As early as 2,000 years ago, the Anasazi were known to build dams and sophisticated irrigation systems on tributaries of the San Juan River to irrigate their crops. During the initial period of European settlement in the 1800s, small private dams were built to supply water to farms and mining operations, and to generate hydroelectricity (an early hydro project was the Tacoma power station, built on the Animas River in 1905.) In 1901, the Turley survey concluded that the San Juan River contained enough water to irrigate up to , but due to the high cost of delivering water to desert lands, neither private investors nor the federal government were willing to fund such large projects. The U.S. Reclamation Service (now the Bureau of Reclamation) conducted surveys of dam sites on the lower San Juan River in 1914, as part of the Boulder Canyon Project (the so-called "Bluff reservoir" was never built, after engineers determined that the high silt load of the lower San Juan would make a storage reservoir here useless within a short time). By the 1920s – with the oil boom spurring rapid growth in the Farmington area and food shortages impacting the Navajo Nation – the federal government recognized the need for a multi-purpose dam project on the upper San Juan River, which would later become Navajo Dam.