Making the Desert Bloom: The Rio Grande Project and Elephant Butte Dam

From a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by historian Marilyn Harper, created by the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation with the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers.

The Rio Grande from space. NASA / Visible Earth.

Green from orbit

In 1962, John Glenn was asked what he'd noticed from his Mercury capsule. One of the few things he recalled clearly was a "lot of desert with a big irrigated area that comes down a valley northwest of El Paso." That green strip was the Elephant Butte Irrigation District — part of the Bureau of Reclamation's Rio Grande Project, on the river bottomlands of south-central New Mexico and west Texas.

The reservoir catches spring floods for summer and fall, when the river often ran dry. Below El Paso the river is the U.S.–Mexico border, and the Project serves farms in Mexico too.

Why "reclamation"

To reclaim is to make wasteland farmable. Farming needs about 20 inches of rain a year; most of the West gets far less. Settlers watched snowmelt rush down the rivers each spring and missed it badly by late summer. Dams could store it and canals could spread it — but most private and state irrigation companies of the late nineteenth century failed for lack of money or engineering skill.

By the 1890s, westerners wanted federal help, backed by John Wesley Powell's reports, irrigation lobbies, dam-site studies by the Army Corps of Engineers and USGS, and the West's growing clout in Congress. Both parties endorsed irrigation in 1900; when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt made it happen.

The Reclamation Act, 1902

Roosevelt signed it on June 17, 1902, one of the first big laws of the Progressive Era. It extended the promise of the 1862 Homestead Act — up to 160 acres, five years of living on and farming the land, $18 in fees — to land that needed water.

• Where: 16 western states and territories; Texas was added in 1906.
• Paid for by sales of federal public land; water users would repay construction costs, first within 10 years, then take over operation and maintenance.
• Limits: water for no more than 160 acres per owner, who had to live on or near the land and farm at least half of it.
• Run by the Reclamation Service, created within the USGS (independent in 1907, renamed the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923).

Roosevelt advised not "doing too much" at first, but pressure brought a project to every western state; 25 were approved by 1906. By the 1910s many were in trouble: costs ran high, crop income low, and poor drainage raised groundwater until salts made the soil barren. By the early 1920s, many settlers had left, repayments lagged and the fund was nearly empty.

The reckoning: a Fact Finders Committee (1923) reported that planners had wrongly assumed free land and cheap water were enough; most settlers had to buy land, sometimes at "extortionate prices," and turning raw land into a farm often cost as much as the canals and reservoirs. The Fact Finders' Act (1924) gave Congress the say over new projects, required soil, water and crop studies first, and eased repayment and the 160-acre limit.

A new direction: from the Boulder Canyon Project (1928), built around Hoover Dam, Reclamation built multipurpose river-basin projects for flood control, city water and hydropower, with Treasury money. Today it is the nation's largest water supplier and the West's second-largest electricity producer: over 600 dams, 58 power plants, and water for about 10 million acres — 140,000 farmers on 188 projects.

Building the Rio Grande Project

From Reclamation's annual reports:

• 1904–1905: Mesilla Valley farmers, long irrigating with their own canals, asked for a permanent diversion dam. On December 2, 1905, the Secretary of the Interior approved the Leasburg unit — a dam and about 6 miles of canal — with $200,000.
• 1906–1907: work on a big storage dam waited until the Act reached Texas (1906) and the U.S.–Mexico treaty on sharing the river (1907).
• February 14, 1908: Leasburg done. That season farmers had ample water and about 17,000 acres under cultivation.
• May 1909 – July 1910: dam work stopped when land for the reservoir and railroad couldn't be bought at fair prices; the government used eminent domain.
• 1910–1912: preparations — a 10½-mile railroad from the Santa Fe line, a bridge, offices, housing, a hospital, a store, and a flume to carry the river past the site.
• November 6, 1912: river diverted; digging began two days later, three shifts a day. Dam construction began June 3, 1913.
• 1915: first stored water delivered. November 5, 1915: water through the new Mesilla Diversion Dam into the East and West Side canals.
• June 1916: the dam finished, for about $5,000,000; the workforce, once over 1,000, was down to 172.

Photo 1: Elephant Butte Dam under construction, 1915. Cableways strung from towers on both banks carried concrete and equipment to the site. The finished concrete gravity dam is 301 feet high and 1,674 feet long, with 618,785 cubic yards of concrete — in 1915, the "largest structure yet undertaken by the Reclamation Service." National Archives.

Photo 2: Leasburg Diversion Dam, 1908 — 600 feet long and 9 feet high, from Peñasco Rock across the river, with the headworks of the Leasburg Canal at lower right. National Archives.

Waterlogged, then drained

More water brought a new problem. By 1918, about 66 per cent of the Mesilla Valley was waterlogged from over-irrigation and poor drainage. Reclamation dug a 350-mile system of deep, open drains — 13 long main drains in the Mesilla Valley — with a steam dragline at work by April 1916.

Photo 5: a dragline at work, 1918. National Archives.

By June 1921, 211.8 miles of drains were done: ponds vanished, dying orchards revived, and fields white with alkali grew crops again after one season. Reclamation took over and rebuilt most of the old community ditches, cutting waste. The main irrigation and drainage works were complete in 1924.

Photo 3: an out-take from the Leasburg Canal into the Doña Ana Lateral, 1908. Gates on tall poles let water into the lateral; a check structure holds the canal's level up. Walter J. Lubken, National Archives.

Cotton and prosperity

• 1920: alfalfa led, then wheat and corn; over 20,000 acres went into cotton.
• Mid-1920s: cotton, worth an estimated $12 million, nearly equaled the cost of the works; construction charges were paid on time.
• 1927: 4,669 farms — 2,901 run by owners, 1,768 by tenants.
• 1931: about 95 per cent of the land farmed; 4,500 farms, most of 60 to 120 acres. The Depression hit: bank deposits fell from $30 million (December 1930) to $17.5 million a year later, though payments to the government stayed mostly current.

Photo 4: irrigated cantaloupe fields, 1930 — water runs from a raised ditch into the furrows. National Archives.

Illustration 1a: the Mesilla Valley just below Leasburg Dam today, northern part — a USGS topographic map detail from the district's National Register nomination. The Leasburg Canal follows the 4,000-foot contour at the valley's edge.

Illustration 1b: the southern part.

Map 2: the Rio Grande Project today. Bureau of Reclamation.

Visiting

The fields are private, but canals are visible from roads off Interstate 25. Elephant Butte Lake State Park holds the dam, a visitor center and Civilian Conservation Corps cabins; Leasburg Dam and Percha Dam state parks hold those diversion dams.

The river's future

The Rio Grande is used and reused so heavily that in many years no water reaches the lower riverbed. A 2011 Reclamation report projected 5 to 6°F warmer temperatures in the basin and about 2.5 percent less precipitation by mid-century. The river also supplies Albuquerque, Las Cruces and El Paso, and a 1907 treaty owes Mexico 60,000 acre-feet a year.

Sources

Based on "'Making the Desert Bloom': The Rio Grande Project," a Teaching with Historic Places lesson by Marilyn Harper, National Park Service, drawing on National Register documentation for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, Elephant Butte Dam and Elephant Butte Historic District, the Reclamation Service and Bureau of Reclamation annual reports, the Bureau's Brief History and William D. Rowley's The Bureau of Reclamation: Origins and Growth to 1945 (2006); a work of the United States government in the public domain. The lesson's classroom questions and activities are not reproduced; teachers will find them on the original page.