The Man Who Forever Changed the West

A new study detailing the life and policy contributions of Francis G. Newlands, one of the most important historical figures in the development of water use in the western United States. This exploration of Newlands' life and legacy by historian William Lilley III examines Newlands' contributions to early 19th century federal law, which initiated the vast irrigation system that waters the western United States to this day.

Countless legends shape our image of the American West: Buffalo Bill, Jesse James, Billy the Kid. But many people who most deeply impacted the West are lost to popular memory.

One such shaper was Francis G. Newlands, a larger-than-life political figure who crafted the early 20th century federal law that initiated the vast irrigation system that waters the western United States to this day.

Today, with the region’s water issues once again front and center, Newlands’ life and legacy are getting renewed attention. One leading example is “The System of the River,” an exploration by the historian William Lilley III of how Newland shrewdly engineered a solution to water management that offers important lessons for modern-day policymakers.

“Media reporting on today’s water scarcity has the flavor of ‘discovering a new crisis,’ but the issues are the same as they were during Newlands’ time,” says Lilley, a member of the advisory council at the Bill Lane Center for the American West since its founding in 2005.

According to Lilley, Newlands’ combination of innovative thinking, tenacity and savvy politicking paved the way for a national effort to harness the interstate rivers of the American West. That signature achievement, the National Reclamation Act of 1902, is considered one of the most significant government policies enabling settlement of the arid west. It was also notable for giving power over water management to the federal government.

“By the time his career had run its course,” writes Lilley in his study, “the West would be changed forever.”

David Kennedy, a Stanford history professor who collaborated on the project, says the study gives Newlands long overdue recognition. “The modern West is literally inconceivable without the hugely ambitious irrigation projects that Newlands set in motion,” says Kennedy, the co-founding director of the Lane Center.

Bruce E. Cain, the Spence and Cleone Eccles Family Director at the Bill Lane Center, adds that the “The System of the River” is an important contribution to the Center’s current research agenda, which explores questions of environmental governance and management in the West.

“The need for regional management of water remains one of the most salient issues in the West, and one that the Center continues to study with enthusiasm,” writes Cain.

In publishing Lilley's study, Cain hopes to encourage today's scholars to revisit Newlands' innovative methods. "Collaboration across government is critical for the issues confronting westerners today,” he says. “From wildfires to climate change, coordinated and systematic planning is fundamental to the past, present and future of the American West."

An Outsider Makes His Mark

Lilley, a scholar of the American West and of water management, first wrote about Newlands for his doctoral dissertation at Yale in the 1960s. He recently set out to update that work in part because he sees parallels between the challenges Newlands faced and overcame and severe water shortages brought on by climate change.

Newlands was successful, Lilley writes, because he was both innovative and savvy about selling his vision. He was also like many other legends of the West: an outsider whose knowledge, skills and force of personality made a mark.

“His personal papers read like an adventure book on the Gilded Age,” writes Lilley.
    
Newlands arrived in San Francisco in 1870 with only a law degree and the polish of a Yale-educated Easterner. Despite his outsider status, he was welcomed into the highest circles of society and married the daughter of the city’s richest man.
    
Through his father-in-law, Newlands became general counsel of Spring Valley Water Works, which supplied water to San Francisco. He scored his first water-management victory when the San Francisco Board of Supervisors began considering a new water-rate schedule with the political goal of lowering prices sharply and reducing the profits of a monopoly utility.

In response, Newlands relied on his powers of persuasion, knowledge and input from experts to give the Board a lesson on the utility’s finances. He showed them how the company’s finances were tied to the size of San Francisco’s population. As the city grew, the costs of supplying water to inhabitants—measured on a per capita basis—decreased. Inversely, when the population shrank, the utility’s costs rose.

The city agreed to set a rate schedule tied to the city’s population. This allowed the Supervisors to claim a 10 percent rate reduction in water rates and the company to maintain its 9 percent dividend. Newlands had brokered a win-win situation, as long as the population cooperated.

A New Power Player Comes to Washington

Newlands’ social aptitude, educational credentials and stubborn perseverance proved key to his landmark achievement.
    
“Newlands’ life was one long training session for the Reclamation Act,” says Lilley.

The inspiration for the law, also known as the Newlands Act, was rooted in failure. In the late 1880s, Newlands moved to Nevada where he devised, in conjunction with California’s leading irrigation engineer, a groundbreaking plan to irrigate the notoriously arid state. Newlands used a coordinated watershed approach developed by John Wesley Powell of the US Geological Survey.
    
“The Nevada plan…marked a high point in the irrigation boom in the West,” writes Lilley.

Though initially successful, the plan fell apart after state legislators placed their districts’ needs for public works spending above the needs of finding the best sites for dams to help manage water supply.

Newlands emerged from the experience a critic of local governance. State governments, he concluded, were “too politicized” and “too inept” to oversee irrigation in the West. He then ran for Congress in 1892 and won largely on his outsider status.

In 1901, he introduced the Reclamation Act to move irrigation powers to the federal government. To gain support, he hosted elaborate “irrigation dinners” to educate his fellow Congressmen—employing the same powers of persuasion that helped him triumph in the earlier battle with San Francisco over water rates.

“Newlands once more sought to smooth the path of his preferred policy by educating—and entertaining—the policymakers,” says Lilley. “In this regard, he helped usher in the modern era of the outside policy expert as a major power player in national affairs.”

The act revolutionized irrigation law in three ways: it overrode state interests, gave the Secretary of the Interior power over all aspects of the irrigation process, and used the revolving sale of public lands to fund the projects, thereby bypassing the usual congressional appropriations process.
    
“The lesson in the Newlands Act is that Congress and the state legislatures were stuck in the same place for decades,” says Lilley. “Breakthrough did not happen until the outsider short-circuited the stalemate.”

The System of the River: Francis Newlands and the Improbable Quest to Irrigate the West