Winter Break Reading

I'll get back to the personnel economics of U budget cuts tomorrow maybe, but some winter reading for today.

Two of the books I read over the winter break were related, and they were:
Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
Mark Stein's How the States Got Their Shapes

I certainly wasn't expecting to see a connection, but one of Powell's proposals (in the late 1800s) involved the economics of political boundaries, which is the topic of the second book.

Powell recognized, long before most anyone else, that water was the crucial resource in the American West. This is unlike the Eastern US, where there's plenty of water falling from the sky ("rain", I guess they call it) onto any piece of land. Here, we don't get too much of this "rain" stuff. For most agricultural purposes, land is useless without water. Powell argued that the homestead laws used to settle places like Iowa just weren't going to work in the West. It just wasn't going to work to give individuals 160 acres --- the standard grant under the Homestead Act --- with no thought about where water was going to come from.

One of Powell's water-centric proposals was made to the Montana territorial legislature. He advised them to organize counties according to drainage basins. If all residents on a particular creek or river are members of the same county, then water usage decisions can be delegated to that county and resolved locally. Essentially, Powell was arguing that political boundaries ought to be drawn to allow for localized decision-making regarding scarce resources. He was ignored, of course, and this means that upstream counties and downstream counties fight over water rights. One problem with this political organization is that both upstream and downstream counties act in a completely self-interested manner, and issues are either resolved by the state (which has comparatively limited access to information on local conditions) or through protracted negotiations. Witness the problems of the Colorado River Compact --- which is an agreement of seven Colorado-River-basin states --- for examples of the exact problems Powell was hoping Montana could avoid.

This year is the 100th anniversary of Stegner's birth, so it's a good year to read him. I'm not a big fan of fiction --- why read something made up when the real world is so interesting? --- but he wrote lots of great non-fiction stuff about the West (and about Mormonism in particular).

Mark Stein's book is about how Powell's advice --- design political units to minimize across-jurisdiction conflict --- was sometimes heeded and sometimes ignored as the Congress drew up state boundaries. Under "heeded", have a look at Washington and Idaho. Gold was discovered in what-was-then the Washington Territory north of Boise in 1860. Miners flocked to the area. Farmers in the Puget Sound area did not want miners in Boise making laws for them (and vice versa), so Congress split the territory in two.

Under "ignored", look at Wyoming. It's four degrees of latitude high, and seven degrees of longitude wide. Same with Colorado. Congress was pretty much ignoring conditions on the ground, and just making similar-sized states out of blank spaces on the map.

From Stein's book, I also learned that Utah is smaller than originally planned. Much of eastern Nevada was part of Utah --- until the mining really got going there. Congress didn't trust the LDS settlers of Utah, so they lopped off big chunks of land and put them in Nevada (which Congress figured wouldn't be LDS-controlled) instead.

West Wendover was nearly ours!