Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [135]
Only if it was allowed to build the Allenspur Dam. “[F]uture events such as a disastrous local flood possibly could change local attitudes,” Stamm concluded. Therefore, his recommendation to Dominy was that the Bureau try “to get the wild river determination altered ... to accommodate the potential future construction of the Allenspur Unit.” By doing so, it would ensure that “all foreseeable desireable future water resource developments would be protected.” The Bureau was prepared to accept Wild and Scenic River status for the Yellowstone, in other words, as long as it could someday build the dam that would largely destroy it as a wild and scenic river.
Behind such nearly pathological unwillingness to let go of even one river stood, of course, the lurking shadow of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The only conceivable justification for a dam on the Yellowstone was flood control. For now, the Bureau held the authorization to build the project. If it demurred, the Corps might waste no time in trying to build it instead.
If, by the late 1960s, the rivalry between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers had degenerated into an ongoing squabble over needless projects instead of necessary ones; if each agency was reaching farther afield from its original mandate—the Bureau now talking about building a single-purpose flood-control dam, the Corps incessantly trying to steal the loyalty of the Bureau’s irrigation constituency; if they were trying to move into geographic territory where they had no business being—the Bureau into the swamps of Louisiana (there are internal memos suggesting that even this wet state should perhaps be brought into the Bureau’s orbit, per request of Senator Russell Long), the Corps into the middle of the Central Valley Project’s sevice area—if all of this was true, then it was entirely fitting that the climactic battle between the Bureau and the corps should be fought in, of all places, Alaska.
On April 7, 1961, Daryl Roberts, the head of the Bureau’s Alaska District office, wrote a blue-envelope letter to Commissioner Dominy reporting on a luncheon conversation he had just had with C. W. Snedden, the publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Snedden, Roberts wrote, had told him that “the Corps of Engineers was cutting my throat and brainwashing the local people in favor of Rampart Dam.” Snedden reported that the Corps had “held two meetings with the City Council, had met with the Chamber of Commerce, the National Resource Committee and others to sell them on holding off on the Devil’s Canyon Project until the Corps completes their Rampart study.” This news had so upset Roberts that he made a proposal to Dominy that, in all likelihood, no one had ever made before: the Bureau should enlist the same conservationists who had just defeated one of its most beloved dams, Echo Park, in a joint effort to make war on the Corps of Engineers.
What was ironic about the Bureau and the Corps staging their climactic battle in Alaska was that, strictly speaking, neither of them had any business being there. Alaska has very little agriculture—about the only place one can grow anything is in the Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage—and its few farmers employ little irrigation, if any. Besides, the state has more groundwater than one can dream of, most of it a few feet beneath the surface of the earth. The only navigable inland waterway is the Yukon River, and what the Corps was proposing to build would have put an end to that. Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the tiny towns along the Yukon sit on bluffs; only once did Fairbanks have a serious flood, and the city was expanding up the hill, away from the Tanana River. Irrigation, flood control, navigation—none of those applied; yet those were the principal assignments of the Bureau and the Corps. Everything else—recreation, power, fish and wildlife “enhancement”—was