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By Root 1612 0

Like Dreyfus, Casey had become cynical about the whole Reclamation program, but he couldn’t help retaining his loyalty to the Bureau. Once, in the early 1970s, when a friend sent a young engineering graduate over for job advice, Casey suggested that he apply at the Bureau, and the young man made a sour face. “He told me that the Bureau of Reclamation was a disgrace,” Casey remembered. “And I got mad at him for saying that, but here was a guy fresh out of one of the top engineering schools—the kind of guy who once would have loved to work for the Bureau—and he said it was nothing but a bunch of nature-wreckers out to waste the taxpayers’ money. It was Floyd Dominy who gave it that reputation. You couldn’t convince him that the Bureau’s pigheadedness about things like Marble and Bridge Canyon dams was turning the whole country off. After he’d told me his Rainbow Bridge story for the seventh time and how he’d licked the conservationists, I said, ‘Well, you won that one, but you haven’t won too many others lately.’ He said. ‘What haven’t I won?’ And I said, ‘Well, they licked you pretty good on Marble and Bridge Canyon.’

“You know what his answer was? ‘My Secretary turned chickenshit on me.’ The man was blind. He went completely blind.”

These are mere opinions, but the record speaks for itself. The Central Arizona Project which Dominy finally managed to build is a medium-sized dwarf compared with the Pacific Southwest Water Plan he had planned, and he had to sacrifice the last years of his career to the effort to get it authorized. Today, few of the other grand projects conceived under him exist. There is no Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, no Texas Water Plan, no Auburn Dam, no Kellogg Reservoir, no English Ridge Dam, no Peripheral Canal, no additional dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake River, no Oahe and Garrison diversion projects. Dominy wanted to move the Bureau’s activities into the eastern United States, because he came to believe that irrigation often makes better sense in wetter regions than in emphatically dry ones, and also because he wanted to invade the Corps of Engineers’ domain in order to retaliate for the Corps having encroached on the Bureau in the West. But all of those plans—for irrigation projects in Louisiana, for a series of reservoirs in Appalachia set around new industrial towns—came to naught. The legacy of Floyd Dominy is not so much bricks and mortar as a reputation—a reputation and an attitude. The attitude is his—one of arrogant indifference to sweeping changes in the public mood—and it is probably the foremost obstacle in the Bureau of Reclamation’s way as it tries to play a meaningful role in the future of the American West.

Actually, there is one more legacy, one of flesh and blood. In Dominy’s office at his Shenandoah farm, next to his huge commissioner’s desk, is a photograph of him with his son on a boat speeding across Lake Powell, arms around each other. Remove the film of thirty years and Floyd could be Charles Dominy’s twin—they look that much alike. In the 1980s, Charles was the chief of the southeastern district of the Army Corps of Engineers. He was turning the Savannah River into a continuous reservoir, channelizing countless miles of meandering streams and creeks, draining the last wild swamp and forest lands of the wet Southeast for soybean farms. He was also plotting to revive the cross-Florida barge canal—a casualty of the same administration that deposed his father.

A couple of hours earlier Dominy had been lambasting the Corps, saying it “has no conscience.” As he saw his guest look at the photograph, however, he broke into a proud grin. He said, “That boy is going to be Chief of Engineers someday.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

An American Nile (II)

Nineteen twenty-eight, the year the Hoover Dam legislation was passed, was a milestone year in Arizona in another sense. The population went past 400,000—the largest number of people who had lived there in approximately seven hundred years.

The original 400,000 Arizonans (that is an outside estimate; the number may have been