Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

In the end, Brower and a handful of conservationists managed to bring about the biggest defeat the western water lobby had suffered until then: a denial of funds to build Echo Park Dam. To pull it off, though, they had had to compromise; for the sake of victory at Echo Park, they had agreed to leave Glen Canyon Dam alone. Later, when the dam was already under construction, Brower floated this then almost inaccessible reach of the Colorado River in a dory much like Major Powell’s. He was astonished by the beauty of the place, as were most of the handful of people (a few thousand perhaps) who managed to see Glen Canyon before it was drowned. When the reservoir filled, Brower’s friends actually wondered whether he might shoot himself. In the forward to a Sierra Club book called The Place No One Knew, he flagellated himself over the loss. “Glen Canyon died in 1963,” he wrote, “and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you. Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure.” Never again, Brower vowed, was he going to compromise over such a dam.