Accessibility Tools

The Carey Act and Conservation in Colorado

by Gerald C. Morton

Hardcover Price $53.00
Ebook Price $41.00
30-day ebook rental price $20.50

Buy Now


“Effective and engaging. Morton contributes a significant narrative in the history of the American West by analyzing a detailed but previously unseen story of the tug and pull between settlers’ dreams of independence and success and the realities of politics and finance. This book is a microcosm study of a much larger story outlined in works about American expansion, agrarian myth, democracy, capitalism versus populism, and works on the history of western reclamation.”
—April Summitt, La Sierra University
 

The Carey Act and Conservation in Colorado is an environmental history of the endless missteps and unforeseen consequences that characterized Colorado’s participation in the Carey Act—an 1894 federal law that granted one million acres of desert-classified public land to each western state for private irrigation development and settlement. In this inclusive narrative, author Gerald Morton reveals how this obscure law affected thirty-four of Colorado’s most arid stretches of landscape.

Morton contextualizes the Carey Act’s significance in Colorado through a study of the Two Buttes and Muddy Creek projects in the state’s southeastern corner—tragic examples of the disconnect among developers seeking windfall profits in the face of financial rollercoasters, the challenge of reclaiming remote sagebrush country, and settlers seeking viable livelihoods that eventually led conservationists to reimagine the failures as public wildlife refuges. A collision of values between developers and settlers lay at the center of those wildlife habitat conservation efforts, forcing people to rethink their relationship with the land and ephemeral streams—an awareness that correlated with the advent of modern ecology.

The Carey Act and Conservation in Colorado is the untold story of the manipulation of nature and the reconceived use of land for public wildlife areas on the southern plains of the American West. Offering original research on arid lands policy, federal and state agency oversight, irrigation bond financing, heartbroken settlers’ grievances, individual developers’ motives, and the rise of wildlife conservation, this compelling tale of misfortune will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in conservationist and environmental history in the American West.

 

Gerald C. Morton is an independent historian and fifth-generation Coloradan. A former teacher and exhibits curator for the Colorado Historical Society (now History Colorado), he writes about multigenerational Colorado businesses and the environmental history of the American West.

University Press of Colorado Logo

Details

  • Hardcover Price: $53.00
  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-64642-648-5
  • Ebook Price: $41.00
  • 30-day ebook rental price: $20.50
  • EISBN: 978-1-64642-649-2
  • Publication Month: October
  • Publication Year: 2024
  • Pages: 284
  • Illustrations: 28
  • Discount Type: Short
  • Author: by Gerald C. Morton
  • ECommerce Code: 978-1-64642-648-5
  • Get Permissions: Get Permission

Related Titles

Browse Related Titles Tagged Under:

University Press of Colorado University of Alaska Press Utah State University Press University of Wyoming Press