John W. Morris
As I have said, Dave Helms was probably the best real estate man in the entire Corps. If we had
money that couldn't be committed to construction, he could use it to acquire land necessary for
the project. We were going along fairly well when Charlie Maynard called and said he could not
commit all of his money and asked if I could use about million. I said, "Yes." He offered to
ask General Dunn if he would give Tulsa the million.
After some discussion I suggested that to keep the boss from being too upset, he let me tell Dunn
I had to have million. When the boss asks you for it, you can say okay, but very reluctantly.
That's what happened. So it worked out just fine. We used the million. Charlie was a great,
generous friend.
While the Arkansas River project was the centerpiece, we had other dams and projects, including
the extension of the project to Wichita and to Oklahoma City. We spent a lot of time on those
two. We figured out how to get to Wichita. Because the top portion of the navigation channel to
Tulsa uses the Verdigris, not the Arkansas, we had to jump back into the Arkansas or use some
other way to Wichita.
Then there was the project to extend navigation to OkIahoma City, the Central
project.
It was to be a pump-back facility to conserve water. I came to Washington to present it to the
Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors. The Kaskaskia navigation project in Illinois was also
presented by the district engineer of Rock Island, as I recall. The board and the Chief of
Engineers elected to recommend only the Kaskaskia. The Kaskaskia was built. The Central
Oklahoma project never made it, although Arcadia Dam, a feature of the project, is in place today.
Q:
Might that have been a project that Senator Kerr's death was critical to?
If he'd lived, I believe he'd have gotten it authorized. The project was totally within the confines
A:
of the state of Oklahoma. Since so much attention had gone to the Arkansas River project, not
many states were willing to give Oklahoma another major project right away. That was a political
fact of life. It was a good project and should have been built.
Concurrent with that was the salt study. Salt beds ran through southern Kansas and into
Oklahoma and Texas. Fresh water would run through them and become polluted. As a result, the
Arkansas River at Tulsa is unusable for many purposes because of its salinity. Great quantities
of good water could have been obtained by diverting the fresh runoff and streams around these
salt beds, and, in some cases, impounding already polluted water to keep it away from fresh
sources.
The Red River had the same type of problem and, as far east as Lake Texhoma, was too saline
to be used for industrial purposes. The region included Dallas. The Red River project and the
Arkansas project were combined into a single program. That was probably a mistake. This was,
and remains, one of the best projects in our country, but we could never get it clearly authorized
and funded. The Red River portion did proceed, in part, primarily because Congressman Carl
Albert was able to have specific sites corrected. I would expect the Red River water now is
probably pretty fresh. I thought we had a real winner and pushed hard within the Corps while
Governor and later Senator Bellmon worked hard outside and in Congress. Even so, the project
did not go, I regret to say. Ironically, if man had created the pollution, correction would have been
mandatory. Since nature created the situation, man was not allowed to fix it.
The Little River system, a tributary to the Red River, included a series of dams which run parallel
to the Red from an east-to-west direction. There was Broken Bow,
Dierks, Hugo, Pine
Creek, and
Of those dams, all were built eventually, but
became a centerpiece
later, several years later, in the environmental program. In fact, it was stopped for a while for
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