Carey Act (1894)
The federal government’s inadequate first effort to underwrite water reclamation projects by selling public lands and
blending federal and state responsibilities.
After the Civil War, the growing agricultural needs of
industrial America and the population’s westward surge
encountered a harsh reality—arid lands beyond the 100th
meridian could not sustain eastern forms of agriculture.
Inspired by Jeffersonian ideals of an agrarian society, generous rains in the 1870s and 1880s, and a fantasy that “water
40 Captains of Industryfollows the plow” (and forests), the federal government determined to promote irrigation. The Timber Culture Act (1873)
gave land to anyone planting trees; the Desert Land Act
(1877) bestowed additional acres on those irrigating land.
These measures benefited mostly speculators; individual
farmers lacked the capital necessary to purchase any land.
John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Lands of the Arid
Region of the United States (1878) advocated that laws be
appropriate to the environment. Arid land required larger
homesteads, whose shape and location must depend on available water—irrigation remained essential. By the 1880s and
1890s, droughts and the panic of 1893 gave his proposals
urgency.
Irrigation advocates feuded. Should the federal government undertake reclamation (as many western congressional
representatives wanted) or simply support reclamation by
land cessions? Eastern states feared the reclamation cost, so in
1894 U.S. Senator Joseph Carey (Wyoming) authored a law
mixing federal and state responsibilities. Any arid state might
receive up to one million acres for reclamation, though neither it nor its assignees (such as an heir or prospective buyer)
could receive title to that land until after 10 years of irrigation. State or private companies could build the reclamation
projects using the land as collateral. Settlers must irrigate 20
of every 160 acres. The federal government approved all
plans, and states chose the land, supervised settlement (preventing monopolies and speculation), and regulated water
prices. Several projects started, most notably one by William
F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Yet this experiment in cooperative federalism failed. By 1958, only a million acres had been distributed. States feared indebtedness as in the canal debacles of the
1830s; Populist suspicions of big government, localism, and
sectionalism hampered progress; and projects exceeded westerners’ technical and capital resources. It remained for the
federal government to undertake reclamation itself after the
passage of the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902.