Water in the Desert, Irrigation and the Making of Utah

July twenty-third, eighteen forty-seven. The pioneers had been in the Salt Lake Valley for twenty-four hours. Their first act was not to build shelter or to pray, though they did both of those. Their first act was to dig a ditch. They turned City Creek out of its channel and onto a patch of sun-baked ground, and within hours the soil was soft enough to plant potatoes. It was a founding gesture: in Utah, water comes first.

Irrigation was not new to the West. The Ancestral Puebloans had built canals in the canyon country for a thousand years. The Hohokam in Arizona had engineered a system of hundreds of miles of channels. But what the Latter-day Saint pioneers did in Utah was different in scale and organization. Under Brigham Young, water was treated as a communal resource, no individual could own a stream, a principle that contradicted English common law and anticipated by decades the doctrine of prior appropriation that western states eventually codified. The Church organized labor, allocated shares, and adjudicated disputes. By eighteen sixty the territory had an estimated two hundred thousand acres under irrigation, the largest such system in North America at the time.

The desert resisted and kept resisting. Crickets devoured the first crops in eighteen forty-eight until flocks of California gulls, the same bird that now appears on Utah's state quarter, arrived and ate them. Drought struck repeatedly. The Great Salt Lake, with no outlet, concentrated whatever salts the mountains sent down, making its waters useless for irrigation and its shores inhospitable for agriculture.

What irrigation built, however, was real. By the time of statehood in eighteen ninety-six, Utahns had built over a thousand miles of canals and transformed valleys that fur trappers had described as uninhabitable. The Bureau of Reclamation's Strawberry Valley Project, completed in the early nineteen twenties, tunneled through the Wasatch Mountains to bring water from the Colorado Basin to the Wasatch Front, a kind of hydraulic alchemy that redrew the map of what was possible in the high desert.