century fueled by conviction that the land was there to be conquered and tamed. Railroad construction, European immigration, manifest-destiny journalism, the Homestead Acts that encouraged or otherwise subsidized draining and farming of desert lands, all combined to foster the illusion that the desert West could be tamed. Warnings that the climate and land were hostile, water availability irregular, and rapid, thoughtless settlement of the area foolhardy, notably from Powell, who wanted to carefully organize irrigation plans for the West, were very much ignored. Land speculators and politicians, together with individual dreams, fostered a pattern and ethos of self-interested settlement and partial-interest control of water resources that, in various guises, has persisted to the modern period.
2. The settlement and agricultural development of the Los Angeles basin would not have been possible had it not been for a major water project that resulted in construction of the Los Angeles aqueduct. However, as Reisner explains, t
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