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The Klamath is only a beginning. North of it, on the coast of Oregon, run other short, fat rivers (the Rogue, Umpqua and Smith) that could be made to flow southwest at slightly greater cost. They would yield about 6,000,000 acre-feet and bring another 2,000,000 acres into production, perhaps in the Mojave Desert or the Imperial Valley. And above this ¼ladder¼ of rivers, as the bureaumen call it, lies the Columbia, the biggest prize of all. Its basin and adjacent "water surplus" areas now waste into the sea 300 million acre-feet a year. One-fifth of its flow would fill all needs of the Northwest, leaving an exportable surplus of 240 million acre-feet.
When the bureaumen are asked what they would do with the Columbia, they go into engineering ecstasy only slightly tempered with apology. Few parts of the West, they say, are wholly inaccessible to the water of Oregon.
Food for 75 Million. To reach such dry areas as the Lahontan Basin of Nevada or the Mojave Desert will be a long, costly job. But the Bureau of Reclamation is forced by the nature of its job to look far ahead. It takes years of exploration, surveying and figuring to find the best course for an artificial river. More years are needed to design and build the dams and pumps. So the bureau feels that it should plan for a time perhaps 50 years hence when the growing U.S. population will really need more food and will pay as much as the cost of a small war for new land that can produce it.
Bureaumen believe that eventually 50 million more acres can be irrigated west of the Rockies, and that this would feed an additional 75 million people. Even after that, there is plenty more. East of the Rockies lie large areas of semi-arid land that could increase their production mightily. It would be quite a job to pump the Mississippi into Texas and Oklahoma, but the more enthusiastic bureaumen believe it could be done. ¼We and our contractors,¼ they say, ¼enjoy pushing rivers around.¼
* The policy of favoring family-size farms dates from the Homestead Act of 1862 (President Abraham Lincoln) and was reaffirmed in the Reclamation Act of 1902 (President Theodore Roosevelt).
* An acre-foot equals 43,560 cubic feet of water, enough to cover one acre one foot deep.