The Columbia Flows to the Land

Richard L. Neuberger

Here is a Fourth of July message that Thomas Jefferson dimly visioned when he sent Lewis and Clarke to Oregon in 1805—the saga of a lonely wilderness which men might turn to lush farms and busy towns in the great Northwest. Mr. Neuberger gives us a progress report on the land to be watered and powered by Grand Coulee.

TALES AROUND THE CAMPFIRE WERE ALL THAT THE AMERICAN patriots knew about the distant reaches of the land they had freed from Britain on July 4, 1776. At St. Louis geography ended and legend began. To bold, adventurous men no legend was as stirring as that of "the Great River Ourigan" which flowed out of the northland and emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Jefferson believed the river had a part in the destiny of America and sent an expedition to explore it. On October 10, 1805, a lean and tattered United States army captain glimpsed across sagebrush flats and rocky mesas the waterway of which so many of his countrymen, whether President or fur trader, had dreamed a dream of empire.
One hundred and thirty-four years have passed since Meriwether Lewis first saw the Columbia River. That long ago white men reached the last frontier. But the river's principal part in the destiny of the nation is yet to be played. The part is just beginning now. The sagebrush the explorer trod is sagebrush still, but soon orchards and alfalfa will grow there. On the course of the Columbia through the state of Washington rises a dam that already dwarfs any other structure ever built by human beings. This dam will irrigate more than 1,200,000 acres of wasteland. It also will generate the largest chunk of electricity produced at any one place on earth.
Here is the American dream: the conquest of the wilderness, a nudge at the final frontier. Nothing we have built is as typical of the New World as this. No country except the United States would have undertaken Grand Coulee Dam: a gigantic concrete barrier to make the upland desert bloom, to provide farm homes for 50,000 families now on the move from submarginal areas, to spin 10,708,000,000 kilowatt-hours of power in fastnesses as gaunt as when the flag first came?
The elements that make up American civilization are part of the compound at Grand Coulee. It is a project which typifies the nation. Here are the ingenuity, the resourcefulness and the peremptory action of big business; Block the Columbia with a wall three times as massive as the Great Pyramid; pump the river back into its old glacial course; generate so much electricity the power plant will have to be operated by remote control; move whole towns out of the way of the 151-mile lake that will stretch to Canada. This is an enterprise worthy of the world's greatest industrial country. Here also, where the vast dam squats in fortress-like magnificence across the continent's mightiest river, is the social consciousness of the New Deal. Farmers in the backwoods live near tumbling waterfalls and have no electricity in their homes; housewives in Portland and Spokane pay private companies light bills half again as high as those charged by the municipal plant in Tacoma. Grand Coulee will span the region with steel-latticed towers carrying cheap power to ranch and bungalow. Wandering men and women, looking for new opportunity, form a migratory population all over the West. Their rehabilitation is a crucial problem. Grand Coulee will irrigate land for as many farms as there are in the entire state of New Jersey. All this will be controlled by the government, with speculation and profit subordinated to the general welfare.
AND IN THESE WASHINGTON HINTERLANDS, WHERE THE TECHNICAL skill of big business and the aspirations of government are so spectacularly combined, perhaps there is also some trace of the constant urge of America to find new territory for settlement on the sundown side of the continent. "Almost from the day when independence was declared," Professor Beard has said, "the frontier sentinels of the United States looked upon all the territory from the Mississippi to the Pacific as their property." Grand Coulee is on the last frontier; it is a wilderness epic. It will reclaim an expansive area which now is largely sagebrush and dust. Six years ago only a couple of isolated ranchers lived where now the stupendous dam takes shape. Maybe something of the same quality that brought Captain Lewis's ragged men westward is putting together this structure so enormous that no other engineering achievement compares with it.
The proportions of Grand Coulee Dam are without precedent. Late this spring the barrier contained 6,405,000 cubic yards of concrete. The finished dam will be made up of 11,250,000 cubic yards. Contrast this with the approximately 3,500,000 cubic yards in the next bulkiest edifice on earth, the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The cement in Grand Coulee would build a standard automobile highway from Jersey City to Seattle and back by way of Los Angeles. Over the spillway of the dam will crash a sheet of water half again as long as the American Falls at Niagara and twice as high. On the parapet four ocean liners the size of the Normandie might be placed end to end. Sufficient water will flow through the dam each year to provide New York City's drinking supply for a century. The base of the dam covers thirty-five acres of ground. Each of the twin powerhouses at Grand Coulee will produce as much electricity as Muscle Shoals and the Dnieperstroy Dam in Russia combined. Behind the dam will be a man-made lake with 2000 gallons of water for every person in the world. There will be twelve pumps at Grand Coulee, each of them adequate to take care of the water requirements of two communities the size of Chicago. From bedrock to crest the dam will be as lofty as a forty-story building. Practically all the construction features connected with this project are of unparalleled magnitude.
But not alone for these intrinsic reasons is Grand Coulee important. The breathtaking dam is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end which may have profound consequences for both region and nation. In their astonishment over the dimensions of the undertaking, many people have overlooked the purpose the dam is intended to serve. Most Americans know by now that Grand Coulee is the biggest structure on the planet; comparatively few know why so staggering an enterprise has been begun.
THIS IS AN APPROPRIATE TIME TO LOOK BEYOND THE GREAT barrier and examine its destiny and future. Now, after construction work has been going on since 1933, auxiliary tasks of significance are under way. Twelve gaping tunnels have just been blasted in the granite cliffs above the dam. Through these passageways water from the river will be pumped into the Grand Coulee, a deep, dry chasm running at right angles to the Columbia. This basaltic cleft the river carved in glacial epochs when a frozen finger of the polar ice sheet blocked the Columbia and forced it out of its original course. The Coulee is 52 miles long, 600 to 800 feet deep and from 2 to 5 miles in width. This immense trough will become a balancing reservoir for the water pumped through the tunnels. From the Coulee the water will be coasted to the Africa-shaped chunk of land which is the key to the project.
Men are now making an exhaustive study of that 1,200,000-acre tract. Each acre of ground is being appraised as to value, classified as to soil content and mapped as to contour. The government must know what the land will grow, what it is worth and where the gravity canals must twist and flow. In the Bureau of Reclamation offices in the little town of Ephrata, the accumulation of data mounts in stacks against the day when the first spurt of water will be spewed through the tunnels and out onto the floor of the Coulee. This work will continue while the dam is completed. Late in 1941 or early the following year the dam will be finished; the Columbia will be barricaded behind 22,500,000 tons of concrete. By then there will be a thorough record of what the late Elwood Mead, for many years United States commissioner of reclamation, described as "the best undeveloped irrigation area on this continent, and probably the best single developed or undeveloped area on the continent."
THIS TRACT OF LAND HAS A HISTORY; LIKE MANY CHAPTERS in the colonization of the Northwest, the history is not a pleasant one. Nearly seventy-five years ago every alternate section of the area was owned by the Northern Pacific Railroad as part of its congressional land grant. The line encouraged westward migration; settlers bought the land for wheat raising. Other parts of the tract were homesteaded. Men borrowed heavily to finance farm buildings and other improvements. Equipment was expensive. For a few years the moisture stored in the soil supported dry farming. Then the ground began to cake and harden; crops burned up in the field; the wind started to blow away the arid clods; the settlers moved on. Mortgages were foreclosed and much of the area reverted to banks and loan companies. One bank now owns 27,880 acres; 5 percent of the land is owned by the federal government; 5 percent by the state of Washington and 5 percent still by the Northern Pacific. Some of the land became so tax delinquent the counties took over: Grant County owns 35,000 acres; Franklin County, 21,900 acres; and Adams County, 13,340. A considerable portion of the area still belongs to the colonists who were able to finance themselves; these people had no mortgage companies hanging over them, only the steely-blue sky from which no rain fell. They pulled out and left their farms to the elements.
Today, the area is dotted with crumbling ranches and boarded-up schoolhouses that tell the story of this ruined past. And here and there a farmer still hangs on, running a herd of scraggly cattle or raising wheat with sporadic results. . . .
Here is George Healy who left Missouri in 1900 and homesteaded a dry farm in 1905. He remembers when the sections around him held neighbors and friends. Their children and his learned to read and write at a school just down the road. Then, one by one, the farmers surrendered to the sun's glare and the wind's might and the baked-out ground. Now the farmhouses on George Healy's horizon are as deserted and abandoned as some tottering Greek temple. Against the skyline tower windmills that have not moved for a generation. Many years have passed since lights last gleamed through the windows of those twisted, desolate ranches. Memory has all but vanished of the neighbors George Healy knew.
But some of those neighbors are coming back. A few of them got off the train at the Great Northern siding in Ephrata several months ago to help form the world's largest irrigation district. By a vote of 709 to 34 the landowners decided to organize an agency to buy water from the government. From Seattle and Spokane and Portland came men and women, now working in the cities, who two or three decades ago left their farms to the wind and heat. From the lands themselves came men like George Healy, whose farms are dry, cheerless places, without water for irrigation or electricity for the ordinary comforts of modern civilization. These people at last were ready to believe that their dream of a Promised Land in the Northwest—a dream deferred almost half-a-century for some of them—was finally to come true. The great dam at the head of the Coulee is not a railroad's glittering and evanescent assurances. It is unmistakably real. Already the tunnels await one seventh of the Columbia's surging water supply, and the powerhouse foundations have been grooved to hold eighteen generators of 105,000 kilowatt capacity each. Such things cannot be amorphous; they are as tangible as concrete and steel.
"Grand Coulee," the Oregon State Planning Board has observed, "is a conscious effort at the redistribution of American population westward." For this reason, if none other, monopolization of the irrigated area will be forbidden. A single man will be allowed to cultivate only forty acres; the holdings of a family will be restricted to twice that much. This was ordered recently by Congress and concurred in by the 1939 session of the Washington legislature. Lands in excess of these limitations must be sold at the price set by government appraisers; water will not be delivered to acreage disposed of beyond the appraisal figures. The Citizens' Savings Bank and Trust Company of Spokane will have to sell its holdings on tract 31 at substantially the same price as Chris Nyberg of Grandview, Wash., on tract 32. The landowners once asked an average price of $86 an acre; the anti-speculation law passed by Congress, at the insistence of Senators Schwellenbach and Bone. will hold the price to from $7.50 to $15 an acre.
The whole Grand Coulee undertaking will cost in the vicinity of $400 million. The dam itself will cost $186 million; the irrigation canals and ditches and surveying, $208 million. The Bureau of Reclamation regards the project as self-liquidating. Power revenues and water rights are expected to pay the bill. The portion of the job allocated to irrigation amounts to approximately $90 an acre. Payment will be staggered over forty years without interest. The first four years on the lands no payment will be demanded. This will leave the preliminary growing period free of obligation. The next four years the bill will be $2 an acre each year. For each of the thirty-two years after that the settlers will pay $2.50 an acre. This will aggregate $88 by the time the forty-year period has expired. The cost of pumping water—and this item will continue indefinitely, of course—will be $2.60 an acre a year.
Payment of the $88 for water rights on each of the 1,200,000 acres will return to the government $105,600,000. Power must pay the remainder. Can it do so? Some statistics are in order. Firm power will be produced at Grand Coulee for 1.2 mills a kilowatt-hour. If this commercial electricity can be sold for 2.25 mills, the chief engineer on the project, Frank A. Banks, believes that "the cost of the dam with interest on the part allocated to power at 4 percent can be liquidated in fifty years with a surplus of $144,500,000 available for partial liquidation of the irrigation investment. After fifty years the annual surplus would amount to $15 million." Banks is a cautious, white-haired man who has constructed numerous dams for the Reclamation Bureau.
The Chicago Tribune regards all this as nonsense and madness. Grand Coulee, according to the Tribune, will be no more self-liquidating than the Great Pyramid it so humbles in size. What about these contentions?
The Minidoka project on the Snake River in Idaho is in some respects a small scale replica of Grand Coulee. Water rights there cost about $2 an acre annually. Pumping charges are approximately $2.50 a year. These figures do not differ drastically from those at Grand Coulee. The first unit of the Minidoka project was completed in 1909. Up to the summer of 1938 the sum of $8,546,349.27 was due there in water rights to pay for construction charges. By that date $8,451,W6.45 had been paid. At Minidoka a year ago, $2,273,620.94 had been required for pumping and maintenance charges, and $2,268,065.74 had been paid. A lot of business men preaching economy in government would like to have that ratio of collections in their own firms. For several years the adapting of additional acreage to irrigation at Minidoka has been financed by income from the power plant.
OF COURSE, THE MINIDOKA PROJECT WHERE THIS RECORD HAS been achieved is for 120,000 acres. Grand Coulee adds a big digit to that acreage: 1,200,000 acres. This is the unknown quantity about the federal government's principal public works undertaking. No previous experience has prepared anyone for operating an enterprise of such magnitude. The Columbia River is a new element in the conservation of the country's physical resources.
The Columbia is unique among the rivers of America. It has the immensity of the sluggish Missouri and the speed of the savage Colorado. In its basin is 42 percent of all the undeveloped hydroelectricity in the United States. The Tennessee River ranks second among the country's power sources. It can produce 23 billion kilowatt-hours, slightly more than one third the capacity of the Columbia: 62 billion kilowatt-hours. Into the Columbia rush the glacier-nourished creeks that come down from the Canadian Rockies. Its maw is fed by the angry Snake, still writhing from its passage through the 7900-foot crevice of Hell's Canyon. The Kootenai, the Clark Fork, the Spokane, the Deschutes and a score of other streams foam out of the uplands to plenish this second largest of America's rivers—a river which humbles the Hudson in size and the Potomac in speed. In some stretches the Columbia is slow and ponderous. It is like a giant that waits to spring. Then, suddenly, it breaks through a granite canyon and where the whitecaps toss on the expanse of green, enough horsepower goes to waste to move a thousand trains and light a million homes.
Yet until a few years ago the Columbia flowed to the sea almost as unharnessed as it did on October 10, 1805, when the Indian girl Sacajawea pointed a thin arm westward and Captain Lewis knew he had found "the Great River Ourigan." Grand Coulee and Bonneville Dams, both formally begun in 1933, are the first attempts of any considerable magnitude to utilize the Columbia's power potentialities. Until Grand Coulee was authorized the river was used for irrigation at all. "To let this immense, dependable water supply run unused," said Dr. Mead, "is an economic waste, the extent of which is only realized by those who know the country."
All over America men and women are living on submarginal agricultural areas. Crops are meager and uncertain. Houses are shabby and bare. In other. parts of the nation, people are jammed into crowded tenements. Where can they go? What about the 1,200,000 acres in the Washington wastelands that need only water to bloom like the Garden of Eden? In 1937 at Grand Coulee the President said:

There are parts of this nation that are not as favored as the Northwest. Mistakes have been made. They have cut off their timber. Their land is played out, or they plowed up prairie land which is now blowing away. I am thinking about those people as well as you people. You have got room for them here in the Northwest where they can make homes, where they can live happily and prosperously.
The irrigation of 1,200,000 acres which now are unproductive will have an effect on the whole nation. Just east of the Africa-shaped chunk of territory to be reclaimed at Grand Coulee are the 414,000 acres of the Yakima project. This undertaking was started at about the turn of the century. In the first ten years of the Yakima project, population there increased 26.2 percent as compared with an increase for the whole state of 18.8 percent. Farm values in Yakima County have virtually doubled since 1910; in adjacent counties where there has been no irrigation they have descended as much as 25 percent. In 1929 the Yakima Valley produced $52,348,938 worth of agricultural commodities; the value of the gold mined in Alaska the same year was $7,761,000. More than half the income of Yakima is spent for merchandise manufactured on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. In this fashion irrigation benefits people far from the irrigated areas. Irrigation farmers are consumers, too. Railroad revenues for shipping Yakima fruits and vegetables annually amount to $4,500,000. Eighty-nine percent of all the hardware implements bought by Yakima farmers is sent from the East. Yakima's status as the center of the principal irrigated area in the state is an enviable one in Washington's economy. In 1935 retail sales per capita in the community were $901. This compares with $446 in Seattle and $368 in Tacoma. On land in the Yakima Valley where once sagebrush grew, farmers now raise asparagus, strawberries, corn, cantaloupes, pears, potatoes, prunes, peaches, onions, sugar beets, hops, lettuce, apples, apricots, beans, cherries and numerous other crops.
"The soil in the Yakima Valley is of the same general character as that of the Grand Coulee lands," says the Washington State Planning Council. "Whatever is true of the development of the Yakima Valley will be equally true of the Columbia Basin area. The Planning Council believes the Coulee land will eventually produce a yearly minimum of $150 million worth of farm products. There will be approximately 30,000 farm homes with a farm population of about 200,000 people. Providing essential services for these people will be another 200,000 men and women in towns throughout the irrigated area. The National Resources Committee wants this to be a model region. Schools, streets, sewage systems, hospitals, recreational centers and transportation facilities will be carefully arranged and planned. Substandard districts in the towns will be prevented if it is humanly possible to do so. Over maps and charts in Portland, technicians and social scientists of the Resources Committee are studying the preliminaries of this task.
Yakima has been a testing laboratory for what may occur on a larger scale at Grand Coulee. In 1910 there were 55,000 people on the Coulee lands and 78,000 in the Yakima Valley. A few years ago Yakima had a population of 115,000; the Coulee lands, 38,000. People in the Yakima Valley spend for manufactured goods from the East a sum three fourths the value of our annual export trade with Brazil. What will be the result when three times the area of the Yakima project is criss-crossed with canals in which Columbia River water swirls and flows? Yakima was desolate once. It still bears the mark of the past. The desert stretches up to the peach orchards. Spots of land not watered are pocked with sagebrush. The irrigation ditches that tap the Yakima River are the line of demarcation; they separate Canaan from the wastes.
Frequently the advances of a planned society confer important benefits upon the instrumentalities of capitalism. While the power companies writhed as Bonneville Dam was constructed, the Union Pacific bolstered its freight revenues hauling vast quantities of material for the project. On the Grand Coulee lands, the franchise values of the Northern Pacific, Great Northern, and Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific will be increased $7 million. For the whole region, development of the 1,200,000 acres of land will stack an additional $26,015,000 on the worth of railroad franchises. Dr. Walter E. Packard of the Department of Agriculture believes the railroads and other groups to be benefited should assist the farmers in retiring the cost of the enterprise. Why should the men tilling the soil carry the burden alone? "The railroads, the cities in the vicinity, food distributors and middlemen will be aided materially by Grand Coulee," says Dr. Packard. "They should help amortize the government's investment there."
The lands to be reclaimed at Grand Coulee, an area twice the size of the state of Rhode Island, will not be developed at one fell swoop. Approximately 150,000 acres will be ready for settlement in 1943. Each year thereafter about 50,000 additional acres will be colonized. This gradual process is irksome to some of the people in the national capital. Even if all the Coulee lands were ready now, Secretary Ickes says they could take care of only half the farm families forced out of the Dust Bowl since 1934. "Almost all the drought immigrants," declares the Farm Security Administration, "could, under favorable farming conditions and with adequate assistance, once again become self-supporting."
All this brings up one question about New Deal economics. Why is the government curtailing crop production in many parts of the country and adding 1,200,000 acres of crop lands in another? The late Paul Y. Anderson, brilliant Pulitzer Prize correspondent for the St. Louis Star-Times, asked this at a Hyde Park press conference after the President's 1937 transcontinental journey. Mr. Roosevelt grinned amiably and made no direct reply. Obviously, inconsistencies constantly confront any program which limits food production while people are in need. But Grand Coulee will grow only negligible quantities of the four crops which present the most aggravating surpluses: corn, cotton, wheat and tobacco. With Yakima as-a standard for measurement, the principal products at Grand Coulee will be alfalfa, fruits and vegetables. The country has not yet plowed under pears or strawberries or tomatoes or peas or forage for hungry livestock.
The Far West needs more farm lands. The region is not agriculturally self-sustaining. Nor has it sufficient manufacturing. It is literally a colonial empire for the East. Its raw materials are taken from the ground and shipped across the continent to be processed. It is a long way from the markets for the things it grows and a long way from the industries which make the things it buys. There is even a serious transportation problem. Trains and ships leaving the Northwest carry timber, minerals and other bulky material. They come back with manufactured merchandise which requires infinitely less room; thus the returning carriers are inadequately loaded. The balance of trade in the Northwest is out of kilter. A study by the National Resources Committee has shown that the area exists mainly by exploiting its physical resources. Forests are gutted, mines cleaned out and streams fished to the last salmon egg. Much of this raw material is exported across the Continental Divide to be manufactured. A lumberjack in Oregon cuts down a Douglas fir; the lumber is sent to Michigan to be made into a table; the lumber jack buys the table for his house; the lumber has had a round-trip almost across the continent. A wheat rancher in the Idaho hills sells his crop; it is shipped to Battle Creek or Chicago and made into cereal; the farmer buys a package of the cereal at the village store for his breakfast.
Commerce between the regions is desirable. The vast amount of goods purchased from the East is one of the reasons used to justify federal reclamation undertakings. But some sort of balance is necessary; a region cannot realize its full potentialities as long as its natural resources are extracted and then processed elsewhere. A man never gets anywhere selling logs and buying back chiffonniers.
Grand Coulee will help to make the Northwest more self-sustaining agriculturally. The vast treasure-trove of hydro-electricity tapped may also result in the manufacturing the region is seeking. Representative Charles H. Leavy of Washington has pointed out that not far from Grand Coulee, in the highlands of Idaho, the government owns public domain containing 6,600,000,000 tons of raw phosphate. The Northwest has 91 percent of all the phosphate rock in the country; these beds have been penetrated only superficially. Idaho's raw phosphate developed by Grand Coulee's electricity might create a supply of fertilizer which would renovate farming in America. There are other possibilities. The cheapest power rates in the nation will result in the widespread use of electric ranges, heaters and freezing units. The Northwest will need this equipment. The mountains contain rich deposits of bauxite, the source of aluminum; this process requires huge blocks of electricity.
Already the transmission lines from Bonneville Dam stretch over the frontier. Those from Grand Coulee will be constructed soon. Whatever industries are established in the Columbia Basin as a consequence of these projects will probably be decentralized; they will not be concentrated in crowded urban areas, where the perils of slums and tenements are omnipresent. At Bonneville, in 1937, the President said new manufacturing units should be spread out over the whole area. Lewis Mumford seconded this recommendation last year. Factories in the hinterlands along the surging Columbia, rather than jammed wall to wall in Portland or Seattle? And why not? What would be so unorthodox about every worker having his acre or so of peas and beans back of the house, as an anchor to windward if the work should give out?
The desperate need of the Northwest for new farm lands and new industries has produced a curious distinction between the nation's two seaboards. In New England, the Republicans are denouncing the dam-building program of the federal government. Along the swift Columbia, just the opposite situation prevails. Senator McNary of Oregon, the Republican minority leader, was the principal sponsor of Bonneville. The Spokane Chamber of Commerce has a special department to promote Grand Coulee. Every Republican Senator and Congressman from the Northwest is supporting the bill to construct a new dam on the Columbia at Umatilla Rapids. The Republican Spokesman-Review of Spokane and the Oregonian of Portland frequently issue special sections telling of progress on the federal dams in their localities.
Indeed, the most conservative forces in the Northwest approve what is taking place. Senator Rufus Holman of Oregon, supporter of that state's anti-labor law, continually urges extension of the program started at Bonneville and Grand Coulee. Yakima County is the nucleus of a vast public development in land usage. Yet Yakima voted decisively last autumn for the Washington initiative measure restricting the activities of organized labor. So did the counties located in the heart of the Coulee lands, the counties which have accepted so enthusiastically the principle of public power and government responsibility for submarginal farming areas. Grant County, for example, voted for the anti-labor bill and also for a People's Utility District to replace the Washington Water Power Company. Approval in the Northwest of the New Deal's premier public works project has not meant, by any stretch of the imagination, approval of the New Deal's attitude toward labor unions.
Maybe there is a reason for this which is neither social nor economic. Perhaps it lies in the human love for magnitude and heroic deeds. About Grand Coulee there is a universality of appeal which no one can resist. The biggest structure on the planet; making the desert bloom; orchards where now sagebrush grows; power on the last frontier; the final wilderness reclaimed. These are phrases and objectives and aspirations which find acceptance among men of widely conflicting faiths. Secretary Ickes has gathered inspiration at the foot of the towering bulwark, and so has Garet Garrett of the Saturday Evening Post. The crown prince of Sweden was silent a moment as he viewed the barrier and the tunnels and the arid hills in the distance, and so was Professor Harold J. Laski.
There it is across the river of which Thomas Jefferson dreamed—Grand Coulee! Millions of tons of concrete, millions of tons of steel: a monument of our time, the mightiest rampart yet erected by any men in any nation at any time. Here is democracy in action; here something is really being done. The everlasting bickering over ideologies and -isms and theories seems far away now, as the concrete buckets move up and down and the dam rises inch by inch above the water. The people in Portland lost their savings in the Central Public Service debacle; the people in Spokane pay light rates which are too high; thousands of farmers in the backwoods have no electricity at all. And down in the river bed the foundations for the world's biggest powerhouses take form. The men and women on the Coulee lands have struggled with dry-farming long enough and must be rehabilitated now; on the roads from California and the Dust Bowl the migratory workers look for a new chance in life.
The sun drops behind the uplands and twilight shrouds the flats. The gaunt, tumble-down farms are black against the sky. A kerosene lamp flickers in the window of George Healy's house. The wind comes up after the hush of sundown and stirs the sagebrush. There are ghosts abroad on the flats tonight. Off there on the far-away ridge is where the frontiersman stood, with the American flag whipping at his back, and claimed all this territory for the little Republic on the other side of the continent. Here thousands of men and women once fought a losing struggle with caked and crumbling soil—and at last gave up. Yet victory may still be theirs. The battle is not over. Down the long, rockbound corridor of the Coulee, high-voltage transmission lines soon will reach, and after them the surge of water that means fertility for the piece of land shaped like Africa.