A Region of Fragments

AT 7:36 P.M. ON OCTOBER 9, 1936, ELIZABETH SCATTERGOOD, THE daughter of the chief engineer of the Los Angeles Bureau of Power and Light, lowered "the most powerful fingertip in the world." At that instant, telegraph wires carried a signal from Scattergood's finger to the powerhouse at the base of Boulder Dam. Hearing the telegraph's staccato alert, an engineer in the powerhouse threw a switch, opening circuits that sent electricity coursing through the power lines that surmounted the canyon walls downstream from the dam. An instant after Scattergood lifted her finger, sixteen arc lights on the top floor of City Hall burst to light, extending "long fingers of brilliance into the darkness," in the words of an LA Times reporter. "The dim-lit city, starting up like a sleeper," Thomas Treanor wrote, "was in an instant clothed with such a flaming radiance as man has never made before." More than one million Angelinos flooded the streets in the city's largest civic celebration since the Armistice. Addressing the throng, Mayor Frank Shaw promised benefits not only for his city, but for a far broader region. The dam's power would trigger, Shaw announced, "a higher order of social and industrial development that will bring us happy results in the Southwest."

Boulder Dam had been an object of national fascination since its construction began five years earlier. Seven hundred fifty thousand annual visitors flocked to see the dam's creation, thrilling at the high-scalers swinging from ropes hundreds of feet long and marveling at the massive buckets of concrete lowered to the dam's rising crest, activity that formed a welcome contrast to the photos of bread lines and migrant labor camps that filled the nation's newspapers in the Depression's depths. Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, certainly realized the dam's potent symbolism. He was in office for less than a month before removing "Hoover" from the dam and replacing it with "Boulder."

Roosevelt realized its symbolic power too. In September 1935, as he began his reelection campaign, Roosevelt traveled to Black Canyon. With ten thousand spectators "fringing the parapet like pygmies," as the Times reported, Roosevelt explained the dam as a manifestation of the transformations the New Deal had set in motion. "The largest generators and turbines yet installed in this country, machinery that can continuously supply nearly two million horsepower of electric energy," Roosevelt explained, would soon "power factory motors, street and household lights and irrigation pumps." In so doing, the dam's energy would transform the region and the nation at large. No longer would the Southwest be known primarily as a land of "unpeopled, forbidding desert." Its residents would no longer "dread the coming of a flood" or fear "a shortage of water" caused by the "turbulent," "unpredictable" river. Instead, the dam would create industrial modernity, benefiting "the millions of people who now dwell in this basin, and the millions of others who will come to dwell here in future generations." In closing the frontier stage of development in the Southwest, the dam promised to benefit the nation at large. "The mighty waters of the Colorado were running unused to the sea," Roosevelt proclaimed. "Today, we translate them into a great national possession."

The crowd gathered on the dam's crest roared, but people elsewhere in the Southwest were less enthusiastic. Many Arizonans feared that the benefits Roosevelt outlined would be distributed far more unequally than he suggested. Since a 1922 interstate compact dividing the river's waters had placed Arizona and California together in the Colorado River's lower basin, California's demand for water seemed an existential threat. A year before the dedication of Boulder Dam, Arizona governor Benjamin Mouer had declared martial law on the Arizona shore of the Colorado, deploying forty infantrymen and twenty machine gunners to Parker, Arizona, and dispatching the "Arizona Navy"—five state guardsmen aboard the ferryboat Julia B—to prevent federal workers from completing preliminary work on Parker Dam, which, downstream from Boulder, would divert the now controlled waters of the Colorado to Southern California. To Mouer, the planned aqueduct was little better than theft of Arizona's rightful resources. "We may get licked in this affair," Mouer proclaimed, "but we will go down fighting." The Los Angeles Times dispatched a "war correspondent," who archly reported on the mobilization of "troops into this theater of war to protect the State of Arizona from invasion by all or part of the State of California." A member of the Arizona Navy took his anger out on California literally, firing a shotgun into the Colorado's western shore. The incident ended in farce. The Julia B became entangled in cables cast across the river, and its sailors suffered the indignity of being rescued by a boat owned by the City of Los Angeles. The conflict moved to the Supreme Court, which enjoined further work on the dam before Congress settled the matter by passing the 1935 Rivers and Harbors Bill expressly authorizing Parker Dam. While it did not prevent the dam's completion, the voyage of the Arizona Navy signaled the fears among many Arizonans that the development of the Colorado's energy did not foretell shared regional and national growth. Rather, they saw competition in which Arizona's needs were subordinated to those of California.

The state capital in Phoenix was not the only place in Arizona where officials had reasons to fear Boulder Dam. In 1933, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier spoke before the Navajo Tribal Council in Fort Defiance, Arizona. "Down there on the Colorado River," Collier told the council, "is the biggest, most expensive dam in the world ... which will furnish all southern California with water and power. The Boulder Dam will be filled up with your fine agricultural soil in no great number of years if we do not stop erosion." Collier warned the council that the dam's construction might lead other federal officials to identify erosion from the Navajo Reservation as a threat to regional development and national investment. Either Navajos could stop erosion voluntarily, Collier warned, or someone would do it for them. Attempts to control erosion, however, entailed new regulation of grazing land, new limits on herd sizes, and, more generally, the destabilization of the subsistence economy that had allowed Navajos to mount perhaps the most successful response to American conquest of any American Indian tribe.

The beams of light that lit Los Angeles, the Arizona Navy traveling up the Colorado River, and the warnings to the...