Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Bureau of Reclamation, meanwhile, felt so threatened by the Pick Plan that it had quickly produced a plan of its own that was equally ambitious, and only slightly more susceptible to logic. Reconnaissance studies of reservoir and irrigation sites were conducted with such haste that, even within the Bureau, they were referred to as “windshield reconnaissance”—an allusion to $30 million reservoirs being plotted from behind the windshields of moving cars. The Bureau spewed out project recommendations like popcorn. The final Sloan Plan was a catch basin of ninety dams and several hundred individual irrigation projects; among other things, it called for fifteen reservoirs on three meager tributaries in the Dakotas. The Sloan Plan, however, soon acquired some powerful supporters, t...

On October 15, 1944, Glenn Sloan and a representative of Colonel Pick (who had since gone off to build the Ledo Road in Burma) sat down in a meeting which is probably historic for what it accomplished in a given amount of time. On October 17, two days later, they emerged to announce that the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan had been “reconciled.” Had anyone taken a closer look—hardly anyone did—he would have seen that the reconciliation amounted to the adoption, virtually intact, of both agencies’ plans. With the single exception of a dam at Oak Creek, South Dakota, originally proposed by the Corps of Engineers, the Pick-Sloan “compromise” included every dam and project in the original and separate plans, plus some additions which the agencies had somehow managed to overlook. Critics such as James Patton, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, called it a “shameless shotgun wedding,” and calculated that instead of saving the taxpayers money, it would cost them at least $250 million in redundant features. Henry Hart acidly observed that “reconciliation meant chiefly that each agency became reconciled to the works of the other.”

The most significant aspect of the reconciliation was that the two agencies had agreed to spend $1.9 billion of the taxpayers’ money (an estimate which would, as usual, turn out to be much too low) on a whole whose parts, according to their earlier testimony, would cancel out each other’s usefulness. The second most significant aspect was that the Bureau agreed to let the Corps go ahead and build its huge main-stem reservoirs first: “The Corps got the here and now,” says David Weiman, a lobbyist who would later be hired to fight several of the Bureau’s projects by the same farmers who were supposed to benefit from their existence. “The Bureau got the then and there.”

One of the least-known consequences of water development in America is its impact on the Indians who hadn’t already succumbed to the U.S. Cavalry, smallpox, and social rot. Although many of the tribes had been sequestered on reservations that were far from the riverbottoms where they used to live, some tribes had been granted good riverbottom reservation land—either because the lands were prone to flooding, or because the government was occasionally in a generous mood.

The three tribes whom Lewis and Clark encountered along the Missouri River in North Dakota were the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Arikara. Perhaps because they were generally peaceful and had helped the explorers (Lewis and Clark spent their first winter with the Mandan, and their adopted Shoshone-Mandan interpreter, Sacajawea, probably saved their lives), the associated Three Tribes were later rewarded with some of the better reservation land in the West: miles of fertile bottoms along the serpentine Missouri, which they used mainly for raising cattle. These were the same lands that the Bureau of Reclamation considered the best winter cattle range in the state, and which it said ought never to be drowned by a reservoir. Under the Corps of Engineers plan, however, the Three Tribes’ reservation would sit directly under the reservoir behind Garrison Dam.

The Corps had, of course, taken extraordinary care not to inundate any of the white towns that were situated along the river. The reservoir behind Oahe Dam, which would be more than 150 miles long, would stop just shy of Bismarck, North Dakota. Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, would sit safely inside a small reservoir-free zone between the tail end of Lake Francis Case and the upper end of Lake Oahe; were it not for the town, the two reservoirs would have virtually touched, nose to tail. Chamberlain, South Dakota, nestled between the reservoirs formed by Big Bend and Fort Randall Dams, was similarly spared. The height of Garrison Dam was reduced by twenty feet so that the surface level of the reservoir would be 1,830 feet above sea level, not 1,850 feet as original...

For the sake of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, where the Mandan and Arikara and Hidatsa lived, no such intricate gerrymandering of reservoir outlines was even tried. Garrison Dam, which the Corps justified largely because of its flood-control benefits downstream, was going to cause horrific local flood damage the moment its reservoir beg...

Colonel Lewis Pick, the architect of the tribes’ inundation, was the embodiment of a no-nonsense military man. Pick liked to punctuate his conversation with Cagney-style “See? See?”s; these were not questions—they were commands. When first assigned to the Missouri River Division during the early part of the Second World War, he ordered all of his staff to work a series of continuous seven-day weeks. On the first Sunday after the order was given, Pick spied on all his top officers and summarily dismissed those who were not at their desks. Later, when he was in Burma, he fired a whole team of surveyors for laying out...

Since what Pick proposed to do to the Indians was the most calamitous thing that had happened to them in their history, he might have had the good grace to leave the proceedings through which the tribe would be compensated to someone else. But Pick was a take-charge type. He not only insisted on participating; he insisted on running them himself.

Initially, the Three Tribes pleaded with the government not to build Garrison Dam at all. “All of the bottom lands and all of the bench lands on this reservation will be flooded,” wrote the business council of the Three Tribes in an anguished resolution condemning the plan. Most of it will be underwater to a depth of 100 feet or more. The homes and lands of 349 families, comprising 1,544 individuals, will be covered with deep water. The lands which will be flooded are practically all the lands which are of any use or value to produce feed for stock or winter shelter. We are stock-men and our living depends on our production of cattle. . . . All of our people have lived where we now are for more than 100 years. Our people have lived on and cultivated the bottom lands along the Missouri River for many hundreds of years. We were here before the first white men stepped foot on this land. We have always kept the peace. We have kept our side of all treaties. We have been, and now are, as nearly self-supporting as the average white community. We recognize the value to our white neighbors, and to the people down stream, of the plan to control the River and to make use of the great surplus of flood waters; but we cannot agree that we should be destroyed, drowned out, removed, and divided for the public benefit while all other white communities are protected and safe-guarded by the same River development plan which now threatens us with destruction. . . .

One small faction of the Three Tribes, led by a flamboyant young radical named Crow Flies High, remained opposed to any compromise at all. As negotiations were already underway between the Interior Department, the Corps, and the Tribal Business Council, a delegation from the dissident faction burst into the room in ceremonial dress and began disrupting the proceedings. The leader of the group, who was probably Crow Flies High, went up to Colonel Pick and made an obscene gesture. Pick turned the color of uncooked liver. It was an insult, he said lividly, that he would remember as long as he lived.

On the basis of that petty insult, Pick stormed out of the negotiations, never to return. As far as he was concerned, all of the points of agreement that had already been reached were null and void. When Arthur Morgan, the first director of the Tennessee Valley Authority—and the one person who kept the memory of the Indians’ tragedy alive—visited the Three Tribes some time later, however, he discovered a different sentiment as to why Pick had walked out. There was, he wrote, “a nearly unanimous opinion that the Corps welcomed the attack of the Crow Flies High group because it provided a semblance of justification for ignoring the clear terms of the law. . . .”

Before the negotiations were interrupted, the Corps had offered the Indians some scattered property on the Missouri benchlands to replace the bottomlands they would lose. (“I want to show you where we are going to place you people,” a local Congregationalist minister quoted Pick as saying.) Under the law, all compensatory lands were to be “comparable in quality and sufficient in area to compensate the said tribes for the land on the Fort Berthold Reservation.” It was up to the Secretary of the Interior, Cap Krug, to decide whether the criteria had been met. As Krug well knew, there was no land in North Dakota that could adequately compensate the tribes for prime winter cattle range in a river valley. He had decided, therefore, to accede to the Indians’ other demands for water, at-cost hydroelectric power, and ...

Colonel Pick, however, was still smoldering over the indignity he had suffered, and he had his good friends in Congress. A few months after Krug announced that he was prepared to meet most or all of the Indians’ terms, the disposition of their case was removed by Congress from Interior’s hands and given to the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. The committee soon tore up Interior’s version of the bill and wrote its own version exactly along the lines suggested by Pick. The Fort Berthold tribes would not even be permitted to fish in the reservoir. Their cattle would not be allowed to drink from it, or graze by it. The right to purchase hydroelectricity at cost was abrogated. The tribes were forbidden to use any compensatory money they received to hire attorneys. They were not even allowed to cut the trees that would be drowned by the reservoir, except in one case, and there, according to the new terms, they were not permitted to haul them away.

On May 20, 1948, Secretary Krug ceremoniously signed the bill disposing of the Fort Berthold matter in his office in Washington. Despite some intervention by the Interior Department, most of the Corps’ vengeful provisions were still intact. Standing behind Krug, alongside a slouching Mike Straus of the Bureau of Reclamation and a scowling General Pick, was handsome George Gillette, the leader of the tribal business council, in a pinstripe suit. “The members of the tribal council sign this contract with heavy hearts,” Gillette managed to say. “Right now the future does not look good to us.” Then, as Krug reached for a bundle of commemorative pens to sign the bill, and as the assembled politicians and bureaucrats looked on embarrassed or stony-faced, George Gillette cradled his face in one hand and began to cry.

To eliminate any possibility that Congress or the President might succumb to a tender conscience and eliminate Garrison Dam from the Pick-Sloan Plan, the Corps had already begun work on it in 1945, three years before the agreement with the Indians was signed. In fact, it would spend $60 million on ambiguously authorized “preliminary” work on the dam between 1945 and 1948. A number of members of Congress protested that such work was, if not outright illegal, then certainly a moral wrong. But the one party that mi...

The Fort Berthold Indians have never recovered from the trauma they underwent. Their whole sense of cohesiveness was lost, and they adjusted badly to life on the arid plains and in the white towns. But no humiliation could have been greater than for them to see the signs that were erected around the reservoir as it slowly filled, submerging the dying cottonwoods and drowning the land they had occupied for at least four hundred years. In what looked to the Indians like a s...

No one will ever know how many ill-conceived water projects were built by the Bureau and the Corps simply because the one agency thought the other would build it first.

What was ironic about the Bureau and the Corps staging their climactic battle in Alaska was that, strictly speaking, neither of them had any business being there. Alaska has very little agriculture—about the only place one can grow anything is in the Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage—and its few farmers employ little irrigation, if any. Besides, the state has more groundwater than one can dream of, most of it a few feet beneath the surface of the earth. The only navigable inland waterway is the Yukon River, and what the Corps was proposing to build would have put an end to that. Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the tiny towns along the Yukon sit on bluffs; only once did Fairbanks have a serious flood, and the city was expanding up the hill, away from the Tanana River. Irrigation, flood control, navigation—none of those applied; yet those were the principal assignments of the Bureau and the Corps. Everything else—recreation, power, fish and wildlife “enhancement”—was supposed to be incidental to those activities. In Alaska, however, such “incidental” benefits were the only rationale they could come up with to build dams. And the dams they wanted to build were too monumental to pass up.

The Corps’ dream project, Rampart Dam on the Yukon River, was, at last, an opportunity to show the world what it could really do. It wasn’t its size that was so breathtaking—although, with a speculative height of 530 feet and a length of 4,700 feet, it had the dimensions of Grand Coulee—as the size of the reservoir that would form behind it. Lake Rampart would become the largest reservoir in the world. It would cover 10,800 square miles, making it almost exactly the size of Lake Erie. And it was the power—five million kilowatts of it, two and a half times more than the initial output of Grand Coulee. Rampart was, by far, the grandest virgin hydroelectric damsite under the American flag; there were only a dozen like it in the entire world.

The Bureau’s project, Devil’s Canyon Dam on the Susitna River, was, by contrast, almost invisible. But it was still huge: a high plug in a great canyon on the river which ranked sixteenth in the United States in terms of annual flow, Devil’s Canyon would produce hundreds and hundreds of megawatts of power, depending on ...

The Bureau’s dam would drown Devil’s Canyon, a remote stretch of almost unbelievable wildwater rapids about a hundred miles north of Anchorage. Even fish couldn’t navigate those rapids, and no sane person would try—although in the mid 1970s, a group of kayakers led by Dr. Walt Blackadar, a fifty-three-year-old surgeon from Salmon, Idaho, did, and succeeded, at least in the sense that none of them died. Devil’s Canyon’s ...

Rampart Dam, however, was an ecological disaster probably without precedent in the world. It would drown the entire Yukon Flats, a sightless plain of marshes, bogs, and small shallow lakes that nurtures more ducks than all of the United States below the Canadian border. In its report on the project, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stated, “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” At least a million and a half ducks were contributed to the North American flyways by the Yukon Flats, besides 12,500 geese, thousands of swans, an estimated ten thousand little brown cranes, eagles, sandhill cranes, osprey, and moose—thousands and thousands of moose, to which such boggy ...

There were salmon. More than a quarter of a million salmon passed through Rampart Canyon every year, some of them destined to go through two time zones to spawning tributaries all the way across Alaska and into Canada. A high dam would end their migration, irrevocably. The Corps’ plan to lift them out and carry them across the 250-mile reservoir in barges wouldn’t help, because t...

There were also furbearing animals—wolverines, lynx, weasels, martins, muskrat, otter, mink, beaver—animals which were the livelihood, to greater or lesser degrees, of most of the Yukon people. Some forty thousand pelts, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, could be taken from th...

And there were people—twelve hundred of them in the taking area, another eight or nine thousand whose livelihoods would be drastically affected, by either the drowning of animal habitat or the end of the salmon runs. Many of those people were Canadian citizens, many others were American Indians and Eskimos who had been promised, by treaty, a land that could sustain them forever. The Corps was promising jobs building the dam, jobs in the tourist industry, jobs in the lake trout fishery that was suppo...

The whole idea behind Rampart Dam was to turn Alaska, overnight, into an industrial subcontinent. Five million kilowatts were enough to heat and light Anchorage and ten other cities its size, with power left over for a large aluminum smelter, a large munitions plant, a couple of pulp and paper mills, a refinery, perhaps even a uranium-enrichment facility tucked safely away in the wilderness—and even then, about half of the power would be left over for ...

Realistically speaking, the dam made no sense at all. Neither did Devil’s Canyon Dam. The last thing Alaska had to worry about was an energy crisis. It had 300,000 inhabitants; its population could fit inside a few square blocks of Manhattan. Even then, before the gigantic North Slope oil field was discovered, it had proven oil reserves estimated at 170 million barrels (the North Slope was to increase the figure by some ten billion more). It had 360 million board-feet of timber; the driftwood floating down the Susitna River seemed enough fuel to fulfill Anchorage’s needs. It had, right around Anchorage, some of the most dramatic tidal variations in the world; the difference between high and low tide approached twenty feet, and a single tidal project taking advantage of similar conditions at DeRance, France, was producing hundreds of megawatts, more than Anchorage (which held half of Alaska’s population) would need for decades. Main...

Behind their fiercely independent stance, Alaskans, in the 1960s, were a people completely dependent on Washington, D.C. Their major industry, after fishing, was the U.S. military; their third major industry was the rest of the U.S. government. Alaskans spoke of their state as a “colony,” but as colonies go they had themselves a pretty good thing, and they exhibited all the character traits of colonial people—which is to say that they wanted to exploit “their” resources for themselves, but expected the federal government to pay the cost.

Senator Ernest Gruening, formerly a governor of the state, was the main booster of Rampart; he lobbied for it with a zeal that bordered on the fanatic. Behind him were pressure groups like Yukon Power for America, or the more picturesque North of the Range association, which said in its brochures that Alaska’s future depended on “coming forward with both guns blazing.” What mattered most to the boosters was that Rampart was an opportunity—the first real opportunity—to leave mankind’s mark on a place that held it in magnificent contempt. George Sundborg, Gruening’s administrative assistant, dismissed the area to be drowned by the dam as practically worthless; there were “not more than ten flush toilets in it.” Gruening went further: it was totally worthless. “[T]he Yukon Flats,” he wrote, “—a mammoth swamp—from the standpoint of human habitability is about as worthless and useless an area as can be found in the path of any hydroelectric development. Scenically it is zero. In fact, it is one of the few really ugly areas in a land prodigal with sensational beauty.”

And, since these were the 1960s, and since this was the army that wanted to build the project, there may have been a further consideration working behind Rampart Dam. Ernest Gruening had, he said, recently returned from Russia, where he had seen “hydroelectric power dams larger than the largest in America.” The dam, then, was to be a monument against Communism; and if it made it any easier to build it, one might as well note that the ducks whose habitat would be drowned were Communist ducks—many of them migrated to Siberia. Did it make s...

And there the irony of the whole long fight between the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers came full circle. Had they really cooperated—as General William Cassidy had stated they would, and must—there is no telling what they might have built. Their rivalry prevailed, and grew more intense, during one of history’s truly unique periods—a time when we had the confidence, and the money, and, one might say, the compulsion to build on a fantastically grand scale. The money invested in the dozens of relatively small projects each agency built—in many cases because the other threatened to build first—would have sufficed to build the great works they insisted were necessary, but which required extraordinary determination, cooperation, and raw political clout in order to be authorized. Fifty million here, eighty million there, a hundred million here, and soon one was talking about real money. In the 1960s, Dos Rios Dam could have been built for $400 million; today it might cost $3 billion or more. A diversion from the Columbia River to the Southwest could have been built for $6 billion or so in the sixties, and there was so much surplus energy in the Northwest that a few million acre-feet of water removed from a river that dumps 140 million acre-feet into the sea might not have been missed. Today the cost seems utterly prohibitive, and Washington and Oregon would probably resist the engineers with tanks. The opportunity was there. But the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau squandered ...

When Emma Dominy, writhing and shrieking, finally evicted her son Floyd, the doctors dumped him on a scale and whistled. Floyd Elgin Dominy, ten pounds, four ounces, at birth. Floyd Elgin Dominy, larger than life. All of Floyd’s siblings were born huge. His brother Ralph weighed twelve pounds. Emma’s six giant babies were a cross she was to bear through the rest of her life. Her uterus became distended, causing her horrid pain. She developed a nervous condition. Her temper became explosive, her outbursts hysterical. Strong-willed, French-Irish, and beautiful, Emma May Dominy was a handful anyway. Charles Dominy and his wife fought day and night. They had what is referred to as a “difficult” marriage, cemented precariously by children, religion, and a pious wheatbelt condemnation of divorce. Life, remembers Floyd, was like living on an earthquake fault. There was never any peace. “They fussed and fumed from morning to night. We’d lie awake at night and listen to them tearing into each other.” He is seventy when he says this, but his childhood is still a bad memory; you can read it in the turned-down corners of his mouth. “I remember what a relief it was to get away from home. It bugged me right through college. When everyone else was having nightmares about missing exams, I was having nightmares that my parents were murdering each other.”

Hastings, Nebraska, is a long way from paradise: Libya in the summer, Siberia in the winter; too wet for the Bureau of Reclamation, too arid for trees. Hard up against the hundredth meridian, Hastings occupies America’s agricultural DMZ. Neither God nor government has taken it under its wing. Disaster is Hastings’s stock-in-trade—that and dullness. “The capriciousness of nature is the one thing that livens that place up,” says Dominy. “When they aren’t talking crop prices or tattling on their neighbors, all anyone talks about is the weather.” Hastings is tornado country (one of the few double-funneled tornadoes ever seen was photographed near there), baseball-size-hail country, banshee blizzard country, drought-without-end country. The region’s whole economy can be drained by a summer’s drought, dashed by an afternoon’s hailstorm. The anarchy of nature may be one reason why most of Hastings’s residents—Republican or Democrat, dry farmer or irrigation farmer, city dweller or country dweller—devoutly believe that man should exercise as much dominion over the earth as he can. Hastings, Nebraska: birthplace of Floyd Dominy, future Commissioner of Reclamation.

At seventeen, Floyd fell in love. Her name was Alice Criswell. She was sweet, demure, and very pretty, a little heroine out of Willa Cather. They met at a state convention; he was Master Counsellor for the Order of DeMolay, and she was the Queen of Job’s Daughters. Alice’s family lived in western Nebraska, near Chappell, a good two hundred miles away. Floyd was mad for her, but his father refused to let him borrow the car. Floyd had $30 to his name. He spent $25 of it on a beat-up one-cylinder motorcycle that, with luck, would take him to Alice. “It was a helluva trip out there. The roads were all dirt in those days. I wore out a pair of boots balancing that one-lunger, but I made it. When I got ready to go back home, the damn thing wouldn’t fire up. Alice’s father looked at it and said, ‘Your magneto’s shot.’ I said, ‘Can we fix it?’ He spent two hours trying, but the sonofabitch was beyond repair. I had to sell it for what I could get, which was five bucks, and start hitchhiking home. Hitchhike, hell. You hardly saw a car in western Nebraska in those days. I’d walked about three miles when I came upon an old guy with his head stuck under the hood of his truck. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ and I looked in and saw that his magneto was shot. Well, in the last two hours I’d learned about magnetos. I took his apart, saw right away what was wrong with it, and fixed it then and there. That old geezer was so impressed that he offered me a job on the spot. I never went home again.”

The sensible thing for a mechanically gifted farm boy who didn’t particularly like farming to major in was engineering. At Hastings College, Dominy had given it a brief go and quit. “I didn’t like the preciseness,” he says. In 1930, he entered the University of Wyoming at Laramie, choosing economics as a major. He was captain of the hockey team. He stayed on and won a master’s degree in 1933. By then the country’s economy was in a screaming nosedive and the West was five years into the Great Drought. The ranchers around Laramie couldn’t sell their cattle—first because no one had money to buy them, second because the cattle weren’t worth buying anyway. They were thirsty and starving, vacant-eyed beasts with bellies bloated from hunger and protruding ribs. Stupefied by the intensity of the disaster, Wyoming’s people were in the same condition, mentally if not physically. Campbell County, two hundred miles north of Laramie, was typical of the places that had plummeted through FDR’s safety net of relief. Roosevelt couldn’t launch a federal dam project there because Campbell County had no river worth a dam. It had no highway project because no one went there and it hardly had cars. It had no writers’ projects, no hospital projects, no dog census. All it had was the cattle liquidation program. The Agriculture Department’s county agent paid the ranchers $8 a head for their scrawny cattle, then shot them. The farmers took the $8 and spent it on horse feed and rifle shells, then he...

In his new position, Dominy had an opportunity to learn anything he wanted about the three-hundred-odd Reclamation projects in existence. He read every project history, reserving for special attention the “bad elements”—the projects that were failing. “Half of our projects were insolvent. I was fascinated: why some and not others? I said to myself, ‘Whoever figures this out and starts to haul Reclamation out of this financial ooze is going to be the next commissioner.’ The reasons were complicated. In the early days, Reclamation made some bad mistakes—we miscalculated water availability, we laid out canals that didn’t work right, we had drainage problems that we should have anticipated. Soil, altitude, crop prices, markets—they all made a difference. On top of that, there were practically no requirements. Straus and Warne let any idiot get into a Reclamation project. You didn’t have to demonstrate that you had capital, farming skills, anything. Any fool could sign up and get on a Reclamation farm and use whatever intelligence he had cheating the government. When the projects began to go bankrupt, Straus and Warne were afraid to expose them. They covered the goddamn things up and that got us in a hell of a lot of trouble with Congress. We were illegally delivering water all over the place. Payments were way in arrears and no one was doing a damn thing about it. I think we were violating the law at least as often as we were not violating it.”

If Dominy harbored a lifelong grudge, it was against engineers. Away from their drafting tables, he thought, engineers could be inexcusably stupid. On the other hand, they had a mystical ability to erect huge structures along exact lines, using bizarre formulas he could not even read. They could map a river basin, analyze some abutment rocks, measure the streamflow, and build a dam of precisely the shape, size, and structure to suit it. They had labored through the trigonometry, the calculus, the chemistry, the topology, and the geology that he had backed away from—the one time in his life he had given up on anything. The problem was, they couldn’t explain their own work or its importance, couldn’t understand human relations, couldn’t see a political problem about to smack them in the face. He could do all of that—brilliantly. Dominy needed them, and he knew it, and they needed him—and didn’t know it. It made him furious.

“I liked Floyd. I trusted him. I thought he would be loyal to me as secretary.” “I liked Stewart. He was a bad administrator, but he had marvelous instincts. He also had guts. He wouldn’t bite a chainsaw, but he had guts.” “Dominy despised Stewart Udall, and Udall regarded him like a rogue elephant. Dominy used to come storming out of Udall’s office and say, ‘Who does he think he is?! The Commissioner of Reclamation?’” “Dominy was the most able bureaucrat I’ve ever known.” “I was amazed by him. He had the constitution of a double ox. He’d be dead drunk at a party at three A.M. and he’d be testifying at eight-thirty the next morning and you couldn’t tell.” “He was merciless to the people around him. He could be hell on his assistant commissioners. He was horrible to some of the regional directors. If you made a stupid mistake he was all over you and he wouldn’t quit.” “When we went on tours abroad, Dominy was treated like the President of the United States.” “He was a magician with Congress. His friends there would do anything for him. They believed every word he said.” “When he testified he spouted numbers like a computer. He spoke with absolute self-assurance. It was all hogwash. If he didn’t know a number, he made one up.” “When Dominy was ousted the Bureau of Reclamation fell apart. It will never recover. The disarray over there now is ridiculous.” “When you worked for Dominy you were always terrified of the page-eight syndrome. If you handed him a memorandum and page e...

Nominally, the Bureau of Reclamation is a part of the Interior Department. The commissioner is, in theory, directly responsible to the Interior Secretary and the President, and carries out the wishes of whatever administration occupies the White House—whether that administration appointed him or not. Actually, everyone who has watched the Bureau in action over the years knows it doesn’t work that way. The Bureau is a creature of Congress, and most Presidents have not been able to control it any better than they could control the weather or the press. The role of the Bureau vis-à-vis the White House and Congress might be likened to that of a child placed in a foster home by a doting pair of unstable parents. The child may tell lies, throw tantrums, wreck the house, and eat everything in the icebox, but if his foster parents finally decide to give him a thrashing, his real parents materialize out of nowhere and wrest the paddle from their hands. Jimmy Carter lost the momentum of his presidency, and a chance at a second term, through a hapless effort to bring the Bureau and the Corps of Engineers under control. Eisenhower, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford all tried to dump or delay a number of projects the Bureau and Corps wanted to build, and failed in almost every case. Congress simply tossed the projects into omnibus public-works bills, which would have required that the President veto anything from important flood-control projects to fish hatcheries to job programs in order to ge...

The peculiar relationship between the Bureau and the two leading branches of government—in which it can defy the wishes of the branch that supposedly runs it and is largely subservient to the wishes of the other—is something relatively new. Mostly it is a development of the postwar era. In the past, the President often had to champion the Reclamation program against the objections of an eastern-dominated Congress, which found the whole idea a waste of money. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Herbert Hoover all fought with Congress over Reclamation dams they wanted built. As the dams octupled the population of the West, however, and as long-lived members of Congress from the South and West rose into important committee chairmanships, the character of Congressional leadership changed, and its attitudes followed. With Wayne Aspinall and Carl Hayden running the Interior and Appropriations committees, Ike could no more enforce a “no new starts” policy than Jimmy Carter could bounce a $40 million Corps of Engineers dam whose sole beneficiary was to be a private catfish farm in the district of an influential Congressman from Oklahoma. As far as public works were concerned, by the 1950s it was Congress, not the White House, that ran the government. We had become a plutocracy of the powerful and entrenched.

A number of higher Reclamation officials—Dexheimer included—had been moonlighting at consulting jobs, and when the news reached Congress some members were furious about it. (These were the days when Cabinet members still resigned over ethical transgressions which, today, would be considered almost innocent.)

Most Commissioners of Reclamation were dull, pious Mormons—or, if not Mormon, and pious, then at least dull. Floyd Dominy was a two-fisted drinker, a gambler; he had a scabrous vocabulary and a prodigious sex drive. In interviews, Bureau men tend to be careful, guarded, and obviously suspicious of reporters. Dominy was candid and amazingly open. Most commissioners like to operate within carefully defined parameters, always going by the book. Dominy was freewheeling and reckless, racing yellow lights and burning rubber in three gears. He could be methodical, he worked incredibly hard, he always did his homework—those were the qualities that sustained him through four successive administrations. But he had a self-destructive impulse, a violent temper, and a compulsion to tempt fate. He could, for example, make a lifelong enemy of a very powerful politician over lunch.

If attacking the governor of Utah took nerve, if taking on the entire engineering profession took gall, then waging ceaseless war against one’s superiors would have to be regarded as slightly nuts. But Dominy continually attacked and defied all three of his immediate superiors in the Interior bureaucracy—the Secretary, Under Secretary, and Assistant Secretary—and won nearly every time.

“As his superior I simply had to rein him in from time to time,” muttered Holum during a telephone interview, and declined to discuss the subject further. The truth was, however, that Dominy made a fool of Holum much more frequently than Holum made a fool of him. The one time he did—when he and Carr managed to freeze the commissioner off the presidential airplane during one of Kennedy’s western tours—Udall returned to his office only to find powerful Congressman Wayne Aspinall on the other end of the telephone, waiting to chew off his ear. After that, Dominy not only got to ride on Air Force One, but he had his own fancy aircraft—and his own building.

For years, the world’s great amalgamation of engineering talent had been housed in a complex of warehouses, military depots, and glorified barracks outside Denver known today as Federal Center. Then, it was simply known as the Ammo Depot. Thrown up hastily during the war, the Bureau’s headquarters, a two-block-long hangar called Building Fifty-six, had neither air conditioning nor many windows. The only source of heat was some undersized radiators spaced many yards apart. Chunks of ceiling calved like icebergs; water dribbled from a hundred leaks. The plumbing sounded as if a team of Russian weight lifters were banging wrenches against the pipes.

Mike Straus and Dexheimer had tolerated this travesty of a headquarters, but Dominy would not. He wouldn’t keep his cows in there. He was going to get Congress to appropriate money for a new building—a new building that would, in time, become known as the Floyd E. Dominy Building. Under his tutelage, the Bureau’s public relations department produced a picture book called Inside Building Fifty-six. In it were photographs of rusting pipes, of rotting ceilings suspended over bowed heads, of huddled secretaries typing in overcoats. Accompanying the pictures was a text that might have described the Sheraton Maui. It was, especially from engineers, a high-class piece of wit. The results, however, were negligible. Udall was frightened of a new building’s cost; a few Congressmen even wondered out loud why such a brochure should be produced at public expense. That was enough to make Dominy mad, but not half as mad as he was when he learned that the General Services Administration, run by a close friend of James Carr—the same Jim Carr who had told Dominy that the Bureau’s headquarters were adequate—erected a new building next door to house the complex’s garbage cans.

The federal code stated things plainly enough: the construction of new federal edifices, unless Congress voted otherwise, was left to the discretion of the GSA. Dominy asked his lawyer, Eddie Weinberg, to give him the exceptions to the rule. There were none, Weinberg said—except that, obviously, the GSA had no say-so over the Bureau’s dams. “Well, then, it’s simple,” he told Weinberg, “we’ll get the goddamned thing authorized as a dam.” It was a quintessential Dominy solution, brilliant in its simplicity, splendid in its insolence. The building would be authorized as a dam. The Senate Appropriations Committee—Car...

Fascinated by the outcome of this thing, Weinberg was finally persuaded to go along. Later that year, there was Dominy, with Hayden’s blessing already in hand, testifying before his counterpart on the House Appropriations Committee, chairman Clarence Cannon of Missouri. Dominy was eloquent in his blunt Harry Truman style. “I’ve got a building where icicles practically form in winter,” he complained, “and a plane where ice does form, right in the carburetor. My people need a decent place to work, and I need a plane that isn’t going to fall out of the sky so I can live to see them enjoy it.” Cannon asked, “Do you have any idea when your plane might fall out of the sky?” “Probably on the very next flight,” said Dominy. “Wel...

When Carr’s friend, the GSA administrator, found out that Dominy had sneaked a new building into a bill that nominally authorized only dams, he was apoplectic. When Carr found out soon thereafter that Dominy had immediately signed a $250,000 design agreement without his approval, he was beside himself. Carr forgot, however, that Dominy had been clever enough to make a friend in every strategic place; and there was no more strategic place in the Interior Building than the mailroom. Stewart Udall was out of town, making a speech, but he was indignant when he learned from Carr how Dominy had operated behind his back. With the Secretary’s approval, Carr wrote and signed a letter agreeing to hand the $250,000 back to the Treasury. “When I found out about that,” says Dominy, “I called my man in the mailroom. I said, ‘I’ll take the rap and you’ll keep your job—don’t you let that letter out of the building.’ He promised me he wouldn’t. Then I called up Udall that night in his hotel room. I dialed him every fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t get away from me. When I got through to him, I said, ‘Stew, dammit, you can’t do that. It’s not $250,000 cash. It’s $250,000 credit with the Appropriati...