Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

But Jackson’s rider had made illegal the feasibility study that Dominy had quietly ordered on the Columbia diversion. Jackson, who obviously had heard rumors of the secret plan, was out to kill it in its embryonic state. The Northwest had water to spare, but it no longer had power to spare, and nearly all of its electricity came from dams. To remove ten million acre-feet from the Columbia River meant a reduction of several billion kilowatt-hours in power output, unless one diverted the water below the dams. The Bureau would undoubtedly want to do that; but suppose the pumping cost of a diversion from low elevation would add tremendously to the project’s cost, and it made much more sense to divert above the dams? If the enormous momentum that could develop behind the diversion scheme really got rolling, the Northwest would look awfully selfish refusing to part with some of its superabundant water just because it insisted on paying one-fourth the average national price for electricity. “I told Jackson that we ought to let them study the idea,” recalled Daniel Dreyfus, who was then the Senator’s closest aide. “There was no way it was going to be economically feasible. Twenty years earlier, maybe. In the sixties, absolutely not. ‘Let’s let ’em study it,’ I told Jackson. ‘Study the damned thing and it will slay itself. It’s a crazy idea.’ But his reasoning was that there’d been other crazy projects that got built just because they were studied. I still never thought it could ge...