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By Root 1708 0

state except, perhaps, Nevada. Nevada had introduced stable industries: gambling, prostitution, marriage, divorce. In Colorado, the only industry that had filled the fearful troughs between the boom cycles, when it looked as if the state might be virtually abandoned, was agriculture. It represented stability. Late in the twentieth century, it had also come to represent something else. Unlike eastern states, which can keep out development only by passing laws, western states have a natural means of halting industries they don’t want at their gates: a scarcity of water. In the early 1970s, Colorado became the first western state that actually wanted to keep an industry out, or at least keep it from overwhelming its economy and way of life. The industry was energy—especially oil shale. And the means of holding back its growth was to try to put the remaining water in agriculture’s hands and let the energy companies worry about wresting it away—or let them import water from somewhere else, as Exxon was proposing to run an aqueduct from Oahe Reservoir in South Dakota.

C. J. Kuiper, on the other hand, was charged with putting water to beneficial use, and it seemed silly to him to waste tens of thousands of acre-feet on crops with a low economic return—crops which were subsidized by the Reclamation program and, in the case of some, federal price supports—when half of America’s oil was now coming out of the Middle East. Privately, Kuiper believed oil shale development was necessary: philosophically, he believed in the doctrine of highest use. Water had become so scarce in Colorado that whoever could pay the most should get what remained. Reclamation farmers paid the least of anyone.

Such thinking, however, was ultimately to have very little to do with the position Kuiper took on the Narrows Project. His position rested on his growing conviction that Narrows, if built, wouldn’t even be able to hold water; that it would never be able to deliver the water it promised; and that there was a very real possibility the dam would collapse.

Never, since Narrows was first authorized in 1944, had anyone suggested that it might sit on an unsafe site. How much on-site testing the Bureau did prior to the 1970s is unknown; its main concern seemed to be drumming up enough local support to overwhelm the oppositon. But by 1976 it had its first sizable appropriation in hand, and finally decided it ought to learn something about the geology of the Narrows site.

One morning in the summer of that year, Corky Tomky, a neighbor of Don Christenson’s and a leader in the battle against the dam, noticed that the Bureau had a man with a drilling rig down by the South Platte. Tomky wandered over to say hello. The man announced that he was drilling core samples to see what the foundation of the dam was like. Tomky asked him what he had found so far.

“Well, don’t quote me,” the driller answered, “but this site has big problems.”

“Big problems?”

“Big problems. There’s bedrock down there somewhere, but I can’t find it. I’ve drilled two hundred and fifty feet down and still haven’t hit it. All I get is gravel and loose rock, and sand.”

“What do you suppose that means?” Tomky asked.

“It means,” the Bureau man drawled, “that this dam is going to have a hell of a time holding water. The foundation is like a coffee filter. But don’t tell ’em I told you that.”

Tomky swore that he wouldn’t, then he walked casually back to his truck and gunned it over the bumpy road toward Don Cristenson’s place.

“As soon as Corky told me what he heard,” Christenson recalled, “we called up our Congressman, Jim Johnson. He was one hundred percent for the dam, but we figured this was a piece of news. We got his assistant on the line—I can’t even remember what his name is. Well, he sounded real concerned on the phone. He told me, ‘I’ll talk to the Congressman and get right back to you.’ I wished I’d had a tape recorder on that damn line. He never got back to me. No, sir. And the next day, wouldn’t you believe it, that well driller was not back on the job. They handcuffed him to