and allocation of water were central to western settlement, this focus is both appropriate and laudatory. From this gush of literature have come new insights into the social and institutional process ofhuman habitation and the interplay of politics, culture, values, and technology in making the arid region “blossom as the rose.” To Reclaim a Divided West is both monumental and provocative in its approach, assumptions, and findings. What emerges from Donald Pisani’s prodigious labors and trenchant analysis is a view of western water from the ground up, rather than the top down—a fragmented, complex mosaic rather than the more symmetrical waterscapes fash­ ioned byJohn Ganoe, Stanley Roland Davison, Samuel P. Hays, Donald Worster, and others. Certainly no other scholar has looked at this subject with more depth, care, and thoughtfulness from the standpoint of law, economics, and government. The book passes through well-known themes and eras including the evolution of water law, the private and corporate allocation of water, the trials of various state irrigation ventures, struggles to define the appropriate federal role, and the movement that culminated in the 1902 Reclamation Act. 872 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The portrait that emerges is rich in chaos and conflict. Pisani seems to have few impressionistic visions to flesh out, victims to lament, or ideological axes to grind. What he lays out is a mix of personalities, institutions, policies, desires, and expectations that varied intraregionally from community to community, state to state, and basin to basin. The book is meticulous, traditional natural-resource history in the tradition of Paul Wallace Gates, to whom the author pays homage in his acknowledgments (p. xx). The underlying theme is fragmentation. The author upholds this leitmotiv by postulating that the social and economic dynamics of western mercantilism fostered a region ablaze with conflict at all levels of government rather than consensus. Furthermore, there seems to have been no orderly transition from chaos, provincialism, and inefficiency to the more centralized, rational promise of the 1902 Reclamation Act. In fact, Pisani argues that in this watermark fed­ eral law “the decentralizers won a signal victory in 1902, one destined to have a profound influence on water policy in the twentieth cen­ tury” (p. 325). The book departs sharply from much of the current scholarship on western water by downplaying the importance of geography and aridity. Even though this assumption is more implied than stated, Pisani’s West is shaped much more by traditional American values, culture, institu­ tions, and economic realities than its setting and environment. Perhaps this course correction will be a helpful tonic to current scholarly directions that place too little or a distorted emphasis on the political economy of the region. To...