Photos courtesy Center for Columbia River History

On November 6 and 7, the Center for Columbia River History hosted a conference that explored the historical and cultural impacts of dams worldwide. There were talks about local resistance to dam building and local politics, from the Columbia to India’s Narmada River. One speaker explored the fascinating transfer of engineering technology from the Columbia Basin to Afghanistan — and then back again. Another examined the unintended consequences of dam building on Ghana’s Volta River. Eighty percent of the power from the Volta’s Akosombo Dam is sold internationally. Meanwhile, hundreds of villages have been inundated. Local villagers have been condensed into cities, and because only 20 percent of the power is available in Ghana, local communities suffer rolling blackouts and outages. Meanwhile, nationalist efforts continue to promote more dam building. Another speaker examined the impact of dam building on those engaged in the process itself — construction workers who mourn lost landscapes even as they believe in a narrative of progress. She pointed out that there is more to the story of dam building than loss.

Historic dam building resonates with familiar themes: economic depression; federal stimulus; environmental damage; loss of community; economic controversy; economic development; jobs. In the 1920s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 301 Report identified multiple dam sites on the Columbia. These “run of the river” dams would be built where the natural flow and elevation drop of the river could generate electricity. These were sites that slowed transportation, where in the 19th century people had to leave the river and walk around rapids, where early 20th century canals and locks allowed sternwheelers limited upriver passage.

These run of the river sites were also the Columbia’s best fishing places, where for eons, massive salmon were speared as they jumped over falls or into dipnets. Places like the Cascade Rapids, Celilo Falls, and Kettle Falls, all covered by big dams, are among the best known. They were the most bounteous places on the river, where Native fishers met the river’s powerful falls head on and made a living from it. Covering these sites with the lakes and reservoirs that comprise today’s Columbia forever altered a way of life, maintained for eons and well into the twentieth century.

The big dams of the twentieth century are both destructive and generative. They destroy and create. This is as true on the Columbia as anywhere else. As Columbia Basin dams tore communities apart, they contributed to developing others.

Bonneville Dam, 146 miles inland, was first in the series of dams that transformed the Columbia from a free-running river in to a series of lakes that the federal government manages for hydroelectric generation, transportation, flood control, and irrigation. Since Bonneville, 13 additional major dams have been built on the mainstem Columbia, with literally hundreds of smaller dams reshaping its tributaries. Built under Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Works programs, Bonneville provided jobs during the Great Depression and electricity that fueled industry in the Northwest economy for decades.

The Great Depression provided a prime environment for public investment. In 1933 construction began at both Bonneville and Grand Coulee. In 1936, the government passed the Rural Electrification Act. This legislation provided federal funding to install electrical distribution systems in rural areas. The act revolutionized rural America. Thus, the 1930s public power motto: “Power to the People!” Although controversy raged over public versus private power and the role of government, federal investment brought major industry to the region. By 1937, Roosevelt created the Bonneville Power Administration, under director James D. Ross. BPA quickly obtained $10.75 million for rural electrification and built transmission lines from Bonneville to Vancouver, The Dalles, Eugene, Aberdeen, and eventually to Grand Coulee Dam. By 1938, the completed Bonneville Dam went on line with 10 generators and a fish ladder. BPA set uniformly low rates around the region to invite industrial development — and the strategy worked. Soon, there were more jobs.

As Bonneville Dam began producing electric power and war loomed, the need for aluminum increased. The expanding Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) looked for an available power source and found it in Vancouver. On December 20, 1939 ALCOA signed an agreement with BPA to provide power for a new smelter in Vancouver, the first ALCOA smelter built west of the Mississippi. When officials announced ALCOA’s Vancouver arrival in December 1939, the Columbian headline called the $3 million aluminum reduction plant “The greatest Christmas present in the history of the northwest’s oldest city.”

The site would be located two-and-a-half miles downriver from Vancouver and would employ 300 to 400 men. A 20-year contract with BPA provided what Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes called “a factual answer” to “skeptics” who decried the building of Bonneville Dam. Not only could the Northwest make use of the power provided by the dam, but businesses like ALCOA would pave the way for a new industrial future, one of expansion that meant “new markets for the merchant and farmer. This is only the beginning,” claimed Ickes. The newspaper went on to say that the economic stimulus provided by ALCOA could mean shipment of an additional 50,000 tons of freight and more jobs for longshoremen and railroad workers.
By the following December, thousands flocked to the company’s dedication of the $4.5 million alumina reduction plant “which hundreds of workmen have raised in less than eight months from a former cow pasture.” Willing labor and cheap electricity made the site ideal. Oregon Governor Charles Sprague attended. He jokingly remarked that he felt like the bridesmaid at [the State of Washington’s] wedding: “What has she got that I haven’t got?” he asked. “After all…there’s just the river and the sales tax between us.”

Construction of the ALCOA plant downstream from Vancouver heralded economic and technological diversification for the city and brought a boom to the homebuilding industry as well. When the U.S. entered the war less than a year after ALCOA produced its first ingot, aluminum production soared. ALCOA and the Kaiser Vancouver Shipyards played an important role in the war years that followed, as did other regional federal facilities powered by Columbia River dams. By 1943 the ALCOA plant produced enough aluminum for 1,600 bombers, many constructed by the Boeing Company of Seattle. Upriver, Grand Coulee Dam sent electricity to aluminum plants, Boeing, and the Hanford nuclear facility, structures that generated power and community — whether we like their creations or not.

Donna Sinclair is the Program Manager for the Center for Columbia River History.