Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

With the help of two San Francisco advertising men, Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage, the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau’s arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel,” asked one advertisement, “so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” The response was thunderous. Dan Dreyfus was still with the Bureau of Reclamation then, in charge of planning projects like the CAP. “I never saw anything like it,” remembers Dreyfus. “Letters were arriving in dump trucks. Ninety-five percent of them said we’d better keep our mitts off the Grand Canyon and a lot of them quoted the Sierra Club ads.”