Land of the Big Blue River

In 174 years as a nation, the U.S. has produced few such spectacles as the colossal birth throes of the Grand Coulee Dam. Its grey and gargantuan bulk was eight years (1933-41) abuilding, and in that time armies of sightseers wended their way into a scarred and desolate canyon of the Columbia River, 150 airline miles east of Seattle, to goggle at the horrid obstetrics.

Staring at the neon-lit construction camps and the jungles of trestles, cranes and forms that littered the dusty valley, many a tourist decided he was witnessing the most gigantic boondoggle since the pyramids.

It was best seen after dark when great batteries of floodlights poured a spurious noontide over the rising, mile-long ramparts of fresh concrete. Listening to the clang and roar of machinery out in the blazing night, skeptics railed at the whole fantastic scene. Many were convinced that there would be small use for the dam's electricity, that only one generator --a little one--would be installed, and that the vast pile would be left, peeping away to itself down through the ages, like a stranded whale with a peanut whistle in its nose.

But the skeptics were yelling up the wrong penstock. By this week, as President Truman headed west to dedicate Grand Coulee and the Columbia Basin project, the dam had long since become the world's greatest single source of electricity. When the President pushes a ceremonial button to start its newest generator (13th of 18 to be installed), Grand Coulee will be producing 1,404,000 kilowatts--enough to supply both Cleveland and Cincinnati with all their power. Yet this amazing torrent of energy will not satisfy the insatiable demand.

Out of the Wilderness. World War II tripped off the biggest influx of newcomers in the Northwest's history; it had gained a million and a half people. The population of Washington jumped from 1,700,000 to 2,500,000 between 1940 and 1950, Oregon from 1,000,000 to 1,600,000. For the first time, the Northwest, risen from the raw wilderness in little more than a century, seemed to be within range of becoming an industrial dominion, rather than a mere outpost of Eastern manufacturing and finance.

Last week, as spring melted the high snows of the Cascade and Olympic mountains, warmed Idaho's forests of ponderosa pine and turned Oregon's rain-sprinkled coastal valleys a lush and tender green, the Northwest pulsed with prosperity and hope. Its clean and airy cities reflected neither the gaudiness nor the fevered excitement which westward migration had given Southern California, but the signs of expansion and new enterprise were everywhere.

Richland, a complete new town of 24,000, had sprung up on the desert at Washington's Hanford plutonium works, and two others--Kennewick and Pasco--had been virtually reborn as a result. Years of steady construction had ringed and dotted Seattle (pop. 525,000), Spokane (pop. 180,000), Portland (pop. 436,000) and dozens of other smaller towns with new stores, factories, and miles of freshly painted houses. The poorest of the houses boasted green lawns and flowers.

None of this growth and prospering meant that the millennium had arrived; the Northwest had vexing problems. Its economy was still based primarily on mining, fishing, agriculture and lumbering, and though all were doing well, they did not fully support the expanding population.

Expendable Resources. The timber industry had undergone a revolution: logging in 1950 would send an oldtime Wobbly or an oldtime "bull o' the woods" lurching off to consult an oculist--or a bartender. The steam donkey, the logging locomotive, the oldtime logging camp had all but faded out; Caterpillars crashed and thundered through the fir jungles, yanking new-cut logs along, and truck &. trailer rigs took them to the mill. Loggers still wore "tin" pants, calked boots and red hats, but they felled trees with power saws, lived in town, and rode into the woods on buses or in their own cars.

Reforestation was now a well-developed technique. Big companies like Weyerhaeuser collected tons of fir seed, cleaned it with special machinery and planted it as carefully as farmers planting cabbage. The industry made pulp, plywood and innumerable new products. But like Puget Sound's fleet of salmon trollers and purse seiners, it was tapping an exhaustible commodity--neither industry could expand beyond certain rigid limits without inviting disaster.

The Northwest's wheat and cattle lands had reached their peak of production; the Wenatchee and Yakima fruit orchards (apples, pears and peaches) had apparently surfeited their market. An early Northwest dream--vast trade with the Orient--had blinked out. In 1950 the slack was being taken up with public money: Boeing's big airplane contracts, the Bremerton Navy Yard, hydroelectric projects and the Hanford plant made the U.S. Government the region's biggest employer.

The River. If it had not been for the blue Columbia River, the Northwest's horde of new people might have seemed dangerously like a liability last week--as incapable of self-support in time of future depression as the dust-bowlers of the '30s in times of drought. But the river--sliding placidly past its deep, black coulees, along leagues of empty sagebrush, through its lovely Cascades Canyon to the sea--seemed to hold the key to real prosperity.

It is a big river (second on the North American continent), and uniquely adapted to both hydroelectric development and irrigation. Its headwaters flow from the mountains of British Columbia. One of its tributaries, the Snake (which runs through Hell's Canyon, a gorge deeper than the

Grand Canyon), rises in the mountains of Wyoming. It floods in summer, when the high snows melt, and when the desert lands gasp for moisture. In July a spectacular sheet of white water, a quarter of a mile wide, 17 feet thick and twice as high as Niagara, spills over the top of Grand Coulee Dam. In time, this overflow will be channeled off to irrigate half a million acres of desert without sacrificing one kilowatt of electrical output. Only then will the New Deal's resettlement dream come true, in the blossoming in the sagebrush of 12,800 one-family farms (to keep the farms small, the U.S. will refuse to sell any one owner water for more than approximately 160 acres).

Columbia River irrigation would not begin before 1952, and then would spread only across eastern Washington, for the Northwest is really two separate regions, divided by the north-south wall of the Cascade Mountains: a dry country of wheat, pine and sagebrush on the east, a wet, green coastal shelf with somber Douglas fir forests and arms of rain-dimpled tidewater on the west.

But Columbia River power--a resource as exciting to many an industrial adventurer as Alaskan gold or Texas gas & oil--was available to both areas, and it was already throbbing down the long transmission lines of the Bonneville Power Administration. Its effect on the Northwest, in less than one decade, had been little short of miraculous.

Twenty Competitors. Though the region was studded with hydroelectric plants before Grand Coulee was built, it has soaked up electricity so greedily that it still needs periodic brownouts to conserve power. The Northwest has become the capital of U.S. light-metals production. Fourteen electro-process industries have moved into the region; 16 more have bought factory sites, will put 25,000 people to work as soon as they can get power.

The Government was diligently trying to satisfy the unquenchable demand. Engineers had spotted 257 more hydroelectric dam sites on the Columbia and its tributaries; 21 had some kind of authorization, and seven of them--two on the Columbia, three in Oregon's Willamette Basin, one on Montana's Flathead River and one on the upper Snake River in Idaho--were under construction.

It was not an orderly development of the big river, and probably not the most economical way to exploit its vast power resources. Twenty different government agencies and bureaus had a hand in it, and three--the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bonneville Power Administration--were competing with each other in actual river development. Earnest, professorial Paul J. Raver, chief of the Bonneville administration (which distributes Columbia power), was the nearest thing to a czar of Columbia River power, but he had nothing like the control over the region that the

TVA administrator has over the smaller Tennessee. Though the Northwest fully embraced the concept of public power, it rebelled somewhat at the idea of an all-powerful Columbia Valley Authority (as President Truman had recommended), and seemed mightily inclined to let well enough alone--as long as it got more federal money and more electricity.

If this stand seemed slightly contradictory, the Northwest was a country of contradictions. It hungered for education and sent its sons & daughters to college in droves, but had produced few real scholars, and had shown little love for literature, music or the arts. Of Seattle, Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham once cried: "An esthetic dustbin!" It believed in low taxes--and high old-age pensions. It attracted all kinds of people thirsting to get rich quick, but it, had produced few great fortunes--the newcomer with wild dreams had a trick of settling back to enjoy the scenery.

The People. Most of its people enjoyed the boom, but were wary of change--at heart they believed the Northwest was a wonderful place just as it was. There were reasons. Though living was not cheap, wages were high. There were self-conscious attempts at social snobbery, but neither the tradition nor the wealth and power which produce Newports, obsequious clerks and polite Park Avenue doormen; the Northwest's waitresses and laundry drivers were a neighborly lot, but were glad to say they took no backtalk from the customers.

The Northwest was a place which provided prerogatives for the average man. Pendleton, Ore. had a country club whose dues were only $6 a month for a family, and its membership included a bakery driver, a farm-implement clerk and two gas-station grease monkeys. This was still unusual, but almost anyone in the Northwest could ski or fish for salmon practically at his front door, build a lawn and admire magnificent mountains as he did so, raise his children decently, and with luck own a boat or a shack in the woods. In moments of contemplation he could fervently pity the unfortunate people "back east"--i.e., all who live between Butte, Mont, and the Atlantic.

How the harnessing of the big river would affect all this, he was not quite sure. He worried vaguely about his spacious reaches being overrun, but as a believer in progress he only knew that he had to build his big dams and find out.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.