Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [99]
Thanks to the stunning wealth irrigation farming had produced, California came rolling out of the 1920s like Jay Gatsby in his alabaster phaeton. Agriculture was California; there were no sprawling defense and aerospace industries, there was no Silicon Valley. To give all of this up was unthinkable, even if it was the middle of the Depression. The rescue project which the legislature approved in 1933 not only was bold, it was almost unimaginable. If built, it would be by far the biggest water project in history. It would capture the flows not just of the San Joaquin River, which drained the southern half of the Sierra Nevada, but of the Sacramento, which drained the northern half and some of the Coast Range. It was planned to capture two-thirds of the runoff of the nation’s second-largest state, and would move water through thousands of miles of canals and relocate rivers, quite literally, from one end of the state to the other. In normal times, California might even have had the means to begin building it. But this was the Depression, and California, rich as it was, still had to go to the New York bond markets for cash. The voters had no sooner approved a $170 million bond issue (a colossal sum considering the time and circumstances) than the bottom fell out of the market. No sooner had that happened, however, than Franklin Roosevelt landed in the White House.
On FDR’s orders, the Bureau of Reclamation officially took over the Central Valley Project in December of 1935. By then the Great Plains had dissolved into the Dust Bowl and the first hundreds of thousands of Okies were rattling into California. In the face of such destitution and calamity, the dams going up were a thrilling sight. The grandest of them was rising in a wild madrone and digger pine canyon on the upper Sacramento River; 602 feet high, it would top out 124 feet lower than Hoover, but it would be half again as wide, an immense, curvilinear, gravity-arch curtain of concrete whose name would first be Kennett, then Shasta. On the San Joaquin River, a big squat dam called Friant was being built at the same time; a third huge earth-and-rock structure would be erected later on the Trinity River, shoveling water from the Klamath drainage to the Sacramento. All together, the dams would give the project an annual yield of more than seven million acre-feet of water, enough to irrigate a million and a half, two million, perhaps three million acres—depending on how much was supplemental irrigation for existing farms and how much was new land. But all of this effort would create, at most, jobs and farms for 100,000 displaced people. (Most of the refugees would actually become migrant workers—wetbacks with Oklahoma accents and white skin.) The biggest public-works project in the world, in other words, was not nearly big enough to soak up the huge tide of the dispossessed. FDR knew that, and that was why he had announced, before the Central Valley Project was even officially underway, “in definite and certain terms, that the next great... development to be undertaken by the Federal Government must be that on the Columbia River.”
Daughter of ice, orphan of fire, the Columbia River emerged sometime within the relatively recent past, say twenty million years ago, and for most of its ancestral existence followed a course straight westward toward Seattle and Puget Sound. Seattle, of course, was not there when the Columbia first rose. Neither was Puget Sound. Neither was Washington. Most of what we call the Pacific Northwest is accreted terrain—a landmass of exotic origin that migrated up from somewhere around the Equator, riding the Pacific Plate, and glommed on. When the Pacific and North American plates began to collide millions of years ago, the Pacific Plate was at first subducted into North America’s basement. Down there, it encountered the large