Seventh of a series

“[T]he West’s cardinal law: that water flows toward power and money.”

- Marc Reisner

In the first season of the television series, “Yellowstone,” a California developer named Dan Jenkins reveals his plans to divert the Yellowstone River to provide water and power to the huge casino he intends to build in Paradise Valley. When the timid bankers voice skepticism, Jenkins replies, “On our land, it’s our river. This isn’t California, gentlemen. This is Montana. We can do whatever we want.”

Well, not quite. Jenkins’ dam was still on the drawing board when John Dutton dynamited both the valley and Jenkins’ plans, rerouting the river so that it now ran solely through the Dutton ranch. That took care of that problem.

A couple of articles have subsequently tried to spoil the fun. One noted that Jenkins seemed ignorant of Article IX Section 3.3 of Montana’s Constitution, which states: “All surface, underground, flood, and atmospheric waters within the boundaries of the state are the property of the state for the use of its people and are subject to appropriation for beneficial uses as provided by law.”  Montana allocates water rights through a system called “prior appropriation”, which basically means whoever gets there first gets the water (“first in time, first in right”). Because the Duttons came to the valley in 1883, “they didn’t need dynamite, they needed a decent water rights attorney. . . and a permit.” But that ain’t the way the Duttons do business.

Nor were the people of California – at least the old timers – the wimps whom Jenkins mocked. They were just more subtle.  At the beginning of the 20th century, when the power brokers in Los Angeles wanted water to build the city and enrich themselves, they stole it. All the way from the Owens Valley, 270 miles to the northeast, where they had surreptitiously bought up the land and built an aqueduct.

The original name of the Owens Valley was Payahǖǖnadǖ or “place of flowing water,” which is a bit ironic since it took Los Angeles only 13 years to empty the 100-square-mile lake completely, sending to the city four times as much water as it needed. Draining the lake put the local farmers out of business, and they did respond with dynamite – by trying to blow up the aqueduct on 17 separate occasions. Today, Los Angeles owns most of the land in the valley, and the empty lake’s dry bed has created serious air pollution issues for the inhabitants.

Several years ago, I went to the Owens Valley to spend a week without food and only a little water in the Inyo Mountains. Because the high Sierras on the west side of the valley suck up all the Pacific rains, it is the driest place I have ever been. Just to its east is Death Valley.

The story of the great water theft in the Owens Valley is told mythically in Roman Polanski’s film, “Chinatown,” and majestically in Marc Reisner’s book Cadillac Desert, while the Yellowstone story is told melodramatically in the eponymous television series. But the less electrifying historical and academic papers show that, while “water wars” did bring violence and fraud to the West, “armed water insurrections have been replaced by court fights and water rights sales.”

And that brings me to another truth the headlines often overlook: that rivers have at least as much ability to bring people together as to send them to the mattresses – and that the commons does not have to be the catastrophe that Garret Hardin makes it out to be.