B Street: The Notorious Playground of Coulee Dam

Preface

IX PREFACE A s early as 1918, a few men in eastern Washington State realized that the arid land of the great Columbia basin needed water. They reasoned that the land, rich in itself, would never be worth much until it could be irrigated. Elbert F. Blaine of Grandview came up with the idea of irrigating the Grand Coulee valley. He suggested that water could come via a canal from the Pend Oreille River and that the water would be drawn to the Grand Coulee by gravity, simply because of the change in elevation. In 1919, William M. Clapp, an attorney from Ephrata, met with a few others in town and discussed matters of local importance. The talk soon centered on how the Grand Coulee was formed when glaciers dammed the Columbia River, diverting water into the canyon. Clapp suggested that if nature had once dammed the river, nothing could stop men from doing the same thing with concrete. The water could be pumped five hundred feet up from the Columbia River to the level of the Grand Coulee and stored in Banks Lake, a man-made reservoir. From there, canals could distribute the water to the lands of the Great Columbia Plain. The men thought about Clapp’s idea and agreed that he had offered a most interesting concept . This plan became known as the “pumping plan” and was sup- X PREFACE ported by residents of Wenatchee and of smaller towns such as Ephrata, Moses Lake, Pasco, and Quincy. Now there were two different ideas for irrigating the arid land, Elbert Blaine’s gravity plan and William Clapp’s pumping plan. The two plans were hotly debated during the 1920s. The Spokane Chamber of Commerce and the Washington Water Power Company supported the gravity plan.They did not want competition from anyone, especially the United States government, in supplying hydroelectric power to consumers in the region. The people in Wenatchee and the smaller towns favored the pumping plan. They were interested in helping those who were not rich. They reasoned that revenues from hydroelectric power would eventually pay for the costs of irrigating and thus help the farmers who were having a difficult time. Supporters of the pumping plan promoted the idea that reclamation could be achieved by constructing a dam. They pointed out that the sale of hydroelectric power to a growing number of people moving into the area would pay for the costs. They proposed locating the dam at the north end of the Grand Coulee on the Columbia River. To many in eastern Washington, this seemed like a pipe dream; when the Great Depression hit in 1929, the plan was placed on the back burner for many. One third of the nation’s labor force was without work. Most lived from day to day, concentrating on merely surviving from one day to the next. No kind of work or way of obtaining a few dollars was looked down upon, and nearly everyone accepted ways of surviving that, before the hard times, they had deemed beneath them or unacceptable. It became obvious that Washington State was in need of large-scale employment. In 1931, the Bureau of Reclamation became interested in building a dam on the Columbia River, but President Herbert Hoover’s administration was having problems with the Depression and was Washington State map locating Grand Coulee near the Columbia River. Courtesy Lawney Reyes and Kroll Map Company. PREFACE XI trying to balance the budget. A few favored the construction of a dam, but that idea was set aside for a later date, after the economy had improved. Help from the federal government appeared unlikely. Rufus Woods, editor of the Wenatchee Daily World newspaper, could not dismiss the idea of a dam at the Grand Coulee, and an attorney, James O’Sullivan, who had moved to the area from Michigan , joined Woods in his ongoing pursuit. The idea fascinated him, and he devoted his life to making the dream a reality. Eventually, Woods and O’Sullivan, with the backing of others, were able to get support from many in the state of Washington and, finally, the needed endorsement from Olympia, the state capital. In time, their efforts paid off at the federal level when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the bill into law. Roosevelt was aware at the time that large numbers of men could be put to work building a dam, easing...