Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [250]
The fountainhead of southern Idaho’s agricultural wealth lies to the northeast, where the Yellowstone plateau and the Grand Teton Mountains produce enough water to engorge the Snake to substantial size before it enters the state. On a bright day, the Grand Tetons are visible from the eastern reaches of the plain; a huge buttress wall facing north-south, ninety miles long and thirteen thousand feet high, the range wrings a lot of water out of passing Pacific storms. On the western side the runoff gathers into two rivers, the Henry’s Fork and the Teton, which ultimately join the Snake above Idaho Falls. The Teton is, or was, the prettier river; for thirty miles, it whipsawed through a low, U-shaped canyon amid cottonwoods along the bottom and conifers that walked up the canyon’s collapsed slopes. An oasis stream in a landscape that is at best austere, the Teton was coveted by the deer that wintered in its canyon, by the fat trout darting from pool to pool and by the humans who thought it could be put to better use. Since the 1920s and before, there was talk of a dam somewhere on the river, but the dam was never built. One reason can be seen in the granular rock of the canyon’s steep slopes. The geology of the region is ultravolcanic: the rock is fissured, fractionated, cavitated, and criss-crossed by minor faults. The neighboring farmland, meanwhile, though productive enough, requires inordinate amounts of water. Those two drawbacks add up to poor economics, and though a Teton Dam was studied and restudied through the 1940s and 1950s, it was never built—until the 1960s.
The impetus, as in the case of many dams, was disaster, or what was called disaster—first a drought, then a flood. The drought occurred in 1961 and 1962, the flood the winter after. The flood caused some few hundred thousand dollars worth of damage, most of it because ice jams occurred at a couple of bridges during a sudden early melt. The drought was mainly a misnomer, nothing like the early thirties or the drastic rainless period in California in the mid-1970s; farm income remained high. In the West, however, a drought and a flood together set off a strong Pavlovian response. The first thing that enters anyone’s mind is a dam.
For a project that had spent three or four decades in the pupa stage, Teton was authorized and built in a great hurry. The main reason was Willis Walker, a crotchety Mormon farmer and president of the Fremont-Madison Irrigation District, who managed to organize all of southwestern Idaho behind it. His task was not that difficult. This, after all, was the Mormon West. The closest thing to oppositoin was indifference. years later, speaking with a reporter, Walker reminisced, “One of the arguments we used back there was that in ‘60 and ’61 we had a lot of potatoes and a lot of sugar beets around here that didn’t have enough water to finish them out. I figured I had better find that water or quit farming.” The argument conjured images of crops wilting on the vine, of families ruined on the eve of harvest for want of water to bring their crops to ripeness. Everyone bought it, even though it was nonsense, for the most part. Years later, a graduate student writing a thesis discovered that production of some crops had actually increased during the drought. In Fremont and Madison counties, for example, the yield of potatoes in 1961, the worst year of the drought, was 212 hundredweight per acre. Between 1956 and 1959, a stretch of more or less normal years, the average yield was only 184 hundredweight per acre.
Even had the drought threatened ruin, there was a solution much simpler and cheaper than a dam, the same solution that California’s farmers would fall back on during their