Senator Newlands' Ditch

Willa walked to the river the morning after the law was signed and stood where her mother had stood thirty-four years before, watching something be taken.

She was twenty-four years old. Her mother, Tona, had been twenty when the railroad came through and the town called Reno appeared on the winter valley where the Washoe had camped and fished and gathered pine nuts for longer than anyone could count. Tona had watched the lots auctioned and the buildings rise and the river, their river, become the center of a town that did not know it had been anything before.

Willa watched the river now and understood that the taking was not finished.

The Newlands Reclamation Act had been signed by President Roosevelt on June 17, 1902. Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada had championed it -- a man who lived in a fine house and spoke with great conviction about the future of the American West, by which he meant the future of irrigation, which meant the future of water, which meant the Truckee.

The law authorized the federal government to build dams and canals and diversion projects across the arid West. The first project selected was in Nevada. A dam would be built on the Truckee River east of Reno, at a place called Derby, and it would divert the river's water south into the Carson River watershed and across sixty miles of desert to irrigate farmland near Fallon.

Willa understood what this meant. She had grown up hearing the river discussed by men in suits the way men in suits discussed everything -- as a resource, a problem, an opportunity, a thing to be managed. She had learned English at the Indian school in Wadsworth, where they taught her to read and write and speak in a language that was not her own, and she had used that language to read the newspaper accounts of the Reclamation Act with the same careful attention Wei Ah Lum had once given his grammar book.

The water that would be diverted at Derby belonged, in some legal sense that Willa could not fully untangle, to everyone and no one. The river ran from Lake Tahoe through Reno and across the desert to Pyramid Lake, where it ended. Pyramid Lake was where the Paiute lived. The lake was their fishery, their economy, their center. The cui-ui fish that spawned at the river's mouth had fed the Paiute for thousands of years.

If you diverted the river before it reached the lake, the lake would shrink.

This was not a complicated idea. A child could understand it. A child standing at the riverbank could look upstream and downstream and see that the water was going somewhere and that if you took it out before it got there, the place it was going would have less of it.

He believed the desert should be farmed. He believed irrigation was civilization. He believed that the water of the Truckee River was wasted if it simply flowed into a lake in the desert where it served no purpose that he could see.

He did not see the Paiute. This was not unusual.

Willa's mother had taught her the Washoe names for things. The river had a name that was older than English. The valley had a name. The mountains had names. None of these names appeared on the maps the senator used, because the maps had been drawn by people who believed naming a thing was the same as discovering it.

She stood at the river and watched the water move east. It was June, and the snowmelt was still coming, and the Truckee ran fast and cold and clear the way it did every summer, carrying with it the Sierra's memory of winter. In a few years, a concrete dam would stand in its path. The water would be turned south, into a canal, and sent across the desert in a straight line, and the river below the dam would be diminished by half.

Pyramid Lake would begin to drop. It would drop eighty-seven feet over the next sixty-five years. The cui-ui would nearly disappear. The Lahontan cutthroat trout, which had been in the lake since the Pleistocene, would go extinct in those waters by 1938.

None of this had happened yet. The dam was still a plan, a set of drawings in an office in Washington. But Willa could feel it the way her mother had felt the railroad -- as a vibration in the ground, a change in pressure, the weight of something large and deliberate moving toward you.

She had tried to explain this to a teacher in Wadsworth, a white woman from Vermont who was kind and well-meaning and who listened with the attentive patience of someone who believed she understood.

"But the farmland will feed so many people," the teacher had said.

"The lake feeds people," Willa said.

"I mean in the modern sense."

Willa had not answered, because there was no answer to a sentence like that. In the modern sense. As if hunger were different now. As if fish caught by Paiute hands were less real than wheat grown in diverted water on land that had been desert for ten thousand years.

She walked along the river toward town. Reno was thirty-four years old and it looked it. The wooden buildings of Commercial Row had been joined by brick buildings and stone buildings and a courthouse and a university and hotels that advertised hot baths and electric light. The town had a population of about four thousand and was growing in the way desert towns grow -- in bursts, following water and money and the railroad, pausing when one or more of these things dried up.

At Wei Ah Lum's laundry on Commercial Row, she stopped. She did not go in. The laundry was still open, though the old man moved more slowly now and his son James handled most of the work. She could see them through the window, two men pressing shirts in a room full of steam, and she thought about how many kinds of work there were that no one saw or valued until it stopped being done.

She walked home to her mother's house on the edge of town, where the streets ended and the sage began. Tona was sitting on the porch, mending something, her hands moving with the patient economy of a woman who had been mending things her entire life.

"The law passed," Willa said.

Her mother looked at the river, which was visible from the porch as a green line through the brown.

"Yes," Tona said.

"They're going to build a dam."

"Yes."

"Doesn't that make you angry?"

Tona set down her mending and looked at her daughter with an expression that was not anger and not resignation but something older than both.

"The river was here before the dam," she said. "It will be here after."

Willa sat on the porch beside her mother and looked at the river and hoped that this was true.

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