Verdict IN AN AGE when people who ran the country thought the great rivers of America could be plugged to create a green promised land in the Pacific Northwest and electrify the Tennessee Valley, Hugh Bennett was encouraged to think big and think epic. When he returned to Washington after the Dust Bowl summit and a tour of his conservation projects, Bennett believed that the Great Plains could be saved; it did not have to blow away and lose its people. But all the marvels of concrete and rebar used elsewhere could not put back what the winds and a swarm of one-way plows had done on the prairie. There would be no magical engineered solution. Some believed so, of course. Congress authorized a plan to reverse the flow of water under the Continental Divide, an attempt to create a hydraulic savior, moving west to east through a tunnel. In Oklahoma, politicians were still insistent on choking off the little flow of the Cimarron River to create an impound of water near Guymon. Others thought the solution was to go deep, dig far below the surface, and mine the great underground reservoir of ancient water, the Ogallala Aquifer.
