Steven C. Schulte: Wayne Aspinall and the shaping of the American West

Schulte, S. C. (2002). Wayne Aspinall and the shaping of the American West. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado.


A historical biography of a United States congressman from Colorado, who served from 1949 to 1973, this book recounts Aspinall's push for economic development, through "major reclamation projects, wilderness legislation, mining laws, and bill pertaining to national parks and monuments" (p. IX) within the west. Aspinall witnessed the debate on the Colorado River Compact prior to 1922, the year of its ratification. He began to participate in the formation of Colorado water policy making in 1937, the year President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the Colorado-Big Thompson transmountain diversion project. Aspinall and other west slope politicians agreed to a compromise, which led to the agreement--the east slope received the transmountain water diversions and the west slope got guarantees for compensatory storage.

With the ratification of the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact, in 1949, arguments surfaced for the need of reclamation projects and federal funding on the west slope, "working closely with Bureau of Reclamation planners, politicians from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming began agitating for the construction of reclamation projects that would benefit the Upper Colorado River Basin. This was necessary, they argued, to ensure the region's economic future" (pp. 50-51).

Schulte described Aspinall conceptual framework as a "pre-ecological worldview" (p. 53), one that emphasized economizing and not conserving natural resources. The West had land and water resources and, therefore, the right to use them for the benefit of the region and the nation. Furthermore, science and engineering could solve water shortage problems in the arid and semi-arid region with dams and reservoirs.

During Aspinall's tenure in Congress, he spearheaded the approval of the following reclamation projects:

Collbran Grand Junction storage 1952
Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) Glen Canyon Dam, Lake Powell 1956
Frying Pan-Arkansas Gunnison River diversion to the Arkansas
Central Arizona Project (CAP) 1968 Guaranteed water for Arizona and California

Representing the western slope, with a home near the city of Grand Junction, Colorado, Aspinall chaired the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee from 1959 to 1973. A proponent of large water construction projects and mining interests, he became an anachronism in the 1970s, a time of growing public concerns about the environment and ecological sustainability.