NOT A DROP TO DRINK : THE GREAT THIRST: Californians and Water, 1770s-1980s, <i> By Norris Hundley Jr. (University of California Press: $25; 536 pp., illustrated)</i>

California entered the 20th Century with the messianic promise that its water would become the elixir of social justice. As famed irrigation crusader William E. Smythe predicted in his 1900 book, “The Conquest of Arid America,” “civilization would bloom where barbarism has blighted the land.” Thanks to the irrigation ditch, family farms would replace agricultural estates, and the frontier of democratic opportunity celebrated by historian Frederick Turner would reopen once again after having been closed since the end of the Gold Rush by overbearing land and railroad monopolies.

Now, toward century’s end, arid America has been systematically conquered, but with results not forseen by Smythe. To appreciate the staggering physical transformations involved, it is only necessary to compare a current map of California with one published in Smythe’s time. In 1900, the largest inland body of water in the state was Lake Tulare, the Salton Sea was mere sand and most rivers flowed from the Sierra to the Delta. Today, Lake Tulare is a vast cotton field, the Salton Sea (a mishap of irrigation) is the largest body of water, and all major rivers except the Eel flow, at least in part, to the swimming pools and lawns of Southern California.

This Promethean reshaping of the state’s hydrography has conjured cities out of the desert and put California fruit on the tables of the world, but it has not created a more egalitarian, let alone Jeffersonian, society. Exactly what kind of society it has created--sustainable industrial agriculture or doomed hydraulic “barbarism”--is the question at the very core of Norris Hundley’s magnificent new history of California’s water conquistadors.

“The Great Thirst” is the first comprehensive account of California water from the Edenic dream-time of the aboriginal population to the Great Drought of the early 1990s. As Hundley repeatedly and generously acknowledges, his work stands on the shoulders of a remarkable generation of water historians and critics: William Kahrl, Donald Worster, Robert Gottlieb, Donald Pisani, Abraham Hoffman, Robert Kelley and Marc Reisner. Their recent, path-breaking histories of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Metropolitan Water District and so on--are warp and woof for Hundley’s loom.

Unlike some of his colleagues, however, Hundley eschews conceptual grandiosity. Indeed, he politely distances himself from Donald Worster’s enthusiasm (in “Rivers of Empire”) for “hydraulic determinism”: the notion, first advanced by renegade Marxist Karl Wittfogel in the 1920s, that large-scale irrigation inevitably creates “Oriental despotism.”

If, as William Kahrl claims, California has continuously “invented itself with water,” Hundley argues that it has not occurred through the agency of any single will, but rather through the brutal clash of diverse material interests. In short, there is no primordial “water conspiracy.”

Hundley’s story begins with the raising of the Bear Flag, when California’s Anglos replaced Spain and Mexico’s communitarian water customs with notions of private appropriation derived by pathetic fallacy from the water-rich East.

Because Gold Rush California did briefly approximate a Jacksonian utopia--a Republic of Fortune unconstrained by tradition or Whig oligarchy--the anarchy of competition soon led to both monopolies and the cataclysmic exploitation of nature. Hydraulic-mining companies were able to take possession of the entire Mother Lode by establishing corporate control over the streams in the late 1850s. For the next quarter-century their behemoth water cannons blasted away entire hillsides and forests, deluging mud and debris upon the hapless farmers of the Central Valley.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court finally stopped this environmental havoc in 1880, a new round of water warfare promptly broke out between rival gangs of land monopolists in the Central Valley. The generation-long legal battle between the “Riparians” and the “Appropriators”--each side falsely posing as the ally of the homesteader--filled a million pages of the legal record without fundamentally resolving the legal status of California’s water resources.

As Hundley points out, we are haunted to this very day by the juridical schizophrenia of the 19th Century: Is water a public resource or private commodity? Is it property defined by prior appropriation or strictly by ownership of riparian land?

The great depression that struck California in 1883 incited new agitation for a more equitable distribution of land and water in California. The irrigation crusade launched by Smythe and others was envisioned as a renewal of the rural middle class, the crucial social ballast in a state increasingly polarized between the capitalist open shop and an angry labor movement. Ironically, the major triumph of Western irrigation reformers--the formation of the federal Reclamation Service in 1902--also proved to be their ultimate undoing. Hundley shows in vivid detail how water-hungry cities, in unholy alliance with big agriculture, “captured” the Reclamation Service and subverted agrarian reform.

Los Angeles, of course, stands in the storm center of this 20th-Century melodrama. Most of us know some version of the real story behind “Chinatown.” but few realize that in confiscating the water of the Owens Valley to remove the natural constraints on the city’s expansion (thus turning suburban dirt into gold), the city destroyed the society of virtuous family farmers that Smythe had seen as a model for the new West. Hundley expands on this history by showing how the same calculus of self-interest led Los Angeles to form a common front with the latifundia, or large farms, of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys.

In its relentless pursuit of water from the Colorado Basin and Northern California, urban Southern California became beholden to a system of agribusiness built on on water subsidies and pauperized labor. City fathers and growers lobbied side by side for the great artificial rivers--the Colorado Aqueduct, the All-American Canal and the Central Valley Project--that shifted the water balance from north to south. What Hundley terms “Hydraulic Society Triumphant” reached its haughty crescendo with the State Water Project in the 1960s. Boasting that the project would be “a monument to me,” liberal Governor Pat Brown steamrolled Northern opposition with a grand alliance of Southern California cities and San Joaquin Valley farms.

The State Water Project, L.A. voters were told, would relieve the dangerous overpumping of wells in the Valley and free Southern California once and for all from undue dependence on the Colorado River. In fact, the ground-water drought has steadily worsened, while the Southland water supply has become more precarious than ever. Rather than making its way into the city, state water has been used primarily to open new farmlands in desiccated Kern and Tulare Counties. A handful of giant landowners, including the Tejon Ranch subsidiary of Times-Mirror, the company that owns this newspaper, have been the main beneficiaries.

By 1980, four low-value, water-intensive crops--rice, alfalfa, cotton and irrigated pasture, which together constitute less than 1% of the state’s economy--were consuming more than a third of California’s water. At the same time, it was becoming clearer that intractable salinity problems would eventually force the abandonment of much of the farmland in the Imperial and western San Joaquin valleys. Unruffled corporate growers, meanwhile, were preparing for their reincarnation as “water farmers,” selling their state water allotments to desperate Southland cities. (The current Alice-in-Wonderland structure of federal and state subsidies allows an acre-foot of untreated water that costs the Metropolitan Water District $233 to be purchased by some farmers for a mere $2.50.)

Norris Hundley is the kind of gentle polemicist who doesn’t actually polemicize, but the final pages of “The Great Thirst” are inexorable: Californians no longer can afford to play God with the Western waterscape simply to sustain a handful of outrageously greedy cotton planters, or to extend Los Angeles’ prodigal suburbs endlessly into the Mojave. We have reached a crisis that can only be resolved by a combination of agrarian reform, permanent urban water conservation and the democratization of water-resource management. Our water bill is long overdue.