drowning of big meadows: Nature's managers in progressive-Era California, The

Environmental History, Jan 1999 by Teisch, Jessica

Twenty fathoms under in a milky green light the spectral cabins, the skeleton cottonwoods, the ghostly gas pumps of Hite, Utah, glow dimly through the underwater mist, outlines and edges softened by the cumulative blur of slowly settling silt. Hite has been submerged by Lake Powell for many years now, but Smith will not grant recognition to alien powers.

In his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey immortalized the drowning of Glen Canyon on the bumperstickers on the truck of Seldom Seen Smith, an "honest jack" Mormon who hailed from Hite, Utah. As Glen Canyon dam opened its gates in 1963 and sent water and power to Las Vegas and Phoenix, Smith's town disintegrated into a "cumulative blur of slowly settling silt" one hundred feet below the dam. That same year, David Brower and the Sierra Club published a photographic essay, Glen Canyon: The Place No One Knew. Together, Abbey and Brower transformed a forgotten valley into a national symbol of lost wilderness. Today, Abbey's dark tale of ecosabotage aimed against the Bureau of Reclamation has reentered national politics. This time, however, the "un-damming" of Glen Canyon has captured the popular imagination.,

Other such places in the American West have gone unremarked. From a broad historical perspective, the drowning of Big Meadows at the turn of the century and the subsequent creation of Lake Almanor, the largest privately built hydroelectric reservoir at that time, is an important, yet ignored, chapter in the continuous recreation of the Western landscape. Big Meadows, a mountain valley abutting the Feather River in the Sierra Nevada's northernmost county, highlights the complex underpinnings of both public and private water and power development in Progressive-era California.'

Why did Big Meadows and myriad places like it, such as Millertown (near Fresno) and Monticello (now Lake Berryessa), disappear without Glen Canyon's fanfare? Examining various forms of resistance to dam-building in the context of fictitious "public goods" asserted by businessmen and politicians provides one answer. The drowning of Big Meadows, juxtaposed with the fates of two contemporaneous municipal projects, Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley, illustrates the divergent responses of remote valley inhabitants to organized interests in water and power development.

Municipal projects created political spaces for organized local and national resistance because they evoked widespread debate over the "public good." Owens Valley residents constantly challenged the ideology of Los Angeles about urban growth and recovered, to some extent, their economic sustainability. Likewise, Hetch Hetchy's location in Yosemite National Park gave rise to a national controversy over preservation and conservation, galvanizing the country into rethinking competing claims between wilderness and "progress." Public projects unquestionably raised the political stakes. Private projects such as Big Meadows generally lacked this key political space for effective opposition to hydrodevelopment, and as a result, disappeared quickly and quietly. The battles over Hetch Hetchy and Owens Valley make the drowning of Big Meadows all the more notable by the absence of widespread controversies over the "public good."

Most importantly, this comparison between public and private projects sheds new understanding on the nature of municipal reform, particularly the relationship of the private business sector to the state. It reveals that Progressive-era reform was as much about redirecting private industrial capital as it was about redistributing public power and the material symbols of progress, such as clean water and electricity. This story focuses on the role of the Great Western Power Company (GWP) in transforming Big Meadows. It shows how the company first co-opted local resistance and then redefined the "public good" in accordance with its visions of electrifying San Francisco Bay area industries and irrigating Sacramento Valley farms. The public counterparts of Big Meadows are considered as points of comparison to illustrate the expansive geography of private industrial capital and to suggest why Big Meadows drowned without a fight. This public-private approach also raises provocative questions about the complex nature of social and political change in the early i9oos: How much of Progressivism was about creating new paradigms for managing natural resources, and how much of it was about channeling private capital into the diverse projects of elite business and political groups? How did different configurations of"business in politics," as Lincoln Steffens called the corruption of American city governments, transform remote mountain valleys?3

In many respects, municipal undertakings only nominally replaced the private organizational structures of resource-based industries. The scientific and objective reformer who staunchly advocated municipal ownership of utilities-the centerpiece of Progressive reform-often worked simultaneously with private corporations such as GWP. Private interests often kindled public projects. Capital originating in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York filtered through private corporations, other industries, and into public projects. Los Angeles Express owner Edwin T. Earl, for example, used his fortune from his fruit-shipping business in Owens Valley to back GWP's Feather River project, as well as to advocate municipal ownership of utilities for Los Angeles.