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2 AT HELL’S GATES I daho’s Seven Devils Mountains overlook Hells Canyon. Seven thousand feet belowtheirgraniteridgestheSnake River rushes toward the Columbia River, 140 miles northwestward. Seen from the Seven Devils on a crisp autumn afternoon, the Snake glints silver-bright, a thin blade slicing stacks of leather-colored rock. Scattered pines and sagebrush fringe the canyon’s terraced walls. Hells Canyon, from a raft on the river, resembles a mad giant’s titanic garden, unplumbed shelves lined with untended planters. The Columbia’s largest tributary, the Snake River drains the western slope of the northern Rocky Mountains. The Snake watershed embraces both damp high-altitude forests fringing the Continental Divide and arid sagebrush steppes spreading north from the Great Basin.1 The Snake and its tributaries , at the end of World War II, nursed the Northwest’s second-largest anadromous fishery. Only the main Columbia watershed supported more salmon and steelhead trout.2 Hells Canyon divides political sovereignties but compels them to cooperate in the Snake River’s management. The river in the canyon defines Oregon and Idaho’s common boundary: each jurisdiction shares substantial legal authority over its water flows and biotic communities.3 As an interstate river, the Snake is also subject to the United States’ sovereign power pursuant to the Constitution’s commerce, navigation, and federal property provisions.4 Hells Canyon divides Idaho from Oregon on a map. Yet the Snake River stitchestogethertheNorthwest’stwodistinctivenaturalrealms.Itunitesarid uplands, falling west down the Continental Divide, with the wetter Columbia Basin rising east from the Pacific Ocean. Hells Canyon stands between these two watersheds, bridging divergent northwestern topography, climate, vegetation, and biological lifeways. Look eastward from the Seven Devils at 23 the Canyon’s brink and the Snake Basin rises toward the Rockies. Turn westward , and the Columbia Basin tips into the sea.5 Northwestern geography pivots around the Snake in Hells Canyon, roughly halfway between the Continental Divide and Pacific Ocean. Farewell Bend, at the Canyon’s upper or southern end, lies about 285 miles west of the Continental Divide. Graham’s Landing, where Idaho, Oregon, and Washington meet at the Canyon’s northern foot, is about 310 miles east of the Pacific. The Snake bisects the Columbia as well. At Wallula, Washington, the Columbia has flowed 260 river miles through the United States when it encounters the Snake. About 260 river miles below their confluence lies Astoria, Oregon, where the Columbia roars across the sandy bar between fresh water and salt ocean.6 Gus Norwood thought nature and geography providently placed Hells Canyon and the Snake River in the path of postwar federal hydroelectric expansion.Theexecutivesecretaryof theNorthwestPublicPowerAssociation portrayed public power’s annexation of the Snake Basin as a logical consequence of the New Deal’s transformation of the Columbia Basin. “In 1948 BPA won the right to serve in northern Idaho,” he wrote in 1950. “In 1949 it won the right to serve in western Montana and in 1950 the southern Oregon 230,000 volt loop was approved. There lacks now only southern Idaho to round out the logical boundaries for Bonneville Power Administration.” Federalizing Hells Canyon’s waterpower, he contended, simply ratified nature’s own hydroelectric logic: “Applications of the Idaho Power Co. to construct a dam on the Middle Snake . . . are further evidence of a private power company scheme to isolate the Snake River Basin from the Columbia River Basin and maintain it as a private power company preserve.”7 Idaho Power Company also thought history and geography stimulated conflict about Hells Canyon’s postwar fate. “It is impossible,” the company argued, “to evaluate power production in the Hells Canyon stretch of the river without a study of the irrigation development of the Snake River above it. . . . TheSnakeRiver,aboveHellsCanyon,hascharacteristicsdiªerentfrom any other major river in the Columbia Basin. It is essentially an irrigation stream.”8 The Army Corps of Engineers, though it sought to build Hells Canyon High Dam, nevertheless conceded Snake Basin people were using water diªerently from their downstream neighbors in the postwar Columbia Basin. “The economy of the Central Snake River sub-basin is dependent on agricultural development,” the corps reported to Congress, “which in turn 24 AT HELL’S GATES is dependent on ample water for irrigation. Storage or diversion of water for agricultural uses is detrimental to present or future downstream power development because of the resultant reduction in downstream flows.”9 HellsCanyon’sgeographicandecologiccentralitytotheNorthwestshaped humanhistory.BecauseHellsCanyonandtheSnake,aswellastheColumbia and Salmon rivers, are...

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