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By Root 1680 0

physically. Campbell County, two hundred miles north of Laramie, was typical of the places that had plummeted through FDR’s safety net of relief. Roosevelt couldn’t launch a federal dam project there because Campbell County had no river worth a dam. It had no highway project because no one went there and it hardly had cars. It had no writers’ projects, no hospital projects, no dog census. All it had was the cattle liquidation program. The Agriculture Department’s county agent paid the ranchers $8 a head for their scrawny cattle, then shot them. The farmers took the $8 and spent it on horse feed and rifle shells, then headed into the uplands in search of deer and rabbits. During the Depression, Campbell County reverted substantially to the hunter-gatherer existence of the Crow and northern Cheyenne who had forfeited the territory. The two things it had going for it were reasonably abundant herds of game and the county agent, Floyd Dominy.

At eleven o‘clock one morning in the spring of 1980, Dominy, floating on three gin and juices and powered by two cigars, was in a mood to talk about his Campbell County days. “We had a drought, grasshoppers, crickets. I tell you it was something else. It looked as if nothing could live. Under the federal regulations, five thousand cattle were to be bought in the whole state of Wyoming. Fifty thousand were dying in Campbell County alone. I called up Washington and said, ‘This is worse than you can believe. Send me another vet, dammit.’ They sent me three vets. That got me some attention. The range improvement program, though, really put me on the map. That took creativity and force. The government was paying farmers fifteen cents a cubic yard to move dirt. Hell, I wasn’t going to pay fifteen cents if it cost ten. I said to those ranchers, ‘I’m gonna pay you cost—nothing more.’ Naturally, they bellyached. But with my relief allotment stretched further I could build a lot more dams.”

Campbell County is drier than crisp toast, but it does get some rain. There are mountains around that produce orographic clouds, and some of them produce rain—not much, but enough to make it worth trying to store the runoff that occasionally pours down the creeks. “I said to myself, ‘It’s stupid to let a drop of that stuff escape. We’ve got to capture that water.’ I’d take these ranchers out to where I wanted them to build a dam, some godawful-looking dry creek somewhere, and they’d say, ‘A dam’s no good. There’s no water to take.’ And I’d say, ‘Goddamn it, a ten-minute downpour in this devegetated moonscape and you’ll see a nice little surge come through here.’ The one good thing about Wyoming is there’s not enough groundcover to soak up the rain where it falls. I said to the farmers, ‘You capture that water and at least your cows won’t die of thirst. You get a little extra for irrigation and you can grow some grass on it. What do you want to do—just sit here and starve?’

“So I got them building dams. I practiced myself with a little four-horsepower Fresno scraper. The county surveyor and I developed our own set of regulations. We said it’s got to have ten-foot width and five feet of freeboard. The federal regulations said the Soil Conservation man had to approve the damsite. The Forest Service guy was supposed to have his say-so, too. I said to hell with it. I cut all that red tape. The extension director and the Wyoming dean of agriculture finally got wind of what I was up to. They said to me, ‘Floyd, you can’t do that. You’ve got to play by the rules.’ I said, ‘The Democrats would have a really black eye if they announce a program that doesn’t work.’ ”

Dominy took a swig of gin and juice, leaned back in his black easy chair, and chuckled. “That was the end of ‘prior approval.’ Henry Wallace took the phrase right out of the law.

“We built three hundred dams in my county. That was more than in the whole rest of the West. I was a one-man Bureau of Reclamation. We were moving! I was twenty-four years old, and I was king. Campbell County was my demesne. They still talk about me out there. I saved a lot of cattle