HISTORY 142A Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: John Wesley Powell, William Mulholland
Document Summary
Day 16: more about history of water in california. John wesley powell had own ideas should be distributed and utilized. Land ownership would be a lot more democratized. Not clustered in the hands of a few. He says that one of the main problems they"re seeing is that state boundaries don"t make sense according to the water scape. So he comes up with his own idea of reassigning state boundaries according to where water sheds are. He kind of redrew the whole map according to water sheds. He says that this would be a rational system that takes into account the water supply. No one in the government liked this idea or his redrawn map. He gets booed off the stage in washington dc when he proposes this idea. Between 1920s and 1960s, federal government gets into the water allocation business. Army corps of engineers and bureau of engineers involved in this.
