Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [103]
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.
It is hard to imagine today, when big public-works projects such as New York’s Westway are held up for fifteen years in the courts, what the go-go years were like. In 1936, the four largest concrete dams ever built—Hoover, Shasta, Bonneville, and Grand Coulee—were being erected at breakneck speed, all at the same time. In Montana, Fort Peck Dam, the largest structure anywhere except for the Great Wall—which took a third of the Chinese male population a thousand years to build—was going up, too. The age of dams reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s, when hundreds upon hundreds of them were thrown up, forever altering the face of the continent—but most of those dams were middle-sized, squat, utilitarian, banal. The 1930s were the glory days. No dam after Hoover has ever quite matched its grace and glorious detail. Shasta Dam looks rundown now—the Grecian pavilions are rotting, the face is water-stained—but it was nearly as majestic as Hoover when it was built, and quite a bit bigger.
Symbolic achievements mattered terribly in the thirties, and the federal dams going up on the western rivers were the reigning symbols of the era. A few years earlier it had been the great skyscrapers that served as the landmarks of American achievement. In the late 1920s, they were rising simultaneously, too—the Empire State Building, the Chrysler