This book illuminates the myriad personalities and interests that
combined and clashed over the Pecos Valley reservoirs and canals. Many
Americans, including western lawmakers, considered irrigation to be
America at its best. Wealthy easterners invested in its development in
the great traditions of American capitalism. Farmers laboring side by
side to transform the desert into productive cropland represented the
ideals of Jeffersonian yeoman democracy. These people, and the change of
the Pecos Valley from rustic cattle territory to towns and irrigated
farmland, form the framework for this rich story of the American West.
Today the once formidable Pecos River has become a mere shadow of its
former self. Dammed in many places for irrigation, its springs pumped
dry in others, the Pecos leads a precarious existence. Yet the contest
over its water--within New Mexico and between New Mexico and Texas
through the Pecos River Compact--continues.