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By Root 1440 0

of import but recognize the impracticality of seeking such authorization at this time.” Wyoming, he said, took a similar view: “It feels that import is an absolute necessity for their future development and protection and they desire conditional authorization.... Studies of importation are an absolute minimum and anything else would result in opposition to the bill.” Utah was slightly less adamant than Colorado and Wyoming, but not much. New Mexico would accept a bill that only authorized a feasibility study, but nothing less than that. Between them, as Dominy well knew, the four states had the power in Congress to kill any bill they didn’t like. Wayne Aspinall of Colorado was the autocratic chairman of the House Interior Committee, which would have to report out the bill in order for it to reach the floor of Congress; he could bottle it up forever if he desired. Clinton Anderson of New Mexico had similar power in the Senate, Carl Hayden notwithstanding. And there were plenty of others in both houses to be reckoned with.

However, for all their insistence on an augmentation project that might be viewed as something akin to a military invasion by northern Columbia or the Pacific Northwest, the upper-basin representatives were curiously ambivalent about the one item already authorized in HR 4671 that would generate the billions that would allow such a rescue project to be built—Bridge Canyon Dam. “New Mexico observes that its inclusion could be untimely and unwise,” reported Crandall to Dominy. Even the choleric Felix Sparks, he wrote, was inclined “to defer to the lower-basin states on this question.” Wyoming’s and Utah’s positions were “not materially different than the position of Colorado and New Mexico.” And yet if Bridge Canyon Dam were not built, with its promise of huge amounts of high-priced peaking power, how could the rescue project they insisted on be self-financing? It couldn’t. But no Reclamation project had ever been built that didn’t at least create the illusion that it was self-financing.

For the moment, however, the upper-basin states were not worried about that. They were much more worried about a former magazine editor and amateur lepidopterist from Berkeley, California, named David Brower.

David Brower’s passionate opposition to dams has its origins in his teeth. Brower’s childhood, spent in that most tolerant of American cities, had not been happy. He had an awkward case of shyness and, to boot, a row of missing teeth, and his schoolmates taunted him mercilessly about both. In his midteens he departed for the only place in California where he felt he would be left alone or at least find better company: the Sierra Nevada. In those days—the late 1920s—back-packing and mountaineering were considered the oddest of preoccupations, the province of slightly deranged British peers. The Sierra Nevada, which is invaded by so many hikers today that it feels like a zoo, was virtually devoid of humanity. The rapture Brower experienced there transported him to a mystic state; it became a dependency, a drug. He had food and supplies cached all over the place; he could return to one weeks after laying it in and it would still be there. Like his hero John Muir, Brower grew intimate with vast portions of that range. He would return to Berkeley, work at odd jobs for a while, make enough money to quit, and leave for the mountains again. By his late twenties, Brower had become the sort of person the water-development lobby cannot fathom: someone who puts unspoiled nature above the material aspirations of mankind. For his part, by the time he became the first paid executive director of the Sierra Club, in 1952, Brower had decided that no work of man violated nature as completely, as irrevocably, as a dam.

Relatively late in life, Brower had discovered the sublime emptiness of the plateau and red canyon country of the Colorado River Basin. It was the same terrain that had enchanted John Wesley Powell eighty years before, and it was almost as unpeopled and unspoiled as it had been then. Brower loved everything about it: