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By Root 1586 0

and (he was convinced) bribed reporters to rail against the Bureau’s public-power dams. Straus also made some tentative efforts to crack down on the big California growers who were setting up dummy corporations and trusts in order to farm tens of thousands of acres illegally with subsidized Bureau of Reclamation water. In so doing, he infuriated the growers’ and the utilities’ friends in Congress, and a group of them finally decided to get rid of him. Since Straus served at the President’s whim and had Harry Truman’s blessing, it was useless to demand he be fired, so the politicians tried another tack. In 1949, they pinned an obscure rider onto the public-works appropriations bill that specifically withheld the salaries of Michael Straus and his regional director in California, Richard Boke. The independently wealthy Straus remained as commissioner—without pay. His enemies were upset, and that is putting it mildly. “Straus made them so mad I thought they might put out a contract on his life,” says Floyd Dominy. “I have done what no good Republican has been able to do,” Straus wrote to his friend Bill Warne, a former assistant commissioner then in Iran, “and that is to unite the Republican party on at least one platform and provide them with one program—to wit, who can fire Straus first.”

However, as the big growers in California and the private western utilities were trying to get rid of Mike Straus, the upper basin was cultivating him just as assiduously. The population of the basin had grown substantially since the Colorado River Compact was signed, but the growth of irrigated agriculture had remained well behind. Most irrigation was by simple diversion, without benefit of reservoir storage. During droughts, the farmers were flirting with disaster; during floods, they watched millions of acre-feet escape to the lower basin unused. The farmers on the other side of the Front Range, on the perfectly flat expanse of the plains, had topography working for them; they could easily lead a diversion channel out of a river such as the Platte, fill a small offstream basin, and have a ready-made storage reservoir for a fraction of the cost of an on-stream dam. The West Slope farmers—those sitting in the Colorado River drainage—were at a terrific natural disadvantage, having no way to store their water and (in the case of some) being at a higher elevation besides. Meanwhile, California was now using up its entire entitlement and still growing by leaps and bounds. If the upper basin didn’t hurry and begin using its own entitlement, California seemed certain to try to “borrow” it; if it succeeded, and millions of people then depended on that water, how would the upper basin ever get it back? But how, on the other hand, were Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming ever to use their share of the river if they couldn’t afford to build dams themselves and if high-altitude Reclamation projects could never pay themselves back?

The answer, frantically conceived by Mike Straus’s Bureau during the last days of his reign—much of it was laid out in the weeks after Eisenhower, who was certain to fire Straus, was already President-elect—was the Colorado River Storage Project. Behind the innocuous name was something as big as the universe itself. In a press release that accompanied the legislation’s transmittal to Congress in early 1953—days before Ike’s inauguration—Straus described it rather modestly as “a series of ten dams having a storage capacity of 48.5 million acre-feet.” What he failed to mention was that 48.5 million acre-feet was more than all the existing reservoirs on the main-stem Colorado and all the tributaries could hold—more than the combined capacity of Lake Havasu, Theodore Roosevelt Lake, Apache Lake, Bartlett Reservoir, San Carlos Reservoir, Painted Rock Reservoir, plus the then largest reservoir on earth, Lake Mead. The ten dams would, according to Straus, capture “several times the total annual flow of the river.” In fact, with the lower basin reservoirs already holding close to forty million acre-feet, between five and eight times the