Cadillac Desert (77 page)

“You are being insubordinate,” he yelled at Kuiper. “I’m going to take disciplinary action against you. You are going to regret this.”

Kuiper stood up and went chest to nose with Sherman, who was a full head shorter. “I’m civil service,” he thundered. “You
can’t
discipline me without cause. But I hope you try. I’ll blow you right out of the water, young man.”

It seemed that
nothing
could change Dick Lamm’s and Harris Sherman’s minds about Narrows: not the plight of the Weldon Valley; not the state engineer’s misgivings about the safety of the damsite; not the Teton disaster; not even the fact—which became an issue again after Kuiper’s skepticism was reported in the press—that there was an alternative to the Narrows site. It was an alternative that appeared to be safer, that would inundate a cow feedlot instead of homes, churches, and graves, and that made as little or as much economic sense as the Narrows Project.

Twenty-five miles upriver toward Greeley, the Hardin site had been under consideration for years as an alternative to Narrows. It was not authorized by Pick-Sloan mainly because it would have cost slightly more to build. In other, highly important respects, however, it was the superior site. The main “improvement” within the taking area was the Joseph Monfort feedlot, the largest cattle-feeding operation in the world. Qualifying “improvement” is especially advised here, because the Monfort feedlot—100,000 cows on a couple of thousand acres—was an insult to all five senses. Its downwind neighbors found themselves wishing wistfully that they could replace it with a paper mill. One of the largest sources of nonpoint pollution in the country, the feedlot would sooner or later run into the Clean Water Act, and might be shut down for good. Rumor had it that Joe Monfort would be happy to have someone pay him to take it off his hands.

But the Hardin site, if it was substituted for Narrows, would have to be authorized all over again. At its authorization hearings, it would run into cost-conscious members of Congress and the environmental movement, which hadn’t existed when Narrows was first authorized. Worse still—far worse—was the fact that it would have to be justified with a discount, or interest, rate twice as high. Since Narrows was the cheaper site, and
it
could barely pass muster at a 3¼ percent discount rate, it was hard to see how a Hardin dam could ever be authorized.

Now that the Hardin site had reemerged as an alternative, however, it could only be viewed as a threat. The Bureau of Reclamation, therefore, decided that there was only one course open to it. It had to break ground on the Narrows project quickly, and the first step was to move the people out of the way.

The history of “relocation”—removing people in the way of a project from their land and compensating them for what they lost—started early in the century with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and was embellished a short while later by the New York City Water Department when it drowned the Catskill valleys to create a new water supply. These were the first times in our history—except, of course, for the indignities visited on the Indians—when thousands of people were dispossessed for the crime of impeding progress. What the TVA did in the 1930s, what the Corps of Engineers did along the Missouri in the later 1940s, and what the Bureau tried to do in the Weldon Valley in the 1970s followed the same script. They sniffed through the community, smelling out its most avaricious members, those most susceptible to an offer. They spread rumors; they spread lies. They offered extravagant settlements to the first few who bit, then grew less and less spendthrift with the holdouts, both to punish them and to balance the initial extravagance. They played on the social conscience of communities, accusing them of selfishness, of denying the greatest good to the greatest number. And in the final resort—judiciously at first, then more threateningly, then like a defensive line blitzing a quarterback—they invoked the prospect of eminent domain.

They did all this without a sense of shame, because they told themselves they were serving an ultimate good—they were preventing floods, feeding the hungry world, offering power and light to schools and heat and air conditioning to hospitals. They denied—to themselves as to their would-be victims—that the real reason they were doing it was that they couldn’t bear the thought of no longer building dams. And the very majesty of their great works made it easier for them to do it. It may be easier to sweep hundreds of people out of the way than ten or twelve, as if a project important enough to call for the removal of so many must be worth building.

George Kyncl, an employee of the Colorado Department of Social Services, who witnessed firsthand the trauma the Bureau’s relocation effort was causing in the Weldon Valley, was always struck by its indifference to its victims’ fate. “They were like Jekyll and Hyde,” Kyncl says. “When you met them on the street or in meetings or the coffee shop in Fort Morgan they’d smile and joke with the same people they were trying to throw off their land. They were in here for so long they almost felt like members of the local community. You had to keep reminding yourself of the real reason they were here.”

When the Bureau’s men approached Ben Schatz, a South Dakota farmer whose land it wanted for the Oahe Diversion Project, they said, “To us you’re just a dot on the map. When you get in the way, we move you.”

When you get in the way, we move you.
Don Christenson was sitting at home one day in 1976 when the phone rang. Don’s wife, Karen, picked it up. It was a neighbor, someone the Christensons did not see regularly. Don could see from Karen’s expression that it was something bad. Karen kept saying, “No, no, no. No, it’s ridiculous. It’s crazy.” When she hung up, she looked at Don with a pained expression—half laughing, half anguished. “The talk they hear is that we’ve sold out.”

Don and Karen Christenson cannot prove that it was the Bureau that spread the rumor. Could it have been Felix Sparks? Harris Sherman? “The frustrating thing was we didn’t know where the rumor came from,” said Karen. “It was so evil, so nasty a thing to do. You feel so helpless, but you feel so mad. When I heard that rumor I just wanted to scream.” It might have been the Lower South Platte Conservancy District. The district was not above some rather sneaky tactics. In the full-color brochure it was still using in 1981 as a propaganda piece for Narrows, it showed Bijou Creek coming in
behind
the dam, not in front of it, even though that plan had been dead since 1965. Called on this point, Gary Friehauff, its young executive director, offered what seemed like a lame explanation: “We’re still going through the old stock of brochures.”

It was not the first rumor, and by no means would it be the last. At the Damfighters’ Conference in Washington, Christenson had been warned by someone who had watched the Corps of Engineers in action in the Middle West that divisive rumors spread innocuously in neighboring towns would be a prime tactic when the Bureau began trying to buy the land in the reservoir area. Not long afterward, Don got a call from a neighbor who had just gone to Fort Morgan to get a haircut. The man in the next chair had been talking about all the people who, according to scuttlebutt he had heard, were thinking of selling out early. He represented himself as a real estate broker from out of town. No one had ever seen him before.

The Bureau knew exactly whom to go after. Sandy Desmond (a pseudonym) was, for a time, one of the leaders of the Regional Landowners group. Everyone liked Sandy—he was amiable, a teddy bear, a sort of irrepressibly cheerful Mr. Micawber. His weakness was also Micawber’s—Sandy loved money, and he liked to make a fast buck. Nonetheless, people didn’t really worry too much about Sandy. He was, after all, a leader of the opposition. To hear him rave against the Bureau was almost an embarrassment—small children had to be kept out of earshot. “We’re going to kick their goddamned butts out of here in six months,” he said in 1975, after the Bureau set up its first project office since the 1940s.

One Weldon Valley resident remembers how she found out about Sandy. “My husband walked in the house one day,” she says. “I think it was late in the afternoon. I was sitting right here at the kitchen table. I could tell from the look on my husband’s face that something was really wrong. All the things that it could be flashed through my mind in a second and I just lighted on Sandy. I said, ‘Sandy went over.’ And he said, ‘Yup. Sandy went over. They made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.’

“They poisoned the atmosphere in this community something dreadful,” said the woman. “They went after the people they thought were more likely to sell, but they also spread lies about the leaders of the Regional Landowners organization. We just heard the rumors. We didn’t know who was spreading them, we didn’t know if they were true. When I heard that rumor about Don Christenson selling out, I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end,’ They created such an atmosphere of distrust it took years before we got over it. I’m not sure we have completely yet.”

Another weapon in the Narrows lobby’s repertoire was the old strategy of feint and dodge. “Every time we read one of their new reports the figures were different,” says Don Christenson. “In one document they said they were going to have 100,000 acre-feet available from the reservoir each year. They said 120,000 acre-feet. At one point they were up to 150,000. They never gave an explanation. They just changed the numbers on us all the time, so we had to get out the old calculator and prove them wrong again. All the while I’m trying to raise a thousand acres of corn and worry about a few hundred head of cattle. It was no picnic, I’ll tell you. One thing about the Bureau, though,” Christenson added grimly: “They sure know how to make a person mad.”

Meanwhile, as the Bureau was doing battle with the Weldon Valley (or “poverty valley,” as Gary Friehauff of the Lower South Platte organization described it to me) on the one hand and with the newly elected Carter administration on the other—one of Carter’s first actions was to put Narrows on his initial water-projects hit list—the state engineer, C. J. Kuiper, thought he had discovered yet another fatal flaw in the scheme. It was one of those details that dwell in a special kind of obscurity reserved for the perfectly obvious. What if the water couldn’t possibly get to where it was intended to go?

“At first I never thought much about the channel losses,” the state engineer would remember later on. “But one of the biggest headaches of my job had always been getting water down to the senior irrigators along the South Platte. All the groundwater pumpers who came along during the fifties and sixties and seventies had been depauperizing the aquifer on both sides of the river. Some guy would call on fifty second-feet that were his rights and my river master would cut off the junior diverters and the pumpers upstream so he could get it. Nothing would arrive. He’d call on another fifty cfs and we’d send it to him and it still wouldn’t arrive. I said to myself, ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Then we figured out that it was all being captured by the aquifers. The pumpers had emptied those aquifers so bad that
they
were acting like pumps. The water we sent down went right through the bottom of the Platte and migrated laterally and went into the aquifer. It was like it had a great big hole in it.

“So I went to the Bureau and told them their water was going to disappear on the way down from Narrows to the South Platte Conservancy District, and they said, ‘Hogwash!’ I said, ‘Hogwash? We’re cutting junior diverters up and down the river by four hundred cfs so the seniors at Julesburg can get twenty cfs and they’re still not getting a goddamned drop!’ The Bureau was saying that if they released a hundred thousand acre-feet out of Narrows Reservoir, maybe ninety thousand acre-feet would arrive at the headgates of the guys they’d contracted to sell water to. Well, they were full of baloney. They’d be lucky to get twenty-five thousand acre-feet.

“I kept telling the Bureau and Felix Sparks and Harris that I didn’t care if they built their dam or not,” Kuiper said. “But I’m the one who has to see to it that every irrigator gets the water he’s entitled to. Well, if the Bureau promises them ninety thousand acre-feet, and I can only deliver twenty thousand, I’m the one who gets blamed. I can’t give them ninety thousand unless I cut off others who have senior rights, and that’s illegal. The Bureau was making a bunch of outlandish promises and I was the one who was supposed to keep them.”

The Bureau, Dick Lamm, Felix Sparks, and Harris Sherman naturally refused to believe a word Kuiper said. Even so, his reputation was good enough, and his statements were colorful enough, that the newspapers listened to him, and soon the issue of channel losses—of the Bureau planning to build a $226 million project that might not be able to deliver water—was all over the local press. Sensing yet another impasse, the Bureau decided that it had better get someone else’s opinion. “Someone else” turned out to be Woodward-Clyde.

A huge engineering firm of considerable reputation, Woodward-Clyde has enjoyed a comfortable relationship of long standing with the Bureau. The Bureau often relies on Woodward-Clyde to perform independent assessments of its plans; then it often rewards it with lucrative construction contracts. It was no surprise, therefore, when Woodeard-Clyde’s estimate of channel losses in the Platte coincided nicely with the Bureau’s. Kuiper, however, continued to insist that both of them were wrong. “Their whole calculation was based on average
annual
channel losses,” he said. “Well, they may be right on an annualized basis, but an annualized basis doesn’t mean a damn thing. Most of those channel losses occur in the summertime, when the Platte Valley aquifer has been pumped out. That’s when it acts like it has a hole in it and the water going down the river just disappears into it. But summertime is when the Narrows customers are going to need their water. That’s the irrigation season. They’re going to call on it and it won’t get there.”