Cadillac Desert (29 page)

To geologists, the age of the Columbia River Basalts was a particularly exciting time. The vulcanism lasted ten million years or so, and covered a broad area. You can see the evidence in the cindered lava beds of Idaho and western Oregon, in the columnar basalts of Devil’s Postpile in the Sierra Nevada, in the smoking cones of the Cascades. The Cascade volcanoes, which formed recently—Mount St. Helens is probably no more than fifteen thousand years old—are the last embers of a giant bonfire which began to end, according to the available evidence, about seven million years ago. By then, the Pacific and North American plates had begun to equalize, grinding against each other like teeth and causing a chaos of earthquakes and volcanos beyond anything imaginable in our time. The Columbia River flowed during the whole period of eruption; constantly smothered by lava dams, it must have changed course hundreds of times. As the vulcanism subsided, the river began to enjoy the first quietude of its long existence, which lasted several million years—until the ice came.

The continents of snow that slid down from the North Pole during the Ice Ages stopped somewhere along a latitudinal line defined by Seattle, Spokane, and Great Falls, Montana. Where the topographic conditions were right, however, some of them went farther, huge peninsulas of ice that protruded a hundred or two hundred miles south. Near the present location of Lake Coeur d’Alene in western Idaho, an ice lobe laid itself across the path of the voluminous melt pouring from the mile-high glacial walls and blocked it, forming what may well have been history’s most prodigious dam. Confronted by a wall of ice thousands of feet high, the runoff pooled and backed into a reservoir referred to by geologists as Glacial Lake Missoula. Frigid, ephemeral, hundreds of feet deep, the lake covered an area roughly the size of Lake Michigan and contained half as much water. At some point, as the lake deepened behind the ice dam, the dam must have begun to float—ice being lighter than a corresponding volume of water. The flood probably came in a sudden instantaneous release, like the collapse of Teton Dam, and emptied Lake Missoula within a couple of weeks. The volume of the flood is anyone’s guess; Larry Meinert, a geologist at Washington State University at Pullman, says a reasonable estimate is ten times the combined flow of all the rivers in the world. The modern topography of the Northwest was pretty well formed by then; most of Lake Missoula searched out the main stream of the Columbia as its route to the sea. Inundated by a flood surge of 230 million cubic feet per second, the Columbia’s spacious canyon was a thimble holding a dinosaur egg. In the upper stages the flood was probably twenty miles wide, confined by steeper valleys, but as it poured across the old lava plains of central Washington it spread into a flowing tumult as wide as Indiana. In places, the water excavated canyons overnight, extensive channels scoured through bedrock that remain such a dominant feature of the landscape that central Washington is more often referred to by geologists as “the channeled scab-lands.” The big channels are known as coulees—Rocky Coulee, Lind Coulee, Esquazal Coulee. The biggest of all—seven hundred feet deep, five miles across, more than fifty miles long—is called the Grand Coulee.

Lake Missoula—greater and lesser incarnations of it—formed and reformed at least six times. The last time was about seventeen thousand years ago; by then there may have been humans living in the region. All of the land swept by the floods was stripped absolutely to bedrock. The glaciers, however, had left behind mountains of fine silt—the ground-up surface of Canada—and the winds distributed it around the region with a generous universality. The silt, known as loess, makes for extremely good farmland, and in some parts of Washington, such as the Palouse region below the Blue Mountains, it accumulated to depths of nearly two hundred feet. Rainfall is sparse behind the Cascades—ten to twenty inches is the norm—but loess has outstanding water-retentive qualities. Through this fortuitous coincidence, the soil neither washed away nor blew away—it grew a cover of blond grass and stayed put, waiting for the white man to arrive. That, in any case, is what white men thought. One spot in particular, around the Grand Coulee, was astonishingly suited for irrigation farming. There were more than a million acres of fine soil on the benchlands, a natural storage reservoir in the coulee itself, and, in the river canyon, a favorable site for a dam. A very, very large dam.

In 1933, the Columbia was by far the biggest river anyone had ever dreamed about damming. Bigger than the Colorado, bigger than the Snake, bigger than the Klamath, bigger than the Rio Grande—about twice as big, in fact, as all of those put together—it was the fourth biggest river in North America. Swelling out of the Purcell Range in Canada, it took off for the ocean like an express train on a route mapped by the Olympic Torch Committee: for three hundred miles it went straight for Alaska, until it picked up the melt from Columbia Glacier, an icefield the size of Chicago; then it turned south; then west; then south again; then east; then south; then west again to the sea. By the time it crossed the U.S. border, it was already so large that the Pend Oreille, a tributary larger than the Colorado, could be swallowed without appreciable effect. At the Dalles, the virgin Columbia had an average flow in excess of 200,000 cubic feet per second, one of the largest rivers anywhere with enough of a drop to contain rapids. Such a volume and such a drop—all of it in a confined canyon—made the river ideal for hydroelectricity; it had a power potential out of proportion even to its vast size. In 1933, it could, if fully developed, have generated enough electricity for everyone living west of the Mississippi River.

For all its power potential, the idea of building a large hydroelectric dam at Grand Coulee was regarded by many people as insane. The Northwest had plenty of smaller rivers, much more easily dammed. The region, in 1930, had only three million inhabitants, and 70 percent of the rural people had no electricity. Even a tenth of its power potential could not be used—especially with Bonneville Dam going up downriver. The Bureau of Reclamation had surveyed the soils of the Grand Coulee benchlands in 1903 and found them excellent, but it had said nothing about building a dam. Major General George Goethals, with the Panama Canal under his belt, came to size up the task and backed off; he recommended a run-of-the-river irrigation diversion instead. Herbert Hoover, himself an engineer and an enthusiast about the dam that was to bear his name, said that construction of a dam at Grand Coulee was “inevitable,” that it should be built “at the earliest possible date,” but from the zeal with which he pursued the goal he might have been talking about the Second Coming. Even the Columbia’s propensity to drown low-lying Portland and Vancouver—it could raise a flood of a million cubic feet per second without too much effort—left the Corps of Engineers unmoved. Only three institutions in the entire country seemed interested in Grand Coulee Dam: the Wenatchee (Washington)
Daily World,
the Bureau of Reclamation, and the new President of the United States.

Franklin Roosevelt first heard about Grand Coulee from Nat Washington, a descendant of George Washington’s brother, who approached him about it at the Democratic National Convention in 1920, when FDR was James M. Cox’s running mate. The future President was intrigued, but in a mild way; it would cost a fortune, and FDR, in those days, was still promising to balance the budget. By 1933, however, the Grand Coulee project would have been invented by Roosevelt if someone else hadn’t thought of it first. It was colossal and magnificent—a purgative of national despair. It would employ tens of thousands. It could settle tens of thousands more on irrigated lands in a region whose inhabitants, in the late 1920s, consisted of a ferryman and a couple of hay farmers. It was loathed by the Republican conservatives and the private-power interests. Perhaps best of all, it was regarded by none other than the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers as “a grandiose project of no more usefulness than the pyramids of Egypt.” To Roosevelt, that remark was as good a reason as any to build it.

And it was built on a foundation of deception.

In 1931, the Corps of Engineers finally pronounced the construction of a concrete dam at Grand Coulee feasible. What the Corps had in mind, however, was a low dam, rising two or three hundred feet from bedrock—a dam similar to its own Bonneville Dam downstream, useful only for regulating navigation flows and for hydroelectricity. The Bureau, however, was not interested in a low dam. The pump lift from the reservoir surface to the canyon rim would be at least five hundred feet; such a lift was beyond the capacity of any pumps in existence at the time, and even if they
had
existed their enormous appetite for power would make any irrigation project infeasible in an economic sense. A high dam was absolutely necessary for an irrigation project, not only because it would knock twenty stories off the pump lift, but because it would produce a vast amount of surplus hydroelectricity to handle the still impressive pump lift and generate enough revenue to subsidize the cost of water so that the farmers could afford it.

The problem with a high dam, however, was Congress. Confronted on all sides by calamity and cries for relief, Congress was not about to appropriate $270 million (about twelve times more in today’s money) to build a white elephant of a dam in a remote corner of the country where hardly anyone lived. As it happened, however, Congress had undermined its own intention by giving FDR blanket authority, under the Public Works Administration and the National Industrial Recovery Act, to select and fund “emergency” projects that would assist the relief effort. Why not use some of that money to get started with a low dam—and then switch horses in midstream?

Nowhere is there absolute proof that this is the strategy FDR had in mind. The circumstantial evidence is merely overwhelming. In 1933, he designated $63 million, the greatest sum ever for any single purpose, from the Public Works Administration under Section 202 of the National Industrial Recovery Act to begin construction on a low dam at Grand Coulee. At that point, there was no question of intent; a low dam was specifically mentioned in the appropriation. A few months later, the construction contract for the dam was let to a consortium of engineering firms that went by the acronym MWAK. The contract also specified a low dam. The $63 million was spent in a hurry; by 1935, cofferdams were already in place and the permanent dam’s foundation was rising in the riverbed. It was not, however, a foundation for a low dam—
it was the foundation of a high dam.

In interviews, no engineer who worked on Grand Coulee Dam would admit that the Bureau and FDR had a high dam in mind all along and quietly decided to hoodwink a Congress which they knew would never authorize it. Nonetheless, no other explanation seems plausible. Charles Weil, the Bureau engineer charged with concrete inspection, said that a “substantial” amount of the high dam foundation’s concrete had already been poured before the Roosevelt administration went to Congress in 1935 with a request to change the authorization from a low dam to a high dam. Still, he insisted that the Bureau never tried to deceive anyone. “I wouldn’t say that the Bureau tried to mislead Congress,” Weil offered. “But it had to keep in mind what Congress was willing to fund.” That, of course, is another way of saying that the Bureau chose to mislead Congress. In the beginning, before construction began, a high dam was out of the question. After $63 million had been spent building a foundation for it, however, a low dam was out of the question; at the very least, it wouldn’t have made much sense. The Bureau had presented Congress with a
fait accompli
in the form of a gigantic foundation designed to support a gravity dam 550 feet tall. To build a two-hundred-foot dam on it would have been like mounting a Honda body on the chassis of a truck.

Phil Nalder, who rose from draftsman to manager of the entire Columbia Basin Project, was as circumspect as Weil about the Bureau’s motives and strategy. According to Nalder, “The Bureau determined belatedly that a low dam would have been impractical at the site.” But that, of course, is something the Bureau must have recognized all along. There was nothing “impractical” about building a low dam for power and navigation, but building a low dam for an irrigation project was hopelessly impractical. Nalder, at least, was a bit more candid about whether the evidence didn’t suggest that Roosevelt and the Bureau had pulled a fast one on the Congress. “Well, if you look .at the evidence superficially,” he said, “it would certainly appear that way.”

The issue of a high dam versus a low dam involved much more than power production and the fate of the irrigation project. It also involved the fate of the greatest spawning run of salmon in the world. During the Depression, salmon was the one high-protein food most people could afford; it was still so abundant that it cost about ten cents for a one-pound can. America’s Atlantic salmon were almost wiped out by then; virtually all domestic salmon came from Alaska and the West Coast, and the greatest run—equal to or greater than all the streams and rivers in Oregon and California combined—went up the Columbia River. Some of the fish branched off into the lower tributaries to spawn, but the majority went far up the river into the higher tributaries, beyond Grand Coulee. Many salmon could probably have gotten past a low dam; today, tens of thousands manage to circumnavigate the Dalles, John Day, and Bonneville dams through fish ladders every year. A high Grand Coulee Dam, however, would block their passage forever. A fifty-story wall rising straight out of the river would form an ultimate obstruction—hopeless and forbidding. A fish ladder, built at a proper gradient, would have to run for many miles, cut into sheer canyon walls. No one was even talking about building it; the cost might approach the price of the dam. (Fish facilities at Bonneville Dam’s second powerplant, built many years later, would end up costing $65 million, almost one-fourth the cost of the powerplant itself.) If the high dam spelled doom for most of the salmon in the Columbia River, however, it did perform a miraculous service which, at the time, was utterly unforeseen. It probably won the Second World War.