Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper uses the literary and biographical writings of women settlers, illustrations, photographs, and newspaper articles to uncover the social, cultural and environmental transitions experienced in the western United States during the irrigation movement of 1877-1930. The irrigation movement generated social and cultural upheaval in response to significant environmental change, and as such is of particular significance for our own time of climate transformation. In the late nineteenth century the Irrigation Movement billed the mechanization of water usage for crops as a romantic effort to populate the arid Western United States and Canada, and to bring not only water but families to the dry plains. Federal legislation and railroad boosterism fueled the settlement expansion of the arid West. As settlers decided to venture onto newly opened irrigated lands in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and Washington, the perceptions of irrigation and the landscape altered. Some families and family members starved to death during cold winters, failed dam build attempts, and the construction of ditch systems that refused to deliver water. Middle-class, white women pioneers initially used their writing to create a western culture that did not include diversity, Chinese labor, Native Americans, slavery, or prostitution. Their writings “whitewashed” the West, but they also revealed a growing ambivalence about the role of human interference with the environment, irrigation’s impact on the landscape, and the impact of mechanized agriculture on community.