of the West's water resources may have begun partly as a frontier adventure and partly as a heroic frontier enterprise but had the long-term effect of creating the present-day prospect that agricultural, urban-population, and wilderness interests would collide, even as the sheer availability of water decreased and even as water-related ecology of the region--affected by pollution, overuse, mismanagement, and misallocation--deteriorated at progressively higher rates.
1. The fact that the United States was more or less able to settle the West without interference from the residue of European colonial interests owes something to chance--first, the chance that the conquistadors under Coronado failed to find the gold deposits of Arizona by only a few miles and second the chance that Napoleon would need to divest France of the Louisiana Purchase in order to prosecute his own European wars. This latter fact, combined with what can be seen as Jefferson's foresight in adding vast territory to American control, enabled both the Lewis and Clark expedition to map the water regions westward from St. Louis and the fur traders to engage in the first exploitation of water resources in the form of beaver pelts. Both Lewis and Clark and the fur trappers emphasized the hardness of the land, which initially made most people think it uninhabitable, but some 30 years later, owing to the pioneering efforts of frontiersmen-naturalist-explorers such as John Wesley Powell and John Muir, that same land became the basis of the manifest destiny doctrine that drove westward American migration. Powell's dangerous expedition across rivers of the Great Plains and down the rapids-infested Colorado River (Grand Canyon) and other western rivers, showed that the western waters could be traversed and known even if they could not be navigated in conventional ways. The very few settlements of the West, including those of the Mormons in Utah, grew steadily through the 19th ...