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neutral or opposed it. But now everyone knew the river was overallocated, and everyone wanted to see it replenished by water from somewhere else, so all the basin states were in favor of the Grand Canyon dams. Never before had conservationists challenged the collective will of seven states. Brower and the Sierra Club led the fight. As in the Echo Park battle, he managed to recruit heavyweight expertise. Luna Leopold, one of the country’s leading hydrologists and the son of Aldo Leopold, the famous ecologist, was willing to take a swipe at the Bureau’s flow calculations. Brower found some nuclear engineers from M.I.T. and Bechtel who were eager to demonstrate why nuclear reactors were a cheaper alternative. (Brower would later become one of the leading opponents of nuclear fission.) His most valuable discovery, however, was an utterly unknown thirty-year-old mathematician from New Mexico named Jeffrey Ingram. Ingram was a self-described fanatic about two things: the Grand Canyon, and numbers. He loved playing with figures, and above all he loved exposing figures as frauds. In particular, pyramid schemes fascinated him, and in the Bureau’s pay-back scheme for the Pacific Southwest Water Plan, he thought he had discovered the greatest pyramid scheme anyone ever saw.

In order to finance the CAP and Bridge and Marble Gorge dams, Ingram discovered, the Bureau planned to capture the revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams, after their power sales had paid them off in the late 1980s, and reroute them into the new projects. For one thing, the Bureau, under Reclamation law, had no business doing this. All surplus power revenues were supposed to revert to the Treasury, in order to compensate the taxpayers for having forgiven interest obligations on the irrigation features of the projects. But that was not the half of it. The whole rationale for the Grand Canyon dams was that the river would have to be augmented someday, and power dams were the only means of raising the money for an importation project. The new dams, however, would be terrifically expensive compared to their predecessors. Hoover had been built for the incredibly low sum of $50 million; Bridge Canyon would likely cost close to $1 billion. Because of their enormous cost, the new dams would see their revenues tied up for years, for decades, repaying their own costs and subsidizing the CAP—a subsidy that was crucial if the Bureau was to find anyone to buy its water. Even if revenues from Hoover, Parker, and Davis dams were added, all of that money would be consumed for a seemingly endless period paying for the new works and the CAP subsidy. It would be financing the depletion of the river; there would be no money for augmentation until long after the basin was predicted to run out of water. In fact, according to Ingram’s calculations, if you didn’t build the Grand Canyon dams, money would start flowing into the development fund sooner than if you did. Ultimately, the dams would generate a lot of money—perhaps enough to finance most of the cost of diverting a distant river, if one could be found. But by then it would be too late. The Colorado River would have long since run dry.

It was a formidable argument, and it forced the Bureau of Reclamation to redirect its creative energies toward convincing the Bureau of the Budget that it wasn’t really so. In the meantime, David Brower was free to do what he did best: publicity. With the help of two San Francisco advertising men, Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage, the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau’s arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel,” asked one advertisement, “so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” The response was thunderous. Dan Dreyfus was still with the Bureau of Reclamation then, in charge of planning