Water Resources People and Issues
Anyway, I think Hells Canyon would have been a good project and it would
have had no different environmental effects than the three small dams that the
Idaho Power Company finally built. It would have taken the same land, except
the pool would go on a little bit farther up the canyon, but it would have had
no different effect. In fact, it was easier on the fish. There was only one place,
if you wanted to run
up above it, only one dam instead of three. But no
salmon go up that far any more, I don't think.
But the whole picture was obfuscated by the fact that there was another dam
site down in the canyon, Nez Perce, which would have blocked the Salmon
River, and so the environmentalists attacked the Bureau's plan, arguing that the
Hells Canyon was just the first step toward flooding the entire canyon. Actually
Nez Perce wasn't in the Bureau's plan at all; it was a Corps proposal. Once
you had Hells Canyon Dam, the Bureau didn't need to build anything else on
the Snake River. And when the Corps got into the fight over Nez Perce, they
found another site, which they called Mountain Sheep, which was above the
Salmon River. But that's another story that I was not involved in. I was at one
time going to write a book about my experience with the Hells Canyon project,
and I kept all kinds of notes but, as the issue fades away, you don't get around
to doing half the things that you want to do.
A fair amount's been written about it, of course.
Well, lots has been written about it, that's right.
Yeah.
And a lot of it has been inaccurate. Very few people know the whole
background.
Uh-huh.
That's one of the things I found out when I got over to the Bureau of the
Budget in 1954, one year after Dwight Eisenhower came in and I saw the
papers that had been used for the cabinet meeting where the decision was made
to pull out of federal sponsorship of Hells Canyon, I found that they were
inaccurate. I don't remember exactly the details, but when I looked at it, and
I was horrified because the decision was made in the absence of having all the
facts about those projects. Of course, it was an ideological decision-part of the
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