Sending water back to a lake
Tribal rights, the Navy, alfalfa and where water goes after it's conserved.
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-Daniel
In 1902, Congress passed the Newlands Reclamation Act with profound consequences for the future of the West. The Reclamation Act was named for Nevada Sen. Francis Newlands who aggressively advocated a national irrigation policy (though his name is perhaps best-known today for the sordid legacy he left on race; More on that below).
The Newlands Act helped create an arm of government, the U.S. Reclamation Service (now the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation), that would, over the next five years, build more than two dozen water projects. These projects were aimed at “reclaiming” water from “waste,” where it naturally flowed. They included dams, storage reservoirs and canals. With engineering, they sought to “reclaim” nature and boost the West’s water supply.
One of Reclamation’s first projects found a home in Nevada.
A central feature of the Newlands Project was Derby Dam, built to divert the Truckee River — its headwaters in the mountains around Lake Tahoe — away from its natural terminus at Pyramid Lake, a cultural and spiritual center for the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe. Once diversions began in 1906, the Truckee River was redirected southeast for irrigation in Fallon, away from the tribe’s land and to an entirely different watershed.
The diversions came to have significant environmental consequences for the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, sending water away from the lake and impairing two fish species, the Lahontan cutthroat trout and the cui-ui. The tribe fought for decades to assert its water rights and return water back to Pyramid, which like other lakes in the Great Basin (the Great Salt Lake, Mono Lake and Walker Lake) is terminal, meaning there is no outlet to the sea. So when water is diverted away, the effects are often pronounced.
Now a perhaps unexpected party has re-entered the mix: The U.S. Navy.
Over time, the Naval Air Station in Fallon, home of TOPGUN, became a historically large user within the Newlands Project, irrigating land around its runways to grow alfalfa. Because of all the Truckee River water this used (water diverted away from Pyramid Lake), the tribe criticized this usage, ultimately suing the Navy in a matter that was ultimately resolved by Congress in the 1990 Truckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake Water Settlement Act, which affirmed the tribe’s rights. Among other things, the act told the Navy to reduce use, setting the stage for sending more water to Pyramid Lake.
The Navy did reduce its water use, transferring roughly 2,800 acre-feet of water rights to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. But the tribe alleges in a new court filing that the water never made it to Pyramid Lake, and thus violating the 1990 settlement act.
The “inaction comes at a significant cost to Pyramid Lake and its fishery,” lawyers for the tribe wrote in a court filing. Instead of sending conserved water to Pyramid Lake, the government temporarily used it at Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge, shorebird habitat near Fallon, at the end of the Carson River. But the tribe said the law requires sending the water to where it naturally would have flowed in the Truckee, to Pyramid.
The water, the tribe said, could represent about 5,000 acre-feet going back to Pyramid Lake (an acre-foot is enough water to fill about a football field to a depth of one foot).
As the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service apply with the state to make their temporary use of Navy water at the National Wildlife Refuge a permanent one, the tribe sued in court.
The case underscores the difficulty of enforcing water agreements and settlements. It also marks the difficult decisions that face water managers of the Newlands Project, an irrigation system with a much different make-up than in the 20th Century. Today, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service along with the state of Nevada, which also manages wetlands at Stillwater, are the largest water rights holders in the Newlands Project.
The 1990 Settlement is more than 30 years old, yet it is still being litigated to this day.
Water regulation is slow, with issues stretching on for decades, even generations.
Here’s a link to the court complaint.
More reading from The Nevada Current here.
A word on Newlands the person.
Speaking of Pyramid Lake and the Truckee River, I’ve been knee-deep in history about Newlands and the early origins of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The familiar cast of characters are there, including John Wesley Powell, Frederick Newell, Elwood Mead, George Maxwell, Arthur Powell Davis, Theodore Roosevelt, William Smythe, etc…
But of all them, Newlands is a fascinating, if not haunting, figure in Nevada history, one with an undeniable impact on the trajectory of the West. Newlands spoke of the goals of “reclamation” with an almost religious fervor. Consider the remarks he wrote in the Morning Appeal June 18, 1905, the day after the Derby Dam was dedicated:
“The nation lifts its hand, and the waters which have formerly wasted in the sinks of the the desert flow across the Divide from the Truckee into the drainage area of the Carson. The nation lifts its hand, and the lands which have been worthless become valuable for agriculture. The nation lifts its hand, and the closed doors open to the entry of surplus population from overcrowded eastern cities…”
“The nation lifts its hand…”
What was Newlands’ vision for the nation? He seemed to have a narrow vision of who should make decisions (noblesse oblige) and who belonged. He was not only a racist but extreme for his time. The National Park Service, on its website, describes Newlands as a “white supremacist.” In 1912, he wanted the Democrats to run on the “White Plank,” quoted in the New York Times that year as saying the U.S. was a “white man’s country.”
How did this affect the early vision of reclamation? I’m still researching here… and certainly Newlands was not alone in crafting the law or involved in later iterations.
But two things I’ve learned have jumped out to me.
First, as was pointed out to me recently, the initial text of the 1902 Reclamation Act, backed by Western politicians at a time of anti-Asian rhetoric, included a provision excluding, and I quote here, “Mongolian labor” from working on projects. This fact is documented in the bureau’s own history, written by Nevada historian William Rowley.
Second, the history finds that the early implementation of the Reclamation Act itself led to “thousands of acres lost from Indian or tribal reservation ownership without opening much opportunity.” This took place, at the direction of Congress, which in 1904 directed the reclamation of tribal lands in Yuma, Colorado River and Pyramid Lake Indian Reservations, according to the history. Tribal members could receive five to 10 acre homesteads, while remaining reservation lands could be open to settlement.
To me, this is an important history to recognize and reckon with, especially in the context of current discussions about reclamation’s responsibility into the future.
A few more threads…
Speaking of land… and water, an excellent piece from my Nevada Independent colleague about the history of unique federal land bills in Nevada. Should we keep doing it?
This from the Center for Investigative Reporting and Mother Jones. Such important reporting on where the money goes: “As rural Arizonans face the prospect of wells running dry, foreign firms are sucking up vast amounts of the state’s groundwater to grow hay for Saudi Arabia and other wealthy nations. Now it turns out that a key investor in this water transfer scheme is Arizona’s own employee retirement fund.”
An interesting development in the Colorado River water world (The Desert Sun)
Will the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation keep its contract with a big agricultural water supplier in California? An appellate judge declined to validate the contract in court.
The EPA is investigating a complaint, filed in California by Native American Tribes and environmental groups, alleging civil rights violations in how the state manages water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The complaint points to outdated water quality measures they argue have created a cascading ripple of effects, including harm to fish populations and intensifying toxic algae blooms. More from the L.A. Times.
All about California’s new rules for piping recycled water to the tap, from CalMatters