Water in New Mexico: A History of Its Management and Use by Ira G. Clark

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 491 The Southwestern Division, based in Dallas since the late years of the Depression, oversees district functions from western New Mexico to central Arkansas and from southern Missouri to the border with Mexico. This region has dramatic extremes of culture, topography, and history, and its modern development, like most of the Sun Belt in which it resides, is a function of federal spending to “prime the pump” for economic prosperity. But this book reflects little of this context as it shifts from chronology to projects to internal organiza­ tion. The relationship of the districts to the division is overlooked, as are the weaknesses of corps commander personnel changes every three years and the dependency of the agency on federal funding. The bibliography points up some of the shortcomings of the nar­ rative. More research needs to be done on the post—World War II era in the region. The most powerful national politicians of the last two generations have come from Texas, among them Lyndon B. Johnson, Sam Rayburn, and Jim Wright. Their influence on the corps was (and still is) significant. Perhaps the delicate nature of the division’s rela­ tionship to Congress precluded analysis of this factor. Even though the army engineers have produced several dozen vol­ umes on many aspects of their organizational existence, the problems outlined above endure. One hopes that the willingness of the corps to continue evaluating its environmental and engineering policies will echo down to its meritorious efforts to remember its past. Michael Welsh Dr. Welsh is a research assistant professor of history at the University of New Mexico. Among his publications is U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Albuquerque District 1935—1985 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), nominated for the Robert G. Athearn Award of the Western History Association for the best volume on the 20th-century American West. Water in New Mexico: A History of Its Management and Use. By Ira G. Clark. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. Pp. xviii + 839; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00. Ira Clark has written the definitive history of water policy and the evolution ofwater law for the state of New Mexico. Water in New Mexico is encyclopedic. Clark’s purpose was to write a “single, systematized narrative whose central theme was the management and use of so precious a natural resource” (p. xi). In this he has largely been suc­ cessful. He has written an institutional history of the New Mexico water establishment, with impressive bibliography and notes. Clark periodizes his massive work in three parts: territorial New Mexico, early statehood, and after World War II. His concluding chapter looks at prospects for the future. The major issues involved in water policy and litigation in the West—Native American water rights, interstate compacts, groundwater conservation, federal policy, 492 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE effective administration of state laws and court decrees—are all given some consideration. The technology of water development, however, is given short shrift. Clark briefly mentions the major reclamation projects in New Mexico at Carlsbad and Elephant Butte and even speaks to the failure at Rio Hondo. Yet he concentrates on legislative policy, and fails to discuss the significance of the design technology that made possible the suc­ cessful irrigation projects. Clark begins his story promisingly with a discussion of prehistoric Hohokam irrigation technologies, including deep canals of earthen construction with woven mats used as possible check gates. The physical capabilities of these Native Americans to move and direct the water flow guided the development of their farming practices. Archaeologists theorize that, when their available technology was not adequate to solve other hydraulic problems, such as alkalinity in the soil, they abandoned their fields and moved else­ where. Clearly, this is an example of the integral relationship between water technology and irrigation practice, one that does not end with the Hohokams. In addition, in his chapter on groundwater, Clark notes that “the technological problems were solved in time, but the cost of drilling and pumping was much greater than direct diversion from the streams” (p. 234). At no time, however, is the reader alerted to what those problems might be. The development...