Engineering the Modern American West

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Americans dramatically altered the landscape of the arid American West—especially its precious few rivers. Engineers built ever more ambitious dams, canals, diversions, and reservoirs until, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, only the federal government wielded the resources needed to continue the development. 

At the forefront of the federal effort was Frederick Haynes Newell: son of a rambling New England businessman, graduate of MIT, advisor to Theodore Roosevelt, and prophet for scientific conservation of natural resources. For more than twenty-five years, Newell defined the federal government’s role in Western water.  

Newell’s unlikely rise to power as the first leader of the U.S. Reclamation Service (now Bureau of Reclamation) and his subsequent fall from grace is a story not well remembered. His influence, however, is imprinted on every facet of the incomprehensibly complex system manipulating the West’s water.  

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.” If the Bureau of Reclamation—with its landscape-scale infrastructure and herculean feats of water management—can be said to be the lengthened shadow of one man, that man is Frederick Haynes Newell.