Robert Schiller

Grand Coulee Dam
The Grand Coulee Dam was hailed as the "Eighth Wonder of the World" in 1941 when it was finished being built. It blocks the Columbia River with 12 million cubic yards of concrete, and spreads over a mile wide with the height of a 46-story building all holding back a 150-mile long reservoir called Lake Roosevelt. The dam produces more kilowatts than any other dam in the United States. The Grand Coulee was only part of the Columbia Basin Project that included four additional dams, three reservoir lakes, and approximately 2,300 miles of irrigation canals all making their way through a half a million acres of desert. It has been deemed as the largest public works project that has had the greatest impact on the economic development of the Pacific Northwest. But, the social and environmental costs were severe that the Grand Coulee Dam more than likely could not be built today.
The Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) hired folksinger Woody Guthrie in May 1941, to promote the federal dams on the Columbia River. The issue was who should build the dams: private power companies or the federal government. The power companies had a stable of influential lobbyists. The government had Guthrie, whose generation felt the undammed river was a resource going to waste.
Guthrie earned $266.66 and spent the month traveling around the Columbia Basin writing 26 songs in 30 days. The most famous of these is "Roll on Columbia, Roll On," sung to the tune of "Goodnight Irene" which was later adopted as the state song for Washington. It was the "Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee (Grand Coulee Dam)" that Guthrie wrote in which solidified the government’s role in building the dam’s and harnessing the "wild and wasted stream" for future generations.
. "Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea," Guthrie wrote, "but river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me." The triumph of man over nature and what nature had "wasted" as the river ran to the sea. Man would put the river to work, creating kilowatts that were almost as free as air and deliver water to the desert for farmers. There is now less than 50 miles of free-flowing water left on the entire 1,240-mile length of the Columbia River, between the headwaters and tributaries in British Columbia to the mouth of the Pacific Ocean. The Columbia River has become more of a series of reservoirs behind dams than a river. Though the Grand Coulee was not the first dam on the river, it has left the largest ecological footprint. Though designed as an irrigation project in the 1920s and financed as a jobs program in the 1930s, Grand Coulee Dam became the nation’s primary powerhouse in response to demands for electricity during World War II. The electricity from Grand Coulee flowed to aluminum plants, aircraft factories, shipyards, and many other defense-related industries in and around the Pacific Northwest. A large amount of electricity went to the isolated area in the southeastern corner of Washington where the government was producing plutonium for the building of the atomic bomb. After the war the Grand Coulee and other dams on the lower Columbia River provided power for the continued industrial and urban growth throughout the State of Washington.
The work for the irrigation project for the desert area of Columbia valley was suspended during World War II then resumed again late in the 1940s. The network of canals and reservoirs to feed the lower valley required more time, money, and engineering skill than building the Grand Coulee itself. This can be seen today by the canals that bisect the land that has transformed the geometry of the desert, with sagebrush and tumbleweeds on one side and squares and circles of crops on the other.
In the name of progress there is bound to be an impact on the communities and environment in and around the affected area. Approximately 400 farms, 10 small and isolated communities, with a total population estimated to be between 3,000 and 4,000, were forced to relocate from areas that were going to be affected from floods by the dams and reservoirs. Only a few of the property owners that had who lost their land, felt that the government had paid them fair value for their homes and land. A newsreel that was distributed nationally in 1940, showed an elderly couple leaving their longtime homestead, the wife weeping and the husband looking distraught, while their house burned in the background.
The Grand Coulee Dam has eradicated the wild salmon runs on the upper Columbia beyond the dam; it was built without a ladder for migrating fish. This has affected the way of life for the Columbia Basin’s Native Americans that had sustained them for thousands of years. It has also covered and displaced ancient villages, fishing spots, and burial grounds along with approximately 2,000 members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and about 250 members of the Spokane tribe. For these people progress brought devastating cultural and economic loss not growth or prosperity.
In the 1930s very few people would have ask questions about the impact of the dam, they only assume that the dams were a good and useful project for the future generations. Half a century later plans to dam the last 50-mile stretch of the free-flowing section of the Columbia, near the Hanford Reach and TriCities was defeated as well as the efforts to expand the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project area (from 550,000 to 1.1 million acres). Federal agencies along with environmentalist groups have begun to look for ways to keep water in the river, rather than diverting it for irrigation and other uses, in an effort to protect endangered salmon and steelhead runs.
Though tourists come from all around the world to marvel at Grand Coulee Dam, the biggest thing ever built by human hands, as Woody Guthrie sang about in his songs. One new question arises for the next generation of environmentalists and government officials is whether some of the dams should be torn down. This answer will be a lively debate.

Sources: 1. Leonard Ortolano and Katherine Cushing, Grand Coulee Dam and the Columbia Basin Project, USA, November 2000 2. Woody Guthrie, "Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee," reprinted in Roll on Columbia: The Columbia River Songs ed. by Bill Murlin (Portland, Oregon: Bonneville Power Administration, 1987 3. Grand Coulee: Harnessing a Dream (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994); Rufus Woods, "Formulate Brand New Idea for Irrigation Grant, Adams, Franklin Counties, Covering Million Acres or More 4. "The Benefits and Costs of the Columbia Basin Project: Earlier Perspectives and Changing Perceptions," Agricultural History, Spring 2002, pp. 463-480; Dan Hansen 5. Harnessing a Dream (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1994); Rufus Woods, "Formulate Brand New Idea for Irrigation Grant, Adams, Franklin Counties, Covering Million Acres or More 6. Grand Coulee Dam and the Forgotten Tribe, U Tube, (http://spokanetribe.com/)