Theodore
because it was obvious he had done a lot of squinting through a transit.
Somebody told me that's what caused it.
But I didn't really work with him that closely. It was just a couple of meetings
I went out in the field. At the time, I didn't even recognize him as the
author of-1 didn't even know they were working on the Missouri River basin
plan. You should remember the Pick-Sloan Plan-the Sloan part, the Bureau's
plan, Senate Document
rushed in there to get it in before the Corps
got its report in, because the Bureau could see the Corps moving into its
territory. I'm not sure that Glenn Sloan had started on that job. I mean, it was
under his general
all the planning was-and that may be why he
was still in Denver and not up in Billings. That's probably the reason we used
to joke about how he made windshield surveys of most of those projects that
were recommended. You know what that means. You drove through the area,
and if you could see some flat land, that was irrigable land. I'd have to look at
the date on Senate Document 191 to refresh my memory as to when it was
done. [The Bureau's report was dated April 1944.1
Anyway, in April 1942 I went out to Pendleton, Oregon, drove out across
Wyoming and Idaho, and I continued to get a thrill out of the great open spaces
of the West and seeing places such as the
Springs along the Snake
River in Idaho with all the thousands of springs coming down from in between
the lava flows. And finally over the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon and into
Pendleton. I was only there for one day or so, and then they sent me over to
Prineville, Oregon, to work on the Crooked River project. It's right in the
middle of Oregon. From Prineville we drove up the Crooked River valley to
Paulina which was just a crossroads. At that time there was just a general store
with a gas pump out front and a post office in the back of the store and maybe
two other houses. I stayed with a rancher named Dick Bryant about a half a
mile away. We had government cars and we were surveying potential dam and
reservoir sites in the valley. We also made a base map for land
on every place you could find any flat land.
was for the preliminary report on the Crooked River. It was a basin
report, and I worked up there from about mid-April until mid-June. The
weather was just terrible. It could rain one day; and the nature of the roads was
such that when it rained it was a deep, kind of a gumbo mud that was so
muddy your wheels would spin when you started off. And then a few hours
it stopped raining it would all dry up and you would have a thick layer of
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