Product Description

For nearly a century, the Indians on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming have been battling their white farmer neighbors over the rights to the Wind River. What You See in Clear Water tells the story of this epic struggle, shedding light on the ongoing conflict over water rights in the American West, one of the most divisive and essential issues in America today.

While lawyers argued this landmark case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Geoffrey O’Gara walked the banks of the river with the farmers, ranchers, biologists, and tribal elders who knew it intimately. Reading his account, we come to know the impoverished Shoshone and Arapaho tribes living on the Wind River Reservation, who believe that by treaty they control the water within the reservation. We also meet the farmers who have struggled for decades to scratch a living from the arid soil, and who want to divert the river water to irrigate their lands. O’Gara’s empathetic portrayal of life in the West today, the historical texture he brings to the land and its inhabitants, and the common humanity he finds between hostile neighbors on opposite sides of the river make What You See in Clear Water an unusually rich and rewarding book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1735403 in Books
• Published on: 2002-08-13
• Released on: 2002-08-13
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 7.95" h x .65" w x 5.20" l, .70 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Amazon.com
Seventeen years ago, journalist Geoffrey O'Gara left Washington, D.C., for northwest-central Wyoming to take a job covering environmental and resource issues concerning the Rocky Mountain region. He settled on the outskirts of the Wind River Indian Reservation, and over the years became deeply attached to the land, its people, and the story of "two cultures that have been arguing for 150 years over the same beloved country, and trying to find a way to share it."

What You See in Clear Water traces the history of the reservation from its beginnings, when the Shoshone Indians signed a treaty entitling them to a region encompassing some 44 million acres, to the present, when a century and a half of cuts and revisions have reduced the reservation to 5 percent of its original size. The Shoshones have been compelled to share what remains with their traditional enemies, the Arapahos, and today, both peoples grapple with the familiar hardships of reservation life: poverty, high suicide rates, persistent health issues, and the hostility and indifference of their non-Indian neighbors. For the past two decades, much of that hostility has centered on a highly charged clash between the Indians and whites over water rights to the river that runs through the reservation.

Although O'Gara's narrative is anchored by the ongoing debate over who will decide the fate of the Wind River--and the lives of the people who depend on it--the story deftly and compassionately illuminates the larger conflict that has persisted ever since the European settlers came to the Americas. "It is the unfinished struggle between Native Americans and the whites who surround and threaten to subsume them--once a military conflict, now a cultural war, complicated after all these years by the fact that neighbors, even antagonistic neighbors, know one another in intimate and sometimes affectionate ways." And it is O'Gara's deep concern and abiding affection for the Wind River's inhabitants that give his book its power and its grace. --Svenja Soldovieri

From Booklist
Journalist O'Gara turns to his home ground, the Wind River Range of Wyoming, for this compelling collage of history, reportage, economics, and science. By chronicling the struggle for the resources on and around the Wind River Indian Reservation, centering on the controversy over the water and irrigation rights from the Wind River itself, O'Gara expertly presents the recent history of the American West in microcosm. We learn about past and present heroes of the Shoshone and Arapaho tribes who inhabit the reservation, about the pioneer farmers and their descendents who came to Wyoming to try and scrape a living from the arid land, and about the experts in geology, hydrology, and natural resources law on each side of the issue. Although sections on water and water rights might seem beyond the average reader, O'Gara writes so clearly that they are not. His portraits of the men and women caught up in this saga over the last hundred years make the book strangely moving, while his descriptions of the Wyoming rivers and mountains are the next best thing to being there. Greg Garrett
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Review
“A clear-eyed portrait of Westerners trying to pull a living from a difficult land” -- Outside

“A rare blend of fact and emotion that will inform and move readers.” —Dallas Morning News

“O’Gara is a lyrical writer when sketching pictures of the land. He is fair and evenhanded . . . [and] lets his characters have their say.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A terrific book by a writer patient and sympathetic enough to air all the complex issues, the triumphs and failures, without judging anybody” -- William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky