Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 484e497496

implicitly focuses on three questions: what kinds of goods weretraded across the strait in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries?Where were the sources, markets, trade routes, and significantpoints of exchange? Who tried to control the routes and sites ofexchange, and how? In addressing these questions, he drawsmainly from journals written aboard ships, with just a few excur-sions to sites of metropolitan power. The work is solidly informedby contributions about the region from other disciplines: historicalgeography (James Gibson), salvage anthropology (Ernest Burch, Jr.),and ethno-history (Dorothy Jean Ray), but Bockstoce’s approach isthat of a traditional historian. He offers a well-organized bookwhose strength is its rich empirical detail, rather than methodo-logical and interpretive discussions.

The book is divided into three parts. The first section outlinesthe context. It opens with a chapter on early voyages in the BeringStrait, particularly the American commercial brigs General SanMartin in 1819 and Pedlar in 1820, and the Russian Blagonamer-enny in 1819. The second chapter is an inventory of marketableanimal products and hunting techniques from the region. Thethird takes readers back to the eighteenth century to outlineRussian expansion through northeast Asia into Alaska, while thefourth chapter sketches the opening of markets in China for fursfrom Alaska.

The middle section is about the British and Russian rivalry forcontrol of the region up to 1847. Chapter five follows Russiantrading vessels around the strait in the 1820s, while the sixthchapter recounts the simultaneous British endeavor to finda northwest passage from the Mackenzie River westward and fromthe Bering Strait east. The next four chapters trace the efforts of theRussian-American and Hudson’s Bay companies to establishtrading posts, so as to capture those portions of the native tradingand exchange circuits that carried furs from Alaska across theBering Strait and closer to markets in China.

The third section carries the story to the end of the nineteenthcentury. Chapter eleven portrays the exchange of local resourcesalong the arctic northwest coast as the British searched for thetragic Franklin expedition. Chapter twelve follows the arrival ofAmerican whaling fleets and their impact on trade after 1848. Thelast three chapters examine changes in the patterns of trade afterRussia sold its claim in 1867. These decades saw the use of alcoholas a key commodity, more opportunities for waged seasonalemployment, and the decline of whale and caribou populations.Moreover, the era saw the substitution of interior trade routes tothe Bering Strait by coastal trading stations and annual merchantships, which effectively interrupted the indigenous circuits of tradethat crossed at the Bering Strait.

The inside covers provide regional maps for quick consultationand showmany of the sites and routes under discussion.Within thetext there are several more maps (some are historical reproduc-tions) and many more monochrome images. There is also anappendix on the introduction of firearms, a seven-page chronology,a glossary, and 25-page index, which together form an attractivepackage for the author’s crisp prose.

In the index, a missing keyword points to a drawback in the textitself: there is no entry for ‘theft’. Yet this is a frequent theme in thejournals that Bockstoce cites; visitors often accuse Eskimos of theft,whereas indigenous voices are given but one opportunity toreverse the charge (p. 336) and little chance to suggest alternativeinterpretations. Granted, this may be due to the nature of historicalevidence, but some reflection on the scholarly challenges of inter-preting motive across cultures would have helped. In its absence,the author’s main theoretical premisee that fur trades were alwaysbased on ‘the search for profit, in whichever way it was defined byits participants’ and that ‘these transfers were almost universallyregarded as advantageous by both parties’ (p. xvi) e becomes

a foregone conclusion and statement of fact, leading Bockstoce toflatten those who people his text into barely two-dimensionalcharacters: Homo economicus with glimmers of culture.

That said, there is simply no comparable source on the history oftrade across the Bering Strait. Moreover, Bockstoce establisheda solid reputation for detailed scholarship long ago. His latest book,Furs and Frontiers in the Far North, lives up to that standard and isa rich and significant contribution to economic history by anexperienced, knowledgeable, and gifted scholar of the region.

Matthew KurtzCarleton University, Canada

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.013

Douglas R. Littlefield, Conflict on the Rio Grande: Water and the Law,1879e1939. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 2008, xivþ 299pages, US$39.95 hardcover.

In the annals of America’s western waters, the Colorado River isoften portrayed as the great-grandfather of conflict, controversy,court cases, and compact negotiations. In this admirable book,however, Douglas Littlefield turns the spotlight on the Rio Grande,where irrigation-dependent communities dealt much earlier withmany of the same issues that later plagued the Colorado basin.From entrenched interstate disagreements to vexing internationalnegotiations and tense legal stand-offs between would-be buildersof dams and canals, circumstances along the Rio Grande’s middlereaches prefigured many of the twentieth-century’s most complexissues in US western water resource management.

Littlefield’s goal with this well researched and written history isto highlight the role of local communities in the management ofresources in ‘an emerging, diverse, and fragmented West’ (p. 15). Inhis view, disputes over water resources on the Rio Grande were‘essentially local problems’ (p. 219) that affected relatively smallnumbers of irrigators and farms in the Mesilla Valley (southernNew Mexico) and the El Paso Valley (northern Mexico and farwestern Texas), although they eventually embroiled one Americanterritory, two American states, and the federal governments of boththe United States and Mexico. Littlefield argues that, in a processrepeated throughout the West, the local roots of water conflictsallowed individual irrigators and small-scale irrigation districts tobecome extremely influential. In a ‘legal and philosophical vacuum’

(p. 14) caused because western water law was in its infancy andProgressive-era scientific management was just emerging as thepreferred method of natural resource management, local commu-nities set the tone for compromises and negotiations that wereenacted in federal legislation and international treaties.

This conclusion is based on impressive archival, legal, anddocumentary research into the US Reclamation Service’s Rio GrandeProject which built Elephant Butte Dam in 1916, and into the RioGrande Compact of 1938/9. The first three chapters describecompeting proposals for dams to manage the Rio Grande’s meagerwaters for increased settlement and irrigation. Landowners in the ElPaso area favored plans for a dam north of El Paso that would bejointly owned and controlled by the USA and Mexico, while NewMexicans in the Mesilla Valley favored a dam built by private spec-ulators at Elephant Butte. Although Congress initially authorizeda rightofway for theprivatedam inNewMexico, theUSgovernmentsoon turned against the project to protect emerging plans for aninternational dam at El Paso. Littlefield analyses the US case againstthe private company, which hinged onwhether the Rio Grande wasa navigable river and therefore subject to the US commerce clause.

Reviews / Journal of Historical Geography 36 (2010) 484e497 497

Over twelve years of litigation hostilities developed between Texanand New Mexican irrigators before the case was finally decided infavor of the US government, thus ending the planned private dam.

In chapters four and five Littlefield shows that the primarysource of hostility over the competing dam proposals was howwater would be apportioned. Although western water law hadalready developed the idea of prior appropriation, there was noclear understanding of how priority could be applied across stateand international borders. With no decisive legal precedent tofollow, both Congress in the 1890s and the newly-created USReclamation Service after 1902 investigated ways to divide the RioGrande in a process influence by local irrigators. Littlefield’sprimary example of local influence on federal action (chapter five)is the decision of the US Reclamation Service to present its proposalfor a government-run dam (by then moved upstream, near toElephant Butte) at the 1904 Irrigation Congress in El Paso whichseemed the ideal venue for influencing local opinion. Theendorsement by American and Mexican delegates of a Rio Grandedam and water apportionment brokered by the ReclamationService ‘was made possible only through a locally achievedcompromise among a large body of water users in the MesillaValley and those in the El Paso Valley on both side of the interna-tional boundary’ (p. 96). National newspapers reported howa permanent solution to an intractable Westernwater problem hadbeen achieved by local delegates and would be put in place bycongressional statute and international treaty.

In chapters six through eight Littlefield chronicles the fraughtprocess of enacting the 1904 compromise, which required signif-icant congressional action. First, the US Congress had to extend theReclamation Act to the El Paso Valley, since Texas did not otherwisequalify for reclamation projects. Second, a treaty had to be agreedwith Mexico to finalize how water would be delivered from theElephant Butte reservoir to Mexican irrigators. Third, Congress hadto authorize a monetary appropriation for the construction ofElephant Butte Dam. In all cases local concerns were central tocongressional decision-making and implementation. Littlefield isperhaps most convincing in chapter seven in which he describeshow local people in El Paso insisted that the US compensateMexico for water wrongfully taken by previous upstream with-

drawals; the final US treaty proposal to Mexico indeed suggesteda water delivery infrastructure that would be free of cost forMexico.

The final two chapters describe how state leaders of Colorado,Texas, and New Mexico sought an interstate compact for the RioGrande that would be explicit about apportioning water among thestates. Littlefield claims again that the temporary agreement (1929)and permanent compact (1938/9) were influenced by local inter-ests, but this claim stems mainly from noting that the principles ofthe 1904 Irrigation Congress were respected and enforced throughthe compact negotiations.

In all, this is a very nice book. It focuses mainly on legal issuesbut also deals nimbly with technical and political decisions, usingcourt cases, legal treatises, congressional legislation, agencyarchives, personal correspondence, and media reports. Littlefieldanalyses the traditionally overlooked but strategically importantRio Grande in depth, and, although this point is perhaps overstatedat times, successfully shows how local concerns and politics influ-enced the development and implementation of what have typicallybeen seen as federal initiatives. The work is relevant for historicalreaders with interests in the American West, irrigation, NewMexico, federalism, and resource governance more broadly.

The disadvantage of focusing on a lesser-known river, is theneed to include copious amounts of detail for readers unfamiliarwith the basic storyline. Littlefield has generally done well withthe challenges this entails, sticking to a well-organized structureand minimizing biographical digressions and dry legal recita-tions. Nonetheless, the unavoidable litany of people, places,events, and statutes sometimes threatens to overwhelm thenarrative thread. For serious water historians, the detailed textand extensive archival citations will be more help thanhindrance. Casual readers, however, may come to less charitableconclusions.

Maria LaneUniversity of New Mexico, USA

doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2010.08.010