University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2020 WORTH A DAM: GLACIER VIEW AND THE PRESERVATION OF WILD AMERICA Shawn Patrick Bailey Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Bailey, Shawn Patrick, "WORTH A DAM: GLACIER VIEW AND THE PRESERVATION OF WILD AMERICA" (2020). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 11669. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/11669 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WORTH A DAM: GLACIER VIEW AND THE PRESERVATION OF WILD AMERICA By SHAWN PATRICK BAILEY Master of Arts, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, 2009 Bachelor of Arts, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, 1996 Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History The University of Montana Missoula, MT December 2020 Approved by: Scott Whittenburg, Graduate School Dean Jeff Wiltse, Chair Department of History Michael Mayer Department of History Leif Fredrickson Department of History David Beck Department of Native American Studies Bill Borrie School of Life & Environmental Sciences, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia © COPYRIGHT by Shawn Patrick Bailey 2020 All Rights Reserved ii Bailey, Shawn, PhD, December 2020 History Worth a Dam: Glacier View and the Preservation of Wild America Chairperson: Jeff Wiltse Conceived in the mid-1930s and formally proposed in 1943, the Glacier View Dam was an Army Corps of Engineers’ proposal for the North Fork of the Flathead River in northwestern Montana. This 416-foot tall dam would have provided inexpensive hydroelectric power to the region and helped control flooding on the volatile Columbia River watershed. Glacier View would also have flooded 20,000 acres of Glacier National Park, one of the “crown jewels” of the national park system. An ideologically diverse coalition of National Park Service officials, wilderness activists and outdoor recreation enthusiasts organized the defense of Glacier National Park and convinced both the Secretary of the Interior and Secretary of the Army to eliminate the Glacier View Dam from a multi-reservoir plan for the Columbia in 1949. This dissertation looks at the defeat of the Glacier View Dam from several perspectives and argues that this little-known episode was a seminal moment in the environmental history of the United States. Proponents of the dam believed that Glacier View’s hydroelectric power would create an industrial center in western Montana and help reshape an extractive economy hard hit by the Great Depression, help prevent historic flooding in the region and help win World War Two and the Cold War. One common alternative to Glacier View was the Paradise Dam on the Clark Fork River, still in the headwaters of the Columbia but outside of national park boundaries. Paradise, however, would have flooded 20,000 acres of the Flathead Indian Reservation, the treaty-guaranteed territory of the Salish, Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai peoples. These confederated Native Americans supported the construction of the Glacier View Dam to preserve their lands and economic base in western Montana. The defeat of the Glacier View Dam was an important moment in the ascendence of the wilderness movement, one that preceded and inspired the more famous Echo Park Dam controversy in the 1950s. This controversy was an early instance where modern conceptions of wilderness swayed public policy in the United States and helped lead to the passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968. iii It will be objected that a constantly increasing population makes resistance and conservation a hopeless battle. This is true. Unless a way is found to stabilize the nation’s population, the parks cannot be saved. Or anything else worth a damn. Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, ever more crowded environment, For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world. —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire iv Acknowledgements This dissertation would not have been possible without the support, encouragement and collaboration of many individuals and institutions. For numerous research trips throughout the country, I relied on the generous financial support from the University of Montana through the H. Duane Hampton Research Grant and the Bertha Morton Scholarship and fellowships from the Newberry Library in Chicago. I am indebted to the talented members of the University of Montana History Department, especially Jeff Wiltse, who patiently served as Chair of my dissertation committee and guided this project to its completion, Mike Mayer for offering encouragement and political insight into the Congressional debates over western dams and Leif Fredrickson for agreeing to join my committee in the later stages of this project and for sharing his research on Flathead Lake. I also want to thank Dave Beck for his good humor and insightful feedback on the Native American components of this work and Bill Borrie for challenging my thinking on wilderness conceptions and for waking up early in Melbourne, Australia when necessary. I want to thank my first advisor Dan Flores for his feedback and support during the formative stages of this work. This dissertation started as a paper in one of Dan’s graduate writing seminars and he encouraged me to challenge long held beliefs about dams in the American West. I was lucky to attend graduate school with many very talented historians, writers and friends who read different versions of this work, offered constructive criticism and suggestions and encouraged me to finish. Special thanks to Happy Avery, Monika Bilka, v David Brooks, Greg Gordon, Jon Hall, Rosalyn LaPier, Craig Rigdon, John Robinson and Ian Stacy, all of whom helped greatly in the completion of this dissertation, whether they realized it or not. During this project, I spent months in archives and libraries scattered throughout the country. Thank you to the archivists and staffs at the Bancroft Library at the University of California-Berkeley, the Betsey B. Creekmore Special Collections and University Archives at the University of Tennessee, the Cook Park Library in Libertyville, IL, the Denver Public Library, the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana, the Newberry Library, the Richardson Library at DePaul University, the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina, the Minnesota Historical Society, the Montana Historical Society and the National Archives in Seattle, WA, College Park, MD and Washington, DC. Special thanks to Deirdre Shaw at the Glacier National Park Archives and Donna McCrea at the Mansfield Library for all their help. I would like to thank my friends and family for their years of support and inspiration. Thanks to John Delport and Dan Jarvis, for their friendship and investment in the completion of this project. Thank you to Maureen and Tony Domerchie—and all my extended family—for their encouragement over the years. Thanks especially to my father William, my late mother Suzanne and my sister Shannon for nurturing my interests in history, research and writing and for their decades of love and support. Most of all, thank you to my amazing wife Molly and son Cormac. Cormac for making me smile while urban hiking along the Chicago River and for his curiosity about dams. He calls them “damages,” which I think reveals an astute grasp of the vi environmental history of these structures for a four-year-old. Molly for her years of encouragement, joy, proofreading and unicorn hunting skills. Thank you for your love, patience and understanding as I tried to puzzle together this history of a dam that was never built. vii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Prologue 32 Chapter One: The Pinchot Park 41 Chapter Two: A Wild Paradox 94 Chapter Three: Victory Rivers 149 Chapter Four: “Holler Stop to the Dam Builders” 219 Chapter Five: The Third Road 274 Chapter Six: The Wild Hour 347 Epilogue 414 Bibliography 422 viii Illustrations Illustration One: Map of proposed Glacier View Dam, 1945 3 Illustration Two: Proposed Glacier View Dam site, 2018 5 Illustration Three: Max Baucus in the North Fork Valley, 2013 33 Illustration Four: Topographical map of Glacier National Park, 1914 47 Illustration Five: Horace Albright and Stephen Mather, 1924 111 Illustration Six: Map of Glacier National Park “Life Zones,” 1919 133 Illustration Seven: Glacier View Project Plan, 1948 148 Illustration Eight: “No Beer Sold to Indians” sign, 1936. 173 Illustration Nine: Map of Glacier View, Canyon Creek and Coram Project, 1948 191 Illustration Ten: Artist rendition of proposed Glacier View Dam, 1948 215 Illustration Eleven: Newton Drury and Harold Ickes, 1940 228 Illustration Twelve: Map of Glacier View Dam and Reservoir, 1948 243 Illustration Thirteen: Howard Zahniser, Mardy Murie and Olaus Murie 259 Illustration Fourteen: Official Map of the Flathead