Selected Articles & Publications

“Measuring Expertise: Ralph Parshall and Watershed Management, 1920-1940,” in The Greater Plains: Rethinking a Region’s Environmental Histories, edited by Kathleen Brosnan and Brian Frehner (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).

James Michener once characterized the South Platte River as “a sad, bewildered nothing…a useless irritation.” The river’s paltry 1.6 million annual acre feet of unreliable output seems to justify that characterization. Yet, by the 1910s, farmers had tapped every drop of South Platte irrigation water – whether from natural flow, reservoir storage, or return flow – to support a thriving agriculture headlined by sugar beets, sheep, and cattle. Still, farmers and newcomers demanded more water.  Meeting such demands required expertise. They required engineering.

I argue that, to explain irrigation in arid landscapes such as those watered by the South Platte, we must place water engineers and water managers at the heart of our stories. At the heart of my story is Ralph Parshall, an engineer working for both Colorado Agricultural College and the USDA during the 1920s and 1930s. Parshall’s seminal achievement was the development of a flume capable of reducing errors in water measurement by as much as 30%. Promoting the new flume, Parshall spoke the language of democratic access, arguing that his flume would enable junior irrigators to gain a more consistent supply of water, while opening up former dryland farms to irrigation, enabling them to raise more lucrative crops. Parshall’s influence was further displayed when he wrote the primary economic analysis in support of the Colorado-Big Thompson Project (C-BT). A massive, Depression-era water project, built by the Bureau of Reclamation, the C-BT diverted water from the headwaters of the Colorado River through a tunnel under the peak of Rocky Mountain National Park, adding it to the canals and ditches of Northern Colorado water users.

As my research shows, water manipulation on the South Platte Watershed from the 1910s through the 1930s can largely be explained within the tensions between engineered efficiency and the prerogatives of water managers. 

Sugar State: Industry, Science, and the Nation in Colorado’s Sugar Beet Fields. Western Historical Quarterly 48 (Winter 2017): 367–391. doi: 10.1093/whq/whx004. Available from: https://academic.oup.com/whq/issue/48/4

During the first half of the twentieth century, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists played a significant role in the development of the beet sugar industry in Colorado and throughout the West. Organized around a mandate to increase the size, scope, and efficiency of the beet sugar industry, scientists developed research agendas that mapped onto the needs of industry. To achieve relevance, they responded to requests from Colorado beet sugar companies to solve cultivation quandaries. As the scope of USDA research grew alongside expanding budgets, state-sponsored researchers collaborated with beet sugar refiners, manufacturers of agricultural chemicals and machinery, and researchers at land grant colleges. However, despite growing influence throughout the period under analysis, state power in the sugar beet fields was characterized more by decentralization and diffusion than centralized strength. State-sponsored scientists within both the USDA and Colorado Agricultural College, as well as researchers within the beet sugar industry frequently moved in and out of one another’s employ, shared research space, and conducted joint projects. However, regardless of research project, the Western beet sugar industry supplied the agenda for state-supported science to follow. By examining the role of state-sponsored science in the beet sugar industry of Colorado and the West, this article shows that federal power in the West rose to the degree that it was willing to supply the research needs of industry.

Fences, Conservation, and Tourism: A History of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park. University of Wyoming National Park Service Research Center Annual Report: Vol. 35, Article 7 (2012). Available from: https://repository.uwyo.edu/uwnpsrc_reports/vol35/iss1/7

Amidst current debates over whether the executive branch has power to reduce or eliminate national monuments, and questions regarding how public lands should be managed, this article offers historical perspective. In 1943, Franklin Delano Roosevelt employed the Antiquities Act of 1906 to declare a national monument in the Teton Mountains of Wyoming. This inspired a public battle between conservationists, local ranchers, state lawmakers, tourists, and the federal government over how the land should be used. Amidst all of the bluster, Laurance Rockefeller - whose family secretly bought and then donated much of the land to the Monument - and other prominent conservationists such as Fairfield Osborn and Horace Albright proposed and constructed the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park on Rockefeller lands. The Wildlife Park lured tourists to viewing sites and educational kiosks where they could gawk at and learn about the region’s famed wildlife. While supporters argued that exposure and education would translate into a growing conservationist ethic, principled opponents such as Olaus Murie decried the Wildlife Park, calling it a ‘roadside zoo.’ Murie, the former manager of the nearby National Elk Refuge, argued that the Wildlife Park trivialized nature by supporting access without effort. Through an examination of the Jackson Hole Wildlife Park, this article unpacks the conflicted and evolving ideas about conservation and public lands in the middle of the twentieth century that would inform dialogue in the ensuing decades. Those ideas remain relevant today.

Winter on the Margins: Promoting Flagstaff as a Winter Playground. Journal of Arizona History 52 (Spring 2011): 53-72.

Snow in Flagstaff has been constructed to fit cultural ideas about winter.  It has alternately been conceived of as an opportunity for play, a vehicle to establish the city’s winter identity, and as refuse, since it impedes transportation on streets.  City boosters have promoted Flagstaff’s snowy assets to the desert dwellers of Arizona, while also attempting to convince them that roads will be clear.  This construction has proved problematic since Flagstaff’s semi-arid climate renders snowstorms somewhat erratic, and a mild, sunny climate tends to melt the white stuff rapidly.  As a result, the cultural construction of snow in Flagstaff has often been at odds with the natural one. This article unpacks the cultural and environmental conflicts inherent in Flagstaff’s efforts to establish a winter identity through an examination of winter festivals, ski resort development, and an audacious and naïve bid for the 1960 Winter Olympics.

Making Machines of Animals: The International Livestock Exposition, by Neal A. Knapp, Agricultural History 98 (Fall 2024). 

The Washington Apple: Orchards and the Development of Industrial Agriculture, by Amanda Van Lanen, Western Historical Quarterly 53 (Spring 2024): 73.  

The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession and the Colorado Plateau, by Erika Marie Bsumek, Mormon Studies Review 11 (2024): 147. 

Salinas: A History of Race and Resilience in an Agricultural City, by Carol Lynn McKibben, H-Net Reviews, (December 2022): Available from: https://networks.h-net.org/node/19397/reviews/11980105/weeks-mckibben-salinas-history-race-and-resilience-agricultural-city

Water and Agriculture in Colorado and the American West: First in Line for the Rio Grande, by David Stiller, Environmental History 27 (October 2022): 832-834.

A Land Made from Water: Appropriation and the Evolution of Colorado’s Landscape, Ditches, and Water Institutions, by Robert Crifasi, Environmental History Quarterly 22 (July 2017): 540.

Persistent Progressives: The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, by John F. Freeman, Agricultural History 91 (Fall 2017): 603.

Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, by Michael W. Childers, Environmental History Quarterly 18 (July 2013): 644.

“COVID-19 and Concentrated Animal Feeding in Historical Perspective,” Agricultural History Society, August 2020, available from https://www.aghistorysociety.org/news/michael-weeks-covid-19-and-concentrated-animal-feeding-in-historical-perspective

“Irrigation in Colorado,” in Colorado Encyclopedia, last modified 3 February 2017, http://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/irrigation-colorado.

“Ralph Parshall and Watershed Engineering,” available from poudreheritage.org, Internet.