Northwest Passage
The Great Columbia River
by William Dietrich
About
the book
Chapter One
The Picnic in the Coulee
When seen from the reservoir it rises from, Steamboat Rock does indeed appear
to be steaming toward Grand Coulee Dam. Flat and elongated, the basalt mesa
looks like a giant sternwheeler superstructure on a deck of sagebrush desert.
The deck, in turn, seems to be floating on top of Banks Lake, which fills about
half of that fifty-mile-long geologic scar across central Washington State known
as the Grand Coulee. It is the rock's ruddy summit, however, not the artificial
lake, that provides the best vantage point to begin an understanding of the
Columbia River's history. There one can see the geographic logic of an idea that
utterly changed the Pacific Northwest.
The mesa is the kind of attention-getting monolith that almost demands to be
climbed to its hurricane deck, but instead of a boat stair there is a steep,
crumbling trail up a draw in the volcanic cliffs to the eight-hundred-foot-high
plateau on top. This table is about a square mile in area. Paths wind away
through bunch grass to its abrupt cliffs, giving grand views of the Coulee, the
reservoir, the blue bluffs of the distant Okanogan Highlands, and in spring a
pencil line of green wheat along the Coulee's rim.
I cannot see the Columbia at all. The river and its famous dam are ten miles
to the north, tucked down in a canyon more than a thousand feet below me. Only
silver power pylons on the Coulee horizon, looking like the stiff stick figures
of native American petroglyphs, point to where generators hum. The river used to
flow around this point, however. Steamboat Rock is a stubbornly uneroded piece
of volcanic plateau that cleaved the Columbia in two, back when the river was an
Ice Age torrent excavating the Grand Coulee. After the glaciers retreated and
the prehistoric riverbed went dry, the rock sat for ten thousand years like a
sternwheeler grounded by a departed tide, silent and evocative as an old wreck.
Now it crowns a peninsula in a lake named for the man who oversaw construction
of Grand Coulee Dam, a reservoir which once more has filled the old river
channel with water.
The view seems vaguely disorienting. Steamboat Rock is in the Evergreen
State, but Grand Coulee is mostly treeless and raw in the rain shadow of the
Cascade Mountains. The view is of rock ramparts and wrung-out sky. A state park
at the rock's base uses sprinklers to maintain an oasis of lawn with a
metronomic whick-whick that keeps time with the insects, the green only
emphasizing the long reach of the surrounding desert. I am looking at a Pacific
Northwest that is a rusty brown, a desert canyon with a floor of water.
Grand Coulee roughly marks the northernmost extent of that region of desert
and basin that occupies most of the West between the Pacific coast ranges and
the Rocky Mountains. From where I am standing, this arid domain runs for two
thousand miles south into central Mexico. I drove this long dryness once when
coming out of the Yucatan, and was at first awed and then bored and finally just
anxiously impatient by the endless miles of sage and cactus and sunburnt
mountains, the hard peaks rising like islands from evaporated seas. When I
finally turned west from this sere monotony I pierced the Cascades where the
Columbia does and ran into a cool marine storm in its Gorge. A hundred
waterfalls braided the Oregon cliffs and rain dimpled the pewter surface of
Bonneville Pool. My mind relaxed, finally, as if visually slaking a great
thirst. I had seen the true nature of the West, a region where history is to a
large extent the history of water. At traditional meals of the Yakima Indian
Tribe southwest of Grand Coulee a glass of water is served at the start of any
feast and at its end, a reminder of the centrality of water to this land, the
Creator's gift never to be taken for granted.
Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield once put it differently. "I am convinced it was
not the six-gun that won the West," he told a conference audience, "but water
impounded that won the West."
Steamboat Rock can be as hot and hard as an anvil in high summer. But on the
day I remember, at the end of a wet spring, its table-top summit was muggy warm
and still bloomed lushly with yellow arrow-leaf balsam and purple lupine and
pink phlox. An apple farmer had pointed out purple sage to me and I marveled at
it, this Zane Grey botany I had always assumed to a descriptive figure of
language but is in fact a figwort which blooms a bold, beautiful purple. The air
smelled of sage and dust and artificial lake, that jarring combination our
civilization has created in the dry country.
Steamboat Rock is anchored within the confines of one of the most dramatic
features of the Pacific Northwest. The word coulee comes from the French verb
couler, "to flow," and has become Western vernacular for a dry watercourse. Down
this huge channel the swollen waters of the Columbia poured when its normal path
was blocked by an Ice Age glacier half a mile high. Had I been standing on
Steamboat then the ice would have been a white-gray wall to the north higher
than the Manhattan skyline, grinding at the edge of the Columbia Plateau. A wet,
cold wind would have blown off the sheet across a bitter landscape of tundra.
Below me the river would have roared with a volume up to fifty times its present
flow, milky with glacial flour, and the spray where it broke around Steamboat
would have coated the rock's lava prow with frost. The prehistoric river chewed
through the Columbia Plateau for almost thirty miles, plunged four hundred feet
down basalt cliffs in what was the greatest waterfall in the world, and then
carved the Lower Grand Coulee for another fifteen miles. The result is a channel
two to five miles wide and up to a thousand feet deep, running southwest with
oxidized red walls of such sheer and even height that it brings to mind science
fiction paintings of the imagined canals of Mars. Basalt rubble covers the base
of the cliffs like a skirt. Talus that once spilled onto a flat pan of desert
sand is now lapped by water.
The Coulee is somber, eerie, and magnificent at the same time. Early fur
trader Alexander Ross anticipated the typical mixed reaction of the modern
visitor. "While in one place the solemn gloom forbids the wanderer to advance,"
he described, "in another the prospect is lively and inviting, the ground being
thickly studded with ranges of columns, pillars, battlements, turrets, and steps
above steps, in every variety of shade and color." Parts of the Coulee are
indeed so sculpted and other sections, now under seventy feet of stored water,
were as smooth as a causeway. "Thunder and lightning are known to be more
frequent here than in other parts" Ross goes on in his colorful fashion, "and a
rumbling in the earth is sometimes heard. According to Indian tradition, it is
the abode of evil spirits." I remembered that line when I awoke late one night
while camped by Steamboat's flank, my tent suddenly shaken by a high, howling
wind that sent other campers stumbling out in the dark to secure their
powerboats to the shoreline. There was no rumbling in the earth, but the strange
tempest died as quickly and mysteriously as it came.
The coulee walls present a cross section of one of the greatest basalt flows
on the earth's surface, a hot flood of magma that ran over the interior Pacific
Northwest like crusted syrup in waves more than one hundred feet high. As the
lava cooled it fractured vertically into polygons. When the cliffs erode they
break at these joints to form a wall of connected columns, leaving a corrugated
face like the brooding palisade of a log fort or the pipes on an endless organ.
The effect is beautiful without being pretty. The dull volcanic rock has a
coarseness that seems to swallow light and there is a majestic grim confinement
to the Coulee reminiscent of a prison yard. Yet the disquieting effect of this
geology is relieved by the bright splotches of orange and mustard-green lichen
splashed along the cliffs as if from a rain of paint. Life has made its own
tenacious treaty here. On Steamboat's summit birds chatter and flit over its
meadow, and a large herd of apparently literate deer have taken refuge around
posted "no-hunting" signs.
----------------------------------
I've come to this point to re-imagine a picnic in the Coulee. The Sunday of
June 28, 1931 was bright but blessedly cool here, a perfect day for a rally --
which was fortunate since this was to prove the biggest such gathering in local
memory. An auto caravan of farmers and shopkeepers and small town lawyers wound
down the dry coulee that day past Steamboat Rock, a long plume of dust pointing
toward the gathering point where, once more, they would hear of a fantastic plan
to fill this country with water.
For three decades before this picnic, the western half of the Columbia
Plateau had been emptying of people. The initial wave of hopeful settlers
brought by the railroads had given up, the region's seven to ten inches of
rainfall proven inadequate for farming. Since 1910 the population of the area
had dropped forty percent, and abandoned fields were being recolonized by cheat
grass and sagebrush. Hot winds banged the doors of deserted farmhouses and
rusting windmills squealed as they tried in futility to raise water from wells
run dry. Drought had come to the Northwest along with the Crash in 1929, and
vast dust clouds more than a thousand miles long blew off the arid plateau. Dust
had engulfed an ocean liner six hundred miles off the Pacific Northwest coast
just two months before the 1931 rally. Even today a hard summer wind across the
fields of eastern Washington can turn the sky an eerie yellow-brown: one
navigates with headlights, traffic signals and the neon beer signs in the
windows of farm-town taverns glowing like lighthouse beacons. In lesser breezes
dust devils as high as a Douglas fir spin lazily over the furrows under a broad
blue sky, dancing a minuet with plowing tractors.
As the region's topsoil blew away, hope went with it. A half century of
over-grazing and ill-advised plowing had caught up with the so-called Inland
Empire. Half the farms in Franklin County were foreclosed or abandoned in the
first years of the Great Depression.
Now a handful of dreamers from places most Americans had never heard of --
Wenatchee and Ephrata and Brewster and Waterville -- proposed a solution as
grand as the coulee they gathered in. The federal government, they contended,
should construct the biggest dam ever built, a dam that would plug the nation's
second-biggest river and water an area twice the size of Rhode Island. The dam
would create the world's longest artificial lake, require the world's largest
concrete mixing plant, pour water down the world's biggest spillway, and lift
water into the coulee with the world's most powerful pumps. It would be three
times more massive than Boulder Dam (later renamed Hoover) rising on the
Colorado River near Las Vegas. It would have three times the mass of the Great
Pyramid of Cheops.
The rally was in direct response to a rival one the day before. If there was
public unanimity that the arid interior of the Pacific Northwest needed water,
there was no consensus on how to supply it. For thirteen years residents argued
whether a government dam or private canal was the most practicable scheme. On
the side of the canal proposal was the Columbia Basin Irrigation League, a
business coalition that had the backing of the Spokane establishment and
Washington Water Power, the powerful private electric utility based in that
city. On Saturday the Irrigation League had held a rally of one thousand people
in nearby Lind to urge the digging of a 130-mile canal from Pend Oreille Lake in
northern Idaho to the rain-starved plateau. This scheme required no big dam or
pumps, and thus needed no generators that would compete with Washington Water
Power. Not incidentally, the "gravity plan," as it was known, would feed water
to the Spokane River and thus the utility's turbines, strengthening its monopoly
in the region.
This group seemed to have the upper hand. The eminent George Goethals,
engineer of the Panama Canal, visited the area for just six days in 1922 and
gave his support to the canal, a recommendation that killed serious public
discussion of a dam at Grand Coulee for the next seven years. The Bureau of
Reclamation, which was already directing construction of Boulder Dam, was
intrigued by Grand Coulee but still a bit overwhelmed by a dam that if built
would generate sixteen times as much electricity as everything the Bureau had
built since 1902. The Army Corps of Engineers, which was examining the entire
Columbia River, had yet to issue its recommendation, and attempts to enlist
President Hoover behind a dam at Grand Coulee were rebuffed. "We do not need
further additions to our agricultural lands at present," Hoover said. Many
Americans elswhere thought a dam was absurd. "Up in the Grand Coulee area there
is no one to sell the power to except the jack rabbits and rattlesnakes,"
Republican Rep. Francis Culkin of New York would warn his House colleagues.
Promoting the dam was another League, the Columbia River Development League,
a grassroots coalition powered not by money but by the tireless enthusiasm of
Ephrata lawyers and a boosterish Wenatchee newspaper publisher. This League
hoped their Sunday picnic and rally would visibly demonstrate that as the
Depression deepened, sentiment was swinging behind government intervention to
build the dam. Certainly after years of derision toward the idea the tide now
seemed to be turning. In 1927 the Idaho Legislature passed a law attempting to
reserve would-be canal water from its panhandle. In 1929 the Grange, which was
worried about farm surpluses if the government irrigated new Western lands, was
won over by promises of cheap electricity to farms from a dam at Grand Coulee.
Half the rural households in Washington, and two-thirds in Oregon, were still
without power half a century after Thomas Edison invented an effective light
bulb. As the drought worsened, Pacific Northwest streams that supplied
hydropower to the cities west of the Cascades ran so low that the city of Tacoma
had to borrow power from the aircraft carrier Lexington, rekindling interest in
tapping the mighty Columbia. And in 1930, Washington voters had reacted to
scandal that rocked the nation's private utilities in the wake of the stock
market crash by approving a law allowing creation of public power districts.
Public utilities needed a source of public power, and a government dam on the
Columbia could provide it. Finally, if Hoover remained reluctant to back Grand
Coulee Dam, a new aministration might be persuaded. New York Gov. Franklin
Delano Roosevelt had won decisive re-election in 1930 after creating a public
utility there. Might he run for President?
At issue was not just an engineering dispute of dam versus canal. It was, in
the minds of many farmers and merchants, a battle between public versus private
power, government development versus the abuses of free enterprise, the common
versus an elite, and small town versus big city. Grand Coulee Dam would be cited
as an argument for the democratic potential of physical and social engineering,
the ability of big government to harness nature for the benefit of the little
man. As such, it was a microcosm of the philosophic struggle over the proper
role of the state and proper scale of human development that was to occupy much
of the Twentieth Century. Here was the promise that modern technology could not
only remake the landscape, but society itself. In the Soviet Union, Lenin had
proclaimed that "Communism is Soviet government plus electrification of the
whole country." Here in America, visionaries were proposing that harnessed water
would make economically feasible family-sized 40-acre farms, "land for the
landless" and a new generation of agricultural pioneers in central Washington
400,000 strong. Damming rivers for water and power would free agriculture in the
West from monopolization by huge ranches and big business, giving new life to
Thomas Jefferson's dream of a democracy grounded on the values of yeoman
farmers. Electricity would also bring to rural America the labor-saving machines
already enjoyed by the city, and would allow the dispersal of industry to
smaller towns, reducing pollution and crowding. Not incidentally, a dam would
resuscitate the parched economy of those locals still hanging onto farms and
stores around Grand Coulee. After irrigation, land prices in the irrigated flats
to the south would soar more than a hundred times above their Depression value.
The picnic and rally began with an 8:30 a.m. visit to the dam site itself. To
an untrained eye the location was unremarkable. The Columbia, with a general
course to the south and west, twisted to run north here for a few miles. Flush
with rain and snow melt from Canada, the powerful river ran in a steep valley of
barren, rounded hills about one thousand feet deep and two thousand feet wide at
river level. The canyon broadened to more than a mile wide at its top, requiring
a long, high, fat, and intimidatingly expensive dam.
The site's advantages were two-fold. First, the river had cut through
fractured basalt and glacial till down close to the granite bedrock that could
serve as an adequate foundation. Second, and most important, the site was at the
lip of the neighboring Grand Coulee, the key to the whole scheme in this
otherwise mystifyingly remote spot.
The picnic caravan wound down a gravel road to the river bank and people got
out of their cars for a few minutes to look around at the emptiness. At most two
dozen people lived in the canyon here, running a cable ferry where the dam would
go and trying to eke out a marginal living on bench land a few miles downstream.
An Indian called One-Eyed-Charlie occupied the east bank, and across the river
the Nat Washington family had tried and failed to farm 3,000 acres of scrub land
bought from two black families for nine hundred gold dollars in 1909. A proud
family descended from George Washington's younger brother, the Washingtons had
lost a southern estate called Claymont Court after the Civil War. Starting over
out West, they had tried to go it alone without the government. To bring water
to his 80-foot-high bench land, Washington used a "current pump." This was a
Rube Goldberg contraption in which the current would push a giant oar
downstream, pumping water, and then the board would spring clear of the river
and lurch back. It could be moved up and down on wooden rails to follow the
water level of the wildly fluctuating Columbia.
The river proved not so easily tapped. The first year June snowmelt required
that the pump be pulled off the rails to keep it from being swept away and a
young orchard of apple trees died of thirst. The next year a new set of trees
survived the summer only to be gnawed off by rabbits which could reach their
branches on deep snow. With that kind of experience the Washingtons dreamed of
government help. Scott McCann, an amateur geologist who ran a grocery store in
Coulee City, convinced Nat of the feasibility of the dam proposed by Ephrata
lawyer Billy Clapp and the flamboyant publisher of the Wenatchee World, Rufus
Woods. Washington was a rising star in the Democratic party and during the 1920
national convention he got the chance to describe the dam idea to vice
presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt listened: Washington was
not just a farmer but smooth, personable, a potential candidate someday for
governor. "He had glamour," his son, Nat Jr., remembers. "He spoke with a soft
southern accent. If he had been alive during the Roosevelt years, there is no
telling how far he might have gone."
The river struck first, on July 10, 1926. Nat Jr., a retired state senator
who lives next door to the Bureau of Reclamation headquarters in Ephrata,
vividly remembered the trauma more than sixty years later. "There was a warm
pool behind a sandbar," he described. "I was twelve years old. My Dad was
teaching me to swim. I had no idea what my uncle was doing. Somehow he got on
the river side of the sandbar and began to be swept away. My Dad, who has an
excellent swimmer, dived in. I remember shouting, waving my arm: `Come on in,
come on in, come on in!' He just wouldn't do it. He wouldn't do it. My aunt had
gone in as well to help, and both were taken by the current. My uncle had
already disappeared." He paused a moment, remembering that day with a grim,
awful clarity. "I went to get some horses to ride for help. I dreaded seeing my
grandmother, and having to tell her what had happened. Aunt Pearl dived in, and
I didn't. Every complex I have, I blame on that."
A month later, the river gave up the bodies at Brewster. Such stories were
not uncommon. The Columbia was big, cold, rock-studded, erratic. Damned useless,
if you were a farmer, damned dangerous, if you had to cross it. Even today, ask
long-time river residents what they remember about the river before the dams,
and one of the commonest recollections was the admonition not to swim in it. The
Columbia killed. "Thought the old Columbia would never amount to much," folk
hero Woody Guthrie would later sing.
On the Sunday of the picnic the assembled dam enthusiasts remembered
Washington and his dream. They listened while a lawyer and contractor named
James O'Sullivan stood on the Columbia's shore and pointed out to the crowd
exactly where the structure would go. Then the group dispersed to their cars and
farm trucks and wound back up the thousand-foot bluff and over a divide down
into Grand Coulee. The coulee floor was about six hundred feet higher than the
bed of the nearby river.
The route was deliberately symbolic. The Columbia Plateau is scarred by
coulees, gouged out by Ice Age floods greater than any others known to have
occurred on Earth: Moses Coulee, French Coulee, Black Rock Coulee, Dry Coulee,
Lynch Coulee, Rocky Coulee, Bauer Coulee, Washtucna Coulee, Old Maid Coulee and
so on, one after another writhing across a scabland of washes and broad sandy
plains, where occasional knobs of lava poke above the surface like the conning
towers of submarines. Grand Coulee dwarfs them all, and no place better
illustrates the potential power of water. Big rivers are usually opaque, a
rumpled two-dimensional sheet of swirling liquid with only the boils and eddies
give a clue to the depth underneath. Here in Grand Coulee was the bottom of a
vanished flood where a person could get a sense of depth as well as width, a
notion of just what rivers can do. And the Coulee pointed to what Bureau of
Reclamation Commissioner Elmore Mead called "the largest and finest compact body
of land feasible of irrigation remaining in the United States."
The idea was daringly simple. The dominant geographic feature in eastern
Washington, eastern Oregon and southern Idaho is a broad basalt plateau more
than 100,000 square miles in extent. In central Washington this high rolling
landscape is ringed by the Cascade Mountains to the west, the Okanogan Highlands
to the north, the Rockies to the east, and the Blue Mountains to the south,
explaining the confusing appellation of Columbia "Basin'' to the Plateau even
though much of the Basin is far above the level of the Columbia and Snake
Rivers.
The Plateau is not really flat. It is rumpled by rolling hills and cut by
coulees. But on the broadest scale it is like a vast plate tilted from northeast
to southwest, its upper rim as much as 2,700 feet above sea level and the
southwest apron only 370 feet high, ending at Pasco, Washington. Bending around
the northern and western fringe of this plateau is the Columbia River. If the
river's water could somehow be lifted to the plateau's northern rim, it would
run by gravity southward for two hundred miles before rejoining the Columbia,
irrigating up to a million acres of farmland. Accordingly, these farmers wanted
to duplicate what the Ice Age had done: to dam the Columbia until it spilled
south through the Grand Coulee to Plateau farmland. The initial proposal by
Billy Clapp had called for a titanic structure eight hundred feet high to bring
the reservoir level nearly up to the summit of the lip of land between the
Columbia and the Coulee. That, however, would back the river more than a hundred
miles into Canada. The proposal had been scaled back to a dam 550 feet high
above bedrock, creating a reservoir that reached to the border. This would
generate more than enough electricity to pump river water up and over the rest
of the way: enough electricity, promoters promised, to pay for the dam; enough
electricity, detractors scoffed, that the region couldn't use it all for the
next one hundred and fifty years. The adjacent Upper Coulee would be turned into
a natural reservoir, a basalt bathtub, with a low dam twenty-seven miles to the
south to hold irrigation water in place until farmers needed it.
The Pacific Northwest's reputation as a wet place -- based on the
heavily-populated green trough that runs from Vancouver, British Columbia past
Seattle and Portland to Eugene, Oregon -- is misleading. The Cascade Mountains
block much of this moisture from reaching the interior of the region, leaving
desert and prairie in their eastern shadow. Lewis and Clark called the resulting
landscape "The Great Columbia Plain." The resulting landscape is so confusingly
varied, so rich and poor in soils, so wet and dry depending on site and
elevation, that it baffled some of the settlers looking for a homestead. Many
early explorers misjudged the agricultural potential of what are now some of the
richest wheat growing lands of the United States, mistakenly dismissing them as
too dry. Yet after pioneers plowed these areas and raised record harvests of
dryland wheat, later homesteaders trying to imitate their success learned the
hard way just where the limits of feasible rainfall lay. A distance of ten miles
east or west or a few hundred feet in elevation could mean an inch difference in
rainfall and success or failure in farming. The Pacific Northwest, which
receives up to two hundred inches of precipitation in its rain forests, can get
as little as five inches in the deserts next to stretches of the Columbia River.
The Plateau was at the boundary of arable land and waste, and accordingly is
bisected by the longest creek in America. In any other place a watercourse like
as Crab Creek would either develop into a proper river or evaporate in the
desert sun. Here it just crawled across the scablands, neither accumulating any
appreciable flow or disappearing, until it finally drizzled into the Columbia.
The dream was not new. Northwest irrigation dated back to Marcus Whitman's
first ditch in the Walla Walla Valley in 1838. Later private irrigation
companies both failed and flourished, and by 1910, 2.3 million acres were
watered in the region, two thirds in Idaho. Several abortive private irrigation
schemes for the Columbia Plateau were attempted using windmills, a steam-fired
coal plant and gasoline engines, but high cost and disappointing crops
bankrupted all of them. Schemes drew con men and hucksters. Near the
agriculturally-tempting Wahluke Slope, the body of one promoter of an irrigation
scheme was dragged from the Columbia. His partner had disappeared with a million
dollars in invested funds before a drop of water was pumped.
So the land stayed dry while the nation's second biggest river, fourth
largest in North America, roared and foamed just beyond the Coulee's northern
lip. It might as well have been on the moon. The Columbia had dug itself one to
two thousand feet below the level of the Columbia Plateau, and up on top
abandoned farms were pitted by blowing sand.
This, then, was a rally for water. Grand Coulee Dam would ultimately prove
far more significant to the nation as a generator of electricity but the initial
scheme was simply to use the power to pay for pumps. While there were a few
shiny Cadillacs in the procession motoring down Grand Coulee, many more were
open-top Model T Fords or wheezing farm trucks. These were mostly ordinary
people, small-town folks ground down by the Depression and dreaming of a big
government project that could economically rescue where fate had happened to
drop them.
The monied utilities had looked at the Columbia already. Seattle's powerful
private utility, Puget Sound Power & Light, was already constructing the first
low dam on the river, at Rock Island seventy-five miles to the southwest. This
more modest effort, howver, would not create the vast reservoir storage,
irrigation network or enormous electric generation of a Grand Coulee. Seven
years earlier a subsidiary of General Electric had proposed a private $100
million dam and industrial complex at Priest Rapids, one hundred miles to the
southwest, but that scheme had been killed by the 1929 Crash.
The Columbia River Development League, in contrast, had big dreams and empty
pockets. O'Sullivan was probably one of the worst-compensated lobbyists in the
country. In 1909 he had purchased farm land on the Columbia Plateau that
remained distressingly, pointedly, dry. When Billy Clapp got a story on his dam
idea into the Wenatchee World, development-happy publisher Rufus Woods persuaded
O'Sullivan to look at the site. Drawing on his experience as an engineer,
O'Sullivan had written a series of articles in 1920 supporting the proposal.
Experts and agencies scoffed, however, and he soon retreated to Port Huron,
Michigan, to take over his family's contracting business. Then the Crash came in
1929, souring construction and improving the political climate for the dam.
O'Sullivan left his family in Michigan and came back west as the Development
League's chief lobbyist and spokesman. Promised a salary of two hundred dollars
a month, in reality he was paid so infrequently by his Depression-battered
constituents that he had to cash a life insurance policy to provide money for
his family. When the League managed to scrape together $129 in donations and
deposit it in a local bank, the bank closed its doors and froze all deposits the
next day. When O'Sullivan set out to make speeches at forty towns in subzero
weather, dam enthusiast Roxie Thorsen replaced her promised five dollar donation
with shaving cream and a razor. At Almira, the hotel manager donated a room and
bath. Others shared meals.
Just why O'Sullivan so doggedly pursued this dam has never been adequately
explained. In 1983, his daughter recalled to the Wenatchee World that O'Sullivan
was a lover of history. At Grand Coulee, perhaps, he saw an opportunity to make
it.
So down the Coulee the auto caravan rolled, their imagination jogged even
more by Dry Falls. Here the Upper Coulee opened and flattened for several miles
and then dropped down a four-hundred-foot cliff to become the Lower Coulee. When
the Columbia poured down this course it created a waterfall greater than any in
existence today, a cataract more than twice the height of Niagara and three and
a half times as wide. Its roar shook the land for miles. The cars crawled down
to the base of these silent cliffs and proceeded on a few miles to a pleasant
oasis called Park Lake. Sun Lakes State Park occupies the site today.
The assembly grew swiftly after church that morning as more people
congregated from Wilbur and Almira, Davenport and Odessa, Coulee City and Soap
Lake. Numbers were politically important so an obliging Washington State
Patrolman assigned two Boy Scouts to count the vehicles filing into the park.
They tallied 2,160, most packed with people, lending credence to an estimate in
the Grant County Journal that more than eight thousand gathered to hear the
speeches and honk horns in approval of statements they liked.
A few orchard trees grew next to Park Lake, visible proof of the soil's
fertility if it could just get water. Nearby the League promoters had set up a
stage. At its rear was a map of the proposed project, on either side were large
signs giving salient facts, and just behind the microphone American flags were
planted as exclamation points to the day's emotion. While the assembled families
unpacked their lunch baskets Congressman Ralph Horr of Seattle seized the
opportunity to give a 45-minute harangue against Prohibition. Bored, the crowd
wryly muttered, "He's just wet -- all wet," as Horr rambled on.
At 1:30 p.m. -- the fried chicken, sandwiches, and Horr's interminable
address all having been disposed of -- Rufus Woods called the meeting to order.
O'Sullivan got up to once more recite the facts in favor of a dam, convincing
another 159 people to pay the dollar required for membership in the Development
League. Other politicians rebuked Horr for ignoring the day's subject, but
Congressman Sam B. Hill joked that Horr had not really wandered far afield, for
he spent most of his time "damning certain laws."
Clarence Dill rose to speak. He had won narrow election to the U.S. Senate by
four thousand votes, and attributed his margin to the residents of central
Washington who liked his open-mindedness towards a dam. Still, he expressed
caution. A big dam was a hard sell in Washington, D.C., he warned.
More enthusiastically, Congressman Hill told them the rolling plateau of
abandoned homesteads and grit-pitted barns could become a "garden of Eden."
Later he marveled at the size of the congregation. "I never saw such a crowd in
that country," he remarked.
--------------------------------------------------
Dill's caution was sensible. What the crowd was asking for was construction
of the biggest dam on Earth, probably costing more than all previous federal
public works projects combined. It would have to be built in the midst of the
Great Depression for a five-state region with only 3.5 million people, about
three percent of the nation's population. The dam would generate enough power to
light several large cities in a landscape where there were none, water farms
where there was no one to eat the food, and create a lake one hundred and fifty
miles long. The whole idea struck many people as ludicrously fantastic, even
after Grand Coulee construction began. Writer Herbert Corey wrote in a 1934
article for Public Utilities Fortnightly that Grand Coulee Dam was "the most
colossally humorous stunt of our notably funny generation," and in a 1937 issue
of Collier's Magazine, Jim Marshall predicted the big new federal dams would
prove to be "enormous white elephants about as useful as the pyramids."
The Grand Coulee rally, however, ultimately proved a success beyond the
wildest dreams of its organizers. Grand Coulee and Bonneville dam, near
Portland, became major public works projects of the Roosevelt Administration
that would be elected the following year. By 1934, seven thousand people were
living at Grand Coulee to build the dam. It took another twenty years for the
water to flow south as promised, but by 1963 the population of Grant County to
the south, which would receive much of the water, had grown eight times to fifty
thousand people.
This was just the beginning. In 1932, the Army Corps of Engineers completed a
massive study proposing a network of ten dams between Bonneville and the
Canadian border, a blueprint later expanded into Canada. In the next forty
years, engineers would construct fourteen huge dams on the Columbia River
itself, twenty on its major tributary the Snake, and bring the number of
significant power and irrigation dams in the Columbia river basin as a whole to
more than five hundred, some 211 of them classified as "major" by utility
statisticians. The mighty Columbia was not just harnessed, it was utterly
transformed from an unruly river into a series of placid pools: the most heavily
dammed river system and the greatest producer of hydroelectricity in the world.
As such, Grand Coulee and its cousins became a model of technological mastery.
In Russia, India, China, Latin America and Africa, dams became synonymous with
progress. Delegations from these areas regularly make pilgrimages to Grand
Coulee today, less to learn from the half-century-old wonder than to pay homage.
The Columbia River in its natural state was a miserable waterway for
navigation but a potentially superb resource for hydroelectricity. Its fall of
half a mile in elevation from its source -- four times that of the Mississippi,
in half the distance -- meant it and its tributaries represented more than forty
percent of the hydroelectric potential in the nation.
The Depression-era promises made for the river initially seemed extravagant.
It would power factories for more than 200,000 new industrial workers. It would
water enough land for 100,000 farms. It would increase the region's overall
population by 2.5 million and create a water highway for commercial river
traffic from the Pacific Ocean to Idaho. It would tap hydroelectricity, which
electric visionary J.D. Ross of Seattle called "a coal mine that never gives
out, an oil well that never runs dry." It would remake the Pacific Northwest,
the final frontier in the Lower 48 states, to conform to the most idealistic
visions of the mid-20th Century. The Columbia would demonstrate what science,
engineering and political reform could accomplish. "Thomas Jefferson's dream of
a great, free and independent empire on the banks of the Columbia can come
true!" Ross enthused.
In many ways those promises were fulfilled. Irrigation created entirely new
towns in the Columbia Basin. Columbia River barges did reach Idaho and proved so
cost-effective they now pick up wheat railroaded from the Dakotas. The river's
electricity powered a dozen new aluminum plants and the Hanford atomic weapons
complex. Basin population more than doubled, from 2.8 million in 1933 to more
than 7 million today. Disastrous floods that wreaked havoc as late as 1948 were
tamed. The rural poor not only got power with the new dams, but at rates half
the national average. The electricity proved crucial to the development of World
War II industries, providing the energy to make the aluminum for a third of
America's warplanes. If the Columbia and tributary Snake River did not exist,
neither to a large extent would Seattle and Portland and Spokane and Boise at
their present scale.
Still, speeches are as important for what they omit as what they say. In all
the talk that summer picnic day in Grand Coulee -- and indeed, in all the years
when the fate of the Columbia was decided -- its most obvious historic use was
seldom mentioned. The Columbia River boasted the greatest chinook salmon and
steelhead trout runs in the world. For thousands of years the region's native
inhabitants had used the fish as a primary source of food and the foundation of
their wealth and culture. Pacific salmon, which died as they spawned, also fed a
complex ecosystem with nutrients and energy imported from the ocean. Creatures
ranging from bears to bugs depended on the annual cycle. Today, those runs have
declined an estimated 85 percent, despite the production of more than 170
million young fish each year by artificial hatcheries. Half of the original
salmon and steelhead habitat in the basin is gone. A third of all stream miles
in the basin have been blocked by dams with no means of fish passage. Scores of
individual salmon runs are extinct. As the fish runs approach collapse, so do
the cultures built around them, from tribal reservation economies to
Scandinavian gillnetters at the river's mouth. Ephrata's gain in vegetables is
Astoria's loss in fish.
Nor would the great dam create quite the political utopia that the picnicking
farmers envisioned. By the time Grand Coulee was completed, agriculture was
being transformed by mechanization, fertilizers, and pesticides. Farm labor
shrank, farm size grew, and productivity soared. The dam ultimately watered just
two thousand farms. Moreover, the government built Grand Coulee and other
western irrigation projects at the same time it took surplus agricultural lands
out of production in the East. By the 1990s, the biggest crop in the Columbia
Basin Irrigation Project would not be apples or potatoes or beans or beets or
anything humans consume. It would be alfalfa. Animal feed.
There was even less thought that rally of changing the nature of the river
itself. Nch'i-Wana, or Big River, as some tribes called the Columbia, was
central to the region's self-image. The Pacific Northwest celebrated an identity
as distinct as New York or Miami or Las Vegas. It was an outsized place, virgin
and untamed, always a region of imminent "empire" shaped by a tumultuous
geography ranging from titanic trees to glaciered volcanic peaks. The Columbia's
size and cussed unruliness were a part of this, and people first cheered and
then began to have misgivings as the rapids and falls were stilled: the
Cascades, the Dalles, Celilo Falls, Priest Rapids, Kettle Falls, Devil's Canyon,
Death Rapids, Surprise Rapids. The river of legend and pioneer lore eventually
would be regulated by computer. Historian Richard White called the result "part
plumbing, half-machine. The Columbia has become a robo-river, a cyborg of
sorts." The river became polluted by pulp mill discharges, tailings dumped from
smelters, radioactivity from Hanford, pesticides from farm fields, eroded
sediment from tilling and logging, heat from reactors and power plants. It
became a disturbing model not just of engineering achievement, but of
environmental cost. In the 1980s and early 1990s Northwest utilities spent an
estimated $1.3 billion in direct payments and lost power revenues -- more than
Grand Coulee and all its irrigation works initially cost -- trying to double
remaining fish runs. The effort failed.
In 1990 the Shoshone-Bannock tribe of Idaho -- the tribe of Sacajawea who
helped guide Lewis and Clark to this country -- filed suit under the Endangered
Species Act to protect rapidly dwindling salmon that once swam to their
ancestral territory. With that petition control of the river began to pass from
the engineers to the biologists and lawyers, with consequences still unknown at
this writing. Initially, confusion reigned. Two months after the petition was
filed, Idaho Fish and Game Department officials were still tried to poison lakes
where sockeye had once spawned in order to clear them for trout, the rotenone
dribbling into the Salmon River and killing fifty to one hundred adult Chinook
and thousands of young salmon. Agencies on the Columbia have a long history of
working at cross purposes, in ignorance of each other's goals and data. They
still do.
---------------------------------------------------
This is not a book to either glorify or condemn what has happened to the
Columbia River. Each generation that approached the river was a product of its
time, necessarily captive to the assumptions and necessities of that moment. Yet
examination of the Columbia's past and troubled present is instructive. Serious
thought about what we've done provides perspective for future management
decisions. It can allow us to question our own assumptions and look at the river
through different eyes. No major American river has been transformed quite so
grandly, quickly, and completely as the Columbia. In microcosm it tells the
story of American civilization itself, our proudest achievements and most
dubious legacies.
The Columbia and its tributaries, reaching and snaking through canyons and
around glaciered peaks in a thousand tortured courses, collect water from a
quarter-million square mile basin bigger than France. By the time it reaches the
sea the river has gathered moisture from an atlas of geographical extremes,
ranging from ice fields in the Canadian Rockies to American sage brush desert.
Its basin runs from the hamlet of Canoe River, halfway up British Columbia, to
Tuscarora, Nevada. It extends from Astoria, near the Pacific coast of Oregon, to
Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. Plateau and canyon, mountain and dune,
rain forest and bunch-grass steppe: all contribute to the gathering waters. The
Columbia has seven times the flow of the longer Colorado and two hundred times
that of the even longer Rio Grande. Though half of the Columbia basin is desert,
it gathers two and a half times as much water per square mile of its drainage
area as does the Mississippi-Missouri system. It is the biggest river in the
American West, and the only major one to pierce the rampart of the Cascade and
Sierra Nevada mountains.
Simple size does not fully convey the Columbia's significance. It is a river
that elicits emotion, that tells us stories about ourselves. It is the most
beautiful big American river in the grandeur and variety of its landscape, the
most daring in its engineering, and the most disturbing in its capture. Its
final glorious Gorge is a National Scenic Area where the surface of the Columbia
is scoured by wind surfer sails as colorful as a convention of butterflies. But
the same river winds through the industrial valley of Trail, British Columbia,
that was so polluted earlier in this century that its champion hockey team is
called the Smoke Eaters. It flows past the nation's biggest collection of
radioactive waste, a former nuclear weapons fuel complex where one of the high
school football teams is called the Bombers. In its scenery and modification,
the Columbia is a river of jarring contrast, like some kind of object lesson
laid down by God and man.
The beauty is still there. Few rivers wind through such a dramatic, primeval,
and raw landscape. It runs from canyon to broad lake and back again, from wet
forest to dry desert and once more to forest. High waterfalls fall off the sheer
side of its wind-swept final Gorge like music from the sky. In Canada, glaciers
color the river aqua with their ground flour. The Columbia is in a landscape so
epic as to almost be swallowed up by it. If the sawing of the Colorado into the
depths of the Grand Canyon remind us of the planet's age, the Columbia's course
through a geologically young landscape reminds us how many times the Earth has
remade itself.
Still, the primary lesson of the Columbia is of people. The Mississippi, I
suspect, will always remain in the American imagination a 19th Century river. It
will forever be the place of Tom and Huck, of sternwheeler and flatboat, of the
siege of Vicksburg and the Battle of New Orleans. The Columbia, in contrast, is
our 20th Century river. Its dams represent the optimistic faith in technology of
the century's beginning, and the restless misgivings about large scale
engineering at the century's end. It is the river of the turbine, the dynamo,
the reactor and the airplane. It is the river of Tom Swift, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Popular Mechanics and Nagasaki. In the first three decades after
World War II, major dams were completed in the Columbia Basin at a pace faster
than one per year. It is a river so transformed as seemingly invented. If you
want to see how America dreamed, at the height of the American Century, come to
the Columbia.
It is a river of imagination. People imagined a great Western river had to
exist before the Columbia was explored, and then how it could be remodeled into
something useful. Now they imagine, wistfully, what the great falls and fish
runs and thunder of its floods must once have been like. The Columbia today is a
technocratic battleground, a river turned on and off by valves and switches to
please the competing needs of irrigators and shippers and power users and
fishermen and Indian tribes and environmentalists. In its rare free-flowing
stretches it can rise and fall six to eight feet per day as dams push water
through their turbines to match the rhythm of daily electricity demand by urban
commuters hundreds of miles away. A female salmon, who has fought past the dams
and in her final shuddering lays her eggs on a drowned gravel bar upriver, dies
not knowing her eggs may be dry and dead twelve hours later because of the
rhythm of light switches flicking on and off in an arc of cities from Vancouver,
Canada, to Los Angeles. The Columbia is that cruelest of all stories: a thing
changed into exactly what Americans wanted, and, once changed, proving to be a
disappointment of an entirely different sort.
There is precedent for this.
In 1831, the Nez Perce and Flathead nations in the Columbia Basin sent a
delegation of seven tribesmen two thousand miles east to St. Louis, reportedly
seeking the "white man's Book of Heaven" in order to acquire the spirit power of
the trappers and traders beginning to crisscross the region.
This was not the first time the Nez Perce had shown such initiative. They had
swiftly become pre-eminent horse breeders on the Columbia Plateau after
acquiring that animal about 1720, developing the famed Appaloosa. In the summer
of 1805 they sent a delegation of three young men to trade with the Crow Tribe
for six guns and swiftly used them to defeat a Shoshoni raiding party. They were
not afraid of the newcomers, and sought to learn their secrets.
The Nez Perce befriended Lewis and Clark when the explorers traversed the
tribe's territory. In 1831 the natives learned William Clark still served as
superintendent of Indian Affairs in St. Louis and apparently assumed he could
help them gain the book that perhaps explained the white man's power. Joining
the trade expedition returning across the Great Plains from the annual fur
rendezvous at Wyoming's Green River, the Indians accompanied it to the bustling
frontier city. Exactly what native Americans such as No-Horns-On-His-Head and
Rabbit-Skin-Leggings thought they would acquire remains unclear, since they
could find no one who could speak Salish or Shahaptin and had to communicate by
sign language. Certainly their personal fate was unhappy. Three turned back, two
died of disease in St. Louis, one died at Fort Union on the way home in 1832,
and the last was killed by Blackfoot Indians in Montana that fall. Still, a
garbled version of their visit was printed in a New England Christian newspaper,
and it inspired the arrival of a number of Protestant missionaries in the
Columbia River Basin . These idealistic and well-intentioned saviors brought
farming, education, disease and a wave of new immigration that completely
changed native American life in ways those seven Nez Perce delegates would no
doubt have deemed disastrous.
The Indians sought power, and received it, but at a cost they never
anticipated. Their innocent journey is a useful metaphor for the journey our
civilization has made in its pursuit of power from the Columbia River.
Copyright
� 1995 William
Dietrich |
