Journal of the Southwest

Land of the Underground Rain: Irrigation on the Texas High Plains, 1910-1970 by Donald E.GreenReview by: James H. ShidelerArizona and the West, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. 84-85Published by: Journal of the SouthwestStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40168241 .

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84 ARIZONA and the WEST

(p. 89) to "right" horses instead of "night" horses, and on p. 135 "tapaderas" are referred to as "teather" toe protectors. These errors would be passed over by the casual reader. On one occasion Symons mentions certain Scotsmen who served as

managers of cattle companies, citing McBain of the Matador. I think Murdo Mackenzie would have been a better example.

In addition to time, there is another connecting link between the two works. This link is an exterior one - Wallace Stegner. On the dust jacket of Olson's book, Stegner says that "the shape that his time and place put on him is a shape that I myself acknowledge." Stegner grew up in the French Creek (whitemud) area and alludes to some of the same things in his Wolf Willow as does Symons. To the lay reader and the popular reader, these two works will be a welcome addition to their collections and their leisure.

Harmon Mothershead

The reviewer, a member of the history department at Northwest Missouri State University, Maryville, recently published The Swan Land and Cattle Company, Ltd.

LAND OF THE UNDERGROUND RAIN: Irrigation on the Texas High Plains, 1910-1970. By Donald E. Green. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973. 295 pp. $9.50.

Like the rest of the great Southwest, the semiarid high plains region of western Texas was originally an unlikely place for agricultural development. Range cattle ranching combined with some dry farming was the narrow limit of nineteenth-century land utilization. Near the turn of the century, however, vast subsurface water resources were discovered, and through experiment, bor-

rowing, and convergence of technology, twentieth-century equipment was brought to the high plains. This equipment included rigs capable of drilling big-bore wells one or two hundred feet to reach the first great reservoirs, pumps that could deliver hundreds of cubic feet of water a minute, and steam or internal combus- tion engines to power the pumps. Technological innovation resulted in erratic booms, promotions, and the spread of irrigated agriculture running through several cycles after 1899. Later on, with acceleration after 1940, thousands of additional wells (and deeper ones) were punched into the subsurface pools. Bigger capacity pumps, powerful electric motors, and more elaborate delivery systems came to irrigate five and a half million acres of grain sorghum, wheat, alfalfa, and cotton. The regional economy, however, soon became exposed and vulnerable. Dwindling water supplies could be mined only with increased costs.

This story is an all-too-familiar pattern of profligate development-speculation- exploitation-exhaustion, followed by clamor for the national government to save

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REVIEWS 85

the region from its follies. In this case, salvation is somehow expected to arrive

by the miraculous importation of substitute water from the Mississippi River or from Canada's arctic territories.

Donald Green's book is a fine and sobering example of how one invaluable exhaustible resource was foolishly used up. Green is fully aware of his story's moral, but the folly and wry humor of it does not interfere with his scholarly historical study which is based upon exhaustive research, digging for unusual source materials, and a long-time perceptive association with the region. He has

skillfully interrelated several distinct developments, though sometimes he goes into more detail on land sales boosterism and local fluctuations than the reader needs to know. Especially well done are his accounts of the evolving technology of well drilling and pumping, its links to sales promotions, and state legislative gestures at pumping regulation that were tardy and toothless because they depended upon voluntary self-restraint.

James H. Shideler

The reviewer is Editor of Agricultural History and a Professor of History at the Univer- sity of California, Davis.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS: Crusader in Corduroy. By Dudley Gordon. Los Angeles: Cultural Assets Press, 1972. 344 pp. $12.50.

Writer, editor, builder, anthropologist, conservationist, journalist, folklorist, friend of the Indian, savior of the missions, founder of the Southwest Museum, Charles Fletcher Lummis, if not quite the Renaissance man his biographer claims him to have been, was yet one of California's most colorful and versatile figures.

An Easterner by birth and education, Lummis came to Los Angeles in 1885 after a solitary walk across the continent from Cincinnati, a feat which he later featured in one of his books. From that time he was identified with the City of the Angels and Southern California as one of its greatest boosters. In Los Angeles he went to work on the Times - he had begun his journalistic career in Chilli- cothe, Ohio - and soon became city editor. Then in 1894 Lummis assumed the

editorship of the relatively new West Coast magazine, hand of Sunshine, which he later changed to Out West. In spite of a multitude of other activities, the ten or more years he edited the magazine probably were the most fruitful and influen- tial of his career. As editor he not only contributed regularly - his column "The Lion's Den" could bear reprinting - but he espoused such causes as preservation of the missions and humane treatment for the Indian. The magazine is also a treasury of the cultural movements of the period on the West Coast, and Lummis intro- duced to the public and encouraged a group of writers such as Mary Austin,

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