Dry & High

To Tin Pan Alley, the Rio Grande is a sparkling, star-filled stream that incites cowboys and senoritas to romance. Normally, the river is a chocolate-colored ditch, treacherous with potholes where many an unwary wetback has drowned. It swirls between banks of cactus and mesquite down 1,800 miles of rich, irrigated farmland to the Gulf of Mexico. Last week most of the lower Rio Grande, from Laredo (pop. 51,910) to its mouth at the southernmost tip of Texas, was a dry arroyo; at Laredo, the river ran dry for the first time since the International Water Commission began keeping records 52 years ago. Goats pattered across the stony bed to the Mexican side; Mexican police fired warning shots to head off straggling cattle which tried to cross to the U.S. bank.*

The Rio Grande's basic trouble is a prolonged, three-year drought along its vast watershed, on the east side of the Rockies. Lower valley residents,unable to do much about the weather, angrily blamed upstream dams and irrigation pumpers. Downstream pumping for irrigation has been rationed for 15 months; the crops, livelihood of 670,000 Texans and Mexicans, are fast withering away. This week upstream farmers agreed to cut down on pumping, and a thin trickle of water appeared at Laredo. But it didn't change things much. "The valley," says Brownsville Judge Oscar Dancy, "has its back to the wall. People will move away if we don't get water."

In Montana, the rising Missouri River and its tributaries oozed through levees, inundated 16 towns, caused $4,000,000 damages, forced 3,000 inhabitants to run for the hills. As the crest, nurtured by more than a week of rain, flowed southeastward, apprehensive citizens prepared for the worst.

* A new outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease last fortnight forced the U.S. to restore the ban on Mexican cattle.

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