Engineering the Desert: American Expansion and Global Expertise in the Colorado Desert, 1847-1920
- ISBN-10
- 1303097222
- ISBN-13
- 9781303097225
- Pages
- 292
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2013
- Author
- Eric John Steiger
Description
Americans traveling across the Colorado Desert toward the Pacific Coast in the middle of the nineteenth century experienced first-hand one of the least hospitable landscapes in North America. When the survivors wrote of their experiences, they told of a hazardous arid wasteland. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, the desert had become one of the most productive agricultural zones in the United States, apparently fulfilling the optimistic dreams of ambitious developers who recognized the potential in combining dry air, fertile land, and the Colorado River. This dissertation takes as its central assumption that irrigating the Colorado Desert was only one option among several, and that the actual course of development in the Colorado Desert depended a great deal on socio-political circumstances, environmental realities, and engineering skill. I argue that the region became a proving ground for the social ethos at the heart of the global engineering profession in the twentieth century. Engineers funded by private investments constructed irrigation canals from the Colorado River into the central portion of the Colorado Desert, renamed by developers the Imperial Valley, in the first decade of the twentieth century. Previous scholarship has demonstrated the Imperial Valley to be an example of the excesses and failures of late nineteenth-century developmental boosterism. A history focused on the Colorado Desert's engineers, however, recaptures the significance of the Colorado Desert as a vital laboratory where new methods of American expansion were developed. Hydraulic managers and their supporters used the challenges posed by the desert environment and politics to test and reshape a professional self-identity. This engineering ethos assumed the application of technical expertise to be a basic good, but one that was always under pressure from the excessive demands of unscrupulous profit-seekers. Successfully navigating these competing interests required engineers to abandon their professional independence, but by accepting a key place in an ascendant bureaucratic system, engineers established a model of technical leadership that appeared to reconcile the goals of profit and property with the idealistic conceits of American republicanism.
