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By Root 1765 0

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