Who Controls the Water: Harriet Strong the Pampas Queen, and the Future of Irrigation.

In the 1880s, Southern California agriculture was in a state of crisis. The wheat which had been long the basis of its prosperity was plummeting in price due to competition from the Midwest, Australia, and Russia, and the best solution to that problem - a pivot towards specialty fruits and nuts that were more uniquely suited to California’s climate - had a problem of its own, namely the drought-prone nature of the region. If farmers were to survive, a solution to the water problems of the state needed to be found, a solution that came at last in the form of a person who, traditionally, had no business in agriculture in the first place: Harriet Williams Russell Strong (1844-1926).

Harriet Russell was born in New York to an august family whose ancestors included a founder of Yale, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the Commissary General of the North during the War of 1812. Though well connected in the region, the call to the West in the aftermath of the California Gold Rush of 1849 proved irresistible, and at the age of six, Harriet moved with her family to California. Unusually for the era, Harriet’s family were keen to support her educational development, and sent her to the predecessor of Mills College, the Young Ladies Seminary. This had been founded in Benicia in 1852, and Harriet entered in 1858, some thirteen years before the institution changed its name and moved to Oakland. Her mother was particularly insistent that she pursue an education, writing to her that, should anything happen, the one thing that could never be taken away from her was what she had learned.

That advice, to rely on the quality of her mind in the midst of adversity, was to become Strong’s guiding principle in the many trials ahead, but upon leaving the Seminary in 1860 her immediate concern was what to do about the small army of suitors besieging her. Her family had moved to Nevada, yet another hot spot of precious metal speculation, and in 1862 she met Charles Lyman Strong, a mine superintendent who turned her head. The pair married in 1863, a pairing begun in optimism but that would ultimately end in tragedy. Neither had robust health, and Charles’s work kept him apart from the family for long stretches at a time, and the relationship suffered as a result. Charles kept seeking a mine that would pay big and solve all his problems. Harriet just wanted the family together. In 1876, they had a fateful conversation in which Charles admitted he had “no love to give” anymore, and for the next seven years, until his death by suicide in 1883, Harriet lived a miserable life, convinced that she was unloved, that marriage had robbed her of her freedom and her sphere of action, with consequent tolls on her health that compelled her to take long Resting cures.

Charles’s suicide, occasioned by his failures in business, rocked the family. As creditors began claiming their share of the estate, Harriet retreated to Ranchito del Fuerte, the struggling southern California farm that, like so many others in the region, was seeking to find a way out of the collapse of the California grain market in the 1880s. She had no prior experience in farming, but was able to harness an unexpected resource in her aid: her gender. She found that farmers who, when speaking with other men, would often keep their secrets and advice close to their chest to avoid competition, had no such reservations when speaking with a woman whom they expected was only going to fail, and therefore didn’t require any guardedness. She harvested the best advice from farmers in a similar position to hers, and decided to take the leap and attempt to make the farm work, even as its legal status was still being fought out in the courts. She borrowed $4000 and decided to plant walnut trees and, while waiting for those to grow to full size, to plant pampas grass between the rows, which would be more immediately harvestable. The pampas decision, combined with her own unerring sense of marketing, proved a great hit. She sent political ribbons made of pampas grass to both political parties, and created an elaborate pampas display at the World’s Columbian Expedition in 1893, all of which generated buzz for the versatility of her product, and allowed her to sell millions of plumes a year, netting corresponding millions of dollars in profits. 

With her economic success and familial connections, she was able to become a force in the political scene, and particularly devoted herself to issues of women’s rights and of pushing forward political action on water control policy. In the former arena, she had the misfortune of being several decades ahead of her time, working hard to establish a national association of businesswomen like herself to not only mutually support each other, but to gather resources towards the establishment of a college where young women could learn the fundamentals of business and finance. This was a quality idea that unfortunately tended to unravel the moment she wasn’t directly concentrating on it, as she lacked a reliable and enthused set of sub-lieutenants in the cause of women’s financial education. 

Her success in the area of water policy was to prove longer lasting. During her episodes of taking the Resting Cure she had a great deal of time to direct her mind to problems both big and small, and distracted herself with developing solutions to them. On the small scale, this resulted in her developing and patenting inventions like a new mechanism for raising and lowering windows, but on the large scale it involved a complete rethink of the perpetual problem southern California had with its water supply. Long months of drought would be succeeded by sudden downpours, most of which ran off, uncaptured and unusable. She set to work designing a series of dams which could act as braces for each other, and hold the overflow water during flooding season, allowing for a steadier water supply, and also designed and patented a water control system for mines to allow for the shunting away of debris and reclamation of the water they employed. She took her plans to Congress, arguing that it was the patriotic duty of that institution to render arable as much of the nation as possible, and outlining plan to implement her dam system in the Grand Canyon, and erect a canal to bring the waters of the Colorado River to Southern California. She argued that not only would this strengthen America’s agricultural output by allowing farms to flourish in a zone with prime soil and a naturally sunny climate, but that electricity could be generated from the dams as well, allowing electrification of regions that private power companies had neglected up to then. 

As chairperson of the Whittier Chamber of Commerce Flood Control and Conservation Committee, as a successful businessperson, as a household name on the strength of her marketing abilities, and as a member of one of America’s most prestigious and well-connected families, she directly lobbied President Woodrow Wilson in 1917 to adopt plans to bring regular water flow to Southern California, and spoke to Congress in 1919 arguing for the erection of water storage systems. As a woman of action, she was used to sheer willpower overcoming all problems and producing fast results, but of course Congress does not work that way, and it was not until 1928 that all of her lobbying bore fruit, when a $165 million bill was passed that would construct Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) and the All-American Canal. Construction on the Hoover Dam began in 1931, and completed in 1936, while the All-American Canal, which feeds water into the Imperial Valley, was completed in 1942, and tens of millions of individuals have since depended on those projects for their livelihood.

Unfortunately, Strong did not live to see any of this, as on September 16, 1926, a car accident claimed her life. Today, of course, while concerns about the overtapping of the Colorado River, the ecological impact of the engineering projects of the 1930s, and the political corruption centering around California water policy in the mid-20th Century have caused us to reflect upon the ultimate legacy of that era of large scale hydroengineering, the sincerity of Strong’s vision has never been in doubt. She was a woman who refused to let the death of her husband reduce her to penury. She used the power of her mind and the strength of her will to create a product and a market for it where there was none before, and then channeled her gift of invention to solving one of her region’s most perpetual problems, pushing the government to act for what she perceived to be the benefit of all, leaving behind a legacy of action in agriculture, hydroengineering, women’s rights, education, and business that would have been enough for five separate people but that somehow she was able to contain within the unity of herself, a figure whose stature matched the vastness of the West from which she sprang. 

FURTHER READING:

If ever a figure deserved a full book treatment, it is Harriet Strong, but of course there is not one. In the meantime, we are indebted to Sara Alpern who did the academic legwork of filling in Strong’s story, publishing her findings for the Historical Society of Southern California in 2005 in “Harriet Williams Russell Strong: Inventor and California Businesswoman Extraordinaire” which, if you have JSTOR access, you can look up right this very moment and dig deeper into her incredible story!