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“A hundred thousand dollars! You could have licked me if I thought we could raise that kind of money from a little old bunch of farmers.”

In plotting their strategy, the Weldon Valley landowners’ group had made one crucial mistake. They had always assumed that their main fight would be with the Bureau, the Colorado Water Conservation Board—a chamber of commerce for dams—and the Lower South Platte Conservancy District, which was scheduled to receive water from Narrows. The Lower South Platte Conservancy District was led by two brothers, Dave and Don Hamel, both influential in state and national politics; Dave Hamel had run unsuccessfully for governor and was a former administrator of the Rural Electrification Administration. (If Narrows was built, the Hamels would probably be the chief violators of the Reclamation Act in its service area, for they owned several thousand acres there.) But, as it turned out, the Bureau and the Lower South Platte people were merely a major and a minor irritant. The really tough opposition came from the person they had originally counted on for help: Colorado governor Dick Lamm.

What had happened to Lamm, the onetime radical environmental legislator? His former friend Alan Merson, who beat Wayne Aspinall in the Democratic primary in 1972, lost the general election, and ended up as regional administrator for the EPA, thought he had his finger on it. “Lamm got religion rather late in life,” Merson told an interviewer. “Once a political aspirant gets elected, he finds he has this strange new dilemma: rather than worrying about what people want to hear, he has to worry about what they want to have. There’s a big difference. People move out here because of the Rocky Mountains, but if some huge hand came down and swept away the Rocky Mountains a lot of them wouldn’t even notice. They’re too busy getting rich. Well, Dick Lamm was elected in the middle of the biggest boom in this state’s history. He saw that the great big capitalist machine creating all the filth and ugliness and pollution was also making his constituents fat and sleek and happy. He came to feel that he had slighted the capitalist machine, which suddenly seemed to him to be working miracles. I mean, you look out from the capitol dome and all you see is brown inhospitable plains on the one side and ice-covered mountains on the other. It looks like a tough place. But the capitalist machine was scratching phenomenal wealth out of it. At some point Lamm realized that the whole damned machine runs on the impoundment of water. So he said, ‘By God, we’d better impound some more water.’

“It isn’t just Lamm,” Merson went on disgustedly. “The whole Congressional delegation, except for Pat Schroeder”—a young Democratic Congresswoman from Denver—“is on the run from the irrigators—not even all the irrigators, but just those who are lucky enough to be sucking off the big federal teat. Gary Hart, Floyd Haskell, Tim Wirth—I like them all, they’re my friends, but they’re all scared to death of not liking water enough. This state is booming like crazy, and we’re running out of water. So politicians tend to go blind in office. They’re for any water project—they don’t care how bad it is.

“At EPA, we tried to start a permit program for salinity discharges,” Merson went on. “Some of these irrigators are poisoning rivers all the way to the ocean, returning water that’s twenty times saltier than when they take it out. I explained it to Dick and he said, ‘You’re right. It’s a good plan. But I can’t support it. The legislature will kill me over it. Goddamn it, this could be another Interstate 470. I’ll lose!’ That was what really bothered him,” Merson said, “ ‘I’ll lose!’ I took it to Harris Sherman and he said, ‘It’s unconstitutional, illegal, and immoral—and it will hurt agriculture.’ ”

Agriculture was key in Lamm’s and Sherman’s thinking, because what they wanted even more than growth was stable growth. In 125 years, Colorado’s economy has boomed and busted more than that of any other