Water for Tomorrow
Any hope for the Plains' future rests in the wisdom to leave some liquid life.

I wonder if, in long bygone days, the rugged types wielding the Sharps big fifties ever gave even a glimmer of thought, as they lined up the peep sights on oblivious quarry, cocked the hammer, and took up the slack on the set trigger, that they were erasing a resource from the Earth as they blasted the last of the Southern Plains buffalo herd into oblivion?

In the midst of rugged frontier make-a-buck and politically expedient reality, I rather doubt that they gave the issue more than passing consideration. Surely it must have been obvious to the buffalo blasters, who took note of the slightest change in the wind when lining up their shots, that there were fewer and fewer shaggies to be found on the Plains as the reports from the Sharps rolled like constant thunder and the hide stacks piled high.

A few dollars per hide probably seemed to shooters and skinners, freighters, and eventually tanners and marketers, like maximum return from a rapidly depleting resource. The pressing issue was to get out there on the Plains and get all you could as quickly as you could, before someone else beat you to it, then get out, preferably with scalp intact, before Comanches and Kiowa, irate at the intrusion and the incomprehensible waste, exacted a trespass fee. The "politically correct" thinking of that time was that taking out the buffalo opened the way for the Plains to evolve to new ownership and greater usefulness in the vein of manifest destiny.

It is a haunting historical fact that some of the last remnant buffalo in this region were killed in the vicinity of the Running Water Draw in Castro County. As things have evolved, today we have neither buffalo, nor flowing spring water on the Running Water Draw that once harbored both.

I couldn't help thinking about how the buffalo were ill-used, but used up just the same, and correlating that sad chapter to water while attending an irrigation conference in

Before I go farther, I will acknowledge a caveat by the great Western historical novelist Elmer Kelton, who warns it is unfair to judge the acts of people in historic times by the standards of our own era.

Neither do I regard irrigation agriculture as some overwhelming evil. Without it, our own region could not have known the progress and prosperity it has experienced through the decades. Many irrigation conference speakers were on target with their admonitions about needing to be aware of exactly how much water is being used, and the moral requisite to be as efficient as possible in utilizing the remnant water of the Ogallala aquifer.

Speakers outlined how irrigation use, once measured in multiple acre feet per year to water single crops, has been pared to a single acre foot or even fewer inches per season. Getting the maximum return for every acre inch of water is the gold standard.

Still, it stung the ears to hear an individual outlining the steep decline in water well production in his farming area-1,000 gallons a minute, down to 600 gallons, off to a couple hundred, then sharply down to 20, with the need to connect a string of wells together to collect enough water to run a single sprinkler.

Yet, the speaker maintained that, even at a trickle level, irrigation should continue until there is simply no water left for any practical irrigation use. At that point, the speaker said, the land will once again evolve to its next use-whatever that might be. Manifest destiny?

I thought of water rights, piled up like so many dried buffalo hides, sold and packed off to buyers far removed from where the water lives. One already wealthy shooter, after more dollars still, exploiting and decimating a declining priceless resource that really belongs to all.

The Plains Indians believed that the buffalo came out of the earth, and when they disappeared, they had gone back into it. Their hope was to coax their larder and their way of life once more from the earth.

Our life, too, on this same Plains, comes out of the earth, and its water-bearing sands. Any hope for the future rests in the wisdom to leave something for tomorrow.

This piece appeared in the column "On the Turnrow" by Jim Steiert in the February, 2008 edition of the Co-Op Connection, the monthly newsletter of West Texas Rural Telephone Cooperative at Hereford, Texas

Jim Steiert grew up on an irrigated farm near Hart, in the Texas Panhandle. An award winning conservationist, farm and outdoor journalist, he serves as the environmental representative on the Llano Estacado (Region O) Regional Water Management Planning Group.