History of Water in Utah: "The Most Complicated Plumbing System..." (Season 3, Ep. 1)

**Brad Westwood** (0:09)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece. This is a podcast about Utah's history, produced by the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. I'm Brad Westwood, Senior Public Historian. My job is to make the very best, the most interesting, the most accurate history of Utah accessible to the widest audience. If there's one place, one podcast to get your Utah history fix, I hope this is the place.
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I have two guests with me today, Megan van Frank and Greg Smoak. Megan is from the Utah Humanities where she serves as the Director of Center for Community Heritage. Megan is also one of Utah's major influencers in the world of museums. My second guest is Historian Gregory E. Smoak who is Director of the American West Center and Associate Professor in the Department of History, both from the University of Utah. Good morning, Megan, and good morning, Greg. How are you?

**Megan van Frank** (1:21)
Hello.

**Gregory E. Smoak** (1:22)
Good morning, Brad. Good to be here.

**Brad Westwood** (1:24)
So good to have you both. Both of my guests have impressive professional careers in history and in the humanities, in writing, in creative exhibits and presentations, in developing publicly accessible history, and really so much more. We will link additional biographical information for both Megan and Greg in the show notes. Today we're talking about the history of water in Utah, which brings to mind something a friend Harold Mitchell, a Parowan rancher, civil engineer, lawyer, and adjunct professor told me. He was standing in an overlook somewhere on the Wasatch Front with the chair of Brigham Young University's Civil Engineering Department, a gentleman by the name of Rollin Hotchkiss. When Hotchkiss paused in their conversation and he said to my friend, Utah has the most complicated plumbing system of any place I know.
When Harold related this story to me, I thought of Rube Goldberg's machines. You know, the comical drawings that reveal a series of interconnected chain reactions of assemblies of ropes, bells, whistles and gadgets built to satisfy the otherwise simple need. In this case, the Rube Goldberg machine is a massive and complex series of diversions, dams, hundreds of miles of tunnels, pumps, aqueducts, most underground and some above ground, bringing water for agriculture and development, which would otherwise not exist in this semi-arid environment. And so as I thought about my friend's comment, and as I was preparing for this Speak Your Piece, I thought this is a big subject, and we really need to talk for a while about this and really understand it as well as we possibly can.
Megan and Greg have joined me on Speak Your Piece to discuss the Utah Humanities Project entitled Think Water Utah, a statewide collaboration and conversation on the critical topic of water, our primary universal life-giving resource of absolute immeasurable importance to Utah and to us in the West and in the US and the entire big ball we call Earth.
Now, Utah Humanities Think Water Utah includes the touring of two exhibits. First is Water Ways and the second is H2O Today. What's the difference? Tell us a little bit about what those exhibits are about, Megan.

**Megan van Frank** (3:56)
Sure. So, Water Ways and H2O Today are exhibitions that we have from the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. And so both of them are derived from a large national, in fact international, exhibition that was done years ago with the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian and a whole bunch of international partners.
So it is this worldwide kind of like Hello People, Water's important exhibition that the Smithsonian adapted for its museums. And then the Traveling Exhibition Service tends to take some of the more important or adaptable exhibitions from its own suite of shows and adapt them to travel around the country. And so Water Ways is really focusing on the American water story, and H2O Today is about the global water story. But H2O Today here in Utah, and I'm sure we'll get into this, we adapted with Greg's help to insert a lot of Utah content.
So it's a different version here in Utah and it's quite relevant.

**Brad Westwood** (5:12)
We'll let you know where these exhibits will be in Utah in our show notes. We will also be talking about the rich gathering of digital materials associated with this programming.
For now, I want to ask you to type into your browser or write down the following, Think Water Utah and Utah Humanities. These keywords will get you to Utah's humanities links that includes calendars of events, locations, an amazing amount of evidence-based, interesting science, natural history and Utah history. Peppered by natural history and science, we will be discussing Greg Smoak's remarkable historical essay for Think Water Utah entitled Utah Water Ways, which is in my view the best, most up-to-date primer only 40 pages long that I have ever read regarding the history of water in Utah and the dire issues before us regarding water and life in Utah. The essay includes dozens of images, graphs, scores of historical sources for you to pursue if you want to dig deeper into reliable evidence-based history. I need to also let you know that waterways in H2O today are products of the Smithsonian Institution's Traveling Exhibit Services or CITES. The exhibit waterway is part of the Smithsonian Museum's Main Street Program, which adapts, as was mentioned earlier by Megan, adapts exhibits specifically for small organizations in rural Utah. These Smithsonian-based public history programs are combined with, as mentioned by Megan, Utah-related history by Utah Humanities and its partners. And this is a big effort with a lot of partners and a lot of people involved.