The river as lifeline

Whitman County Commissioner Les Wigen examines newly harvested grain at the Almota terminal on the Snake River near Colfax. Whitman County produces more wheat than any other county in the nation and its farmers stand to spend millions more dollars on transportation if the four lower Snake dams are breached.

For wheat farmers, it's a way of life

The Snake River fades in the rearview mirror as we head north and east out of Pasco, past irrigated land and into the dry, rolling hills of the Palouse. The river - the highway for Inland Northwest grain and fuel - is hot and low after three weeks of 100-degree weather.

Salmon are struggling to survive. And Corps of Engineers officials in their Walla Walla edifice are struggling to deal with demands for more cool water to save fish in a river system that is stretched to the limit.

But the Snake River was often hot and low before the dams were built. Old-timers remember summers when it was tepid as bath water and low enough to wade across.

On the benches above the river, a healthy wheat harvest is in full swing. Combines are cutting and combing the amber landscape, shaving a crew cut over gentle hills. Every 10 miles farther east in the Palouse brings another inch of annual rainfall, and a more lucrative harvest.

Lonely farm houses, tucked into the crevices of the land, hail the candidacy of George W. Bush, who promises to keep the four lower Snake dams if he's elected president next month.

Without the lock and dam system on the last 140 miles of the Snake, these roads would be packed with hundreds of trucks each day hauling wheat to market. But for now, the roads are mostly empty, lined by ancient dust-engulfed tractors and crooked barbed-wire fences.

COLFAX - Just beyond the shuffleboard table, Les Wigen commandeers a cafe table and orders the Hyde-Out's daily lunch special.

Bill Nelson, 57, who's wintered cattle near the Snake since childhood, joins him. He drinks coffee and smokes under the red glow of a neon Budweiser sign.

Any other time of year, this dimly lit bar would be packed with hungry farmers, but most of them are now aboard $100,000 machines bringing in the harvest. This is the heart of Washington's grain country. This is the capital of the nation's largest wheat and barley producing county.

The men are long on opinions.

Nelson: "I guess it's hard for me to believe that one morning some gentleman ... got out of bed and his feet hit the floor and boom, 'Let's take those dams out,' his little mind says.

"And I can't believe how damn far he got with it."

Wigen, a Whitman County commissioner, sold his farm last year, otherwise he'd probably be too busy to talk.

But now there's nothing he'd rather talk about than the Snake River. For him it's personal, not some abstract calculation about fish or the environment.

"I've followed that Snake River all my life," he said. "If we don't have water, we don't have nothing."

Wigen was the one who started printing the Save Our Dams bumper stickers that are now common from Lewiston to Pasco. Asked why he's been so active as a dam proponent, Wigen points to a statement that Will Stelle, former regional director of the National Marine Fisheries Service, made last winter.

"The best thing for fish is probably to stop all irrigation, to terminate any kind of development in riparian areas and ... to take out the dams and ... move east," Stelle said.

He quickly added: "But that is not the question that we are really trying to struggle with."

Wigen, however, zeroed in on the first part of the statement, which he interpreted as a challenge to everything good and holy in the history of the West.

"That really got me going."

The resistance movement gained momentum at another cafe in Pomeroy as county commissioners from Southeast Washington began to realize that simply hunkering down and waiting for environmentalists to go away would not keep the Snake dams in place.

They started circulating a petition among county officials statewide to show the breadth of the opposition.

"We said, 'We've got to do something, guys. These are our dams and everybody wants them out,' " Wigen said.

Actually, the dams belong to the nation, not to the people of the region. Congress authorized the dams near the end of World War II. They were built - ironically, over opposition from men such as Nelson whose cattle thrived on the rich bottomlands - between 1961 and 1975.

"Everybody was against the dams when they came, pretty well because they took old-time ground away from people," said the deeply tanned Nelson, who still runs cattle the old-fashioned way - on horseback. "For the cattle end of it, it was better before."

The 30-year delay from authorization to the end of construction was indicative of the country's changing attitudes toward river projects.

It became a case study for the tedious balance between environmental and practical concerns, according to Controversy, Conflict and Compromise, a history of the lower Snake River commissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The human story on the lower Snake goes back thousands of years to when native people hunted, fished and picked berries nearby. Plentiful evidence of their occupation was excavated before the slack water buried millennia of river shore prehistory.

Verdant riverside lands, coupled with the region's abundant grassland, attracted westward-bound European immigrants to the Palouse 100 years before the dams were built. Along the river, they planted apples, peaches, plums, raspberries and prunes - all of which amounted to just a fraction of the wheat fields that dominated the landscape by 1900.

Farmers soon ran into a problem: transportation. Much of their land was more than 1,000 feet above the river, which flowed in a deep canyon virtually from the Idaho border to the Columbia River.

Besides, the lower stretch of the river was littered with more than two dozen rapids that made boat traffic hazardous, especially in the spring. Still, captains braved the river to bring supplies to Lewiston, a gold-rush boom town in the 1860s that paid a premium to the first boats of the spring.

"Sternwheelers, flatboats and tiny river crafts alike, lay off the mouth of the Snake in early spring, waiting for the ... ice floes to clear," said a 1962 dam guide published by the Corps. "An adventuresome few maneuvered their crafts into a tiny, kidney-shaped bay ... to sneak a few precious miles' advantage over the waiting horde downstream."

That inlet became known as Ice Harbor.

It wasn't long before entrepreneurial boatmen recognized the value of another kind of gold - grain.

The Corps book highlights multiple attempts to get grain to the river's "wheat fleet," including a 3,200-foot grain chute built in 1879, a bucket tramway and a cable car on wooden tracks.

Despite the challenges, the Inland Northwest relied on the river, sending its first batch of wheat down the Snake from Almota to Portland in 1876.

"It proved to be a lucrative trip and the Snake River's wheat fleet soon numbered 16 steamers, more than had ever catered to miners," said the Corps book, written by Pullman historians Keith Petersen and Mary Reed.

"In the days before railroads, the lower Snake served as an essential lifeline to residents along and above the river," according to the book. "Those who could ... economically ship this abundance to market would get rich."

Railroads eventually decreased the region's dependence on the river - but a more efficient and large-scale barging program on the dammed Snake soon won the region's heart.

Ice Harbor Dam was built first - with much fanfare and thanks for the late U.S. Sen. Warren Magnuson, D-Wash., who drummed up money for the project.

A priest from St. Patrick's Catholic Church in Walla Walla uttered the official prayer in 1957 as the first concrete was poured.

"Under your providence, it will become a monument which no forces of corrosion will gnaw away and no missile of explosion will find a target," he said, oblivious to the possibility that 43 years later, the agent of the dam's demise might be the government that installed it.

The official bulletin for the dedication ceremony called the dam "a milepost to the future of this Western land's parade of progress."

A newspaper advertisement by the building contractor tried to impress readers with the volume of effort that went into the dam: 500,000 pounds of dynamite, 35 million pounds of steel, 600,000 cubic yards of concrete.

"Total cost of dam: $130,340,000," the ad said. "Total profit from dam: Unlimited."

Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson - and "other stellar guests," according to the Tri-City Herald - attended the dedication on May 9, 1962.

Little was said by officials about what the dam might do to salmon runs, despite sharp attacks by fisheries advocates and agencies that protested fish-killing dams.

Soon, the country pushed ahead with Lower Monumental and Little Goose dams upstream of Ice Harbor. The Corps did not, however, get money for another dam at Asotin because Congress pulled its authorization under pressure from prominent U.S. Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.

The Corps of Engineers had plans for a dam near the town of Asotin, but Congress never approved money for the project.

By the time Lower Granite Dam was finished, farmers from North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Eastern Oregon and Eastern Washington were shipping grain to Pasco on a wide, calm waterway tracing the path of the once-boisterous Snake.

Wigen - who started farming the year after Ice Harbor was completed - grew up 15 miles from the river in La Crosse, one of the many two-bit towns that dot the Palouse.

As a kid, he bought muskmelons from riverbed farmers before their land was condemned and the government forced the dams "down our throats." He fished, swam and boated the old, wild river.

And Wigen watched the slack water work its way east and directly benefited from it as his commute to the grain terminal shrank - from 90 miles to Pasco, to 40 miles to Windust, then to just 15 miles to Central Ferry.

"This (dam system) puts us in touch with the world," he said. "A ship can go all the way around the world and come back to here."

With the dams in place, Wigen and other farmers could haul more for less. Shipping prices dropped when efficient and reliable barges started competing with the railroads.

Should the dams be removed, farmers expect their shipping prices to jump - perhaps by 25 cents or more per bushel. It may not seem like much, but Wigen fears the concentrated effect on a county that grows roughly 36 million bushels a year.

And farmers shudder to think about a return to shipping on the dilapidated rail system or by semi-trucks hauling the 3.5 million tons of grain that floated down the Snake in 1998.

A four-barge tow, for example, holds more than a 100-car grain train and the same as 538 trucks.

At the Almota elevator alone, the amount of wheat shipped by barge would fill 59 trucks every weekday all year around - or more than 15,000 trucks a year, said Gary Behymer, a Richland native and general manager of the elevator company.

Trucks from the other terminals would add another 83,000 hauls per year. Spaced 300 feet apart, that would be a line of trucks 27 miles long en route toward Pasco every business day.

What would be big business for Pasco, however, would mean nearly $2 million in shipping costs coming from the pockets of Almota farmers - not to mention those who send their wheat to the river's several other elevators.

"I talk to a lot ... of environmentalists and they don't understand that," Wigen said. "All they want to see is these little fishies spawning in the little river like it used to be. And I always say, 'My Dad came out here and started farming with horses. We can't go backwards.' "

Chris Schluneger, 52, another Whitman County grower, joins the conversation.

"An environmentalist asked me what economics has got to do with it, but he won't give me the keys to his cars, his wallet or his house. (When that happens) then we'll ask the question, what does economics got to do with it."

It's not hard to understand the sentiment - not when wheat prices have hovered near record lows for the better part of three years. At the same time, the cost of farm-delivered diesel fuel has jumped sharply, as has the cost of equipment and seemingly everything else.

"Everybody is in the same boat," Nelson said. "It's gonna take us down."

He complains about yuppies and the stock market - how they control America. Wigen, the politician, complains about how politics has ruined the process for determining if the dams should be breached.

Around the table, there seemed to be no end to potential problems without the dams. The men talked about a wide, stinking, useless mud bog replacing a leg of the world's second-largest wheat shipping corridor.

What mud wouldn't stick to the dry riverbed would flow downstream - perhaps 75 million cubic yards - creating a chocolate-colored river that Oregon State University entomologist Gary Reed warns would be dangerous for fish because of the toxins attached to the dirt.

Once released by dam breaching, DDT, Dieldrin and other toxic chemicals in the mud "could cause further decline of already endangered species," Reed said. "A portion of such residues would be expected to work its way into the fishes' food chain ... and eventually ... (to) man."

The farmers talk about regional electricity shortages, a problem highlighted in June when a low-water year forced electricity prices up across the Northwest. It was just the kind of thing that they hope makes the region understand that its electricity - substantially created by water flowing through dam turbines - isn't boundless, even with the four lower Snake dams intact.

And the men talk about the underdeveloped Northwest rail industry, which shriveled when barge traffic took away the bulk of business and more profitable Midwest long-haul trains sucked rail cars away from the region.

To the east of Colfax in Idaho, a strange scenario was shaping up with environmentalists proposing subsidies to keep open a rail line, even though its owners want to abandon it because they say it's a financial drain.

A coalition of environmental groups - the same forces behind the dam breaching movement - asked the federal Surface Transportation Board not to allow closure of the "vital" Camas Prairie RailNet's line from Grangeville to Spalding.

They even suggested using public money to keep the trains rolling, what they called clear evidence of their commitment to rural communities.

Without the dams, "the Grangeville-Spalding line will be essential ... (as) an affordable transportation option," said Rob Masonis of American Rivers before the board granted the abandonment.

That rail line, however, probably won't become critical in the near future.

Barring a court order - which American Rivers and other groups are seeking - the dams appear to be in place for at least another five years while federal officials continue to evaluate their future.

The federal plan released this summer would set performance "triggers" for Snake fish stocks. The triggers would automatically send the dam breaching issue to Congress if certain criteria for fish recovery were not met.

The men at the Hyde-Out, of course, never want to see the fight get that far. Not even the government's preliminary decision to wait for at least five years makes them smile.

"It's still hanging over our heads," said Nelson. "There's no security there."