The serenity of Yellowstone Lake glows, as John Taliaferro writes, as "a diadem." But if private water developers in Idaho and Montana had had their way, this liquid centerpiece of Yellowstone would have been flooded under thanks to a dam built at the point where the Yellowstone River begins its flow toward Hayden Valley and an eventual tumble into the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. George Bird Grinnell played a crucial role in marshaling resistance. Had the dam been built, many favorite areas along the lake, including shoreside geysers, and important wildlife habitat, would have been submerged. Photo courtesy Neal Herbert/NPS
Below is an excerpt from John Taliaferro, Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West (Liveright, 2019)
Editor’s Note (to set the context:)The First World War was barely over. George Bird Grinnell had already led efforts to rescue American bison from extinction; form the first Audubon Society; create Glacier National Park; found the Boone and Crockett Club with Theodore Roosevelt, codifying ethics of fair chase and enlisting hunters as stewards of conservation; and, as editor of Forest and Stream, push for federal legislation protecting migratory birds, an act that would stand as precedent for the Endangered Species Act. Once again, he felt compelled to rally, this time in defense of one of his favorite protected areas, Yellowstone National Park.
By John Taliaferro
A number of conservation matters had commanded George Bird Grinnell's attention in recent months. Alaskans were pressing to loosen the laws against hunting bears and the export of bearskins. For years the Boone and Crockett Club had pushed to establish game refuges within national forests; the latest bill toward this end had received a welcome push from a young Forest Service visionary from New Mexico by the name of Aldo Leopold. Yet the issue that aroused Grinnell the most was an imminent threat to Yellowstone.
In early 1920 Senator John Nugent and Representative Addison Smith, both of Idaho, introduced bills to authorize construction of dams on the Falls River and its tributary, the Bechler River, in the southwestern corner of the park, in order to improve irrigation along the Snake River, which these streams supplied. The farmers whose interests Nugent and Smith represented had also concocted an astonishing, and even more invasive, project: a dam at the outlet of Yellowstone Lake, where it flowed into the Yellowstone River, that reportedly would raise the lake level as much as twenty-five feet.
By their calculations, the impounded water could then be routed, via a tunnel, or possibly two, beneath the Continental Divide – that is, beneath Two Ocean Plateau -- to the Snake River and the thirstier country on the western slope. (Never mind that the tunnel would have to be dug through the still-flexing floor of a volcanic crater.)
In the 1920s, farmers and irrigators in Idaho worked to muster support from the U.S. Department of Interior to build a dam and impoundment on the Fall River, pictured here, to give them more water for growing crops. It would have come at a huge ecological cost to the southwest corner of Yellowstone, also known as the "Cascade Corner" because of its abundance of waterfalls. It also would have affected wildlife habitat and angling. It was almost built. Photo courtesy NPS
Not to be outdone, a group in Livingston, Montana, favored a similar dam at the mouth of the lake to aid irrigation and mitigate flooding on their side of the divide, in the lower Yellowstone River valley.
The Senate bill on the Falls River dams passed without opposition on April 6, and the House bill was placed on the unanimous-consent calendar -- which is where it was poised when Grinnell and his cohort of conservationists came awake and took to the ramparts. Grinnell was quick to label this new threat “a second Hetch Hetchy.”
More than that, he saw the dam legislation as only the first, ominous step down a far more perilous path. On April 21 he wrote to Connecticut Congressman Schuyler Merritt, a friend and fellow Yale man (class of 1873): “The point I make against this [House] bill,” Grinnell told Merritt, “is not so much that it destroys the most important range and feeding ground of the moose in Yellowstone Park, but that it is an obvious effort … to get a foothold in the Park and to establish a precedent for taking away from the public, which owns these parks, a little bit for the use of some private local people. If they can take water from this corner of the Park, the greater irrigation project which contemplates damming the Yellowstone Lake and flooding a great area of the country will be justified. If they can use these waters for local purposes, why cannot they use the timber or anything else the Park contains for such local purposes? If a beginning is made to nibble away something from a single national park for private purposes, the whole system of national parks will presently come crashing to the ground.”
“The point I make against this [House] bill,” Grinnell told Merritt, “is not so much that it destroys the most important range and feeding ground of the moose in Yellowstone Park, but that it is an obvious effort … to get a foothold in the Park and to establish a precedent for taking away from the public, which owns these parks, a little bit for the use of some private local people. If they can take water from this corner of the Park....if they can use these waters for local purposes, why cannot they use the timber or anything else the Park contains for such local purposes?"
Grinnell also heard credible rumors that, should the Idahoans not get their dams (and even if they did), they contemplated further legislation to have the Yellowstone boundary modified so as to excise the Falls River basin from the park entirely. [Today, it is called the Fall River.]
The campaign to prevent the damming of Yellowstone was a test of the combined forces of American conservation. Hetch Hetchy had been a bitter defeat; this time would be different. The National Association of Audubon Societies, the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Sierra Club, the National Geographic Society, the American Civic Association, and the American Society of Landscape Architects all passed resolutions against the dams. Robert Sterling Yard used the newly organized auxiliary, the National Parks Association, as a megaphone for the defense of Yellowstone, eventually rallying hundreds of outdoor clubs, automobile associations, teachers’ organizations, and scientific groups to take a stand against the dams. Thousands of citizens wrote letters protesting the assault on one of the nation’s crown jewels.
Yellowstone Lake was indeed a diadem: 130 square miles of blue purity, fringed nearly to its shoreline by lodgepole pines and accented here and there by geothermal gems. To picture the harm that would befall the lake once a dam was built, critics needed look no farther than Jackson Lake, to the south of the park, where a recently improved dam on the Snake River had left a bathtub ring of mudflats and a stubble of drowned trees in the shallows.
As for the dams in the Falls River basin, few tourists had visited this corner of the park, but its very wildness was reason enough to demand its preservation. Where Idaho farmers and politicians saw a worthless marsh, Yellowstone proponents saw nature untrammeled. “[T]he preservation of remote, unfrequented areas is one of the most attractive and valuable features of … the Yellowstone [Park], where the primitive wilderness can remain untouched and undisturbed,” Edward Nelson of the U. S. Biological Survey wrote to Wyoming Congressman Frank Mondell.
“[T]o permit the exploitation of areas within its borders, such as the flooding of large tracts for reservoir sites, would be to vitiate the purpose for which the park has been established.”
“[T]he preservation of remote, unfrequented areas is one of the most attractive and valuable features of … the Yellowstone [Park], where the primitive wilderness can remain untouched and undisturbed,” Edward Nelson of the U. S. Biological Survey wrote to Wyoming Congressman Frank Mondell. “[T]o permit the exploitation of areas within its borders, such as the flooding of large tracts for reservoir sites, would be to vitiate the purpose for which the park has been established.”
No voice was more vehement than that of George Bird Grinnell. Here was a battle that hit close to home. “The Yellowstone Park has always been a sort of baby [of mine],” he told the Boone and Crockett Club’s vice president, Charles Davison, “and I feel that we ought to take strong ground.” (He had said the same thing about Glacier National Park.)
Four months earlier he had bemoaned his physical frailty to Billy Hofer. Now, as he climbed on his steed one more time, he declared to his old guide, who knew the contested country better than almost any man alive, “It seems to me like more or less renewing my youth to be fighting about the Yellowstone Park again.” When the Anaconda (Montana)Standard, a booster of the dams, accused him of being an “eastern faddist” who sought to deny “ample water to 3,000 settlers in the Snake River country of Idaho,” Grinnell more than relished the rough-and-tumble. “The story tickles me,” he wrote a lawyer friend in Helena. So, too, did the Livingston Enterprise’s attempt to dismiss him as a “nature faker.”
The Livingston Enterprise newspaper, responding to Grinnell's campaign to prevent the Yellowstone and other rivers from being dammed inside the national park, attempted to dismiss him as a "nature faker."
At first the momentum in favor of the dams seemed unstoppable. The worst drought in more than thirty years had parched the northern Rockies in 1918-1919, and the world war had made food production a matter of national urgency – the same urgency that prompted the Water Power Act to maximize the hydroelectric and irrigation potential of federal lands, including national parks. (It would become law on June 20, 1920.)
The backers of the dam framed the debate as one between yeoman westerners and eastern elites. “It is just a question,” Representative Smith said on the House floor, “of whether the Congress is willing to allow the farmers living in eastern Idaho to build reservoirs … to save for irrigation purposes the snow and rains which God almighty sends for all of us, or whether a few splendid but overly esthetic people … who are living in luxury in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other eastern cities, and apparently have little interest or sympathy for those of limited means who are trying to build homes for themselves and families on the arid lands, are to be permitted to [defeat] this legislation.”
Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane supported the Yellowstone dams and the Water Power Act and pressured his national park director, Stephen Mather, to fall in line. Mather equivocated initially, and Grinnell wasted no time in calling him out. “I shall not believe, without seeing a statement from you, that you are in favor of this bill. If you are in favor of it, you cannot, I feel sure, know how far-reaching it is and how it threatens the whole national park system,” he wrote with calculated incredulity.
National Park Service Director Stephen T. Mather who initially was supportive of dams being built in Yellowstone to serve private water interests outside the park.
A month later he held Mather’s feet closer to the coals: “I am sorry to say that I think you have, to some extent, lost standing with the conservationists by the quasi assent that you [at first] gave to the bill. You have done so much and you are so highly regarded by most of those interested in the national park that I should be very deeply grieved if, for any reason, they felt that you were not measuring up to their ideals.”
Mather’s heart was in the right place, and although he took longer than Grinnell would have liked, he spoke out against the dams -- once Secretary Lane stepped down in February and was replaced by the more conservation-minded John Barton Payne of Chicago. “[T]he whole National Park System is facing a grave crisis, where a single false step would be irremediable,” Mather wrote in his annual report for 1920. In assessing the various dams under consideration, he described the “pollution,” “injury,” “havoc,” and “ruin” they would inflict in the Falls River basin. The loss of scenic beauty, he stressed, would be “awful to contemplate.”
Grinnell worried that his wife’s health might prevent him from going to Washington to appear before the House Rules Committee on May 25, but in the end he was able to make the overnight trip. “There were fifty or sixty people present, I should think,” he reported to Billy Hofer, “and more than one half of them were opposed to the bill.”
Among those who spoke against the dams that day were Robert Sterling Yard, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, J. Horace McFarland of the American Civic Association, zoologist Wilfred H. Osgood of Chicago’s Field Museum, and John Burnham of the American Game Protective Association. Grinnell carried not only the banner of the Boone and Crockett Club, but also those of the National Association of Audubon Societies, the New York Zoological Society, and the American Museum of National History.
Among those who spoke against the dams that day were Robert Sterling Yard, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, J. Horace McFarland of the American Civic Association, zoologist Wilfred H. Osgood of Chicago’s Field Museum, and John Burnham of the American Game Protective Association. Grinnell carried not only the banner of the Boone and Crockett Club, but also those of the National Association of Audubon Societies, the New York Zoological Society, and the American Museum of National History.
Their testimony dominated the two-hour hearing and apparently was persuasive, for the Smith bill was not brought to a vote and died on the calendar -- for the time being at least. “Yellowstone Plan Defeated by Highbrows,” sniffed one Idaho paper. “[T]hat this bill would have permitted the creation of a lake where a swamp now exists did not appeal to these easterners at all, for they maintain that nothing but nature shall be allowed to sway in the sacred precincts of the Yellowstone.”
Grinnell had a different perspective. “It will be a good many years, I suspect, before the men who come from the further West will absorb the real conservation idea,” he wrote to Henry Graves, who had succeeded Gifford Pinchot as chief of the National Forest Service (and, recently, had resigned himself). “The western men want to seize and turn into money everything in sight and are willing to trust to Providence to take care of the next generation.”
Grinnell knew the dammers would be back. “The ease and swiftness with which bills to commercialize national parks, national monuments, and national forests slip through Congress seems alarming,” he wrote Mather in early June, “and I feel that something should be done to protect the public against these attacks, which usually originate out in a country adjacent to the territory desired by the looters.” He asked Mather if he might spare a Park Service man to keep an eye on Congress. “[I]t might be practicable for the information about any bill … to be reported privately to someone here in New York, and we here might have a committee of three or four dependable men who could try to take steps for the protection of the public.”
“The ease and swiftness with which bills to commercialize national parks, national monuments, and national forests slip through Congress seems alarming,” Grinnell wrote to National Park Service Director Stephen T. Mather, "and I feel that something should be done to protect the public against these attacks, which usually originate out in a country adjacent to the territory desired by the looters.”
They called themselves the National Parks Committee. Their first meeting took place on June 29 in New York, attended by Grinnell, Burnham, Madison Grant, Charles Davison, and William C. Gregg, a New Jersey industrialist with a deep affection for Yellowstone. The initial idea was to act as a New York counterpart to Washington’s National Parks Association, although Grinnell, who was the committee’s chairman, enlisted several leaders of the Washington group into his. Jointly and severally, their goal was to prevent plundering of the parks for commercial purposes.
While they girded for the next assault on Yellowstone, they took two more proactive steps toward park protection. Through letter writing, lobbying, and arm-twisting, they tried to amend the Water Power Act so as to exempt the national parks and monuments. “How [this] got into the bill and why [it was] not discovered in the bill by Mr. Mather, Mr. Yard, and the other people in Washington who are supposed to be looking after those things is one of the conundrums I am unable to answer,” Grinnell vented to William Gregg.
The second step was to make national park protection an issue in the upcoming presidential election. Grinnell was fed up with Woodrow Wilson and his administration; on the other hand, he could not work up much enthusiasm for the Republicans and their ticket, Ohio Senator Warren G. Harding and Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge. When the Republican platform endorsed the Water Power Act, Grinnell saw an opportunity to play the Democratic opposition to his advantage.
“[I]t seems natural,” he wrote to Robert Sterling Yard, “that the Democratic politicians should be glad to do anything that they could to show [that] the Republican politicians are in the wrong.”
With this in mind, he pressed fellow Boone and Crockett member Charles Sheldon to call on Franklin D. Roosevelt, the thirty-eight-year old assistant secretary of the navy who was about to be chosen as running mate to James M. Cox, governor of Ohio, on the Democratic ticket. “Would it be possible or practicable for you to write or telegraph him to get put into the Democratic platform a plank advocating the continued protection of our national parks?” Grinnell asked Sheldon and then suggested some talking points that might sway Roosevelt.
“I believe that the parks are actual producers of wealth,” he explained, “because they enable the people who visit them to work through the rest of the year harder, longer, and better than they would work if they had not had the change of thought and received the mental stimulus that they got from these novel surroundings, and this contact with nature. I believe that the sum of all this better work done by the people who visit the parks is worth more than all the water, all the power, and all the timber that they contain. I want you to say something of this to Roosevelt, who, I believe, is an active politician, a good fellow, and who might feel an interest.”
When it came to loyalty, Grinnell’s was to parks over party.
The following winter Grinnell and the defenders of Yellowstone readied themselves for the assault they knew was coming. Over the summer William Gregg, the New Jersey industrialist and Yellowstone enthusiast, had made a trip to the seldom-visited Falls River basin of the park and produced a report puncturing the myth spread by Idahoans that the area they wished to dam was “a dismal swamp which produced nothing but malaria and mosquitoes.”
On the contrary, Gregg discovered a “region of delight, abounding in … forests and meadows, fine trout streams, lakes, waterfalls, cascades and hot springs – an ideal paradise for the camper.”He referred to it as “the Cascade Corner.”
Interior Secretary Payne also toured Yellowstone over the summer and stated in no uncertain terms that commercial interests – including agricultural – should keep their hands off the national parks. Articles appeared in newspapers and magazines under headlines such as “Pawning the Heirlooms” and, inevitably, “Another Hetch Hetchy.”
The former, in the Saturday Evening Post, was written by Emerson Hough. He and Grinnell may have had a falling-out once upon a time, but they remained on the same page with respect to conservation and the public trust.
One dam would have been built at the outflow of Yellowstone Lake where the Yellowstone River recommences its journey northward; another dam would have been erected along the Fall River marked in light blue. For the latter a proposal was advanced to pipe water from the new impoundment beneath the Continental Divide and put it into the Upper Snake River.
None of this posturing deterred the dam proponents, however. A bill to dam the Falls River basin was reintroduced at the next session of Congress. The proposition to dam Yellowstone Lake and tunnel under the Continental Divide was supplanted by the better-organized campaign of a group of Montanans calling itself the Yellowstone Irrigation Association. In November the association, comprising mostly chamber-of-commerce men of Livingston, published a pamphlet that declared that flooding or its opposite, low water, had cost Montanans $200 million in damage and productivity over the past four years. The problem could be easily solved, the association announced, by “an artistic concrete structure.”
The pamphlet scoffed at critical reports “circulated by our eastern friends, who are inadvertently permitting their imaginations to run riot.” Warnings that “great areas of forest will be submerged; [that] ugly stretches of mud bank [will be] left by the draining of the lake; [that] game [will be] run out of the park; [that] the paint pots, geysers, and other scenic wonders [will be] destroyed” were patently false.Besides, contested another dam enthusiast, even if the scenery were marred somewhat, “Beauty is only skin deep.”
On December 7 a bill was introduced authorizing a dam near the lake’s outlet. Its sponsor was Montana Senator Thomas J. Walsh, a Democrat.
Earlier in the year Grinnell had figured the Democrats as the better hope for the national parks. But in October, when it became evident that the party of Woodrow Wilson had no chance, he had sought the ear of Warren G. Harding. His emissary to the Republican candidate was Madison Grant, representing Grinnell’s new group, the National Parks Committee -- with the obvious backing of a much larger network of influential organizations and men.
Grinnell lived in the East but he was always looking West.
By the end of the month, Grinnell was able to report to Charles Sargent, eminent botanist and protector of forests, “I had a letter of mine shown last week to Senator Harding, who wrote me quite an encouraging note.” A few days later he wrote again to Sargent: “If Mr. Harding should be elected … the fight [to protect Yellowstone] will be made much easier for us all.”
Harding was indeed elected, by a landslide, and as secretary of the Interior he chose Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico. At first Grinnell was as optimistic about Fall as he was about Harding. “As a western man acquainted with western conditions … you can perform great public service,” he flattered the new secretary in March, shortly after Fall’s appointment. “On the subject of national parks, I have had lately some intercourse with your predecessor, Judge Payne, whose views on these subjects were [quite] liberal. With a wider territorial experience … your viewpoint might be even broader than this.”
Soon enough, however, Fall would shatter Grinnell’s (and the nation’s) rosy expectations for the Harding regime. Fall was exposed not as a protector but as a plunderer of the public trust; and he would wind up in jail for accepting bribes to lease federal lands (Elk Hills in California and Teapot Dome in Wyoming) to private interests (oil). As it happened, the senator who would lead the investigation against Fall was Thomas Walsh – the same Thomas Walsh who, for all the sanctimony he was to exude in his pursuit of a venal colleague, had, in the early months of the Harding Administration, been all too willing to side with private interests (the Yellowstone Irrigation Association) against the sanctity of federal land (Yellowstone National Park).
This time the conservationists were ready, and the efforts of Grinnell, Robert Sterling Yard, William Gregg, and fellow members of the National Parks Association and National Parks Committee had the desired effect. Public awareness of the Cascade Corner kept the House’s version of the bill to dam the Falls River from coming to a vote before the winter session of Congress ended. Then, in February 1921, two weeks before Harding’s inauguration, when Senator Walsh tried to hold surprise hearings on his dam bill, they again presented a stout and orderly front.
Their argument, marshaled over the previous year, was twofold. First, the dam, even if it raised the lake only six feet, would do great harm to the lakefront and would also choke the river’s flow over the magnificent upper and lower falls of the river. This disfigurement would do enormous economic harm, Grinnell warned in one of the many letters he wrote to business groups throughout Montana.
George Bird Grinnell's private study in New York. Even when he wasn't in the West advocating for protection of Yellowstone and other public lands, the West was always close to his heart. This story is especially timely and speaks to the question: Were Yellowstone left to the whims of local interests and not a national treasure defended by all citizens, would its resources have survived intact?
“Every year [Yellowstone] brings to Montana many thousands of people who leave in Montana a great deal of money,” he explained to the Commercial Club of Billings, “which of course helps to develop the country and to make the wheels of business revolve.”
Second, they insisted that the dam would, in fact, nothave much effect on the river’s flow beyond the park – that is, in the rest of Montana. Most of the water in the lower Yellowstone comes from streams below the proposed dam site. The lake actually serves as its own flood control, checking, holding, and gradually releasing the water that flows into it each spring from the mountains at the southern (upper) end of the lake. Or as Grinnell put it succinctly to Senator Key Pittman of Nevada: “The proponents of the Walsh bill seem to be ignorant that the Yellowstone Lake is not a source of floods but a preventer of floods.”
Grinnell’s letters do not mention whether he attended the committee hearing on February 28, when the Yellowstone defenders had their say. But the united resistance held up. The Walsh bill did not make it out of committee. Its fate now rested in the hands of a future Congress and the next administration.
More good news came in March, when Congress passed an amendment to the Water Power Act, exempting existing national parks and monuments from hydroelectric exploitation. President Wilson signed the bill on the evening of March 3, one day before he left the White House.
“This result has been attained by the admirable team work of many associations and individuals, all of whom united to inform the public at large of the danger that threatened their playgrounds,” Grinnell wrote to L. O. Vaught. “The return of these reservations to the direct control of Congress” – as opposed to a commission appointed under the Water Power Act – “strengthens the hands of those who are striving for the protection of the parks and erects a new barrier against the [future] consideration by Congress of the Walsh Bill.”
Even so, he hastened to add, recognizing that the Yellowstone bills were not yet dead and that future national parks and monuments could be vulnerable to water grabbers, “We have still a fight on our hands.”
Taliaferro's biography on Grinnell is an amazing read, built on 40,000 pages of correspondence with major figures in American conservation, many personal field journals and an unpublished autobiography. Grinnell is available wherever good books are sold. We encourage you to buy your copy from your favorite local bookseller. Read MoJo's review of the book.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is part of an ongoing series called "Those Who Faced A Challenge And Did The Right Thing," with research underwritten in part through a grant by The Cinnabar Foundation.
About John Taliaferro
John Taliaferro, author of Grinnell: America's Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, is a graduate of Harvard College, a former senior editor at Newsweek, and the author of four previous books. He lives in Austin, Texas, and Pray, Montana. He is also author of the acclaimed biography Charles Mr. Russell: The Life and Legend of America's Cowboy Artist and several others.
