Stuck With Byron

I suppose I am stuck with Byron Pearson. 

Well, rather, the literature about the Grand Canyon, and specifically attempts to authorize dam-building in it, is stuck with Byron Pearson. I admit I am culpable; I should have written the necessary rebuttal when he published Still the Wild River Runs in 2002, four years after he had been awarded his Ph.D. upon completing the dissertation that led to the book. 

I first encountered Byron 12 March 1998. Although he told me he was done with his dissertation, he asked to interview me after David Brower had suggested he do so. We had a pleasant chat; I noted in my journal: “Byron Pearson on G C dams - ok, ltd” — the last word my abbreviation for ‘limited’.

He talked about his dissertation’s thesis: the dams were defeated through the efforts of Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State, and although Byron recognized the noisy Sierra Club campaign against the dams, we were not responsible for their defeat. A nice iconoclastic position for a would-be academic looking to make a career. 

Four years later, when his book appeared, he emphasized that point about the Sierra Club’s irrelevance, adding that Grand Canyon and  environmental advocates like Roderick Nash (who had published ground-breaking work on the American Wilderness idea & System) were responsible for giving the Sierra Club credit it did not deserve for defeating the dams.

In our 1998 interview (and since), I corrected Byron’s view of the internal politics of the dam fight. He saw us as clamoring outsiders who scored points with the public and the newspapers, but were not involved or included in the the actual, on-going, non-public political machinations that determined the dams’ fate. As I told him then, that was not true. We worked closely, meeting frequently, with key Jackson aides and allies: Sterling Monroe, Jackson’s long-time number one staff member, and Representative Thomas Foley, who was a Jackson protege currently at the start of an illustrious House career (he became Speaker) and the principal northwestern spokesperson on the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee that was considering the legislation that included the dams. 

Did we work closely? Here is an example. The Club’s Northwest Representative, Brock Evans, came as part of our Club delegation in May 1966 to testify before the House Committee. Foley asked me to ask him NOT to testify; he did not want to give Rep. Morris Udall (the Arizonan who led the committee effort to cobble together a satisfy-all pro-waterworks, pro-dam bill) any opportunity to score points against the northwest position that the Columbia River was not up for export to Los Angeles and Phoenix. (Note: I realize I am leaving a lot up to the reader’s grasp of these old, old issues; indeed, even to me the half-century-old story seems like another geologic age.) We of course agreed, anxious to help out an ally, even though Brock’s trip would be for naught.

Byron took 3-4 years to go from that talk with me to his 2002 University of Arizona Press book — plenty of time to talk with me further about the anti-dam story and the Club’s political involvement. He could have expanded his grasp on what happened when, by whom. However he did not; apparently the idea that we were politically involved did not fit his iconoclastic stance. 

He didn’t even consider the Hooker Dam issue, that threatened to be a deal-breaker until the Club, its New Mexican allies, Morris Udall, and Senator Anderson “connived” together to de-fuse any fuss. And I still remember the reaming-out my ear got over the telephone when our “friend” Representative John Saylor learned his position on Hooker had been undermined by our machinations. 

(Let me take a moment to recall Mr. Saylor for his great contributions, as what we would call now an environmental politician, an easterner sticking his Republican nose into the tents of the then mostly Democratic westerners so eager to over-develop our West. He has so much to his credit for his accomplishments and his presence as a conscience. One of the saddest moments, especially I believe for the Grand Canyon, was when John Saylor died suddenly in 1973, just as the Park expansion legislation was being developed.)

So were we the outsiders Pearson wants us to be seen as, naively wandering around beating our anti-dam drum, but ignorant of and irrelevant to how the congressional sausage was really being made?

Again: I remember all the times I contacted the Bureau of Reclamation, speaking to staff member (apparently assigned to such duties) Dan Dreyfus, first in letters, and later over the phone. He was my instructor and inside source for all things Reclamation in those years. And indeed, Dan & I became friends in later years; he joined the Senate Committee staff and was key when I was involved in the legislation to expand Grand Canyon National Park. Again, Byron would not be curious about such connections; they did not fit in the story he, in the iconoclast/scholar role he adopted, wanted to promote.

And I remember when David Brower and I — at the height of the House dam action — personally contacted our great opponent, Morris Udall, and invited him — on account of his conservationist history — to be the keynote speaker in November at a Sierra Club conference held in Santa Fe. He agreed, told jokes, and spoke about the proposal for a Sonoran Desert National Park (sadly too valuable for its qualities as a military bombing range). Did our private reaching out to Mo make any difference in his later sterling environmental legislation career? We certainly worked intimately on crafting the Park (and Havasupai) expansion bills, following directly from the anti-dam legislation. 

I remember the time Brower and I met House Interior Committee Chairman Wayne Aspinall at a dinner, and we were collegial enough (as bitter enemies) for him to joke about my beard. I shaved it off.

I do not claim we were great pals with all the key actors, though Brower certainly carried enough clout to personally press Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. The point I do insist on is that Pearson is quite simply wrong about our interest, knowledge, and involvement in the politics of the Colorado River Basin legislation. And I do insist that our presence was powered by the public approval of our efforts to save Grand Canyon from dams, a presence that had to be, and was, taken into account by other players in that arena. 

What Pearson left out, in his disdain for the Sierra Club and what he sees as over-hyped environmentalism, are the very elements that turned this fight over a congressional bill into a nation-changing alteration in the course of the American West and the environmental affairs of all of us. 

That is not all he left out, as I detailed for his re-tread of his 2002 book, the recently (2019) published: Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth. (See my entry in this blog of 15 December  2019: “Pearson’s Myth: A Missed Opportunity; An assessment of a historian’s research on the fight to  keep the Grand Canyon free of dams”.) I remain astonished at the claim that his book is the result of 25 years of wide-ranging research. Not so, as I analyze in that blog entry; his writing is almost entirely still dependent on a few Arizona and Sierra Club archives and interviews done back in the twentieth century. It leaves out almost all material from all but a handful of the principal actors.

However, as the book publisher’s hype indicates (repeated in most of the search results) this book now sits out there, along with its old near-twin, a mock-definitive recounting of the dam fight. And so I am stuck with Byron’s view of the ineffectualness of environmentalists and citizens in keeping dams from being built in the Grand Canyon. I never wrote the refutation his slanted approach needs. My bad. The best I could do are some of my other posts in the blog “Celebrating the Grand Canyon”, e.g. about Senator Jackson and what good allies the Club and the Senator were. They are collected under the tab for “Dams”, down at the bottom. 

 I will end here by insisting again on the counter-factual: What if there had been no Sierra Club (plus so many other anti-dam groups  and all those citizens and the media) campaign to save the Grand Canyon from becoming the site for dams? That simply could not have happened, of course; Brower, the Club, and so many others (Martin Litton must be mentioned) had been gearing up for this campaign since the Club was inveigled by a California lawyer back in 1948 to support a huge Grand Canyon dam with conditions. But then the huge fight over Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument happened. And Glen Canyon dam happened. And the Wilderness Act happened. And a vigorous, activist, pushy conservationist-into-environmentalist movement was born, nourished and grew. When, therefore, the Colorado River Basin states and the federal Bureau of Reclamation with its parent Interior Department were ready in the mid-1960’s to push for their gigantic water development plans, those who wanted to keep the Grand Canyon free of dams were also ready. Not just knowledgeable about the Canyon, but experienced in congressional internal workings. And the dam-builders knew we were there and ready.

Yet we can fantasize with Byron that we were not. That there was no activist Sierra Club, no conservationist community, no determination to keep dams out of the Park System; just the same quiescent acceptance of the dams’ inevitability as in 1948. Also, we can suppose the same desperate determination by the Colorado River Basin States to make up for the “deficit” in river flow that threatened them in a few decades. There was nothing new in bringing water from one river basin over into another to prevent such deficits or promote more growth. Look at Los Angeles, at southern California, at Colorado. So it was no great stretch for the far-sighted water gurus in Congress to put together a water development scheme that envisioned, a few decades off maybe, tapping the great flow of the Columbia River to send some of it south. And it would be remembered, certainly by the powerful Carl Hayden, senior Arizona Senator, that he had gotten his waterworks AND his dam through the Senate only 15 years before. 

So, in the Pearson fantasy, the Udall brothers, Interior and House of Representatives, guided by Hayden’s dream of Colorado water for Arizona, with the hard-charging Commissioner of Reclamation Floyd Dominy, working under their disciplined, experienced, canny House eminence Wayne Aspinall, would have put together their everything-for-everybody water bill, dams and all, and sent it to the Senate.

There would have stood Senator Jackson, Byron Pearson’s lonely hero, confronting those massed forces of Western development. 

Absent from this counter-factual fantasy is any noise or even peeps from go-along conservationist groups stuck in 1948 stance (not just the Sierra Club, but the protective National Parks Association too). And, as in real life, Senator Hayden, Senator Anderson, and Senator Jackson would have sat down and talked things over. Quiet in their offices; no mass noise leaking in against dams or for the Grand Canyon. The newspapers all friendly. No full-page anti-dam ads; no IRS attack; no testimony showing the dams were a “pistol aimed at the Columbia”. This counter-factual Jackson would have raised his objections: no water from the Columbia; no money for plans to bring water from the Columbia; no studies to take water from the Columbia. He wouldn’t even have to say he would block any action on the House water bill because his colleagues and friends, Carl and Clint, would have said: Sure, Scoop, we will protect you, at least for the foreseeable. Thanks, says Jackson, but how about those dams and all that money they will generate; I don’t want it to go into a big fund to do a raid on us. Absolutely not, say the other men of power, we will put on a provision that any extra dam revenues will go, oh how about, into the welfare of Indian tribes. Thats great, says Scoop; everybody’s happy; lets do it, dams and all. 

And that’s how, in the fanciful political world Pearson wants to conjure up for beguiled readers, the Grand Canyon dams got built. 

Ooops.

Sorry, Byron. There was a Sierra Club. There was a great public love of the Grand Canyon. The surge of public power it created made an overwhelming political issue inextricably tying together Grand Canyon dams and theft of the Columbia River. And the Sierra Club’s friend and ally, Senator Henry Jackson, needed that power and used it. 

Like it or not, you are stuck with reality.