Cadillac Desert (40 page)

“I always felt there was a contradiction between my parents’ fussing and fuming and their Christian piety,” he says. “It seemed inconsistent to me. As a boy, I was very moral. I was president of my Sunday school class. I thought money was the root of evil. If someone had offered me a job paying $300 a year for life, I would have taken it. When I first married Alice, I made her take off her lipstick if we went out for the evening.

“I’m an enigma, even to myself.”

At seventeen, Floyd fell in love. Her name was Alice Criswell. She was sweet, demure, and very pretty, a little heroine out of Willa Cather. They met at a state convention; he was Master Counsellor for the Order of DeMolay, and she was the Queen of Job’s Daughters. Alice’s family lived in western Nebraska, near Chappell, a good two hundred miles away. Floyd was mad for her, but his father refused to let him borrow the car. Floyd had $30 to his name. He spent $25 of it on a beat-up one-cylinder motorcycle that, with luck, would take him to Alice. “It was a helluva trip out there. The roads were all dirt in those days. I wore out a pair of boots balancing that one-lunger, but I made it. When I got ready to go back home, the damn thing wouldn’t fire up. Alice’s father looked at it and said, ‘Your magneto’s shot.’ I said, ‘Can we fix it?’ He spent two hours trying, but the sonofabitch was beyond repair. I had to sell it for what I could get, which was five bucks, and start hitchhiking home. Hitchhike, hell. You hardly saw a car in western Nebraska in those days. I’d walked about three miles when I came upon an old guy with his head stuck under the hood of his truck. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I looked in and saw that his magneto was shot. Well, in the last two hours I’d learned about magnetos. I took his apart, saw right away what was wrong with it, and fixed it then and there. That old geezer was so impressed that he offered me a job on the spot. I never went home again.”

Floyd and Alice married secretly in Georgia, where Floyd had gone after two years at Hastings College to work on a gas pipeline being built across the South. They spent their three-day honeymoon in Florida. Floyd signed in ahead for three days of work and they took off. A supervisor, his heart warmed by a young couple in love, covered for him. “I was nineteen,” Floyd says. “I think that was the first lie I ever told in my life.”

When his stint in Atlanta was up, Floyd and Alice went back to Hastings. For $15 a week, he drove a truck between Hastings and Lincoln. Driving anything—a team of horses—was a dream job to many a farm boy, but Floyd found it excruciatingly dull. “I finally said to myself, ‘Hell, $15 a week is nothing. I’ll go out to western Nebraska with Alice.’ I got myself a job on Fred Smith’s place. Man, that was a badly run operation. They had new weeding tractors and their wheat fields were still being run over by weeds. They only ran the tractors during the daytime—they were too lazy to run them at night. This land was dry-farmed, and those weeds were using precious rainfall that was needed by the wheat. There were lights on the tractors. They should have been running the goddamned machines twenty-four hours a day. So I finally said, ‘This is a helluva way to run a farm!’ Fred Smith thought I was quite an upstart. He said to me, ‘How would you run it?’ and I said, ‘I’ll show you.’ I climbed on one of those tractors and I ran it till ten o‘clock at night. Then I went to bed, got up at three in the morning, and finished the job by four the next afternoon. Cleared out every weed on that farm. I was hell-for-leather. I didn’t stop to take a leak. Old Fred Smith came up to me later as I was changing clothes and said, ‘With that kind of drive, you’re wasting yourself. You ought to go back to college.’ ”

The sensible thing for a mechanically gifted farm boy who didn’t particularly like farming to major in was engineering. At Hastings College, Dominy had given it a brief go and quit. “I didn’t like the preciseness,” he says. In 1930, he entered the University of Wyoming at Laramie, choosing economics as a major. He was captain of the hockey team. He stayed on and won a master’s degree in 1933. By then the country’s economy was in a screaming nosedive and the West was five years into the Great Drought. The ranchers around Laramie couldn’t sell their cattle—first because no one had money to buy them, second because the cattle weren’t worth buying anyway. They were thirsty and starving, vacant-eyed beasts with bellies bloated from hunger and protruding ribs. Stupefied by the intensity of the disaster, Wyoming’s people were in the same condition, mentally if not physically. Campbell County, two hundred miles north of Laramie, was typical of the places that had plummeted through FDR’s safety net of relief. Roosevelt couldn’t launch a federal dam project there because Campbell County had no river worth a dam. It had no highway project because no one went there and it hardly had cars. It had no writers’ projects, no hospital projects, no dog census. All it had was the cattle liquidation program. The Agriculture Department’s county agent paid the ranchers $8 a head for their scrawny cattle, then shot them. The farmers took the $8 and spent it on horse feed and rifle shells, then headed into the uplands in search of deer and rabbits. During the Depression, Campbell County reverted substantially to the hunter-gatherer existence of the Crow and northern Cheyenne who had forfeited the territory. The two things it had going for it were reasonably abundant herds of game and the county agent, Floyd Dominy.

At eleven o‘clock one morning in the spring of 1980, Dominy, floating on three gin and juices and powered by two cigars, was in a mood to talk about his Campbell County days. “We had a drought, grasshoppers, crickets. I tell you it was something else. It looked as if nothing could live. Under the federal regulations, five thousand cattle were to be bought in the whole state of Wyoming. Fifty thousand were dying in Campbell County alone. I called up Washington and said, ‘This is worse than you can believe. Send me another vet, dammit.’ They sent me three vets. That got me some attention. The range improvement program, though, really put me on the map. That took creativity and force. The government was paying farmers fifteen cents a cubic yard to move dirt. Hell, I wasn’t going to pay fifteen cents if it cost ten. I said to those ranchers, ‘I’m gonna pay you cost—nothing more.’ Naturally, they bellyached. But with my relief allotment stretched further I could build a lot more dams.”

Campbell County is drier than crisp toast, but it does get some rain. There are mountains around that produce orographic clouds, and some of them produce rain—not much, but enough to make it worth trying to store the runoff that occasionally pours down the creeks. “I said to myself, ‘It’s stupid to let a drop of that stuff escape. We’ve got to capture that water.’ I’d take these ranchers out to where I wanted them to build a dam, some godawful-looking dry creek somewhere, and they’d say, ‘A dam’s no good. There’s no water to take.’ And I’d say, ‘Goddamn it, a ten-minute downpour in this devegetated moonscape and you’ll see a nice little surge come through here.’ The one good thing about Wyoming is there’s not enough groundcover to soak up the rain where it falls. I said to the farmers, ‘You capture that water and at least your cows won’t die of thirst. You get a little extra for irrigation and you can grow some grass on it. What do you want to do—just sit here and starve?’

“So I got them building dams. I practiced myself with a little four-horsepower Fresno scraper. The county surveyor and I developed our own set of regulations. We said it’s got to have ten-foot width and five feet of freeboard. The federal regulations said the Soil Conservation man had to approve the damsite. The Forest Service guy was supposed to have his say-so, too. I said to hell with it. I cut all that red tape. The extension director and the Wyoming dean of agriculture finally got wind of what I was up to. They said to me, ‘Floyd, you can’t do that. You’ve got to play by the
rules
.’ I said, ‘The Democrats would have a really black eye if they announce a program that doesn’t work.’ ”

Dominy took a swig of gin and juice, leaned back in his black easy chair, and chuckled. “That was the end of ‘prior approval.’ Henry Wallace took the phrase right out of the law.

“We built three hundred dams in my county. That was more than in the whole rest of the West. I was a one-man Bureau of Reclamation. We were moving! I was twenty-four years old, and I was king. Campbell County was my demesne. They still talk about me out there. I saved a lot of cattle from dying and a lot of farmers from going on relief. After that, I started getting job offers from Washington. But I had already psychoanalyzed myself as a strong starter who got bored easily. I figured I’d have to watch that if I wanted to succeed in life. So I had made up my mind to stay in Campbell County five years.”

For Floyd and Alice, the first two and a half years in Campbell County meant a life-style a cut above that of his ancestors when they arrived in Nebraska in 1873. They lived in a stone dugout built into a hillside; they had a gasoline lantern and a coal-burning stove, but no windows. “The place had been abandoned for thirty years. It was vandalized. The house had a leaning chimney and big holes in the floor. I was being paid $130 a month, plus five cents a mile for the car. The guy who owned the hovel was named Mr. Bartles. He was as bald as a billiard ball. I said, ‘What’s the rent?’ He said, ‘You’re crazy wanting to live there in the first place. I’m not going to let you live there
and
charge you rent.’ ”

Dominy didn’t quite achieve his goal of staying five years in Campbell County; he finally succumbed to an offer from the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to help administer the nation’s increasingly complex farm program, working as a field agent for the western states. In 1942, he transferred to the Inter-American Affairs Bureau, working under Nelson Rockefeller. The war effort demanded immense quantities of bauxite, rubber, and cinchona, most of it coming out of the Caribbean and South America. Tens of thousands of miners and loggers were dumped in the middle of the jungle without enough to eat. Instant farms became Dominy’s specialty. He set them up in nine Central and South American countries, and, later, on the islands of Saipan, Tinian, Iwo Jima, and Peleliu as they were recaptured from the Japanese.

In March of 1946, Dominy was back from the Pacific. Reviewing his career on a homebound ship, he decided that nothing had been as satisfying as building all those dams in Campbell County. It was one thing to hack a farm out of a jungle clearing—that was brutal and monotonous work, requiring neither brains nor talent. It was quite another thing to build a dam, store the water, and make the desert bloom. That, in a small way, was changing the order of the universe. On the same day he returned to Washington, Dominy went to a phone booth and put in a call to the Bureau of Reclamation. He had a job in three hours.

As a land-development specialist for the Bureau, Dominy proved his mettle quickly. His experience helped, as did his prodigious energy, but Dominy also had something a great many of the Bureau’s engineers lacked—a knack with people. “It was two things,” he says. “First, I cared about making these projects work. The engineers would build the dam and the irrigation features and walk away from it. They felt the projects were supposed to work out by themselves. When I got there, we had projects failing all over the place. The Bureau would send a threat out to the farmers to shape up, then forget about them for five years. No one took us seriously. Well, by God, they took me seriously. I was tough, but they saw I cared about their problems. That was number two. I proved myself right away. One of our early projects in big trouble was Milk River in Montana. The regional director, Ken Vernon, had revised the repayment contract under political pressure and it was a complete giveaway. I had moved up to Allocation and Repayment then, and I sent him a blistering letter about it. Vernon was several ranks above me and he couldn’t believe it. He called up Goodrich Lineweaver, my superior, and made himself hoarse chewing him out. ‘Who is this goddamned upstart?’ Lineweaver thought he could put me in my place by sending me to negotiate a better deal. He was sure I’d fail. So I went out to Montana. I saw these old farmers lined up in a room like a country church. They were hostile as hell. I demanded that tables and chairs be brought in. I gave them all pencils and a scratch pad and something to drink. Now they could put their feet under something, light up a smoke, and we could have a serious goddamn discussion. We got a whole new package out of this.”

Floyd Dominy’s rise to power in the Bureau of Reclamation was astonishingly fast. From dirt sampler to waterlord of the American West took just thirteen years, and he might as well have been commissioner during the last three. Like a chess master, Dominy leaped and checked his way to the top, going from Land Development to an entirely different branch, Allocation and Repayment, then sidelong to Operation and Maintenance, then to the Irrigation Division, and finally to assistant, associate, and full commissioner. His strategy was simple. He would settle in a branch with a weak man as chief and learn as fast as he could. Then he would flap up to the ledge occupied by the chief and knock him off. The first to go was Bill Palmer, who headed Allocation and Repayment and was there largely because he was a Mormon and had an influential constituency. “Mike Straus was totally unsatisfied with Palmer,” says Dominy, “so I told Lineweaver that they ought to replace him with me. He said, ‘I can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Well, what can you do?’ Lineweaver said, ‘We can make you acting director and not tell Palmer about it.’ I said, ‘How long acting?’ He said, ‘Well, I don’t know, until we can work something out.’ I said, ‘Let’s make it sixty days.’ Lineweaver mumbled and grumbled, ‘I don’t know, Floyd, that’s awfully short.’ I said, ‘It’s long for me.’ Well, I got him to agree. There I was, ‘acting director,’ and Palmer doesn’t even know it. The first thing he does is start making a fuss about having to train me, because he’d just trained some other guy. So I walked into his office late one day and said, ‘Bill, I think you’ve got a bad attitude. I hear you’ve been complaining about having to train me. Well, you don’t have to. Dominy can train Dominy.’ He looked up at me and said, ‘What do you mean by that, Floyd?’ I looked him cold in the eye and said, ‘I mean I’m about to run this division, Bill. It’s you or me, and I can guarantee you it’s going to be me. So maybe what you ought to do is request a transfer. Maybe you should go out West.’ ” Mimicking his tone of voice then, Dominy sounds like a Mafia shakedown artist running a recalcitrant store owner out of the neighborhood. “Well, he took my cue. Next thing I know Bill Palmer is requesting a move to Sacramento and I’m chief of Allocation and Repayment. It took exactly sixty days, just like I said. I brought him back, though. Ultimately, I made him an assistant commissioner. Bill was a good man.”