In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS A nyworkof historicalscholarshipowesdebtstoovastandnumerous to be catalogued fully and accurately. This book is no exception. Its dedication salutes the two people who, more than any others, got me thinking about living in the Northwest. From my mother I learned to read. Her passion for the written word still nourishes me. My father taught me how to live outside, in the fullest sense of both words. Each time I hike, fish, hunt, ski, or help my own children do so, I pass some of his accumulated knowledge to the future. Asthebook’sintroductionwilldescribe,thisaccountof theHellsCanyon controversy originated during my active practice of law in the 1980s and early 1990s in Boise, Idaho. To legal colleagues Brian King, Walter Bithell, John Clute, and Steven Andersen, I oªer thanks for their inspiration and indulgence as I tried to balance the lawyer/politician/scholar calculus. Later, at the Idaho Conservation League, my bosses Glen Stewart and Rick Johnson enabled me to start making sense of the political and legal world I had just left. Kathy Perkins played an important part in encouraging me to pursue the thread I first grasped in those days and in helping me to get started down the road that became this book. Yet, in a real sense, this work of history saw its genesis during my graduate study at the University of Kansas in the late 1990s under the direction of Donald Worster. I owe him debts nearly as large as those I owe my parents . He believed in my potential as a historian. He took a chance on me. Moreover, he bore magnificently the many burdens that I brought into his o‹ce as a middle-aged nontraditional student of unorthodox pedigree for historical study. As his colleague at the University of Kansas, I treasure our opportunity to work together. Don’s many close, thoughtful readings of this manuscript have improved it immeasurably. XXIII Others who have read and commented on it deserve my hearty thanks, beginning with my University of Kansas graduate-school colleagues Kip Curtis, John Egan, Dale Nimz, and Lisa Brady. Members of my dissertation committee—Ted Wilson, Peter Mancall, Rob Glicksman, and Dietrich Earnhart—gave me the benefit of their enormous collective wisdom and patience. During a very di‹cult two-year period, both in my and this book’s lives, series editor Bill Cronon and the University of Washington’s Lita Tarver demonstrated both the virtues of decency and the crafts of editorship . Along the way, conference panelists and commentators, including Arthur McEvoy and Paul Hirt, spotted the book-to-be’s flaws and helped me unlock its potential. Mary Ribesky, of the University of Washington Press, shepherded me professionally through the editing odyssey. And at the end, Mary Brooks contributed her confidence and passion, along with invaluable indexing help. During the book’s lengthy gestation, archivists’ and librarians’ courtesies and hard work uncovered invaluable resources, some buried in dusty back rooms under fishing gear and others neatly arranged and promptly delivered to my writing table. I thank kindly the professional staªs at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, and the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, who make our section of the Missouri Basin such a gold mine for postwar environmental history. Archivists at two government agencies central to this story—at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in Washington, D.C., and at the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife in Clackamas and Portland, Oregon— devoted many hours to locating records indispensable to explaining the Hells Canyon controversy. In the state archives of Idaho and Oregon, in Boise and in Salem, capable professionals directed me to holdings that revealed secrets long kept. In particular, Steven King, of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, took special care to make sure I understood his agency’s viewpoint and handled the science of fish as well as a lawyer/ historian can. During my doctoral study at the University of Kansas, the Madison and Lila Self Graduate Fellowship supplied generous and crucial support. Hundreds of other friends, colleagues, teachers, and students have each contributed to my fulfilling the objective I set fifteen years ago: to explain what happened in Hells Canyon during the first fifteen years after World War II. Their humor, their food and drink, and their simple confidence in XXIV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS my capacity to achieve my goal mattered so much. Somewhere between draft and accepted manuscript, my two children, Jenni and Dylan, celebrated my birthday by...

Share