Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [276]
“You are being insubordinate,” he yelled at Kuiper. “I’m going to take disciplinary action against you. You are going to regret this.”
Kuiper stood up and went chest to nose with Sherman, who was a full head shorter. “I’m civil service,” he thundered. “You can’t discipline me without cause. But I hope you try. I’ll blow you right out of the water, young man.”
It seemed that nothing could change Dick Lamm’s and Harris Sherman’s minds about Narrows: not the plight of the Weldon Valley; not the state engineer’s misgivings about the safety of the damsite; not the Teton disaster; not even the fact—which became an issue again after Kuiper’s skepticism was reported in the press—that there was an alternative to the Narrows site. It was an alternative that appeared to be safer, that would inundate a cow feedlot instead of homes, churches, and graves, and that made as little or as much economic sense as the Narrows Project.
Twenty-five miles upriver toward Greeley, the Hardin site had been under consideration for years as an alternative to Narrows. It was not authorized by Pick-Sloan mainly because it would have cost slightly more to build. In other, highly important respects, however, it was the superior site. The main “improvement” within the taking area was the Joseph Monfort feedlot, the largest cattle-feeding operation in the world. Qualifying “improvement” is especially advised here, because the Monfort feedlot—100,000 cows on a couple of thousand acres—was an insult to all five senses. Its downwind neighbors found themselves wishing wistfully that they could replace it with a paper mill. One of the largest sources of nonpoint pollution in the country, the feedlot would sooner or later run into the Clean Water Act, and might be shut down for good. Rumor had it that Joe Monfort would be happy to have someone pay him to take it off his hands.
But the Hardin site, if it was substituted for Narrows, would have to be authorized all over again. At its authorization hearings, it would run into cost-conscious members of Congress and the environmental movement, which hadn’t existed when Narrows was first authorized. Worse still—far worse—was the fact that it would have to be justified with a discount, or interest, rate twice as high. Since Narrows was the cheaper site, and it could barely pass muster at a 3¼ percent discount rate, it was hard to see how a Hardin dam could ever be authorized.
Now that the Hardin site had reemerged as an alternative, however, it could only be viewed as a threat. The Bureau of Reclamation, therefore, decided that there was only one course open to it. It had to break ground on the Narrows project quickly, and the first step was to move the people out of the way.
The history of “relocation”—removing people in the way of a project from their land and compensating them for what they lost—started early in the century with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and was embellished a short while later by the New York City Water Department when it drowned the Catskill valleys to create a new water supply. These were the first times in our history—except, of course, for the indignities visited on the Indians—when thousands of people were dispossessed for the crime of impeding progress. What the TVA did in the 1930s, what the Corps of Engineers did along the Missouri in the later 1940s, and what the Bureau tried to do in the Weldon Valley in the 1970s followed the same script. They sniffed through the community, smelling out its most avaricious members, those most susceptible to an offer. They spread rumors; they spread lies. They offered extravagant settlements to the first few who bit, then grew less and less spendthrift with the holdouts, both to punish them and to balance the initial extravagance.