To Bonnifield, it was a natural event that would have happened even if the plains hadn’t been overgrazed and plowed up; to Worster, it was almost entirely a man-made disaster. Paul Sears’s Deserts on the March is still the classic book on the subject, and Sears’s conclusions land much closer to Worster than to Bonnifield (who, interestingly, is an Oklahoman). George Sundborg’s Hail Columbia is the story of the damming of the river from the viewpoint of an ardent New Deal water developer (he was administrative assistant to the late Senator Ernest Gruening, who wanted to dam the Yukon, too, and became exasperated that the Soviet Union was building bigger dams than ours). Albert Williams’s book is more balanced, but not as detailed. Daniel Jack Chasan’s The Water Link and Anthony Netboy’s The Columbia River Salmon and Steelhead Trout: Their Fight for Survival both contain mournful accounts of the fabulous fisheries destroyed by dams and logging in the Northwest. Considerable information on the WPPSS fiasco, an indirect result of the huge dam-construction program in the Northwest (and something which I passed over rather lightly in the chapter), is in the files of the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. Important interviews for this chapter: Phil Nalder, Frank Weil, Larry Meinert, Floyd Dominy, Ralph Cavanagh, Jim Casey, Horace Albright, Samuel Hays, Gilbert Stamm, C.
