Public Power, Private Dams: The Hells Canyon High Dam Controversy

Preface

PREFACE T he morning’s Kansas City Star flew a banner headline about the collapse of a proposed merger between the region’s two great electricutilitycompanies .Thebusinessof makingandsellingelectricity was changing fast. The two corporations would probably have to find new partners or other power companies would snap them up. My seatmate on the mid-evening flight to Chicago noticed me reading the story avidly, scrawling notes in the margins. He casually asked what I did for a living. “I’m a historian,” I replied. I had the perfect opening to explain how my history of electricity choices in another place illuminated today’s energy prospects in our home area. But when I said the words “anadromous fish” and proudly told him I was writing about a place called “Hells Canyon, out west, on the Idaho-Oregon border,” he glazed over. What I should have said to my disappointed acquaintance that January night goes like this: “This is a hell of a tale about a hell of a place. It’s even called Hell, . . . Hells Canyon, that is. And I know it’s one hell of a place because I’ve been there.” To my midwestern businessman seatmate on that winter-night flight I should have then said, “This place and time matter a lot to me, and if I tell their story right, they should matter to you.” HellsCanyonmatterstome.Ihaveincheddownitssingledirtroad,brakes hot, driver intent. I have watched a golden eagle lever ponderously into the cold spring morning air, gorged with roadkill lamb. I have sunk into my seat as our two-place prop plane dipped onto final approach to the canyon’s only airstrip, a graveled bench that teeters above the river below Brownlee Dam. I have peered over its eastern rim from Dry Diggins lookout, high up in the Seven Devils Mountains on the Idaho side, to see the Snake twisting silver-blue far below in the warm fall dust-haze. I have scanned Wild Sheep Rapids from an overlook, rafts tied up along the bank below us, hearing its XV ceaseless roar as sixty thousand cubic feet per second of early May snowmelt pounded downstream toward Pittsburg Landing, Lewiston, and the Columbia confluence. I have seen the Snake literally grab a raft like a coyote grabs a mouse, shake it and flip it up, and over, and out into the white rollers, asitspilot,ourparty’sablestboatman,arcedthroughtheairanddisappeared, without a splash, into Wild Sheep’s crest. Five long minutes later, our own raft safely through, I hit the water myself, on purpose this time, bobbing along frantically as we struggled to right the overturned raft, six months of winter along the Continental Divide seeping through my wetsuit (“Cold, Jesus, I can’t believe it’s this cold”). I should have then told my seatmate, as we raced high above the cultivated prairie blackness toward Chicago, that the Snake’s power planted Hells Canyon in my own postwar history. As a boy growing up in the middle 1960s in Boise, Idaho, I played in tan grass foothills beneath gigantic steel towers . They marched in a long, swooping arc clear across the Boise Front, carrying six strands of high-tension cable up from Hells Canyon, down into the Treasure Valley. The towers ended where the city began, at an Idaho Power Company substation next to where the Oregon Trail dipped down into the valley oª the high, dry Mountain Home Desert. Humming perceptibly over the car sounds along Amity Road, the Idaho Power transformers intrigued us. Then we went back to testing soapbox racers along Amity’s narrow shoulder. A dozen vehicles an hour in the late-evening summer shine barely disturbed our test track then. Today, fifteen thousand people live, and another ten thousand work, within a mile of Amity Road. Many design, assemble, and test semiconductors. It is a business that could have sprung up only in a place where electricity and land were cheap—wages, too. Just seventy-five miles northwest of my Boise birthplace, those electric towers began their march up out of Hells Canyon in 1956, the year I was born. They carried their humming cargo, Idaho Power Company’s hardwon bounty, up from the Snake, across the mountains, and out onto southern Idaho’s Snake River Plain. Though I thought the towers were cool, a space-age sign that my little corner of the West was worth bragging about, none of their history mattered to me then. Now my seatmate would be there with me...