Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [277]
They did all this without a sense of shame, because they told themselves they were serving an ultimate good—they were preventing floods, feeding the hungry world, offering power and light to schools and heat and air conditioning to hospitals. They denied—to themselves as to their would-be victims—that the real reason they were doing it was that they couldn’t bear the thought of no longer building dams. And the very majesty of their great works made it easier for them to do it. It may be easier to sweep hundreds of people out of the way than ten or twelve, as if a project important enough to call for the removal of so many must be worth building.
George Kyncl, an employee of the Colorado Department of Social Services, who witnessed firsthand the trauma the Bureau’s relocation effort was causing in the Weldon Valley, was always struck by its indifference to its victims’ fate. “They were like Jekyll and Hyde,” Kyncl says. “When you met them on the street or in meetings or the coffee shop in Fort Morgan they’d smile and joke with the same people they were trying to throw off their land. They were in here for so long they almost felt like members of the local community. You had to keep reminding yourself of the real reason they were here.”
When the Bureau’s men approached Ben Schatz, a South Dakota farmer whose land it wanted for the Oahe Diversion Project, they said, “To us you’re just a dot on the map. When you get in the way, we move you.”
When you get in the way, we move you. Don Christenson was sitting at home one day in 1976 when the phone rang. Don’s wife, Karen, picked it up. It was a neighbor, someone the Christensons did not see regularly. Don could see from Karen’s expression that it was something bad. Karen kept saying, “No, no, no. No, it’s ridiculous. It’s crazy.” When she hung up, she looked at Don with a pained expression—half laughing, half anguished. “The talk they hear is that we’ve sold out.”
Don and Karen Christenson cannot prove that it was the Bureau that spread the rumor. Could it have been Felix Sparks? Harris Sherman? “The frustrating thing was we didn’t know where the rumor came from,” said Karen. “It was so evil, so nasty a thing to do. You feel so helpless, but you feel so mad. When I heard that rumor I just wanted to scream.” It might have been the Lower South Platte Conservancy District. The district was not above some rather sneaky tactics. In the full-color brochure it was still using in 1981 as a propaganda piece for Narrows, it showed Bijou Creek coming in behind the dam, not in front of it, even though that plan had been dead since 1965. Called on this point, Gary Friehauff, its young executive director, offered what seemed like a lame explanation: “We’re still going through the old stock of brochures.”
It was not the first rumor, and by no means would it be the last. At the Damfighters’ Conference in Washington, Christenson had been warned by someone who had watched the Corps of Engineers in action in the Middle West that divisive rumors spread innocuously in neighboring towns would be a prime tactic when the Bureau began trying to buy the land in the reservoir area. Not long afterward, Don got a call from a neighbor who had just gone to Fort Morgan to get a haircut. The man in the next chair had been talking about all the people who, according to scuttlebutt he had heard, were thinking of selling out early. He represented himself as a real estate broker from out of town. No one had ever seen him before.
The Bureau knew exactly whom to go after. Sandy Desmond (a pseudonym) was, for a time, one of the leaders of the Regional Landowners group. Everyone liked Sandy—he was amiable, a teddy bear, a sort of irrepressibly cheerful Mr. Micawber. His weakness was also Micawber’s—Sandy loved money,