• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1568 0

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