This book took a long time to come into being.
My own history as a writer figures in the explanation of its long journey to print. Exactly twenty-five years ago, my second book—The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West—was published. This book has had an adventure-packed life of its own. Denounced by some and welcomed by many, Legacy surprised its author and publisher by becoming a “classic”: required reading for many undergraduate and graduate students, but also widely read by many in the general public.
If I had been ambitious and hungry for professional achievement before 1987, contentment over the happy destiny of The Legacy of Conquest seemed to put me out of business when it came to the writing of book-length manuscripts. I seemed to have made a permanent switch of genres. To the understandable dismay of editors who had, in good faith, added their signature to mine on book contracts, I churned out essays and articles, as well as the less-exalted literary expressions called reports and memos. More than anything, I became a one-woman, 24/7 production facility for speeches, talks, and lectures.
Was I freaked out by the success of Legacy and thereby unwilling to run the risk of writing and publishing another book? While the pleasant burden of that book’s success might have played a part in my choices, a greater factor was the founding of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado with my partner, law professor Charles Wilkinson. The robust health of this organization unleashed a wild round of activities perfectly suited for a person grateful to have been born and raised before the diagnosis of attention deficit disorder came into play.
And yet, keeping the Center of the American West in financial well-being meant staying on the lookout for funding opportunities. Various figures at the Denver Water Department held the convincing opinion that their agency had an instructive and important history. Soon after I moved to Colorado, in 1984, I had come to know Chips Barry, who became manager of Denver Water in 1991. Chips, as readers of this book and especially its afterword will know, was a remarkable person. His respect for history matched, in intensity, his sense of humor. An agreement between Denver Water and the Center of the American West, reserving full intellectual independence for the center, launched this project.
In the early years, the plan was not a strenuous one. We would employ graduate students and postdoctoral affiliates to write chapters for a book that would have, as its principal asset and charm, a robust collection of photographs from the Denver Water archives. We began with the assumption, now hard to reconstruct, that the written text would be lite and not particularly weighted with thought, reflection, and interpretation.
The result was not spirit lifting.
I finally settled down and shouldered the burden that should have been mine all along. I took on the job of fundamentally reworking the cobbled-together manuscript. There was some comedy in this situation, since my working circumstances were aided by a parallel and more literal project in remodeling. In January 2010, I moved into my husband’s house so that we could remodel my house. I took only books, articles, and notes related to A Ditch In Time. This put a valuable damper on my ordinarily impressive gift for conjuring up distractions.
As the contractor tore apart my house, built new rooms, and reconfigured some of the preexisting structure, I performed a comparable set of actions with the manuscript that, for a spell, ruled my life. By October 2011, I had created a draft that seemed robust, unified, funny, and grounded in the two fields of western history and water policy.
This brings me to the acknowledgments.
On the title page, the author identification appears with these words: “Patricia Nelson Limerick with Jason L. Hanson,” followed by a phalanx of collaborators and assistants. Christian Heimburger launched the research process years ago. In a game effort, Tim Brown and Buzzy Jackson wrote chapters for the first draft, which bears little resemblance to the current text. (Both Tim and Buzzy, it is important to say, are gifted and original writers when they are set free of the production-by-committee method under which they were forced to operate!) Two very talented recent graduates of the University of Colorado—Dylan Eiler and Alex Lande—did further research and extensive fact-checking.
Nearly all the work of the Center of the American West is collaborative and cooperative, closer to the customs of a team of scientists than the more individualistic ways of humanists. This leaves us in a state of some perplexity when it comes to the usual allocations of intellectual property. I wrote the text in its current version, and readers familiar with my other work will consistently recognize my voice and style. But Jason Hanson played a crucial role in the book’s completion, and his name therefore appears with mine on the title page. Jason coordinated the follow-up research when I identified new topics we had to add, and he fact-checked and proofread within an inch of his life (or what would have been within an inch of his life if he were not a person of such unusual vitality). He wrangled the photographs, acquired the permission to use them, and wrote the captions. He did all this with world-class equanimity and good nature.
It is impossible to imagine how I and my comrades could have powered through to the completion of this manuscript without the gifts and insights of our captain at the center, Kurt Gutjahr. His official title is program director, although plenty of other terms apply equally well: executive director, managing director, coordinator, mediator, problem solver, navigator, conductor, therapist, and coach. Kurt is the gyroscope of the center of the American West. He gets the credit for a great share of the center’s success.
Many others who worked or work at the center have contributed to the completion of this book: Roni Ires, Amanda Hardman, Ryan Rebhan, Jennifer Aglio, Claudia Puska, Adrianne Kroepsch, Raissa Johnson, Sam Chapman, and Ashley Howe have all pushed this book forward with their hard work and lively spirit. For this project and quite a number of others, Honey Lindburg deserves a special note of thanks. Purchasers of A Ditch in Time, as well as recipients of many Center of the American West announcements and documents, are beneficiaries of the fact that Honey, a gifted graphic designer and visual artist, has expertly taken on the challenge of working in an organization led by an excessively word-oriented person.
Another crucial member of the team is cartographer Jim Robb. His map of the Denver Water supply system appears in the front of the book. Readers are encouraged to consult this map often, since words can only go so far in conveying the complicated spatial and geographical terms of this vast array of streams, rivers, dams, reservoirs, tunnels, ditches, and treatment plants.
Without the opportunity to consult noted hydrologist Dan Luecke, this project would have been far more difficult. A scientist capable of crystal-clear communication of his expertise, Dan is also a historic figure in this story. Similarly, Eric Kuhn at the Colorado River Water Conservation District and Eric Wilkinson at the Northern Colorado Water Conservancy District have played and continue to play a key role in Denver Water’s unfolding history, and their perspectives enriched our understanding of the story we have told here. I am grateful, as well, to a number of other friends with deep experience in the area of natural resources management who read the manuscript and provided thoughtful responses: Ruth and Ken Wright, Dave and Jan Robertson, Pam and George Beardsley, and Ron Stewart. Ann Heinz, the dean of Continuing Education at the University of Colorado, read the full manuscript and provided both encouragement and a number of useful corrections. Mark Shively and George Sibley read parts of the manuscript and, true to their characters, provided thought-provoking and well-informed commentary. In an early stage of the project, my wonderful friend Sue Deans pitched in to the cause of helping us sort out tedious detail from necessary and telling fact. Two very accomplished environmental historians, Martin Melosi and Martin Reuss, read the manuscript closely and offered comments and suggestions that helped me tremendously. Sunnie Bell and Adrianne Kroepsche proofread the final manuscript, and their sharp eyes enhanced the clarity and consistency of this text to the great benefit of our readers.
While scrupulously abiding by the declaration on the opening page of the author’s right to exercise unrestricted judgment, various officials at Denver Water read the manuscript, called factual errors to our attention, and engaged in spirited exchanges over various aspects of their complicated work. We are grateful to manager and CEO Jim Lochhead, director of planning Dave Little, general counsel Patti Wells, and attorney Casey Funk. Before his untimely death, Chips Barry was a resourceful and valuable partner in conversation, and we are grateful to Gail Barry for the permission to include as this book’s afteword the speech that he wrote for a joint presentation with me a few months before his death. Holly Geist, Laura George, and Duncan McCollum gave us invaluable guidance and help in utilizing Denver Water’s rich archives. Retired manager of Denver Water community relations Jane Earle lent her support to this enterprise in a number of ways. In 2008, Jane arranged a remarkable tour of Denver Water facilities, where we had the opportunity to meet and talk with Denver Water personnel Ed Christiansen, Rusty Christensen, Mike Couts, Jade Dreier, Cindy Bryan, and Dale Beverly.
Internationally known for his photography of wildlife and wilderness, John Fielder very graciously consented to let us use his photograph of the High Line Canal for the book’s cover. Two fine photographers—Jackie Shoemaker and Ted Wood—provided the contemporary images that much enrich the visual dimension of this book. Coi Drummond-Gehring guided us in accessing the expansive collection of historical photographs curated by the Denver Public Library’s Western History and Genealogy Department, and Greg Moore and John Sunderland at The Denver Post provided the iconic photo of Chips Barry standing behind a waterwheel.
Glenn Saunders’s daughter, Carol, generously and graciously lent me her father’s scrapbooks. Well-stocked with the principal news coverage of Denver Water over his long career, these scrapbooks gave me the extraordinary opportunity to feel very directly in their compiler’s company. On Saturdays, alone in the center offices with the record that Glenn Saunders had assembled of the agency that he served for years, I read and took notes with an unusual sense of engagement with a significant historical figure.
Colorado Supreme Court justice Gregory Hobbs is a rock star of expertise on Colorado water law. As I worked my way through the remodeling of the manuscript, Justice Hobbs read each chapter and corrected a number of flubs of interpretation and fact on my part. I am very much in his debt for his care in reviewing the manuscript, for the lively foreword that begins this book, and for the joy of being the friend of Greg and Bobbie Hobbs.
I am indebted to a number of audiences in Colorado and elsewhere who let me field-test my ideas in talks and speeches while A Ditch in Time was inching along toward completion. Audiences at the Center for Historical Studies at Northwestern University, the City Club of Denver, the Colorado Historical Society, the Frasier Meadows Retirement Community, the Longmont Senior Center, the Colorado chapter of the American Water Resources Association, Western State College in Gunnison’s Water Workshop, and the Center for Global Humanities at the University of New England all did valuable service as my “focus groups.” At the Douglas County Library in Highlands Ranch, Colorado, I benefitted both from audience commentary and from the presentation by my fellow speaker, John Hendrick, general manager of the Centennial Water and Sanitation District.
Since Robert Baron founded his publishing house in 1984, Fulcrum Publishing has taken center stage in the intellectual life of the West. Fulcrum’s publications—on the region and on broader issues of nature and environment—have lit up the world, and all of us at the Center of the American West are proud to be associated with this accomplished publisher. As Fulcrum’s current president and publisher, Sam Scinta has been a prince, communicating with clarity and warmth on every occasion, working out a contract by which revenue from this book goes directly to the Center of the American West, and keeping his patience with a few missed deadlines. As the book’s editor, Carolyn Sobczak brought to bear exactly the fresh point of view that the manuscript needed, combining encouragement with requests for clarification in exactly the right balance.
As I have often had the occasion to remark, the position of faculty director and chair of the Board of the Center of the American West proves to be the best job on the planet. Nonetheless, I would have been happy to be spared one aspect of this job—repeatedly having to inform the enormously supportive external Board of the Center of the American West that this book was not quite finished. With that melancholy action now removed from my professional obligations, I can now simply say that I am unendingly grateful to the board members for their patience and kindness. Center board member Susan Kirk provided me with a number of useful opportunities to talk with her husband, former Denver Water Board member Dick Kirk, and by virtue of serving sequentially on the Denver Water Board and the Center of the American West Board, Hubert Farbes gave me a grounded and valuable angle on the changes of the early 1990s. Center board member John Wittemyer, after a distinguished career in water law, gave the manuscript a close reading and, when he found only a few missteps on my part, enhanced my confidence considerably.
The commitment of the Center of the American West to do this book began more than seven years ago. Over that time, I was widowed and remarried. Since we took up with each other, my second husband, Houston Kempton, has lived in the company of this seemingly endless project. It is a measure of Houston’s warmth, good nature, congeniality, and endless curiosity that he has never said a word of sorrow or anger over the fact that A Ditch in Time has been our constant companion. My guess is, however, that we will both enjoy life more with A Ditch in Time out in the world on its own. The book only seemed to be chronically incomplete, but my gratitude to Houston for putting up with this undertaking is actually endless.
Patty covered the vast and varied terrain of our gratitude pretty thoroughly, and I have only a few words to add.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Center of the American West over the years for pitching into this project with diverse and extraordinary talents that regularly leave me in awe. In particular, I am indebted to Kurt Gutjahr for his good cheer and steady hand in guiding the center’s endeavors and to Patty for her kindness and unfailing generosity at every turn. In Patty’s dedication to the West and the people who call it home, I find my inspiration.
I am also grateful beyond expression to the friends and family who have supported and encouraged me over the course of this long project. Standing foremost among this crowd is my wonderful wife, Stacie, who has been my touchstone and my greatest blessing, and our beautiful daughter, Ellery, who proves the old Denver Union Water Company claim that better water does indeed make better babies.