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farmers, who had so much water to waste that some of them applied ten or twelve feet per year to their crops, were opposed to the dredging because they liked to shoot ducks. Ben Avery, a widely read outdoor columnist for the Arizona Republic—a newspaper never known to oppose water development unless it was California’s—adopted Topock Marsh as his personal crusade and made a point of savaging the Bureau several times a year. In June of 1966, one of his columns finally caught Dominy’s attention. “I believe we will have to take Avery on,” he wrote to his regional director, Arleigh West, “or face up to the realities [sic] that there is a great deal of truth in what he is saying.” In other words, Dominy knew Avery was right. He knew that Topock Marsh was pitiful compensation for all the habitat the Bureau and Corps had ruined. He knew that the marsh would reappear unless the Bureau continued to spend millions of dollars trying to annihilate it. But which course of action did he choose? The Bureau, he decided, was going to deny everything Ben Avery said and continue demolishing the marsh.

Stewart Udall was upset over the Topock Marsh situation, and since the marsh was being eradicated for the sake of California—not Arizona—he ordered Dominy to do something about it. In typical fashion, Dominy’s response was to try to make an end run around Udall, through the Congress. Though he was nominally Dominy’s boss, Udall didn’t like tangling with his two-fisted commissioner; that was the reason he had John Carver on his staff. Small, tough, and profane, built like a bantamweight prize-fighter, Carver had been hired to be Udall’s all-purpose troubleshooter. Manhandling Dominy, however, was turning into his full-time job.

“The summit meeting was to take place in Udall’s office,” remembers John Gottschalk, who was then the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “It was a good choice—the Secretary was absent, but the trappings of authority would impose themselves. I was a little late in arriving, and as I was walking down the hall I could already hear Carver and Dominy at each others’ throats. God Almighty! Were they screaming at each other! When I walked in they were standing at opposite sides of Udall’s desk just like a couple of football players facing off. They were pounding the table with their fists. Dominy’s face was beet-red. I remember him yelling, ‘What do you want me to do? Resign my fucking job?’ And Carver was shouting back, ‘We want you to get on the team, Floyd! We don’t want you to resign. We want you to stop throwing tantrums and get on the goddamned team!’

“I just stood there transfixed,” says Gottschalk. “I didn’t know whether to try to break it up or slink out the door. It went on like that for another fifteen minutes until Dominy gave up. I remember exactly what he said. He yelled, ‘You realize you’re asking me to go against every sound precept of water management for a bunch of goddamned birds and fish!’ And then he barged out the door like a Sherman tank.”

By the mid-sixties, Dominy finally had realized that the conservation movement was a serious enough threat to the Reclamation program that he would have to acknowledge not only its existence, but its political power. At first he had paid it as much attention as he would a flea, but now he began to go after the flea with a hydrogen bomb. In one issue of Audubon magazine—which had a circulation far smaller than it does today—the magazine’s bird-watching columnist, Olin Pettingill, made a derogatory reference to the Bureau in an article which, for the most part, was about curlews and gallinules. Pettingill remarked that the Bureau’s Nimbus Dam, on the American River east of Sacramento, “has ruined what once were spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead rainbow trout”—an observation that happens to be entirely true. That was the sum total of Pettingill’s criticism: one sentence in a two-thousand-word article about birds. However, as far as Dominy was concerned, the magazine was guilty of delivering “a gratuitous slap in the face.” He wrote to his regional director,