Preface. This is a book review of: “Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West” by Judith Nies.

This book is about how stealing the resources of native Americans lands was made legal, despite enormous Native American opposition to the exploitation of their own territory by the Federal government, and it hasn’t stopped. The biggest villains are Senator Barry Goldwater, Senator Harry Reid, Congressman Morris Udall, and Congressman and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

There are 25 “energy tribes” in the western states who have 30% of America’s untapped mineral resources of oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas.  Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, goes into the detailed history of a few of the hundreds of Osage who were killed by white men to grow rich from the oil boom. This book covers another unknown story of greed and the raping and pillaging of Native American land for yet another fossil fuel: coal. Plus something even more valuable: moving the coal in a water slurry from the Black Mesa aquifer that won’t be replenished until after the next ice age.  I would guess this was probably the largest waste of fresh water in American history, and the poisoning and depletion of water drove untold thousands of Navajo off their own land.

They’d been driven off their land in New Mexico for gold. Millions of acres of Indian treaty lands were lost. Half of the entire Navajo Tribe, for example, which had been prosperous and living in northern New Mexico, had been rounded up by Kit Carson and his battalion of soldiers, marched 350 miles to the New Mexico border at Bosque Redondo, and imprisoned in a desolate labor camp near Fort Sumner. Their lands were believed to be rich in gold.

This book also mentions the 1300 abandoned nuclear mines on 27,000 square miles of land home to 250,000 people (37 of them are on the Black Mesa land). These mines are still blowing radioactive dust from the 4 million tons of uranium mined across the Navajo nation, which employed many Navajo who weren’t given protective clothing or informed about the toxic radiation of uranium. Since then, studies have found that 85% of Navajo homes had uranium in the dust there. The Navajo have had very high rates of lung cancer, kidney disease and many other health problems as well (Morales 2016, Brugge 2002, Wikipedia 2023).

And the tragedy continues. In 1979 the Church rock mill spilled 94 million gallons of radioactive waste entered the Puerco River. This was the largest nuclear disaster in American history, and now Canadian company is trying to open another mine a few miles away. Yet none of the abandoned mines have been cleaned up, though the 500 mines used to make nuclear bombs are on the EPA “to do” list (Holland 2023).

The Black Mesa reservoir is also under threat today from three proposed pumped hydropower projects, proposed by “Nature and People First” headed by CEO Dennis Payre, who fled France to avoid paying a tax bill of $2.5 million dollars. The proposal includes nine reservoirs and other major infrastructure that would span nearly 50 miles and require 450,000 acre-feet from the Black Mesa aquifer, Colorado and San Juan rivers. But mainly the Black Mesa aquifer (and others nearby, none of them named) given that the entire state of Nevada only has allocation rights to 300,000-acre feet of the Colorado river.  Not with 90% of water in Las Vegas coming from these 300,000 acre feet.  This is three times more water than used for coal mining over 50 years. Plus an ongoing 8,000 acre-feet per year to replace evaporation losses. Biodiversity would suffer as well. This is an extremely water-starved region (CBD 2022, EPA 2020, Pelz 2023, Sainato 2023).

When you read how desperate Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson are for electricity, it is possible these PHS projects will go through using only aquifer water, which these cities also depend on. Of course, this will not end well, and southwestern cities will be depopulated from migration to less energy-starved regions of the U.S.  Though most people will give 100% credit to climate change, which is certainly making this happen sooner than it might have.

The Navajo did not want the coal on Black Mesa to be strip-mined, but thousands of them were forced off the land to provide coal to four new electricity generation plants. One of them, the Mohave Generating Station, became the most polluting coal-fired plant in the United States. These plants send electricity to Los Angeles and enabled Las Vegas to grow 129-fold from a small town of 5,000 and Phoenix to grow 48-fold.  This destroyed some of our oldest sustainable Native American cultures so that people in Phoenix and Las Vegas can water their hundreds of golf courses and have swimming pools in the desert.

And power their lights and A/C.  In as destructive a matter as possible. Instead of building a railroad to move the coal strip-mined by Peabody, the first coal slurry–pipeline delivery system in the sent the coal-water slurry 273 miles to distant power plants. After arrival the water was discarded with a huge centrifuge and evaporation ponds. 

The Black Mesa coal-slurry pipeline was famous among water engineers for being the most appalling use of water in the water-scarce West.  To transport 5.5 million tons of coal a year required a monstrous 4,300 acre-feet (billion gallons) of Black Mesa aquifer a year. Water from an aquifer created in the ice age that will never be refilled from rainfall. This dried up many Navajo wells. Those that remained poisoned sheep with the sulfur, mercury, and heavy metals that had leached from the coal. On top of that, over 1300 abandoned nuclear mines still blowing radioactive dust on the Navajo reservation, many of them in the Black Mesa mining district.

Author Judith Nies concludes with:

“Although a 1983 US government report confirmed that desertification in the Southwest is moving faster than that of Africa, pumping out groundwater and burning coal have only increased. As a practical matter, for decades the entire urban Southwest has been living off federal money for subsidized water. As Wallace Stegner observed, “The West has . . . become an empire and gotten the East to pay most of the bills. The oligarchs who control decision making in Las Vegas may have realized that the long-term future of desert living is in doubt, which may be why Steve Wynn (Wynn Resorts) is trying to build a new huge, but “tasteful,” casino in the brownfield marshes of Everett, about eight miles from my home in Massachusetts. That casino also means a new well-funded lobby in state politics.”

What follows are my Kindle notes organized by topic and some added material. Since I am hell bent on energy and natural resources, I left a whole lot out, and much more about Native American exploitation that you should read the book to see.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Nies J (2014) Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West.     

In 1974 Congress passed a poorly conceived bill that divided the surface of the Executive Order Reservation on a fifty-fifty basis between the two tribes. As a practical matter, only a handful of Hopi, who lived clustered in villages at the rocky edge, were affected, but thousands of Navajo families, who lived in sheepherding camps spread out in the interior, had to be moved.

Berger had been handpicked to direct the commission. But as the man charged with removing thousands of Navajo families from the newly delineated Hopi lands, he was no longer able to ignore the realities of an impossible job. For one thing, no one had ever accurately counted the number of Navajo to be moved; for another, no planning had been done to buy alternative land or provide social services or build housing to relocate them; and finally, the Navajo relocation marked the first time in a hundred years that a boundary issue between two tribes was being settled by removing uncounted thousands of the opposing tribe. Why hadn’t the usual arrangement of alternative public lands and a financial settlement been worked out as compensation?

Berger’s incendiary resignation brought unwanted publicity to certain complex details that had theretofore remained invisible. As it turned out, those same disputed Navajo-Hopi lands contained the largest untouched coal deposit in the country.

Peabody Coal was strip-mining those same Navajo and Hopi lands on Black Mesa, extracting close to 15 million tons of coal a year—at the time it was the largest strip mine in the country—that were feeding two Bechtel-built generating stations.

Not only did the Peabody Holding Company not have to report profits because it was not a publicly traded company, but each of its constituent entities (Newmont Mining, Boeing Corporation, Equitable Life, Bechtel, and Fluor Engineering) had a large public relations department that issued its own press releases about the “good” Hopi and the “bad” Navajo.

When I looked around the room with new eyes, I saw a scene of corporate money and power. It looked like a Washington fund-raiser. The men in the room represented a significant cross-section of Wall Street, Washington, and the West. The Indians were not the major players. The real story was about energy and resources, about how coal was going to be used, and about who would make money.

I had unintentionally intruded on the people whose companies were in the process of creating a new Hoover Dam, and with it the water and energy infrastructure that would fuel the next 30 years of metastasizing growth in the West. The irony was that the few people at the time who understood the implications of burning 15 million tons of unfiltered coal a year were the Indians, both Hopi and Navajo, whose traditional people had a very different point of view from the tribal council members. They saw the boundary issue as having been manipulated in order to remove the people who lived on top of the coal and therefore in the way of the strip mining. They knew that coal dust caused pollution and health problems, turned water toxic, pumped out groundwater in the desert, and caused drought. But those Indians couldn’t get to the microphone.

In the 1930s Phoenix and Las Vegas were just waking up. They were still tiny towns surrounded by scorching deserts. Las Vegas, in the Mohave Desert, had a population of 5,000 and Phoenix, in the Sonoran Desert, 48,000. But they had seen the template for growth. It involved water, electricity, air-conditioning, and, most important, federal money.

In the 1930s the federally financed, but privately built, Hoover Dam was under construction only thirty miles from Las Vegas, and most of the water and hydroelectricity would go to California, making it the wealthiest state in the country. The formula required political power in Washington.

By the 1960s Los Angeles needed more electricity. Phoenix needed more water for agriculture and the housing developments that Del Webb was building. They needed to replace the groundwater that had been pumped out in such quantities that large cavities were opening up at the edges of highways. As the fastest-growing city in the country, Las Vegas doubled or tripled its population every decade. It too had subsidence as groundwater was pumped out. Although the small-government, individual-responsibility culture did not believe in bureaucracy, the casino owners knew they had to plan for water and electricity. In short, the urban Southwest was not a desert miracle, but required another new Hoover Dam to produce more inexpensive electricity and water. The key word was inexpensive.

Although the struggle over Black Mesa lands continues to be described as a local issue or a “centuries-old land dispute” between two tribes, it is actually an example of a global phenomenon in which giant transnational corporations have the power to separate indigenous people from their energy-rich lands with the help of host governments. What is not so well known is how it happens in America. Black Mesa is a domestic example of a global syndrome.

If a group photograph had been taken at that Phoenix reception in 1982, it would have included not only Barry Goldwater and Robert Redford, but also the executives from the five corporations of the Peabody Holding Company as well as the heads of 23 utilities who needed the water and energy equivalent of a new Hoover Dam.

Las Vegas is a city divorced from nature—and proud of it. Located in the middle of the Mohave Desert, it gets four inches of rain a year and has a climate like Baghdad. Las Vegas has no real downtown, no civic spaces, no historic buildings, no public parks, and no commemorative plaques—no public history. It is known for its philosophy of round-the-clock Fun and a No-Limits sensibility. As an international destination with 39 million visitors a year and fourteen of the largest hotels in the world, the city attracts more tourists than all of Great Britain.

Behind Hoover Dam is Lake Mead, from which the townships of Las Vegas valley get 90% of their water supply.

Las Vegas is like an atomic particle, with a bright nucleus surrounded by dense dark matter. The dark matter contains some of the most militarized real estate in the world. Nellis Air Force Base has individual parcels that are equivalent in size to Delaware, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.

There is some irony that the premier city in a state famous for its no-tax, small-government, hyper-conservative political culture exists within an economy that is buoyed by billions of dollars from the federal budget, spent by personnel from many government agencies. The Nevada Test Site, for example, is run by the US Department of Energy

The level of Lake Mead has dropped 130 feet, so much that it has triggered laws that require the Southern Nevada Water Authority to seek new sources of water. Presently, the authority is following the Los Angeles–Owens Valley model and has bought water rights to a valley 200 miles north of Las Vegas that has a high groundwater level from mountain snowmelt. The authority has received permission for a right-of-way across federal land and plans to pump the water south to Las Vegas by pipeline.

Another section of Nellis, Area 2, is the largest aboveground weapons storage complex in the United States. This is where the bombs are stored during atomic testing at the Nevada Test Site. Other parcels have names such as the Tonopah Test Range or Area 52, run by Sandia National Laboratories; Creech Air Force Base; the Tolicha Peak Electronic Combat Range; and the now-famous top-secret Area 51, technically part of Edwards Air Force Base but run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), where U-2 surveillance aircraft such as the supersecret Oxcart were tested and from which the unmanned drones currently operating in the skies over Pakistan and Afghanistan are said to be “piloted.

The point is that Las Vegas is far more connected to world events and to Washington than it may seem. It is mistakenly characterized as an entertainment capital, a weekend getaway, a place to get married or divorced quickly.  People think that modern Las Vegas began in 1946 when Bugsy Siegel had his epiphany in the desert and saw a vision arising out of the parched sands. Other versions point out that Las Vegas is actually the most sophisticated military border town in the world, a shadow capital for the planet’s largest military power.

Gambling history

The Havana Mob’s interest in Las Vegas gambling investments came about because of a California attorney general and future Supreme Court chief justice. Earl Warren had campaigned for governor on the promise to shut down the illegal gambling boats operating outside the three-mile limit off Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles. The boats catered to a glamorous, wealthy Hollywood crowd and were staggeringly profitable.  True to his word, in the 1940s Warren had shut down the boats.

All Siegel’s associates called him Benny. No one called him “Bugsy” to his face. The nickname came from his early days as a young thug in New York, where people who saw his psychotic rages called him “crazy as a bedbug.”

Old photos of the Desert Inn casino floor show an all-male clientele with a sprinkling of cocktail waitresses. Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation J. Edgar Hoover was known to be a frequent patron of the Desert Inn casino. No photograph of Hoover at the Desert Inn was ever found.

Gambling and prostitution were a fact of life in Nevada’s hundreds of mining towns. No one thought in terms of legality or illegality. And even though the Volstead Act was still in effect, Prohibition was barely enforced in Nevada.

Las Vegas became a magic name, the one place in the country where that elusive element called “a job” still existed. Thousands made their way to Las Vegas, by bus, train, car. Tony Cornero arrived in Las Vegas in 1931, the same year as Warren Bechtel, except that he came directly from prison.

Tony Cornero was ahead of his time. Although author James Roman called him “the original wise guy,” he also was a good businessman with a vision of a high-class establishment for the visitors who would come to Las Vegas to see the dam construction. He wanted to build not only a hotel and a casino and nightclub but an airstrip that would bring a wealthy clientele to Las Vegas to gamble. He wanted to bring Los Angeles nightclub acts to Las Vegas. Tony Cornero introduced a few other innovations. He used silver dollars rather than chips at the gambling tables. He said that if anybody tried to heist them, they couldn’t get away with much because a bag of silver dollars weighed too much.

Steven Fox, in Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth Century America, wrote that in the early 1950s, “Hoover formed a small group within the FBI specifically instructed to ‘determine and document the nonexistence of organized crime.’” It wasn’t until the 1960s under Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the FBI began to install wiretaps and electronic surveillance of crime leaders, many at the Mob-controlled casinos in Las Vegas. (Even then, Hoover did not authorize wiretaps at the Sahara, where Hoover’s friend Del Webb was the owner, or at the Thunderbird and the Flamingo, where the skim went to Meyer Lansky.), a nightclub that featured big-name Hollywood entertainers, including Frank Sinatra, a Las Vegas regular who would later own 7 percent interest in the Sands in exchange for an agreement to appear there exclusively. (He would later lose his license because of his public association with known Chicago mobster Sam Giancana, at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe, but would get it back in 1980, when Harry Reid, currently majority leader in the US Senate, was head of the Nevada Gaming Commission.)

The Desert Inn Corporation was a money-generating machine and kept at least three sets of books—one for the owners, one for the state gambling commission, and another for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Supposedly, there was a fourth set of books that kept track of the skim that went directly into suitcases carried by the representatives of the various crime syndicates who showed up every week, walked directly to the cashier’s cage, filled the suitcases with money, and left before the nightly count was made and reported.

The take was enormous. “The Miami hotel men,” the euphemism for Lansky’s fronts, were skimming at least $3 million for every $1 million reported. Much of the cash went first to Miami and then to numbered bank accounts in Switzerland, where it was laundered back into the United States through banks and financial institutions in the Bahamas. The money also came from heroin and opium as well as gambling. Throughout the 1950s, wrote Denton and Morris in The Money and the Power, “that secret, indirect, revolving traffic between the Strip and Switzerland was one of the heaviest flows of international capital of the era, making Las Vegas a center of world finance long before many knew its name.

Gangsters who were investing a lot of money in Las Vegas because they saw Nevada as the new Havana, the only place in the United States where gambling was legal. Las Vegas promised enormous profits.

Sophisticated gambling operations had catwalks above the ceilings and two-way mirrors over the tables. Dealers were required to wear uniforms without pockets so they couldn’t palm a $100 chip into a pocket. One attraction of Las Vegas and its legal gambling was that it had none of the payoffs to the police, politicians, and judges that were required costs of doing business in the rest of American cities.

By the time the Crime Commission completed its hearings, Senator Kefauver estimated the untaxed money controlled by Mob interests at $20 billion.  In his summary report of the hearings, Senator Kefauver called organized crime “a phantom government,” with its own laws, its own enforcers, and its own interest in dominating politics. Kefauver cited the extraordinary amounts of money that crime families were able to leverage in local, state, and federal elections and estimated that at any given point in time organized crime controlled more than $20 billion in untaxed dollars ($280 billion in current dollars).

Kefauver presented a network of links between upperworld and underworld gangsters—businessmen, organized crime syndicates, and politicians. Kefauver wanted to continue a second round of hearings, but in 1951 the Senate majority leader, whose office held power over all special committee appointments, fell to Ernest McFarland, the powerful and highly respected Democratic senator from Arizona. Unexpectedly, McFarland, who might have supported a second round of Crime Committee hearings lost his 1952 election. The victor was both a Republican and an inexperienced politician.

Despite Kefauver’s repeated requests, there would be no more Senate investigations into organized crime.

President Chester Arthur 1881-1885

In the 1880s the great opportunities for great wealth in America lay in land development, mining, and opening public lands in the West to Anglo settlement. The conditions for success required political corruption, Wall Street speculation, and many wild moneymaking schemes, not so different from our own era, which some journalists have called the New Gilded Age.

Among Arthur’s dinner guests were investors who were willing to pay for access to public lands in the western territories. Oklahoma’s Indian Territory, for example, was especially prized. Arthur authorized the opening of 500,000 acres of Creek and Winnebago lands in Oklahoma to speculators, homesteaders, and ranchers. Although his act was declared illegal after Arthur was out of office, the displaced Creek and Winnebago Indians, removed to Oklahoma by treaty and guaranteed their lands “in perpetuity,” were overwhelmed by a flood of white settlers.

Chester Arthur, the 21st president of the United States, was an accidental president, but he was no stranger to turning public service into private wealth. One of the least studied of American presidents, his résumé included training as a lawyer; a rise to political prominence as a protégé of Senator Roscoe Conkling, the powerful Republican machine boss in New York; and his appointment as collector of the Port of New York, a patronage job that transformed him into a wealthy man. He became a vice presidential candidate only because the fractious Republican convention of 1880 could not come to agreement among the reformer delegates who wanted a government civil service and the patronage bosses. “To the victor belongs the spoils” was the motto of Conkling’s machine.

After lingering for two and a half months—the fatal blow was that his doctors did not wash their hands and he got a post-wound infection—he died in September 1881. “So Chet Arthur is president,” marveled one senator at the improbability of Chester Arthur in the Oval Office. In fact, Arthur did not rush to inhabit the Oval Office. He took over the presidency but refused to occupy the White House because it was lacking in elegance and not up to his Gilded Age standards of conspicuous wealth. He rented an opulent mansion at taxpayer expense and called in his New York decorator, Louis Tiffany, to remove all the furniture and undertake a thorough redecoration of the White House. He ordered new china and glassware, brought in a French chef from New York’s famous Delmonico’s restaurant, and stocked the wine cellar with imported French wines. He entertained lavishly and often. The guests at his 14-course dinners were political bosses, wealthy industrialists, military men, lobbyists, and representatives of European royalty. He had 82 suits hanging in his White House closet.

Belgian Congo was Leopold’s private real estate deal from which he extracted millions in rubber and gold and enslaved or killed an estimated 6 million African laborers. As Adam Hochschild points out in King Leopold’s Ghost, the money did not go to the Belgium treasury, but went instead to the king’s personal bank accounts.

In America a similar fever for land and mineral wealth gripped speculators as well as the compulsion to contain nomadic Natives onto fixed reservation lands and to remove them from lands that could be valuable for farming, ranching, or mining.

Farther west, in the territories of New Mexico and Arizona, said to be especially rich in minerals, America had its own version of Leopold’s Congo.  It was during this period that the Black Hills of South Dakota were claimed for gold miners and the Sioux Indians chased north to reservations. The gold mountain in Ledeville, which is still producing gold (and was the model for the television series Deadwood), was the source of the Hearst family fortune.

The current Indian agent in 1882, J. R. Fleming, was facing complaints from the Hopi because of white men believed to be Mormon missionaries who were coming into their villages, harassing them about religion, and claiming lands the Hopi had farmed. The lands most desirable have been taken up by the Mormons and others. The agent was powerless to do anything because without a federal reservation boundary, he was without authority. The agent had threatened to resign.

The new Hopi reservation that the superintendent proposed, however, was approximately 36 square miles and enclosed all the Hopi villages and some of the dry washes where they grew crops. The Hopi used a system of dry farming that drew on the water from spring rains that sank beneath the soil in dry washes but could be tapped by corn plants with long roots. (This system is still in use.)  Correspondence and maps show that there had been lively discussion about the possible mineral resources of the area and that the Interior Department had a series of maps showing where the mineral resources were located.

Chester Arthur immediately grasped what his superintendent did not, namely, that if those 20 Mormon families were allowed to continue to settle and improve their lands—as Brigham Young and the Mormon leaders had directed them to do—they would be legally entitled to the mineral wealth beneath those lands. But if those same lands were designated as federal reservation lands, they would be removed from the public domain and closed to white settlement. No stranger to the alchemy of transforming government land into personal wealth, Chester Arthur had the Executive Order drawn up that created a 3,900-square-mile federal reservation known as the 1882 Executive Order Reservation. The order described the 2,508,800 acres of the reservation boundaries and proclaimed that the “tract of country in the territory of Arizona . . . is hereby withdrawn from settlement and sale and set apart for the use and occupancy of the Moqui (Hopi) and other such Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon. Chester Arthur had kept control of the coal resources of the region for another day. When would that day arrive? And who would be able to access the mineral wealth?

Senator Barry Goldwater

Barry Goldwater was a rich man’s son and considered to be something of a lightweight. Goldwater had become president of Goldwater & Sons at the age of 20 after his father, who had built the business, died of a sudden heart attack in 1929. Barry was a freshman at the University of Arizona at the time, and his formal education ended then, a decision he called “the biggest mistake of my life.” Because the Goldwater family’s department stores had professional managers, Barry had plenty of time to explore his many hobbies while he learned the retail business—flying an airplane, photography, ham radios, exploration of Arizona’s backcountry, and collecting Native American art.  He took one of the first rafting trips down the Colorado River. It was an adventure that he filmed with a handheld movie camera at a time when home movies were not common and only a few white people had seen vistas of the Grand Canyon from the river. (Commercial river rafting adventures didn’t begin until the late 1960s.) The film was good enough that he toured the state, showing the film at schools, churches, and community centers, accompanying it with a lecture about the Colorado River and its canyons. Some people felt that this tour was perfect training for retail politics.

He collected Navajo rugs, Hopi pottery, and other Indian artifacts and talked about the days when he had helped his uncle Morris Goldwater of Prescott run a trading post near Navajo Mountain. Many of his photographs appeared in glossy magazines. He was a frequent speaker for chambers of commerce, rotary clubs, and any business group interested in having him.

While he was on the city council, Goldwater’s speeches were legendary for their rambling syntax and non sequiturs. Even Rosenzweig, also on the council, admitted that half the time no one understood what Goldwater was saying: “He’d get wound up, and no one could understand what he was talking about. Many Arizona business leaders and politicians did not take his candidacy seriously. McFarland was highly respected, a two-term senator, and a former attorney general in a Democratic state.

Barry Goldwater was well known in Las Vegas and not just for his boutique store in the lobby of the Desert Inn. As a pilot with his own plane, he frequently made the one-hour flight from Phoenix for a weekend of gambling, partying, and drinking. He stayed at the Desert Inn but often gambled at the Flamingo. Moe Sedway, a Greenbaum associate sometimes referred to as “the ruthless dwarf” and a former Lansky hit man, was another frequent Las Vegas companion of Goldwater’s.

Goldwater’s frequent association with Las Vegas gangsters might have proved a problem except that mass media and television were still in their infancy in 1952 and Goldwater presented a veneer of the rugged West. He was a cowboy aristocrat, a son of one of Arizona’s wealthiest families, but a privileged son who could talk about the old days with his grandfather’s freighting business

The official version of Barry Goldwater’s long-shot election to the US Senate holds that he ran at a critical moment when the conservative tide was turning in Arizona and carried him to victory on Eisenhower’s coattails. But Goldwater needed more to defeat an opponent like McFarland: he needed a lot of money and a new source of voters to provide a margin of victory. Goldwater admitted to outspending McFarland three to one in the 1952 Senate campaign, and rumors of Mob money included paper bags of Las Vegas cash arriving regularly at Goldwater campaign headquarters in Phoenix.

An important question for Goldwater campaign strategists was how to find enough new votes to squeak out a victory. What about the Hopi and Navajo Indians in northern Arizona who would be voting for the first time in the 1952 presidential election? As it turned out, he was right.

When the votes were counted, Goldwater won by 6,725 votes out of 260,000, less than three percentage points. He became a strong supporter of anticommunist Republicans such as Joe McCarthy.

He often told people that he had once run an Indian trading post on the Navajo reservation near Navajo Mountain. “When I think of the area that I had my trading post in,” he later told the House Indian Affairs Committee, “the Paiute Mesa only supported about 1,500 Navajos who had their summer hogans on top of the mesa and their winter hogans in the canyons.” He maintained he knew as much about American Indians as anyone in America.

The colorful West that Goldwater merchandised when he arrived in Washington in 1953 was part of American mythology—an imaginary place of Indian warriors in feathers and war paint, Remington cowboys, flaming sunsets, exquisite Indian crafts, dusty cattle trails, and virile men of action. It is actually a vision of the West that was invented by eastern authors such as Owen Wister, Teddy Roosevelt’s Harvard friend, and maintained by Hollywood writers such as Goldwater’s friend Clarence Budington Kelland. Kelland was the prolific author of many western novels and dozens of short stories published in the Saturday Evening Post. His full-time job, however, was as a campaign consultant for the Republican National Committee.

In Washington Goldwater became the spokesperson for a new hard-right, anticommunist, conservative, small-government agenda that linked western conservative Republicans with southern Democrats. He believed and said publicly that this coalition could wrest control of the Republican Party out of the hands of the eastern moderate Republicans and energize a movement with the goal of repealing all the programs of the New Deal. His overall conservative agenda was built on a platform of repealing government social welfare programs, opposition to civil rights laws, eliminating regulatory agencies, and restoring the primacy of states’ rights. His reason for entering politics, he said, was to reduce the federal bureaucracy.

The real beneficiary would be a Hollywood actor turned politician named Ronald Reagan who won the presidential election of 1980. Within the party Goldwater became a national statesman, a revered figure, the architect of the new conservative revolution, and the forerunner of Fox News and the Tea Party movement.

Goldwaters central role in the law that made up to 15,000 Navajo move off their land

Black Mesa is not black and is not a mesa. It is 4,000 square miles of ginger-colored high desert, an elevated tableland in northern Arizona whose distinctive dark color comes from its mass of deep piñon and juniper trees. The name proved to be particularly appropriate because Black Mesa was also found to be made up of thick beds of coal. Until the 1990s Black Mesa was home to more than 25,000 Navajo in the interior and 8.000 thousand Hopi in cliff-top villages. The people of the two tribes intermarried, went to school together, attended each other’s social dances, and traded goods (Navajo mutton for Hopi corn).

The tribes’ reservation boundary issue, the consequence of an ambiguously worded 1882 Executive Order Reservation, had been cleverly exploited in a series of bills sponsored or supported by Senator Barry Goldwater beginning in 1956. Public Law 93-531, also known as the Navajo and Hopi Land Settlement Act, was a law passed in 1974 that Senator Goldwater and a freshman congressman from Utah named Wayne Owens had sponsored and supported. This was legislation passed in order to open Navajo lands to coal mining.

After the law passed in 1974, the assistant secretary of interior who made those claims left the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to become vice president of Peabody Coal Company, and Peabody had opened a second mining site on Black Mesa. The annual tonnage made the Black Mesa strip-mining operation the largest in the country.

The Hopi-Navajo law was the first time in memory and history that the land settlement required thousands of Indians of one tribe to move in favor of Indians of another tribe. The law had set in motion the relocation of more than 12,000-15,000 Navajo—no accurate count had ever been completed of the number of Navajo residents—in order to give their lands to the Hopi, who did not live there and had no plans to live there. During the congressional hearings, Congress had been told that only 800 hundred families would be moved.

When the relocation started, it was clear no one in Congress had any idea how many Navajo families were going to have to be moved or how much it would cost or how social services would be implemented. How could they? Goldwater had framed the issue as justice for the Hopi and a transfer of lands that were largely uninhabited.

Two years earlier the government began constructing a barbed-wire fence that looped deep into Navajo lands for more than 100 miles. Navajo families who lived on the wrong side of the newly named Hopi side of the fence had to move. After the coal strip mining started, well water and watering holes for livestock were no longer drinkable for either sheep or humans so even more Navajo had to move.

In 1956 Goldwater was the unlikely US senator from Arizona, an event that many maintained was not unrelated to Las Vegas Mob interests. Goldwater’s political career came out of nowhere; his civic experience was limited to eighteen months on the Phoenix City Council. Goldwater’s taste in Mobbed-up friends did not seem to hurt him. To have mobster friends meant you were connected, had juice.

Later, when Goldwater ran for president, his Las Vegas life was edited out of his background and his friendship with Arizona Indians emphasized instead. He was portrayed as a true son of the American West. Some might say, however, that the spirit of Las Vegas—risk, ruthlessness, guns, and greed—is the spirit that settled the West.

By 1971 circumstances had changed in relation to construction of the Central Arizona Water Project, a project of enormous importance to the people of central and southern Arizona and the politicians who had worked on it for 30 years. It appeared that it would be impossible to put another dam on the Colorado River to provide the hydroelectricity to pump 1.9 million acre-feet of water from the Colorado River into Phoenix and Tucson. Instead, the Bureau of Reclamation would have to buy a fourth of the electricity from the still-to-be-constructed Navajo Generating Station. The coal supply to run that plant would require a second mining site on Black Mesa.

In 1971 John Boyden and Barry Goldwater introduced another bill before Congress, the Hopi Land Settlement Act, a bill that would actually physically divide the Executive Order Reservation, giving approximately 2 million acres to the Hopi, and removing the still-uncounted Navajo who lived in the way.

In the 1974 election, 90% of the Navajo vote went against Goldwater.

Harry Reid: Water & Uranium

Senator Harry Reid  has been a major force in getting a federal right-of-way and buying of 200 miles of land to bring the Great Basin Pumping Scheme to fruition for over $15 billion to keep water from Lake Mead flowing to Las Vegas. My main beef with him is that the only place the U.S. had to store nuclear waste, Yucca Mountain, was shut down on behalf of Harry Reid so he would support Obama for President.

The best bet would be to reopen Yucca Mountain for disposal. It was shut down without any technical or safety issues mentioned, and no wonder. Some of the $15 billion spent on it so far was used by scientists who spent 25 years modeling safety over a million years using hundreds of features, events, and processes (FEPS) in every combination. Factors such as climate change, glaciers and icesheets, earthquakes, fractures, faults, volcanism, igneous intrusions, water table rise, erosion, pole reversals, geology, human intrusion, hydrogen or methane gas explosion, effects of corrosion, degradation, radionuclide release, weld failures, mechanical impact, condensation, water intrusion, chemical interactions and more on waste packaging, drip shields, seals, rocks, etc. Over 2,048 pages of FEPS (SNL 2008, Alley 2013).

Although legally allowed to store only 70,000 metric tons of waste (to force other states to share in nuclear waste storage), it has enough space to store 220,000 to 630,000 tons, far more than the 88,000 tons that have accumulated at 77 sites in the U.S. (Maden 2009).

Congressmen Stewart & Morris Udall  

Louise Udall was the wife of the chief justice of the Arizona Supreme Court, Levi Udall. A Udall cousin was the mayor of Phoenix; another was married to the president of the Mormon Church. Two of her sons were en route to impressive careers in Washington, DC. One son, Stewart, was a congressman, who rose in the world to become secretary of interior. Another son, Morris, took his brother’s congressional seat and was working his way up to become chairman of the House Interior Committee, the powerful congressional committee that oversees all national legislation pertaining to mining, mineral rights, water, energy, and Indian lands.

No one mentions the great coal deposits that were discovered beneath the Hopi Navajo lands or the Udall sons had a major role in extracting the coal for energy for the urban centers of the Southwest, particularly Phoenix and Tucson.

“New jobs, large tax benefits, and tremendous economic advantages—not only for the two Indian tribes—but for the entire southwest,” proclaimed Interior Secretary Stewart Udall in announcing the leases in 1966. The leases ran for 35 years and were renewable for another 35.  They violated every guideline that the Department of the Interior had set up for leasing on public lands: no competitive bidding, no automatic renegotiation clauses, a fixed rate rather than a percentage royalty rate. The Hopi got $1.67 per acre-foot for water rights that in 1987 were renegotiated at $427 per acre-foot. The Navajo got $5 per acre-foot. The royalty rate on public lands for coal mining was $1.50 per ton. The Hopi and Navajo split a rate of 37 cents per ton.

Even in the glamorous, style-conscious Kennedy administration, Stewart Udall was a glittering figure. A man of great personal charm, he also had great instincts for power. Obeying the first law of the news camera, he stayed in motion. Images of the interior secretary were always appearing in magazines or on television: Stu Udall rafting rivers, Stu Udall climbing Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, Stu Udall with environmentalists trekking through one of the national parks. He gave the colorless bureaucracy of Interior a new image, and in the process gave environmentalism a new platform. Like President Kennedy, he was photogenic and energetic.

Although the Udall brothers described themselves as lapsed Mormons, or Jack Mormons, they were known to be well connected at the highest levels of the Mormon Church. The idea of male generational succession to political power is an important teaching of the Mormon Church, and in this regard the male members of the Udall family followed that expectation.

In building a political base for his new vision for Interior’s activist mission, he copied his president, appealing to intellectuals. His book The Quiet Crisis was similar in format to Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. With a foreword by President Kennedy, it contained a series of biographies of the white, all-male leaders of the conservation tradition—John Muir, Joseph Wood Krutch, John Wesley Powell, Teddy Roosevelt, and John D. Rockefeller. The profiles had a few surprises. (There was no mention of Rachel Carson or Marjorie Stoneman Douglas.)

After the Goldwater-Boyden-Udall bill passed in 1958, setting up the special court, Boyden filed the necessary papers, the case was heard in 1960, and the decision was handed down on September 28, 1962. The Navajo appealed to the Supreme Court, but the Court declined to hear the case, supposedly after some influential input from Secretary Udall. Discussions were already under way about mineral leasing on the 1882 reservation.

The Hopi traditional leaders were horrified that sacred land was going to be leased for strip mining. Assisted by the Native American Rights Fund, traditional Hopi elders went to court to sue to stop the strip-mining leases, claiming that the leases had been obtained illegally at a time when the Hopi Tribal Council did not have a legal quorum as required by their constitution.

We the Hopi leaders have watched as the white man has destroyed his land, his water and his air. The white man has made it harder for us to maintain our traditional ways and religious life. Now for the first time we have decided to intervene in the white man’s court to prevent the final devastation. We should not have had to go this far. Our words have not been heeded. We can no longer watch as our sacred lands are wrested from our control and as our spiritual center disintegrates. We cannot allow our spiritual homelands to be taken from us. The hour is already late.

The Court ruled that the Hopi traditional priests had no “standing” before the Court. Only the Hopi Tribal Council had legal standing and could sue in the name of the Hopi people.

The Department of the Interior under Stewart Udall authorized the construction of a 2,250-megawatt power plant, the ironically named Navajo Generating Station (no ownership by the Navajo, and half of Navajo families don’t have electricity), from which the Bureau of Reclamation would purchase a fourth of the electricity in order to run the 14 pumping stations that would pump the Colorado River up over three mountain ranges 330 miles into Phoenix and Tucson.

Finally, after 40 years, Arizona would be able to use its full allocation from the Colorado River. The Navajo Generating Station is the only coal-fired power plant in the country that is majority owned by the federal government through the US Bureau of Reclamation.

The energy for the 14 pumping stations, siphons, and tunnels of the Central Arizona Project still comes from Black Mesa coal. The urgency for the water and the substitution of the power plant for the hydroelectric dam contributed to the inability to modify the legislation that set in motion the mass removal of Navajo like Roberta Blackgoat. Neither conservative Republican Barry Goldwater nor liberal Democrat Udall was going to do anything that might endanger water for the parched desert cities of Phoenix and Tucson. Phoenix had five dams high in the Superstition Mountains on the Salt River, and it had pumped out all of its groundwater.

The role of Bechtel in raping Navajo Land

By the time the Hopi and Navajo were coming to Washington to try to change the legislation that would affect the future of their lands and their people, they were dealing with a huge international company with contacts in Washington at the highest levels. Bechtel had 40,000 employees in 20 countries building the infrastructure of the free world. It was often described as a company with its own foreign policy, and soon its foreign policy was America’s foreign policy. It had no public stockholders, issued no annual report, and submitted no quarterly forms to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was the twentieth-largest corporation in the United States but was still a family business. Many of its operations were viewed as opaque, even by its own employees.

As a hard-line anticommunist and a strong Catholic, McCone believed that the atom bomb was a God-given means of defending the American way of life from godless communists. “He was a rightist Catholic,” said journalist I. F. Stone. “A man with holy war views.” Attracted to the decision-making power in Washington, McCone left Bechtel-McCone to help organize the newly formed Department of the Air Force and its highly controversial and top-secret nuclear Strategic Air Command, which put planes in the air 24 hours a day armed with nuclear bombs ready to bomb Russia if so ordered. As Eric Schlosser’s book Command and Control makes clear, most of the danger that human beings faced from nuclear weapons in the Cold War period came from accidents involving airplanes, bombs dropped by mistake, an airplane loaded with a hydrogen bomb catching fire, missiles mistakenly released. As the United States shifted to a “permanent war economy,” John McCone was temperamentally and ideologically suited to help shape America’s new nuclear defense and the commercial nuclear power industry that accompanied it.

Bechtel opened its nuclear division, hired Ken Davis (the Atomic Energy Commission’s director of nuclear reactor development), and began designing commercial nuclear reactors to sell to America’s largest utilities. Bechtel’s nuclear power division hired so many employees of the Atomic Energy Commission that Senator Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut complained, “The nuclear industry was so incestuous that it was hard to tell where the public sector begins and the private one leaves off.” This permeable membrane between government and private industry became the rule, rather than the exception, in building energy infrastructure for the next half century.

Like Bechtel, Peabody Coal had a substantial political presence. It owned coal mines in 10 states, and the 20 senators and dozens of congressmen of those states were aware of the company’s interests. In addition, in other states where they didn’t have mines, Peabody supplied coal to some of the largest utilities in the country, and those utilities had political relations offices. As a result Peabody Coal had a significant government affairs department.

In 1980 the Bechtel Corporation was a major supporter and behind-the-scenes fund-raiser for the presidential candidacy of California governor Ronald Reagan. They were well rewarded for doing so. Caspar Weinberger, Bechtel’s legal counsel, left to become Reagan’s secretary of defense, and Ken Davis, head of Bechtel’s Nuclear Division, was appointed assistant secretary in the Department of Energy. By then George Shultz was chief executive officer of the Bechtel Corporation, the most important of Bechtel’s three operating companies, In 1982 George Shultz left Bechtel to become President Reagan’s secretary of state.

Many former Bechtel executives held lesser posts throughout the Reagan government, particularly in the Departments of Energy and Interior, particularly the Office of Surface Mining and Enforcement.

The narrow resource base of the West was a worry. The water and power infrastructure depended on cheap coal in distant locations. In the case of Arizona, the Central Arizona Project depended primarily on the massive coal beds that lay beneath the Hopi and Navajo reservations. The people who lived close to the coal would have to be moved. Coal strip mining and sheep herding are not compatible occupations. After the passage of the Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974, the physical partition of the Executive Order Reservation and the removal of the Navajo seemed unstoppable.

Navajos forced off the land

Vicki Blackgoat had told me that the mandatory sheep reduction was executed by means of government rangers and Hopi police showing up at dawn in livestock trucks. They would open corrals, herd the sheep into the trucks, and drive away, leaving the families devastated. Sheep were like money in the bank. The sheep reduction and harassment were a means to force them to move.

The Navajo did not want the coal on Black Mesa to be strip-mined, but thousands of them were forced off the land to provide coal to four new electricity generation plants that enabled Las Vegas to go from a small town of 5,000 to a vast sprawl of 647,000 and Phoenix to grow 48-fold.  Rather than build a railroad, the first coal slurry–pipeline delivery system in the world was used to send the strip-mined coal to distant power plants.

The Black Mesa coal-slurry pipeline was famous among water engineers for being the most appalling use of water in the water-scarce West.  The water dried up wells, those that remained poisoned Navajo sheep with sulfur, mercury, and heavy metals that had leached into the groundwater from the Black Mesa aquifer. It was created in the ice age and would never be replenished by rainfall again.

I spent the rest of the day touring the Hopi villages and visiting Hopi potters on the different mesas on a tour arranged by the Hopi Cultural Center. Without that experience, however, I would not have understood the complexity of the topography and the disparate history of the different Hopi villages. Water was the determining factor. Each Hopi village had been located near a spring. The towns might look as though they sat on rock pinnacles in the sky, but each village had its own water supply.

The traditional Navajo refused to move. Land was more than real estate; it was the essence of Navajo culture. Goldwater, who boasted that he had “spent more time with Arizona’s Indians than any other white man,” must have known that there was no word in Navajo for relocation. Their only word was disappearance.

Did Senator Goldwater want to find a peaceful means of settling the so-called land dispute, as he said, or did he mean to move thousands of Navajo off their lands? Who had given the coal company approval to pump massive amounts of water out of the ground for a coal-slurry pipeline? In the high desert, water was more valuable than coal. Their water came from an Ice Age aquifer, and after it was pumped out, annual rainfall would never replenish it. Blackgoat’s well was going dry. In some areas water holes for sheep had become so toxic from sulfates released during coal strip mining that sheep died after they drank. Lambs that were born in the spring were dead by fall because of the mercury and heavy metals that leached into the groundwater. What was going to happen to the water supply of Black Mesa?

These were questions the senator had never answered. No one had been able to ask him. He had counted on other senators deferring to him as the senator from Arizona, the man most knowledgeable about Indian affairs.  Phoenix, a city that was greatly benefiting from the coal mined on the Black Mesa lands because the coal was being used to run the fourteen pumping stations that rerouted a portion of the Colorado River into Phoenix.

When Goldwater made his trip to Black Mesa to answer questions about the mass removal of the Navajo, ten years of strip mining had been under way at two different sites, digging out 13 million tons of coal a year, making the Black Mesa mines the largest strip-mining operation in the United States at the time. One of the strip mines was supplying coal to the Navajo Generating Station, a 2,250-megawatt coal-fired power plant. More than half of the plant’s energy was supplying the energy to run pumping stations to lift the waters of the Colorado River up over three mountain ranges into Phoenix and Tucson. The other plant was a 1,580-megawatt plant in Laughlin, Nevada.

Shallow wells for drinking become contaminated, and water holes for livestock become toxic. People living in the vicinity of the mines had unusually high rates of bronchitis, asthma, and emphysema from the particulates in the air. Additional legislation had been introduced and passed in order to implement the removal of thousands of Navajo families from these same lands. Unfortunately, no plan had been put in place to figure out where thousands of Navajo people might go, or where they should live, or how they might earn a living.

Electric power generation & Growth of cities in the desert

The important thing to remember, however, was that the coal was about more than money. It was about growth—the power to pump water into Phoenix, air-conditioning to Los Angeles, and the electricity to light the giant casinos and cool thousands of new homes in Las Vegas as the population doubled and then tripled every year. Las Vegas became the fastest-growing metropolitan area in the United States.

Bechtel designed and built the coal-slurry pipeline with the help of a federal grant.

The new town of Laughlin—90 miles by road from Las Vegas, 60 miles by river—needed a post office because a giant construction project was already under way by 1966. Even before construction began, even before Don Laughlin bought his six acres, even before the post office was looking for a name, surveyors were measuring the site where a new 1,500-megawatt electricity generating plant was to be located; construction engineers were developing the staging area where equipment would be unloaded; roads were being upgraded to transport men and equipment to the site a hundred feet above the river. This coal-fired plant, soon to be called the Mohave Generating Station, was to be the destination for the first coal-slurry pipeline in the United States, a template for a coal delivery system that could revolutionize the market. Coal was the source of air-conditioning and electricity to power the mushrooming growth of the desert cities of the Southwest. The owners of the new generating station were the utilities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix. The operating utility was Southern California Edison. Like the rest of America in 1966, these cities got more than 60% of their electricity from coal, even though many people erroneously thought that coal had disappeared with the Industrial Revolution.

The same growth pattern was true in Phoenix, where Peoria and Chandler were booming. Real estate developer Del Webb, who operated in both cities, did not advertise his new retirement communities by saying, “Come Live in the Desert.” Instead, he said, “Come Live in the Sun.” The new westerners, who bought model homes in new developments of ten, twenty, and thirty thousand houses, wanted lawns and golf courses and green vegetation

Where were the resources to come from to make this growth possible? The Mohave plant was the first of what some people called “the new Hoover Dam,” four coal-fired plants and two nuclear that were to provide the water and electricity for the selling of the New West.

The unique aspect of this particular generating station was that it would be the first plant in the world to be supplied by slurried coal.

Railroads are the most expensive aspect of supplying a generating station. As I learned from the film I watched at the Black Mesa Pipeline office, the new plant in Laughlin would not require construction of a dedicated railroad with hundred-car trains delivering coal 24 hours a day. (A 1,500-megawatt coal plant burns a freight car of coal every ten minutes.)

The great novelty of the plant in Laughlin was the technology of turning hard coal into liquid slurry and delivering it through a pipeline, making coal potentially as fluid and transportable as oil. Although the pipeline was owned by Williams Technologies of Tulsa, Oklahoma, it had been designed and built by Bechtel with the help of a $3 billion research and development grant from the federal government, helped along by Peter Flanigan, an economics adviser in the Nixon White House. The film’s narrator explained that the cost of building a 300-mile railroad was prohibitive. But a pipeline was plausible even though it would be on Indian lands. “The final decision was theirs,” Morgan Greenwood, the president of Williams Technology, said portentously. “Indians too want the better things of life.

The narrator went on to explain that the slurry-pipeline water “would have no effect on the Indians’ water supply” because the slurry-line water came from 2,000-foot wells encased in steel. The Indians dug shallow wells. The pipeline company “paid the highest royalties the Indians ever received.” “Indian applicants would get jobs.” In fact, the jobs were not so plentiful because strip mining is machinery intensive. A rule of thumb is that 105 full-time miners in the field can strip-mine 2 million tons a year. (The Kayenta Mine on Black Mesa has a 430-man workforce extracting 7.8 million tons of coal a year.)

After the film I went outside to see the slurry pipeline in operation. A conveyor belt carried raw coal to the processing center, where it was crushed into egg-size pieces no larger than two inches. Then it was weighed. The coal royalty paid to the Navajo and Hopi was based on the weight of the coal. Operating on the same principle as the home garbage disposal, the coal was fed into a giant mixmaster (not its technical name), pulverized, mixed with water, and then washed through a pipe, in this case a 273-mile pipeline helped along by five pumping stations. The mix of water and coal had to be carefully calibrated so that the coal particles stayed suspended. If the water flow was too slow, the solids settled to the bottom of the pipe and caused the system to clog; if it went too fast, it caused abrasion to the pipe.

Once arriving in Laughlin, Nevada, the coal slurry was dewatered, dried out by means of a centrifuge, and the water sent to huge evaporation ponds.

The Mohave plant and slurry pipeline promised a new era in coal economics and cheap electricity. The federal grant in process in Washington was key to funding the research and development costs of the slurry pipeline and the plant it would run.  The plant’s construction required massive equipment and hundreds of workers—drillers, explosive experts, electricians, plumbers, concrete technicians, utility engineers—going to work every day in Laughlin

The Mohave was the first of four new coal-fired plants planned and built for the unpopulated interior West between 1967 and 1975. Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas needed the electricity infrastructure to power the Sunbelt Boom. The electricity lit up the elaborate neon signs of Las Vegas, powered air conditioners in Los Angeles, and pumped water into Phoenix. The generating stations were strung out along the Colorado River and into the unpopulated interior of the Colorado Plateau. And the coal for all them was to be strip-mined on the Navajo and Hopi reservations.

The two new units for the Four Corners generating station in Farmington, New Mexico, were the first to be built; the Mohave plant in Laughlin was the second; the third was the Navajo Generation Station in Page; and the Coronado Generating Station in St. Johns, Arizona, was the fourth.

A fifth was planned for southern Utah, called the Kaiparowitz project, but Utah citizens were able to defeat the plant and the slurry pipeline on the evidence of its long-term damaging effects on groundwater in a desert climate.

In the wake of the big casino-hotels came the hunter-gatherers of real estate capitalism—condo developers and retirement-community entrepreneurs. To distract from the stark conditions of desert living, they promoted water taxis, new restaurants, big-name entertainment, a river walk, golf courses, retirement communities, and, of course, Laughlin’s unique location at the edge of a mighty flowing river in the middle of the desert, a failure of Nevada’s real estate capitalism. A series of films on YouTube takes the viewer on a ride around deserted real estate developments in Laughlin and Las Vegas—houses built, grounds landscaped, no one there.

At the Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline office in winter, you will see cone-shaped piles of coal the height of a three-story building covered with a dusting of grayish snow, an overhead conveyor belt depositing coal chunks into a giant mixmaster, and a huge water tank where, somewhere out of view, pumps are sucking water out of the Navajo aquifer, the sole source of water for both the Hopi and the Navajo.

Where does the water come from to run the slurry pipeline? And how much does it take to transport five and a half million tons of coal a year?  I whopping 4,300 acre-feet a year, about a billion gallons drawn from the Navajo aquifer beneath the Hopi-Navajo lands on Black Mesa created in the ice age and not replenishing today.  The water-table level had dropped from 10 to 70 feet in those Navajo and Hopi communities that uses the aquifer, making their wells and springs unusable. The groundwater level is projected to drop as much as 175 feet by the year 2032.

During the public commentary section in the Black Mesa Environmental Impact Statement, from a hearing held in 1988, many people said the water levels were jeopardizing an entire culture.

The Black Mesa slurry pipeline eventually came to represent some of the most profligate and indefensible water use in the world. As groundwater levels lowered, rain clouds didn’t form and coalesce. The winters were shorter and the summers longer.

While the Black Mesa Coal Slurry Pipeline gained a reputation for being the most profligate use of water in the West, the Mohave Generating Station gained distinction as being the most polluting coal-fired plant in the United States. Built before the Clean Air Act without antipollution devices, on some days during its 35-year life, visitors at Hoover Dam and at Grand Canyon Park, hundreds of miles upstream, would get a soot-filled wind blowing in their faces. The polluting winds moved in a northeasterly direction, eventually obscuring views of the Grand Canyon with a scrim of white haze for more than 200 days a year.

In a desert climate there is not enough rainfall for seeds to germinate to reclaim the strip-mined land. Eight to ten inches of annual rain is not enough water to recharge the aquifer.

Today the Mohave plant no longer operates. It closed in 2006 after 34 years of operation. Las Vegas no longer gets any electricity from the plant, nor does Phoenix or Los Angeles. The operating utility owner, Southern California Edison, determined it was too costly to bring it up to current environmental standards.

The Mohave plant should be seen as the cautionary story for Peabody Energy’s current extravagant claims for “clean coal” technologies. Although Peabody says it has reclaimed thousands of acres of strip-mined land, this is not the scene from an airplane. The replanted acres are near roads, and they are replanted with oat grass, not an indigenous plant. The contours of the land have taken on unnatural forms. When seen from plateau overlooks, acres and acres of gray land stripped of topsoil and vegetation stretch to the horizon. Whole valleys and canyons have disappeared into the dragline buckets. Thousands of Anasazi archaeological ruins also disappeared into the slag piles.

Many people mistakenly think coal use has faded away or died out since the Industrial Revolution. In The Quest, Daniel Yergin’s exhaustive and influential book on energy sources, he points out that this is faulty thinking: “Since 2000, though not recognized, the biggest increase in global energy output has come from coal—double that from oil and triple that from natural gas.” In 2012 the US Geological Survey published a graph of America’s coal use with an upward arc that was almost a ninety-degree right angle. In 2013 British Petroleum (BP) published its annual Statistical Report of World Energy Use, showing that coal use not only equaled oil in volume, but had increased more than any other fuel.

America still gets more than 40% of its electricity from coal. In the arid cities of the West, electricity is doing more than running air conditioners and computers. It is also pumping water. Coal-fired energy is running the pumps that suck water from distant rivers and deliver it to the urban centers of the Southwest. Without electricity to pump water from water sources hundreds of miles away, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and metropolitan Los Angeles wouldn’t exist as the population centers they are today.

Hopi lawyer, John Boyden, a millionaire from Salt Lake City

Boyden went first to the Navajo Tribal Council in Window Rock because he had spent time on the Navajo reservation in the 1940s as an observer for the FBI and knew their legal system. But someone on the Navajo Tribal Council remembered Boyden’s earlier role as a US attorney in enforcing the disastrous and devastating livestock reduction of the 1930s ordered by John Collier in Utah’s San Juan River section of the Navajo reservation. Theoretically, the livestock reduction was a policy instituted to prevent overgrazing and to encourage land conservation. It had, however, a more immediate rationale: to prevent silt buildup behind the newly opened Hoover Dam. In its precipitous descent from the Colorado Rockies, the Colorado River carried so much sediment that the dam engineers were afraid the dam would silt up before they could build the already planned second dam upstream, at Glen Canyon.

During the depths of the Depression, in what seemed incomprehensible to the Navajo families, tens of thousands of Navajo sheep and goats were shot and burned, devastating the families who owned them. The hundreds of once prosperous, but now impoverished, Navajo families never recovered. The Navajo Tribal Council told Boyden, “No thanks.

Among the many things that John Boyden did not tell his Hopi clients about the Ute case was that no actual land was ever returned. The $32 million settlement granted to the Ute Indians (of both Utah and Colorado) was for 1.5 million acres of lands taken by signed treaty but never paid for. Reimbursement was based on the price of land at the time it was taken in the 1880s, not on present market value, and the government placed many strings on how the Indians’ money was disbursed—the Ute needed a business plan to explain how they were going to use the settlement money, while the lawyers got their fees immediately. Boyden did file a land claim for the Hopi and a few years later won a $5 million settlement for the tribe and another large fee for himself. Although he worked on a contingency basis, he was eventually well paid. (A Freedom of Information suit filed by the Native American Rights Fund revealed that Boyden received $2.7 million in total fees from the Hopi, equivalent to $16 million today.)

The Indian Claims Commission awards, however, had significant limitations about which Boyden had not advised his new clients. First, the Claims Commission law stipulated that no return of actual land was possible, a fact that the Hopi did not understand when they hired Boyden to file a “land claim” for them.* Second, the financial settlement was to be based on the value of the land when it was taken in the nineteenth century, not its market value in the middle of the twentieth century. Third, the law provided for attorneys’ expenses and additional fees that were “not to exceed ten percent” of the monetary award. Finally, and most important, in accepting the financial settlement, the Indian tribes relinquished forever any title to aboriginal land.

Where was the land? the Hopi council members asked. They thought they were going to get land, real land. Why else would people in their villages agree to hire a lawyer to file a suit? Boyden was obliged to explain that once the Hopi cashed the government’s check, they would relinquish all rights to any claim on aboriginal lands. So the Hopi refused to cash the check.

If the conflict had really been about establishing a boundary, it could have been settled. But because it was about mining, it forced other issues, such as water rights and access to the coal seam and the growing populations of Phoenix and Tucson. It turned out that John Boyden was representing the Hopi at the same time he was representing Peabody Coal and soon Kennecott Copper. In any other state but Utah, he would have been a candidate for disbarment.

I had gone to see the Navajo Generating Station outside of Page and then stopped to take a tour of the Glen Canyon Dam. Glen Canyon was the second-biggest dam on the Colorado River, after Hoover Dam. Designed to provide water and hydroelectricity for the Upper Basin states (Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico), the reservoir behind Glen Canyon Dam was the second-largest man-made lake in the world after Lake Mead.

Trading Posts

The trading post took on the functions of a post office because it was an outpost of colonial government. The US government needed to have a legal means to officially communicate with the Navajo residents. The United States had been an internal colonial power for more than a century before the US Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, setting up tribal constitutions, tribal voting, and tribal councils—leadership forms that were compatible with Washington but did not necessarily reflect the cultural patterns of Indian life.

Indian traders were largely white men who had political connections. Many were Mormons who saw the trading posts as a way of converting the Indians to Mormonism.  Unlike Indian agents, who were federal employees and prohibited from commerce with the tribes, the traders controlled all commercial goods sold on the reservations. From the 1850s on, a pattern of collusion developed among the Indian agents, traders, and politicians. Known as the Indian Ring, it involved local politicians who colluded with the traders and Indian agents to defraud the Indians of payments, supplies, livestock, sheep, goats, tools, land, mineral leases, or whatever Washington had promised through treaties and agreements. The government agents tipped off the traders as to when annuities were due to be paid to the Indian tribes; the traders provided credit in advance at inflated prices; the trader kept much of the money or stole many of the supplies and gave a cut to the agent and the politician. One historian characterized the arrangement as “a more perfect recipe for corruption could not be found.

Unlicensed traders set up trading posts at the edge of the reservation to sell illegal whiskey and guns. Over time the licensed trader’s role was enlarged to include postmaster, banker, and creditor, especially for trade goods that Indians pawned, such as rugs, jewelry, basketry, and pottery. Although some traders, such as Lorenzo Hubbell and John Wetherill, learned Indian languages and successfully promoted economic activities that benefited the Indians, the overall pattern was one of dishonesty or lethargy about Indian economic well-being. The Indians were a captive market.

Forced schooling of Hopi & Navajo Children

The ancient village of Oraibi was one of the first places targeted by the Office of Indian Affairs to implement the new policy and place Hopi children in school. Emory Sekaquaptewa Sr., for example, was five years old in 1906 when government officers raided the Hopi village of Oraibi before dawn, plucked up sleeping children out of their beds, tossed them in horse-drawn wagons, and took them to Keams Canyon. Once at the boarding school, they could not go home until their parents signed an agreement promising they would return their children for future instruction. The next year Helen, who was six, was snatched from her family.

The Navajo children were difficult to round up because they lived in such dispersed sheepherding camps.

More than 70 Hopi fathers from the families who had resisted “educating their children” were taken off to jail, leaving the remaining family members in confusion and despair. Some fathers went to jail for ninety days, others for years. Although the government policy was to keep the children for nine months and send them home for the summer, if the parents didn’t sign the form, the children didn’t get to go home. Helen and Emory Sr. didn’t get to see their parents or their village again for another five years.

For the next 12 years, home was a succession of boarding schools—first in Keams Canyon, then the Indian school in Phoenix—all regimented by military bugle and drill and Christian instruction. “We marched to the dining room three times a day to band music,” Helen wrote. “Corporal punishment was given as a matter of course [with] a harness strap.

The Indian children were expected to be part of the servant class and were taught skills they were expected to use in the Anglo world. The girls learned laundry and sewing; the boys learned carpentry and construction.  Helen Sekaquaptewa said she spent years learning how to organize in parade lines, march to military music, wash and iron vast piles of laundry, clean toilets, prepare meals, and scrub floors. Many students tried to run away. Others feigned acceptance, never losing their Indian ways of thinking and being. But for others the uniforms and the strict discipline came to be their way of life. By the time Emory Sr. got to high school in Phoenix, the school authorities considered him so trustworthy that they sent him after the Indian runaways. It was not taken lightly, these Indians who resisted becoming civilized. “Boys were put in the school jail. . . . Repeaters had their heads shaved and had to wear a dress to school.” Girls were given punishments like “cutting the grass with scissors while wearing a card that said, ‘I ran away.’ The better they adapted to boarding school life, the worse they fit in when they went back to the reservation.

The rift between the Hopi parents and their boarding school children was wide. Helen and Emory were good examples. They had been raised on military pedagogy: drill, discipline, the Bible.

The fake media war between the Hopi & the Navajo

It is a maxim of public relations that to influence opinion, events need to be organized into a story, preferably a story line that the public has heard before. A theme of many Hollywood western movies was the range war, a basic conflict between homesteaders who wanted to farm and ranchers who wanted open range to graze livestock.

Well coached by John Boyden and the public relations firm of Evans and Associates, Abbott Sekaquaptewa appeared before a congressional hearing in 1973 and raised the issue of an oncoming range war and open warfare between the Navajo aggressors and the peaceful Hopi: The Navajo tribe has systematically by use of force, threat, coercion, and intimidation excluded the Hopi people from the lands secured to them by the federal court in Healing v. Jones. We cannot understand how this state of affairs can be condoned by the federal government in the face of a court order to the contrary. Violence and destruction are as common today as they have been historically in this conflict. It is not beyond imagination that open warfare will once again become the order of the day.

For two years national newspapers were running photos of burned corrals, shot-up stock tanks, and roadside signs riddled with bullet holes. Sunday magazine features focused on the smoldering “range war” between the two tribes, calling them the Arabs and the Israelis of the American Southwest. Abbott Sekaquaptewa appeared on 60 minutes: “Marauding Navajo tribesmen [have] always been a time of trial and tribulation for my people. Particularly during my own lifetime, the relentless Navajo dominance and forcible occupation of Hopi land has become a creature of the night, a living nightmare.” Most of Abbott Sekaquaptewa’s testimony had been written by Evans & Associates.

People on the reservation said that it was white men from out of town who were shooting up the signs. The only national newspaper to run an alternative version of events was the Washington Post. “The locus of Hopi policy seems to be in Salt Lake City,” wrote Mark Panitch, “where the Hopi’s energetic and effective lawyer, John Boyden, and the public relations counsel are headquartered. Much of the Hopi success can be attributed to their Mormon allies.” The Mormons had excellent communications channels so that the Hopi side of the story dominated in the national press

The Hopi, through their links with the media, had the best story line. The rule of public relations is that once a narrative has been established in the national media, it is almost impossible to turn it around. The story was of implacable hatred between the two tribes in which the peaceful Hopi were victimized by the aggressive Navajo.  The range war and the “centuries-old Hopi-Navajo struggle” went unquestioned. Had anyone taken the time to look at Navajo history, they might have found a different and equally fascinating story.

The problem with the construct of the “centuries-old Navajo-Hopi land dispute” was that it was not centuries old. The actual history of the Navajo settlement and reservation negotiations would have provided a different historical context. Except for a one-paragraph summary, the story of the Navajo reservation was not made part of the Hopi-Navajo court case in Healing v. Jones.

John Boyden and Stewart Udall and Peabody Coal/Kennecott Copper needed leasing rights, coal, and access to the aquifer. It might have been theft, but it was all done legally. By passing new laws, Black Mesa became a crucial resource colony for the expansion of the New West. Water and energy were key to the massive population shift of the 1970s and ’80s that, in the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, transferred increasing political power from the East to the western states. Even today Nevada has a major mining industry and is the fourth-largest producer of gold in the world.

The Navajo Story

The Navajo also had a story to tell, but they couldn’t get to the microphone. Before the 1850s the Navajo were prosperous and wealthy and living in northern New Mexico. Their struggles were mainly with the Spanish who kidnapped Navajo for slaves. Then after the U.S. won the war with Mexico in 1848, their new enemies were the Anglo-Europeans who believed that Navajo lands were filled with gold. Anglo miners started to come into their lands, looking for gold and silver.

Governor Connelly told the territorial legislature, “The Navajo occupy the finest grazing districts within our limits [and] infest a mining region extending two hundred miles. [We are] excluded from its occupation and the treasures of mineral wealth that are known to exist.” But it took the Civil War to provide the occasion to forcibly clear the land of the troublesome Navajo, so that mineral prospecting could go forward.

In 1862 a Texas general named Henry Hopkins Sibley crossed the Rio Grande with a regiment of Texas cowboys and claimed Santa Fe and the New Mexico territory for the Confederate South. While the US Army troops were diverted in fighting Sibley, the Navajo seized the moment to retaliate against the invading miners. They raided the mining settlements with ferocity, killing miners and carrying off horses, equipment, and supplies. The mine owners screamed for protection. The government in Washington heard them. On September 16, 1862, General James Carleton arrived and said that “There is evidence that a country as rich if not richer in mineral wealth than California, extends from the Rio Grande, northwestwardly all the way across to Washoe [Nevada].” Carleton at first organized companies of “irregular soldiers,” many of them slave raiders, to fight the Navajo. Then he enlisted Kit Carson, the famed frontiersman, explorer, and Indian fighter to be the field commander of the regular Navajo Campaign. Carleton’s war policy toward the Navajo was that of total war—killing the men, taking women and children prisoners, destroying their food base, removing them from their lands, and colonizing them as farmers in eastern New Mexico at Bosque Redondo, almost at the Texas border, where many of them died.

Thousands of sheep, the basis of the Navajo economy, were killed. Carson knew the Navajo could find more food sources, but not if he kept them continually on the move. The Navajo kept moving west, crossing into Arizona Territory, and many fled into the depths of Canyon de Chelly, a mystical and beautiful canyon until then unexplored by white men and protected by quicksand at the canyon entrance. Carson set up a blockade at the canyon entrance and waited out the winter. In the spring of 1864 Carson sent a detachment of men into the canyon and rounded up 1500 Navajo, by then half starved, frozen, and at the end of endurance. Thus began the infamous Long Walk to Fort Sumner, three hundred miles away. During the march through spring blizzards, the soldiers shot anyone moving too slowly, raped women and girls, and physically mutilated their prisoners. Hundreds died, freezing to death.

General Carleton considered it a great victory. Kit Carson became an American hero, although details of the Navajo Campaign later challenged that reputation. The march, however, was merely a preview of what was awaiting the Navajo at Fort Sumner. There, other Navajo who had either turned themselves in or been picked up in other raids were brought together in a prison camp inadequate for seven thousand Navajo. The camp, which had no economy or continuity with preexisting settlement, became known by its Spanish place-name, Bosque Redondo, for the cottonwoods that marked the area.

Soon the Navajo were starving again, and many of them were stricken with malaria or dysentery. The soldiers at Fort Sumner infected many of the Navajo women with syphilis and gonorrhea, which in turn was transmitted among the Navajo men. Comanche Indians from Texas crossed the Rio Grande and raided the camp almost at will. The prisoners were on the verge of starvation most of the time and suffered from heat, malnutrition, and disease. Everyone who saw the camp said it was brutal and inhumane in the extreme. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts—one of the great opponents of slavery during the antebellum period—made a speech on the floor of the Senate, denouncing both the governor of New Mexico and General James Carleton for practicing “Indian slavery.

Throughout the years of the Civil War, the US government was spending more than $1 million every 18 months on the Navajo imprisonment ($50 million in current dollars). When pressed in 1868, General Carleton said it was cheaper to imprison the Navajo than to fight them. He blamed the excessive expense on the corruption of the Indian agency that administered the camp. Indian agency superintendent Steck pressured Carleton to release the prisoners based on extreme hardship, the inability of the settlement to become self-sustaining, and its extraordinary expense. Carleton insisted that Steck should clean up the corruption in his own service.

At first Sherman tried to convince the Navajo to move to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Their leaders refused. Then he finally agreed to negotiate a strip of reservation land overlapping the Arizona and New Mexico border, extending to Canyon de Chelly. Even at the time it was recognized as being far too small and arid to support seven thousand Navajo. In the five years of the Navajo imprisonment, white settlers had moved into their old lands. Their previous economy and agriculture had been completely destroyed. On their old lands they found charred hogans, fields overgrown with brush, and corrals that had to be rebuilt. All that was left of the beautiful peach orchards of Canyon de Chelly were blackened stumps.

According to the Bureau of Ethnography’s Indian Land Sessions in the United States, the treaty was never formally signed, but the Navajo agreed never to wage war against the United States in exchange for being released to their old lands. In turn, the government agreed to supply the Navajo with food and livestock to get them through the first few winters. But somewhere between the Indian Bureau and Fort Wingate, the shipments of supplies disappeared without a trace.

Few of General Sherman’s promises were kept. The Navajo moved far beyond the paper boundaries marked out in the treaty map. The Navajo pushed on. They went north beyond Shiprock, northwest to Monument Valley and Navajo Mountain, and to the valley of the San Juan River. They went beyond the Hopi villages into the interior of Black Mesa. The government never did meet their terms of the treaty to provide them with the promised sheep and cattle to rebuild their economy.

Hoover Dam

The dam project on the Colorado River had been in the works for more than 15 years, budgeted at $50 million, and was the largest civil engineering project in US history. It would also be the first dam on any major river in the world. What made the Hoover Dam project different from any other construction project that any of the partners had ever worked on was that the entire country was in the depths of the Great Depression. The economy was stagnant, and the cost of materials had been cut in half. Labor was limitless. With a national unemployment rate of 25%, one out of every four workers was unemployed.

Families had lost homes, jobs, and their savings, and they needed everything—housing, health care, schools, jobs. By 1931, the year construction started, more than ten thousand unemployed workers from across the country converged on Las Vegas to fight for fifteen hundred jobs. Instead of the young miners they expected to hire, the Six Companies employment office in Las Vegas faced long lines of workers of every age and every background—some in three-piece suits—from all over the country. Many arrived with families and children and were living in tents or cars if they had them. During that first summer, as temperatures soared to more than 120-130 degrees F on the floor of Black Canyon and never went below 100 even at night, many did die.

Organized crime figures already ran illegal gambling in Reno and Carson City, but advocates for legal gambling argued that it would provide an important source of recreation for the Hoover dam workers as well as revenue for the state.

In August 1931 some 1400 workers, almost two-thirds of the workforce at that point, threatened to strike. The workers also demanded payment in real money, not company scrip. Scrip, company paper usable only at Six Companies stores, was a common practice, but illegal on federal contracts. The workers wanted helmets instead of baseball caps that that been coated with hardened tar, because a pebble that fell from the top of the canyon to a worker at the bottom gained enough velocity to kill or cripple him. Frank Crowe, as project superintendent, fired all fourteen hundred men in the morning and began hiring a new workforce the same afternoon. The labor pool was bottomless.

In San Francisco W. H. Wattis called a press conference from his room at St. Francis Hospital, where he was still being treated for cancer, and attributed the strike to the work of communists and the hated Wobblies (International Workers of the World). Its actual structure was like a truncated pyramid, 660 feet thick at the base, tapering to 45 feet thick at the top.

Hoover Dam did transform the West, but its main beneficiary was California, which. California got most the water, the electricity, the canals and aqueducts. The dam, its huge reservoir—named Lake Mead after Elmore Mead, the first head of the Bureau of Reclamation—and the accompanying hydroelectric plant provided the western states, but mainly California, with the water and electricity to break free of the East and to develop their own industries. Within 30 years California had grown to be the fifth-largest economy in the world and the most populous state in the nation. That could not have happened without the water and power provided by Hoover Dam.

States such as Arizona and Nevada, with tiny populations, saw that they would need more water and more electricity in order to grow.  The dam on the Colorado River changed Las Vegas by giving it reliable electricity from the hydroelectric plant and 300,000 acre-feet of water from Lake Mead. At the time Las Vegas didn’t need the water because it still had its own aquifer, but by 1955 it had lowered the groundwater level by 200 feet and started pumping its Colorado River water allocation into the city.

Although the dam was accepted by the government in 1935, post construction repairs continued until 1947, with the crews staying on in Boulder City and Las Vegas. The bedrock in which the dam was anchored was found to be riddled with fissures and faults through which water was seeping. For the next nine years a repair project went forward from inside the dam in which new rows of boreholes were drilled into the bedrock, one of them 480 feet deep. The project required $2 million and twelve thousand tons of cement. Although seepage began pouring into the dam’s galleries and grouting went on for years, this was not public knowledge.

Talk of drought and water shortages is not encouraged. Criticism of water policy issues is limited to reader comments at the end of articles in the Las Vegas Review-Journal and on local cable channels. The theory is that anything that touches on climate change or water limitations will put off the tourist industry. “It was amazing to me when I first got into this job,” said Pat Mulroy, the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, “how sensitive the tourist market is to water stories in Southern Nevada.” “Water stories” refer to the visibly distressed Lake Mead, the shrinking Colorado River, lack of conservation, the location of a wastewater treatment plant only six miles above the water intake pipe, and the legally binding agreements that relate to the state’s share of the Colorado River’s flow.

Although the water authority has been vigilant in promoting a conservation program in which they pay residents to tear up their lawns and replace them with desert plantings, there are still 39 million visitors a year who are taking showers and flushing toilets. No officials are suggesting that anyone tear up the grass on the more than 50 golf courses in Las Vegas. Las Vegas has the highest per capita use of water in the country.  The reality is that Las Vegas’s unallocated groundwater was mostly pumped out by the 1960s. Today, 90% of Las Vegas water comes from the 300,000 acre-feet allocated from Lake Mead and the ever-diminishing waters of the Colorado River.

Past & future water grabs

Las Vegas water planners have already looked to alternative sources and have spent more than a decade formulating new water schemes and buying up water rights in two valleys 200 miles to the north. The plan, which some have dubbed the Grand Scheme, involves running a pipeline at least 200 miles from northern Nevada to Las Vegas.

Although Nevada is a small-government, no-tax, individual-responsibility state, the federal government owns 80% of Nevada’s roughly 70 million acres. The reason was that the state government did not want responsibility for lands that were not water supplied. The state government wanted areas adjacent to rivers and springs and left management of its vast desert and mountain ranges to the Bureau of Land Management.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority, under the direction of Pat Mulroy, began applying for water rights to 90,000 acre-feet of water in Spring Valley and 50,000 acre-feet in Snake Valley. At that point the ranchers and farmers of the area cried “Owens Valley!” They claimed that Wheeler’s snowmelt sustains pressure in the water table for hundreds of miles around. Pulling that amount of water out of the ground, they said, would suck the springs and streams dry, kill the vegetation, and turn the valley floor to dust. Then began a long series of hearings.

An Advisory Committee was charged with working out the mix of Las Vegas’s water needs with those of the ranchers of White Pine and Lincoln Counties. But the scales seemed to tip in favor of Las Vegas. One local member of the Advisory Committee, Gary Perea, reported, “The thing I kept hearing was that MGM Mirage employs more people than live in White Pine County.

White Pine rancher Dean Baker, who had rights to 40,000 acre-feet of water in Snake Valley, decided he didn’t want to share it with Las Vegas casinos. (Forty thousand acre-feet is roughly a seventh of Las Vegas’s entire allocation from the Colorado River.) Meanwhile, Pat Mulroy’s Southern Nevada Water Authority started buying up ranches in the adjacent Spring Valley, spending $22 million for one ranch and eventually $78 million for a dozen more. Once one ranch sold, other ranchers in the valley began to sell, figuring that once the city started pumping water out and the water table fell, their land would be worthless. After buying the ranches, the Las Vegas Water Authority was in the business of alfalfa farming in Spring Valley. Dean Baker, the rancher in Snake Valley, decided to hold out.

Then Utah entered the picture when Utah senators introduced similar land bills and wanted to be able to use the proceeds for construction of a new pipeline from the Colorado River to St. George. (Utah does not use its full allocation of Colorado River water.) St. George, a Mormon town just over the Nevada border, is called the Mormon Dixie because of its mild climate.

Two days after Christmas, on December 27, 2012, the Bureau of Land Management authorized a right-of-way for the Southern Nevada Water Authority to build the 263-mile pipeline that would run from Lincoln and White Pine Counties to Las Vegas. It allows for an 84-inch pipeline (7 feet in diameter), 272 miles of power lines, plus several pumping stations, electricity infrastructure, and a buried water-storage reservoir—all granted “in perpetuity.

Although Pat Mulroy assured a Senate committee there would be no Owens Valley syndrome in Nevada, this is a guarantee she cannot make. The future is out of her control. The city will grow, and there will be a new head of the water authority. Like Los Angeles and the Owens Valley, Las Vegas will need more and more water.

The water situation in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Los Angeles is two-edged. No one wants to be alarmist because it slows growth and keeps the tourists and their dollars away. On the other hand, there is cause for alarm, with 30 million people are dependent on the waters of the Colorado River. And if the Colorado River keeps shrinking, there will soon be need for federal money, a lot of federal money.

The real underlying question is how to finance the Great Basin Pumping Scheme—a network of wells, pumps, and pipelines that will run for 250 miles or more from northern Nevada’s mountain valleys into Las Vegas. How does a low-tax, no-tax state function when faced with a project that requires significant taxpayer-generated revenue? Who will pay?

One of the benefits of hiring a company like Bechtel is that not only does it have experience in building pipeline projects all over the globe, but it also has an unparalleled political and government relations department that knows how to work congressional committees and federal agencies. At the same time, other states might raise objections because Nevada does have two large industries—mining and gambling—that could pay significantly more in taxes.

The mining industry has a tax rate that has been unchanged since 1863 and incorporated into the Nevada state constitution. Mining has a tax rate of 5% (of net). The mining industry likes to present mining as a thing of the past, all scavenger mines and ghost towns (a lot of photo exhibits of mining ghost towns), but mining is still a thriving industry. Twenty-five percent of the world’s gold supply, comes out of Nevada mines.

The gambling industry in Nevada has the lowest tax rate in the country, a maximum of 6.75 percent. In the rest of the country, the average gambling tax rate is 16%. According to the American Gaming Association, in Ohio it’s 33%, Illinois from 15 to 50%, and Massachusetts 25%.

According to the American Gaming Association, in Ohio the rate is 33 percent, in Illinois it runs from 15 to 50 percent, and in Massachusetts it will be 25 percent.  During the recent economic downturn and flat gaming revenues, the Nevada governor (the same one sued for the parking-garage assault) called for a 14% reduction in the state education budget. From kindergarten to university, teachers were laid off, budgets slashed, and state workers furloughed. No mention of adjusting the tax rates or auditing the net proceeds from mining companies.

Although Las Vegas is well known for having the highest suicide rates in the country, in 2013 its mental health policies became the subject of national headlines when San Francisco authorities noticed a sharp increase in its homeless population. Through what was called “Greyhound therapy,” it seemed that Las Vegas mental health patients were being “treated” by putting them on a Greyhound bus with a bag lunch, a day’s supply of medication and a one-way ticket to San Francisco, where they joined the ranks of that city’s homeless. San Francisco estimated it received at least 1500 people from Las Vegas and is now suing the state of Nevada.

Although Roman Polanski’s classic movie Chinatown was based on true events that took place in 1913, the movie placed them in the 1930s—better clothes, better cars—and hit a few of the high points of the collusion between city officials and private landowners, but left out much of the political stealth involved, including federal involvement that reached to Teddy Roosevelt in the White House in 1908. The title Chinatown referred to layers of deception that were so convoluted it was impossible to trace an accurate story line.

From 1908 to 1913, during the five years that Los Angeles was building the 233-mile aqueduct from Owens Valley, Fred Eaton, the mayor of the city, along with Harrison Otis, LA Times publisher Harry Chandler, and a syndicate of friends were buying up lands in the San Fernando Valley in anticipation of future irrigation water from the Owens Valley. When the aqueduct opened in 1913, the first use of Owens Valley water was not for Los Angeles citizens, but for irrigating the new farms of San Fernando Valley and the fortunes of millionaires. Within ten years, by 1924, the Owens Valley Lake had been pumped out.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), began buying up groundwater rights and valley farms in order to drain the Owens River. By 1928 Los Angeles owned 90% of the water rights in the valley. The lake disappeared, the river disappeared, vegetation disappeared, and finally Owens Valley had huge alkali flats at the north end where the lake used to be. The entire valley ecosystem had been devastated and now produces a poisonous dust named “particulate pollution” that is a toxic mix of fine sand, arsenic, and assorted metals 25 times federal health standards. On days with high winds, local emergency rooms filled up with asthmatic children. Winds carried the Owens Valley dust for hundreds of miles, clouding national parks and marring the one hundredth anniversary celebration of the Los Angeles Aqueduct on November 5, 2013. Los Angeles is an arid city at the edge of the Mohave Desert and is still looking for more water sources.

On average the Mohave Desert in southern Nevada gets four inches of rain a year. It is a desert often compared with the Sonoran and named “the hottest desert in North America.” Consequently, a lot of evaporation takes place from the reservoir’s surface.

Overton was once the site of a thirteenth-century Anasazi settlement (now underwater), with hundreds of villages and cliff-side pueblos tucked into the canyon walls. As the river backed up to create Lake Mead in the 1930s, all the archaeological ruins were flooded, but some of the artifacts and petroglyphs were saved and preserved in the museum.

The north branch of Lake Mead, called the Overton Arm, used to extend into the channels of the Muddy and the Virgin Rivers. Had I thought to check the national park website, I would have learned that Overton Marina had been moved three years earlier and relocated 15 miles south to Echo Bay. This far north there was neither a marina nor Lake Mead. The Overton Arm had silted up. Thirty years earlier, in 1981, the US Geological Survey published an infrared satellite map of southern Nevada, and even then the Overton Arm was already silting up in its northern reaches.

California did not have one river that contributed to the flow of the Colorado River. What it did have was more than half the population of the West and the political clout that went with it.  The reservoir behind the dam provided water for millions of people in Greater Los Angeles and irrigated more than 1 million acres in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. California was getting much more than its allocated 4.5 million acre-feet of water because Arizona couldn’t tap its allocation because it didn’t have the infrastructure. Las Vegas didn’t get to use its allocation until the 1960s when it built a pipeline from Lake Mead, so California was probably using Nevada’s water as well.

As a practical matter California was going to get as much water as it wanted because the aqueducts and canals and pumping stations to deliver the water to the Upper Basin states had not yet been built. Until there was a second dam farther upriver, the Upper Basin states had no stored water to tap.

At 895 feet above sea level, at which point Lake Mead is declared a dead pool in which evaporation exceeds inflow. Downriver water delivery to California stops. Electricity generation has already stopped.

As the Park Service bulletin states, drought has increased the amount of evaporation and decreased the amount of snowfall in the Rockies so that the overall flow of the Colorado is considerably less than the numbers Herbert Hoover and the states put into place in 1922.  The other problem at Lake Mead is the buildup of silt flats at the ends of the reservoirs.

The word Colorado means “colorful” in Spanish. The river used to be known as the red river, or “Old Red,” because it carried enormous amounts of silt drawn from those red-rock layers that make up the wonderful canyons and mountains it drains. Reclamation engineers were worried about silt from the minute Hoover Dam opened in 1936. Their worry was the reason for the tens of thousands of Navajo sheep and cattle slaughtered in the 1930s supposedly to prevent the silt runoff from overgrazed areas from flowing into the river. It was in fact a tiny part of the problem. The real solution was the construction of Glen Canyon Dam at Page in 1963.That second dam caught much of the silt that used to build up behind Hoover Dam. (Lake Powell is at 48% of capacity.) Even so, the silt flats are still growing in Lake Mead.

In the 1960s John McPhee arranged a famous rafting trip down the Colorado River for Floyd Dominy, the legendary head of the Bureau of Reclamation, and David Brower, then head of the Sierra Club. The question of the moment was Brower’s opposition to Dominy’s proposed building of a third dam on the Colorado River at Marble Gorge. This proposed dam was going to provide the hydroelectricity to power the fourteen pumping stations of the Central Arizona Project and finally provide Arizona with its share of Colorado River water. During the trip McPhee recorded the two men’s exchange over the issue of silt. “They said Hoover Dam was going to silt up Lake Mead in 30 years,” Dominy said. “For thirty years, Lake Mead caught all the God-damned silt in the Colorado River, and Hoover has not been impaired.” Brower replied that no, but when Lake Mead is low there are 40 miles of silt flats at its upper end, and they’re getting bigger.

David Brower and the Sierra Club won that argument with Dominy, and the Marble Gorge dam was never built. Unfortunately, the Sierra Club’s victory would prove disastrous for the Hopi and Navajo of Black Mesa because the Bureau of Reclamation would substitute coal-fired electricity for hydroelectricity.

The Central Arizona Project is the world’s most expensive water system

Apart from the $8 billion required to build it, it also requires 750 megawatts of electricity to run the pumping stations that move the water through tunnels and siphons, over mountains and across canyons. Just as the Mohave plant was famous for its slurry-pipeline delivery system, the Central Arizona Project was famous for having the highest pump lift of any water in the world. The project includes 14 pumping stations, three tunnels, ten siphons (pipes), and sections of open-air aqueducts that run for 337 miles across terrain of high mountains, deep canyons, and desert. The water goes to irrigation for agriculture, to municipal water for the city of Phoenix, and to provide 1 million gallons of water a day for each of Phoenix’s 247 golf courses.

It is the only project in the world that lifts water 2900 feet. The pump lift from the Havasu reservoir to Phoenix is 1200 feet; the pump lift from Phoenix to Tucson is 1600 feet. The only other major source of water for Las Vegas is hundreds of miles to the north in the rural counties of Lincoln and White Pine. In the 1990s the project of taking groundwater from rural Nevada and piping it to Las Vegas from the north was always described as a last resort. Today the project is under way.

Native Americans Wake Up

The Alcatraz leaders’ demands for government accountability marked a sea change in Indians’ attitudes about their own identity, regardless of tribal affiliation, and the nature of the US government. Alcatraz sparked a new Pan-Indian movement of Native identity, tradition, and spirituality. By the time the Alcatraz occupation ended in June 1971, a new assertive Indian movement had been born, one that was not afraid to take on Washington.

In another Alcatraz-related event, the Taos Pueblo of New Mexico pressed for the return of the sacred Blue Lake. The legislation had been pending since the 1920s, when the corrupt interior secretary Albert Fall—of Teapot Dome notoriety—owned ranch lands adjacent to the lake and drained the water from the lake for his own use. With the help of John Ehrlichman in the White House, Congress finally passed legislation returning the lake to the Taos Pueblo.

By 1973 Peter MacDonald was Navajo tribal chairman and was thinking in Pan-Indian terms. His point of view was that with the amount of oil, coal, uranium, and natural gas being mined on the Navajo reservation, the Navajo people should have the highest per capita income of any reservation in the country. Instead, the leases never seemed to work to the Indians’ advantage or in their real interests. This was true of almost all the “energy tribes.

Lord Hanson, who owned quite a bit of Peabody Coal stock, confidently opened the floor for questions. A small delegation of Hopi and Navajo Indians was clustered behind one microphone, their brightly colored shirts and silver jewelry a splash of vivid color in the sea of beige and gray.

The earlier documentary film about Hanson’s business investments had described the American Indians as Hanson’s “friends and business partners in Arizona” where Peabody Coal operated some of the largest strip mines in the world.

Each member of the delegation stepped forward to explain his or her experience of living with Peabody Coal in the high desert of northern Arizona. In their unmistakably sincere voices and slow cadences, they described the realities behind the stockholders’ quarterly dividends: the toxic water that resulted from blasting the coal beds, polluted water holes that killed their sheep, coal dust in the air causing skyrocketing asthma and bronchitis rates, land stripped of all vegetation that could never be reseeded and reclaimed in the high-desert climate because of inadequate rainfall, mountainous slag heaps of gray earth that once had been valleys of piñon and juniper, thousands of ancient archaeological Anasazi sites destroyed in the dragline buckets, Hopi springs and Navajo wells going dry because of billions of gallons of water pumped out of an Ice Age aquifer to run a coal-slurry pipeline, increasing desertification, and, finally, the ongoing removal of thousands of Indian families, mostly Navajo, who lived too close to the coal.  Only a few people in the lay public understood that second only to Arctic ice melt, the greatest weather changes were being tracked in the American Southwest.

As soon as Navajo Roberta Blackgoat, in her late seventies finished, a dozen security men swarmed around the delegation and forcibly escorted them out of the room. Some in the audience cheered; others booed.

In the winter of 1999, when the relocation of all the Navajo was supposed to be final, activists from the Green Party were demonstrating in front of American embassies in cities across Europe, objecting to the mass relocation of what by then amounted to fifteen thousand Navajo people. In February 2000 the European Parliament passed a resolution citing the United States for “Human Right Violations in Regard to Native Americans in the U.S.-Diné.” That resolution, sent to the American secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, also requested a congressional investigation into the relationship between the strip mining and the Navajo removal. It also called for an investigation of environmental effects: the air and water hazards from coal strip mining, the draining of the aquifer to run the coal-slurry pipeline, the destruction of thousands of archaeological sites, and—still unmentioned in the American press—the nuclear contamination of the New Lands to which the government was sending many of the relocatees. The secretary of state did not respond.

History of Coal

Although the year 1530 is best known for Henry the Eighth’s successful effort to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon, marry Anne Boleyn, throw off the Catholic Church of Rome, and establish the Anglican Church of England of which he was the head, it was also a year when there were 6.5 billion fewer people on the planet than there are today. And it was the year that England began using coal in a more systematic way as heating and cooking fuel. At the time, England had a total population of 3 million and was cold, rainy, and poor.

The pope in Rome owned more than a third of England’s real estate and derived an income three times that of the Crown. One of the church’s income-producing properties was a series of small-scale coal mines near Newcastle, in northern England, at the mouth of the River Tyne. After Henry appropriated most of the Catholic Church’s property for the Church of England, his administrators, looking for new sources of revenue, rewrote the terms of the leases to the advantage of the Newcastle merchants so that the more coal they produced, the higher their “royalty fees.” More money motivated the coal merchants to innovate. Soon coal was being loaded onto barges, floated down the River Tyne to the port, where it was loaded onto coal transport boats, colliers, and shipped to London to be delivered to the surrounding manor estates of the nobility. The nobility had fireplaces, so the coal smoke and the sulfurous gases dispersed up the chimney. Coal was a reliable heating source for their drafty manor houses. But common people, who lived in thatched-roof houses with an open fire pit and no chimney, had no protection from the smoke or the unpleasant smell from the sulfur. Common people disliked coal and refused to use it.

Other external forces, however, soon changed their minds. First was the increasing scarcity and expense of firewood. England’s great forests were being cut down at an alarming rate. Firewood for heating, cooking, building, and charcoal for smelting became scarce and expensive. (The designation of “the king’s wood” was an effort to save some of the great trees of the old forests.) The second was a change in climate.

By the time Henry died and his daughter Elizabeth I took the throne in 1558, Europe had entered into a little Ice Age that would last until the 1700s. The Thames froze, as did canals in the Netherlands. Caused by an increase in the Atlantic ice pack and a change in ocean currents, the drop in temperature created a great demand for heating fuel. Ordinary people began to install stoves or chimneys in their homes and got used to burning coal. As the amount of coal burning increased, the air quality in London began to deteriorate. The air over London often had a yellow tinge from sulfur, and its famous fog was formed by coal particulates suspended in moist air. The fog was so dense that people walked into the Thames and horse-drawn carriages ran over pedestrians. At the same time, while the demand for coal was increasing, the ability to supply coal was diminishing.

As the surface coal was used up, the miners had to tunnel deeper to follow the coal seam. Once they were tunneling below the water table, they were in constant danger of drowning from flooded tunnels. At first they used buckets to remove the water, but the volume of water in the deeper tunnels was too great for a manual bucket brigade. Collapsing tunnels became the greatest single hazard. The coal merchants adapted a waterwheel used for milling. The horse-drawn waterwheel was used to sluice water out of the treacherous tunnels. The cold temperatures meant that the demand for coal kept increasing. The life span for miners was brief; children were used inside the tunnels to manually shut doors if there were water leaks.

Newcomen’s engine did the work of 50 horses, could run for 24 hours at a time, and could pump from much deeper tunnels. By the 1760s Newcomen’s steam engines were pumping water out of coal mines all over England and Scotland.

Mormons and their settlements all over the West

When former Mormon believers left the church, they often sued in state courts to recover the titles to properties that they had signed over to the Mormon leadership. Called the United Order, the Mormons’ system of communal ownership meant private property became church property. During the relatively short life of the early Mormon Church—founded and led by Joseph Smith from 1830 to 1844—the new converts pledged their wealth to the church.

If they died, the church, not their children, inherited. When someone wanted to leave the church—and they did for many reasons—or if their children tried to retrieve their inheritance, the only recourse was to sue through the state legal system. In the process of making their case to state attorneys, the apostate Mormons revealed Joseph Smith’s proclivity for marrying multiple young, attractive female converts (many of them with money), the widespread practice of plural marriage among the leadership, illegal land speculation, and the practice of doing business only with “their own kind.

In what is today Illinois, some fifteen miles from East St. Louis, the enormous pyramid mounds of Cahokia rose on the banks of the Mississippi River. Archaeologists have since determined that a city existed there from AD 750 to 1250 and held a population estimated at between fifteen and forty thousand people, far larger than Paris or London at the time. The original massed pyramid structures of Cahokia are the largest pyramids outside of Egypt. The pyramids were arranged in mathematical measurements having to do with the seasons and planting times. (The pyramidal shapes gave rise to the belief that ancient Egyptians had lived in North America.) Today most of those ancient ruins have been bulldozed into shopping malls or housing developments, but a few remain to give testimony to a mysterious population with considerable engineering skill and artistic finesse.

The majority of settlers in the 1800s were not interested in archaeology; they were interested in land. The impulse for land was a sacred hunger. The settlers knew that it was important that the mounds and artistic objects not be related to the Indians of their day because they needed to take their lands. It was equally important that the Indians be perceived as wild, uncivilized savages of the forest, and in this conceit the Book of Mormon obliged them.

The Book of Mormon holds that an original tribe from Israel came to North America sometime around 600 BC and divided into two factions—the Lamanites and the Nephites. Much of the description of the Lamanites, as predecessors of the Native American tribes, is found in the Book of Enos, where Enos describes the depravity of the Lamanites: “Their hatred was fixed, and they were led by their evil nature that they became wild and ferocious; feeding upon beasts of prey; dwelling in tents and wandering about in the wilderness with a short skin girdle about their loins and their heads shaven; and their skill was in the bow, and in the scimitar and the ax. And many of them did eat nothing save it was raw meat; and they were continually seeking to destroy us. The Nephites, on the other hand, were a thrifty, hardworking people, “a pure and delightsome people.” They “did till the land and raise all manner of grain, and of fruit, and flocks of herds, and flocks of all manner of cattle of every kind, and goats, and wild goats, and also many horses.” They were white-skinned, lived industriously, were devoted to their large families, and prospered. The Indians were descendants of the Lamanites; the Mormons were descendants of the Nephites.  As the personification of the fallen, the Lamanites’ skin turned dark, and they became “a blood-thirsty people, full of idolatry and filthiness.

By the 1840s a critical mass of disaffected Mormons had publicly charged Smith with being a false prophet. Even one of his brothers, William, left the church, charging him with “false prophecy,” but he later returned. His brother’s defection, however, was an injury that—combined with a dozen lawsuits, a failed bank, undocumented land titles, anger at taking other men’s wives as a “commandment from God,” irregular business dealings, and an armed militia of four thousand men—signaled internal institutional unraveling. The final chapter of Joseph Smith’s life came about not from anti-Mormon Gentiles, but from disaffected Mormons who set in motion the events that led to his imprisonment and murder. The apostates sued him in court. Most dangerously, they started a newspaper criticizing his behavior and that of other church leaders.

The great success of the Mormon settlement in the Far West was due to both Young’s leadership and changes by the leadership in religious practice and governance. The former United Order of communal property ownership, for example, was abolished and the practice of tithing substituted. A tithe was calculated at 10 percent of a man’s income.

In Utah there were no apostates, no tolerance for disaffected Mormons. If someone wanted to leave the church, they slipped away quietly in the dead of night.

It is possible that without Young’s leadership to execute the stages of the long migration—setting up colonies at planned intervals along the route to grow food and provide supplies for successive waves of thousands of Mormon pioneers—Mormonism might have remained a small sect that disappeared in the nineteenth century like the Shakers of Annie Lee or the utopian colony of Robert Owen in New Harmony, Indiana.

Within the first ten years of arriving in Salt Lake, Brigham Young sent out explorers and missions to establish more than 100 colonies in the nine states. To successfully colonize these lands required significant planning. Unlike the individual pioneers who claimed lands under the Homestead Act and frequently lost them for lack of water, the Mormons scouted water sources ahead of time and sent parties of 20 or 30 families at a time to establish a settlement. They were equipped with the layout for a town plan and tools for farming, irrigation, or mining. The church also provided them with information about how to file mining claims and claim public domain lands through the Homestead Act, the Desert Lands Act, and the Timber Act.

The Mormons claim they settled the West, and to a significant degree they are right. The geographical location of their colonies was always based on sites with water, minerals, or timber. Successful settlement required locating water sources for irrigation, iron ore to produce tools and machinery, and timber for charcoal and construction.  By the time Brigham Young died in 1877, he had plans for the establishment of more than 350 colonies throughout the West.

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