Cadillac Desert (38 page)

Harold Nelson forwarded Mangan’s letter to Floyd Dominy, adding a postscript of his own. He had just spoken confidentially with the head of a local pressure group organized to support a new Bureau project in eastern Oregon. Nelson’s confidant, a Mr. Courtright, said he was finding considerable sentiment that the group should switch its allegiances and push for rapid authorization by the Corps instead. “Courtright ... stated quite frankly that the argument which they are having the greatest difficulty to counter is the one that authorization through channels available to the Bureau will be much more difficult and time-consuming than through Public Works Committee channels.” Actually, Courtright told Nelson, he knew the real cause of the Bureau’s difficulties. “He attributes [them] to field representatives of the Oregon Water Resources Board and to the Corps of Engineers” itself.

As Harold Nelson intimated, an unholy alliance of local economic interests and a powerful member of Congress was something the Bureau was at pains to resist. In 1967, the Johnson administration, preoccupied with the war in Vietnam and the chronic inflation Johnson’s policy was creating, requested only a minuscule appropriation for Auburn Dam in California. Robert Pafford, the regional director, wrote a memo to Dominy discussing the options the Bureau had. The obvious one was to slow down the construction schedule on the dam itself, but this was “quite inconsistent with the urgent needs for flood control and power.” Another was temporarily to stop work on the irrigation and conveyance facilities—the Forest Hills development and the Auburn-Folsom South Canal. “However,” Pafford wrote, “[Congressman] Bizz Johnson has made it quite clear that he wants Forest Hills moved rapidly, and I am sure you know how unhappy the East Side Association [the main local pressure group] is that we are not moving the Folsom South Canal even faster—they and [neighboring Congressman] Bernie Sisk would react violently if we cut the canal out in fiscal 1967.” Pafford proposed a more palatable alternative: “[O]ur soundest course will be to reprogram Auburn funds internally to handle the urgently needed preconstruction program, and reduce our right-of-way program accordingly.... By reducing land acquisition from $900,000 to $135,000 we will be able to carry out a preconstruction program suitable to Denver’s needs for design data. This will provide for some additional land acquisition, although not nearly as much as would be desirable.”

The remarkable thing about this suggestion was that, first of all, it scorned the will of Congress, which had specifically allocated money for land acquisition and expected it to be used that way. Secondly, its effect could only be to put the squeeze on landowners who sat in the path of the reservoir. It was critical to keep the land-acquisition program moving because of the rapid inflation in California land values, but now Pafford was proposing to do that with one-seventh of the money the Bureau had deemed necessary. This could only mean that people would be offered less money to sell out, and might well accede, since the Bureau could always hold the threat of condemnation over their heads. But it was typical of the way the Bureau operated. If it had a cash-flow problem, the losers would be the people who had had the bad judgment to own property in the valleys it wanted to flood with its reservoirs.

One might be tempted to feel a little sorry for the Bureau of Reclamation. It was, after all, operating at a great disadvantage compared to the Corps, which was unencumbered by social legislation and ostensibly built its reservoirs with the holiest of motives in mind, controlling floods. The available evidence also suggests that the Bureau was not quite as committed to self-perpetuation and self-promotion nor as inclined to trample its opposition. Under several Interior Secretaries—Ickes, Udall, Andrus, even Nixon’s Walter Hickel—it had environmental constraints imposed on it that the Corps needn’t have bothered with. But one’s sympathies might be tempered if one were told that the Bureau, over the intense opposition of a local town, and on a pristine stretch of river up for inclusion in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system, was perfectly capable of proposing a dam which, by its own admission, was completely useless.

The fact that the Yellowstone River was one of the four or five remaining rivers of any size in the American West without a single major dam on it had made it attractive to the Bureau since the 1920s. At one point, according to a former director of the National Park Service, Horace Albright, it had even toyed with the idea of damming the river’s outflow from Yellowstone Lake and turning the jewel of Yellowstone Park into a regulated reservoir, and Albright had ordered his rangers to take the drastic step of hiding the Park Service boats so the Bureau couldn’t come in and survey. The original Pick-Sloan Plan included a dam lower down on the Yellowstone, which is a major tributary of the Missouri, but in twenty years of trying the Bureau hadn’t been able to justify it. The farmers along the river had already built a number of small-scale diversion projects without the Bureau’s help; there was plenty of irrigation going on. Flood control wasn’t a good enough reason, either, since the damaging floods were all on the lower Missouri, and by the 1960s the Corps had that river completely under control. Power potential didn’t amount to much, weighed against the cost of a dam. By 1965, the river had survived six and a half decades of the Bureau and nearly two centuries of the Corps without being dammed—a noteworthy feat of sorts. At about the same time, the conservation movement awoke to the fact that a river of great beauty and substantial size still flowed wild through the northern Rockies and plains, and began to push for official protection in the Wild and Scenic Rivers system. There seemed to be no earthly reason for the Bureau to resist such status—but it did.

The person assigned to take a last, long look at the Yellowstone River, in the light of the conservationists’ effort, was dour, impassive Gil Stamm, a future commissioner, who had just been promoted to assistant commissioner by the man he admired and had served so well. In a long blue-envelope letter to Dominy, dated February 3, 1965, Stamm delivered his report. In general, Stamm wrote, “No storage regulation in the Yellowstone River is required ... as Yellowtail Dam, now under construction, will provide regulation of the Bighorn River and this will insure dependable supplies [of water] below the mouth of the Bighorn,” where most of the irrigation was. The only residual interest the Bureau could rightfully claim was “to provide electric power and flood control to the city of Livingston.”

The problem was compounded by the fact that the Mission site, where the dam was originally planned, was now occupied by several miles of Interstate 90, which went right along the river below Livingston. Relocating the highway would cost more than it was worth. That left three other sites to select from. The best of them, in beautiful Yankee Jim Canyon above Gardiner, Montana, would back water into Yellowstone Park; Stamm decided to rule it out. The Wanigan site was more expensive to develop and, therefore, “can barely show a [benefit-cost] ratio of one to one.” That left the Allenspur site, which was practically in the town of Livingston.

“There is intense local opposition to storage on the upper Yellowstone and particularly the Allenspur site,” Stamm cautioned. “The dam would be very close to Livingston, in effect inundating valuable farm and ranch properties and a reach of outstanding stream fishing with national reputation.... [Both] ranchers and conservationists have expressed strong opposition to any storage development above the town of Big Timber, which is about 35 miles downstream from Livingston.... Findings of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife and the National Park Service show that a dam and reservoir in this area would be detrimental to both fishery and outdoor recreation.” The reservoir, Stamm said, would inundate thirty miles of Class I trout fishery—8 percent of the outstanding trout habitat left in Montana. On top of that, it would create an ideal habitat for goldeneye, a rough fish highly competitive with trout; there was “a definite threat of eventual invasion of the streams of Yellowstone National Park by this generally unwanted fish.”

As if that were not enough, Stamm said that “a single-purpose flood-control reservoir at Allenspur”—which is essentially what the Bureau was left with—“would cost more than presently estimated benefits.” Designing it as a power project wouldn’t help; “if the power were to be evaluated realistically in the light of present-day power values ... Allenspur power would not be very attractive.” But adding a hydroelectric plant might be necessary to win authorization, because “the only support for the potential project is from a few public power supporters.”

In short, a miserable project: without irrigation benefits, without worthwhile power benefits, without demonstrable flood-control benefits, certain to ruin a long reach of the most productive trout river in the West (if not the entire country), and opposed by virtually everyone who stood to benefit from it—for once, by ranchers and conservationists alike. On top of this, an expensive project, projected to cost at least $128 million—say half a billion dollars today. Stamm’s letter reads like an argument
for
giving the upper Yellowstone Wild and Scenic status—a conservationist couldn’t have said it much better himself. But would the Bureau make such a recommendaton? Would it at least not oppose such a recommendation?

Only if it was allowed to build the Allenspur Dam. “[F]uture events such as a disastrous local flood possibly could change local attitudes,” Stamm concluded. Therefore, his recommendation to Dominy was that the Bureau try “to get the wild river determination altered ... to accommodate the potential future construction of the Allenspur Unit.” By doing so, it would ensure that “all foreseeable desireable future water resource developments would be protected.” The Bureau was prepared to accept Wild and Scenic River status for the Yellowstone, in other words, as long as it could someday build the dam that would largely destroy it as a wild and scenic river.

Behind such nearly pathological unwillingness to let go of even one river stood, of course, the lurking shadow of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The only conceivable justification for a dam on the Yellowstone was flood control. For now, the Bureau held the authorization to build the project. If it demurred, the Corps might waste no time in trying to build it instead.

If, by the late 1960s, the rivalry between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers had degenerated into an ongoing squabble over needless projects instead of necessary ones; if each agency was reaching farther afield from its original mandate—the Bureau now talking about building a single-purpose flood-control dam, the Corps incessantly trying to steal the loyalty of the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; if they were trying to move into geographic territory where they had no business being—the Bureau into the swamps of Louisiana (there are internal memos suggesting that even this wet state should perhaps be brought into the Bureau’s orbit, per request of Senator Russell Long), the Corps into the middle of the Central Valley Project’s sevice area—if all of this was true, then it was entirely fitting that the climactic battle between the Bureau and the corps should be fought in, of all places, Alaska.

On April 7, 1961, Daryl Roberts, the head of the Bureau’s Alaska District office, wrote a blue-envelope letter to Commissioner Dominy reporting on a luncheon conversation he had just had with C. W. Snedden, the publisher of the Fairbanks
Daily News-Miner.
Snedden, Roberts wrote, had told him that “the Corps of Engineers was cutting my throat and brainwashing the local people in favor of Rampart Dam.” Snedden reported that the Corps had “held two meetings with the City Council, had met with the Chamber of Commerce, the National Resource Committee and others to sell them on holding off on the Devil’s Canyon Project until the Corps completes their Rampart study.” This news had so upset Roberts that he made a proposal to Dominy that, in all likelihood, no one had ever made before: the Bureau should enlist the same conservationists who had just defeated one of its most beloved dams, Echo Park, in a joint effort to make war on the Corps of Engineers.

What was ironic about the Bureau and the Corps staging their climactic battle in Alaska was that, strictly speaking, neither of them had any business being there. Alaska has very little agriculture—about the only place one can grow anything is in the Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage—and its few farmers employ little irrigation, if any. Besides, the state has more groundwater than one can dream of, most of it a few feet beneath the surface of the earth. The only navigable inland waterway is the Yukon River, and what the Corps was proposing to build would have put an end to that. Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the tiny towns along the Yukon sit on bluffs; only once did Fairbanks have a serious flood, and the city was expanding up the hill, away from the Tanana River. Irrigation, flood control, navigation—none of those applied; yet those were the principal assignments of the Bureau and the Corps. Everything else—recreation, power, fish and wildlife “enhancement”—was supposed to be incidental to those activities. In Alaska, however, such “incidental” benefits were the only rationale they could come up with to build dams. And the dams they wanted to build were too monumental to pass up.

The Corps’ dream project, Rampart Dam on the Yukon River, was, at last, an opportunity to show the world what it could really do. It wasn’t its size that was so breathtaking—although, with a speculative height of 530 feet and a length of 4,700 feet, it had the dimensions of Grand Coulee—as the size of the reservoir that would form behind it. Lake Rampart would become the largest reservoir in the world. It would cover 10,800 square miles, making it almost exactly the size of Lake Erie. And it was the
power
—five million kilowatts of it, two and a half times more than the initial output of Grand Coulee. Rampart was, by far, the grandest virgin hydroelectric damsite under the American flag; there were only a dozen like it in the entire world.