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Beginning around 300 B.C., the Hohokam practiced irrigated agriculture in the Salt River Valley of Arizona. Hohokam farmers dug hundreds of miles of canals, some as much as 30 feet wide and 10 feet deep – a remarkable accomplishment achieved with only hand tools and human labor in this land of extremes.

From its headwaters high in Rocky Mountain National Park to its mouth in the Gulf of California, the Colorado River cuts through 1,450 miles of mountains and valleys, forest and desert. Before it was dammed, the Colorado was a mighty river, gouging canyons and swelling to a torrent when it was angry.

Black and On March 18, 1911, President Theodore Roosevelt traveled by automobile parade through the rugged Arizona terrain to dedicate Roosevelt Dam. A crowd of nearly 1,000 followed in the dust, eager to witness their “Teddy” dedicate the great dam, built to store water that would, in time, transform desert soil into fertile farmland and little Phoenix into an urban center.

What you see is not what you get at Parker Dam, known as “the deepest dam in the world.” Engineers, digging for bedrock on which to build, had to excavate so far beneath the bed of the Colorado River that 73 percent of Parker Dam’s 320-foot structural height is not visible.

Northern California’s Shasta Dam is a keystone of the Bureau of Reclamation’s huge Central Valley Project, which involves 35 of California's counties and two major watersheds: those of the Sacramento River on the north and the San Joaquin River on the south. Together, these watersheds extend for nearly 500 miles, feeding the heart of California’s long, flat Central Valley, one of the most fertile and productive garden spots in the world.

Freelan Oscar (F. O.) Stanley made a career putting water to work. Famous for co-inventing the steam-powered Stanley Steamer auto in 1897, he employed water yet again in 1909 to build a hydroelectric powerplant on the Fall River in Estes Park, Colorado.

The sun peaked at midday on June 10, 1944, as excavation crews working 3,000 feet beneath Rocky Mountain National Park saw a different light at the end of their tunnel. Four years had elapsed since they began digging the 9-foot tall channel—the linchpin of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado-Big Thompson Project.

The longest irrigation tunnel in the world when it was dedicated in 1909, Colorado’s Gunnison Tunnel was an engineering marvel. The 5.8-mile tunnel cut right through the sheer cliffs of the famed Black Canyon, taking water from the Gunnison River and funneling it to the semiarid Uncompahgre Valley to the west.

At 456 feet high, Anderson Ranch Dam was the highest embankment dam in the world when it was completed on Idaho’s Boise River in 1951. That happy day was slow in coming because builders found themselves in the middle of a World War II labor shortage and questions about the nation’s racial exclusions.

Forty miles east of Boise, near tiny Idaho City, Idaho, population 476, two streams come together to form the main branch of the Boise River. The river originates high in the Sawtooth Range of the Rocky Mountains and flows southwest into a valley so fertile that it is considered one of the best farming regions in the American West. But it was gold, not Idaho potatoes, that brought early American settlement to the Boise River Basin.