How did cities grow in America's largest and hottest desert? How did the rivers of the South West shape its history? Don is joined by Kyle Paoletta, author of American Oasis, to explore the complex and diverse history of the American South West.Edited by Aidan Lonergan, produced by Sophie Gee, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast.
Chapter 1: What historical events shaped the American Southwest?
Welcome back to American History Hit. Glad you could join us. I'm Don Wildman. In 1848, after victory in the Mexican-American War, the United States grew its landmass by about a third, some 525,000 square miles, a gigantic geography. that would go on to become the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, even some of Wyoming.
The Rio Grande River was recognized as a major stretch of America's southern border with Mexico, and Mexican claims on parts of Texas were relinquished. Manifest destiny was essentially made manifest by the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty, which ended that war. The United States of America would now officially stretch from sea to shining sea.
This vast territorial annexation was obviously a boon to national pride and economic potential. It was now a realistic option for any American with horse and wagon to go further west and not just to Oregon. But this presented huge challenges as well, heightening divisive national issues having to do with enslavement, state and federal jurisdictions, and the rights of indigenous peoples.
No less complicated was the practical consideration of how these new regions would be settled, when so much of them were made of dreadfully arid lands and parched deserts. Somehow, someway, they would be settled, making a deep and continuing impact on American culture, altering the nation forever.
Journalist Kyle Paoletta has authored a brand new book on the subject entitled American Oasis, and tracks the historical, cultural, political, and economic impact of this dry, dusty, yet vibrantly populated realm we call the American Southwest. Hello, Kyle. Welcome to American History Hit. Thanks so much. Great to be with you. A vast subject matter to take on, the American Southwest.
But you grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so this is a personal mission for you, I suppose. What prompted this book?
Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is very much having grown up in New Mexico and then lived and worked on the East Coast in New York and Boston for the better part of two decades. And what happens when you're from the Southwest and you spend a lot of time, especially in the people in the rest of the country know about the place you're from.
And the sort of broad generalities that, you know, maybe someone's visited the Grand Canyon. Maybe they went to Santa Fe once. They have a grandparent or an uncle who retired to Phoenix. There's sort of like these touchstones that people have. But there's also this broad ignorance that stems from, I think, what you were talking about a little bit in the intro of this
this sense of the Southwest as a very kind of foreboding, unwelcoming geography that how could people live there? How can there be those cities there? And so I think part of what made me really want to kind of return home in a way and have a deeper engagement with the history of the region was really wanting to both explain the Southwest to the rest of the country and help people understand
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Chapter 2: Who is Kyle Paoletta and why did he write American Oasis?
the fifth largest metropolitan area in the country, how would there ever be enough water to supply a city of 5 million people there?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's an excellent question. And as I've talked about the book, I think Phoenix's emergence as an enormous metropolis is something that continually surprises people.
And certainly when it surpassed Philadelphia as the fifth largest city in the country, I think that was like a watershed moment for a lot of Americans of like, wait a second, like, Phoenix is better than Philadelphia? How did that happen? Yeah. So I think the story really starts with the ancestral Sonoran peoples who first lived along the Salt River in what's now central Arizona.
And the Salt is a, unlike the Rio Grande or the Colorado, is... a somewhat less stable river there are some years where it flows you know very rapidly and is a quite impressive river and many years when it runs dry so it's a much more the salt river is a less regular companion for civilization than yeah maybe other rivers are.
So these ancestral peoples dug these irrigation canals and some kind of rudimentary dams and did a lot of these earthworks that allowed them to support some of the most vast agricultural area in what's now the United States in the pre-Columbian era. And so that was roughly 500 to 1500 CE. And so that kind of laid a foundation.
And then there were some climactic changes where those peoples migrated to other rivers, primarily the Gila and the Santa Cruz. And then after Guadalupe Hidalgo, You have Anglo settlers coming in the 1870s who discovered these irrigation canals. And that becomes, that is why it's called Phoenix. It's the sense of where it is a civilization reborn, where this supposedly banished people was.
But even the name speaks to the Anglo-centric view that I am guilty of being an Anglo person from the East Coast. of thinking of the Southwest and certainly Phoenix area as being this thing that needs to be rescued, that needs to be brought life to. When that's exactly what the Spanish, the explorers who came in in the 1500s and so forth also felt that way. But in fact-
Of course, there had been an indigenous culture there, as you're speaking to, that had a very complex irrigation-driven agricultural society built. Sparsely, it wasn't a huge population, but there were a lot of cities built along those rivers and rivers. In those irrigation ways, we're creating these sustainable cultures.
That is so much a part of this story that you're educating us through this book about undoing this preconception of the idea that every certain white person who's ever come into that area thinks of it as being something that needs to be brought back to life.
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Chapter 3: How did ancient peoples manage water in the Southwest?
It goes almost 50 years to create the basics of this whole water system.
Yeah, I mean, I think the history of Phoenix is a history of using up all of the water available and then reaching further to another water source. So it starts with the Salt River and irrigating the Salt River. And very rapidly, Phoenix becomes a kind of premier agricultural center, certainly in the region, but throughout the West.
And what happens, as I mentioned at the beginning, the Salt River is a very irregular river. And so they have sort of the first decade in the 1870s is a boom time. There's regular rain, good snowpack. They're able to really expand what's under cultivation very rapidly. The next decade is a drought. And...
It's probably the only time in Phoenix's history where it lost population, where people said like, oh, this isn't work. I'm going to go to California. And so you have this sort of like immediate challenge. And then the boom times recumb so much so that there's a massive flood that destroys the first railroad bridge in Phoenix.
So all of that becomes part of why Theodore Roosevelt founds the Bureau of Reclamation is this idea of we need to even out the water. We need to make it possible so that when there's boom years, we can... hold on to that to use in the years when there isn't as much rain or snow.
And so the first dam that the Bureau of Reclamation builds is now called the Roosevelt Dam in the mountains kind of northeast of Phoenix. And that reservoir becomes what allows Phoenix to really begin growing because it gives it a very sustainable water source.
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Chapter 4: What challenges did Phoenix face in developing its water system?
Within a couple of decades, the residential population has grown to the point where they can no longer pump groundwater because they're using the dam water for irrigation. People are drinking pumped water. Very quickly, it becomes silty and undrinkable. So they build a pipeline to the Verde River, which is sort of the next tributary north, and that allows them to expand again
which works until the 1950s when they suddenly need much more water than the Verde can provide. And you actually have a situation where the newspaper, the Arizona Republic, has a headline that is basically, Phoenix is going to run out of water a week from now.
Like, there is a genuine crisis that I believe is actually on the 4th of July when this headline runs that, like, we are imminently going to run out of water. And very luckily, there is a massive rainstorm that follows, and they just kind of luck out of the crisis. But that experience leads them to say, okay, we need to, like... Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.
And this is why today almost all of residential Phoenix used to be farms. And all of that, the water that supplies the subdivisions is water from the Roosevelt Reservoir that was primarily irrigating citrus and cotton. So that allows the next growth spurt. And then we get into the 70s and they recognize again, we're growing so fast, we don't have enough water.
Chapter 5: How did the Bureau of Reclamation influence water management in Phoenix?
And that's how you get the Central Arizona Project, which is the 300-mile aqueduct to the Colorado River, allows Arizona to take advantage of its share of that river that it broke up with the other states. And that's completed in, I believe, 1993, and it connects both Phoenix and Tucson to the Colorado. And we are now...
for 30 years later have reached the point at which it's like, oh, still not really enough water.
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
It really breaks down to all these different eras, as you say, 1920-ish. You've got this Redwood pipeline being laid by this New York architect. So much of this is really the story of any American metropolitan area being eventually built. It all starts with water and they create these things based on each other's models. And New York really started it.
What is today 27 reservoirs in the Catskills started as the Croton Reservoir where I live just north of New York. And these engineers were dispatched across the country to create this stuff. How much was this related to John Wesley Powell's initial journey down the Colorado and his view of how water would be distributed?
Well, I think Powell is such a fascinating figure because he's the one who first charged the Colorado for the United States and helps facilitate the Arab settlement by saying, here's where the canyons are, here's where Lee's Ferry is, the premier place to cross the river. But after that experience, he gives a very famous speech where he basically says that
there is not enough water to sustain an East Coast-style population here, that this is a very rugged environment with very limited resources. And I believe he gives that speech in the 1880s or the 1890s. It's before the Bureau of Reclamation is founded, and it is very quickly dismissed by the kind of interest of boosters who, you know,
Definitely part of this story is the land grab that was basically made possible all of the settlement of the West, which, you know, we can talk a little bit about the history of Albuquerque, where I'm from, which was very much a... a lot of Anglo entrepreneurs buying up land very cheaply.
And then having done that, they were able to get the railroad to come to Albuquerque and then see a huge profit because they owned all this land that suddenly was very valuable because it was next to a railroad depot.
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Chapter 6: What is the Central Arizona Project and why is it important?
Right. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. And just to make that point even more, the Homestead Act is rightly very famous for allowing the colonization of Kansas, Nebraska, the Midwest, the Great Plains. But in order to get people to even want the land in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, they have to pass another act that's called the Arid Lands Act, which doubles the amount of land that a homesteader is able to claim if it's arid.
Because it was this idea of like, this is how much the federal government wanted this colonization project to succeed, that they literally were giving away as much land as they possibly could.
Chapter 7: What role did John Wesley Powell play in understanding Southwestern water?
And hence why you then have this big federal investment in things like a Hoover Dam, because suddenly you have all these people who sort of are expecting that the government is going to make good of, you know, you wanted us to live here. We need some water now.
Early in my career on television, I did a show about a dude ranch. It was just me out there lassoing things, but it happened on a ranch in, I believe it was New Mexico, where I really liked the guy that I was working with, this Anglo man who was a multi-generational rancher there. And I asked him in a sort of idle moment, how big is his ranch? Where's it reached to?
Thinking I was pointing out to it. He says, oh, it goes 27 miles down that way. I said, 27 miles? And I said, how often do you even see it? He says, oh, very rarely. But that was how land was distributed out there, you know, and those families that took control of so much, you know, certainly around those urban areas had these vast swaths of land.
It was not unlike the way the Dutch did it with New York. You know, you just gave these rich people this whole thing and off you went.
Well, and speaking of New Mexico, part of the story there is Spanish colonialism where you have the Spanish first coming and coming in 1598 to create the permanent colony and then Santa Fe is established in 1610. This is 20 years before Boston is settled. This is before Jamestown. And you have this system where the Spanish crown is making vast land grants to Spanish settlers.
And to this day, many of those land grants are still legally valid. And there are families who can trace back to the 17th century that there's this chain. But in New Mexico, it's possible to have these vast ranches. And I would bet good money that that rancher who you met, the origin of his ranch was probably as a Spanish land grant. Yeah. Yeah.
But we're talking like two Anglos here.
Yes.
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Chapter 8: How did federal laws encourage settlement in arid Southwestern lands?
The truth is, and much of your book is concerned with it, to your credit, the indigenous history that went before, you know, which was intruded upon by the Spanish at first. Let's talk about those cultures and start around where you grew up, which is where the book begins with Albuquerque and the Pueblo Indians that existed there. Let's talk about how they survived in this arid culture.
Yeah, so I mentioned the cliff dwellings before that are in kind of the highlands of the Colorado Plateau. It's believed that many of the pueblos today are descended from those cliff dwellings, which were initially very defensible kind of positions, that they're in canyons and have very limited entry, but they also have pretty limited water.
If you visit Chaco Canyon today, you will very swiftly realize how dry it is. And so there were some periods of a special aridity that drove a lot of those people to the rivers. And so you have these dozens of villages along the Rio Grande and some of these tributaries. And they practice a style of agriculture that's somewhat similar to what's happening in the Sonoran Desert.
But I think the most important thing is that it's very flexible, that they'll have a pueblo, which if people are unfamiliar, is usually made out of adobe blocks, which is made of mud and straw. It's very much building with the materials of the place that you live in. And those are often quite far from the river or at a real remove from the river.
And then there are sort of irrigation canals and somewhat more temporary farms that acknowledge that there's going to be a flood eventually. All of this land will be submerged. There's no point in building a house here because it's going to get destroyed because it's made of mud. So many of the pueblos are actually a decent distance from the river.
And so when Coronado's party arrives on this exploration, they find, I think it's believed to be about a dozen villages in the area that's now Albuquerque, which is a province known as Tijue. And they go there and they spend a winter there. And it's sort of a classic American story of first contact where initially there is a period of
you know, kind of bartering and friendly relations, trading things. But as the winter sets in, the Spanish army begins just kind of like taking more and more. And there's various sources about exactly what happens if There's a story about a Spanish soldier visiting a Pueblo and literally grabbing the blankets off of people to use. There's one about sexually assaulting a woman.
But there's some kind of violent interaction that leads to the Pueblos to basically close ranks and shut the Spanish out of the actual structures. in the Tihue area, and that leads to a siege.
And this sort of inaugurates this real era of warfare between the Spanish and the Pueblos, which continues from when Coronado was there in the 1540s through when Don Juan de Oñate settles the first permanent colony in 1598, where there's a very famous
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