Fed on promises: The Indian and White struggle for reclamation on the Colorado River Indian Reservation

This comparative community study traces the efforts of Indians, non-Indians, and federal officials to develop agriculture on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The local economy of the Mohave and Chemehuevi Indian community and the non-Indian community of Parker grew in the context of two federal land policies designed to promote growth in the Far West, allotment and reclamation. Using United States Bureau of Indian Affairs, General Land Office, and Bureau of Census records as well as newspapers and other public and private chronicles, this study reveals how progressive programs encouraged non-Indian settlement of arid Indian lands while at the same time intermittently fostering Indian development of the same resources. Federal ambitions to reclaim desert lands bordering the lower Colorado River led to both the creation of Parker and the allotment of irrigated Indian homesteads on the reservation.;The economic aspirations of reservation residents grew out of the expectation of prosperity from programs which promised more than they delivered. Indian allottees received a long-awaited irrigation system but struggled with the high capital costs of modern desert farming as non-Indians, led to believe they would gain access to Indian lands, were denied possession of the reservation. Ultimately, limited congressional aid for western reclamation forced Indian farmers and lessors and non-Indian residents and lessees to depend more on each other than on federal support.