5

The Flood

Since the flood, everything is Safeway.

            —MATTIE GRUNLOSE
               Colville Indian,
               born December 17, 1901

ABOUT SEVENTY MILES northwest of the dam, down near the river on the Colville Reservation, a weather-beaten sign had fallen backwards in the dirt. “DRUGS, ALCOHOL, SUICIDE,” it said. Beside the faded words was the silhouette of an Indian brave slumped over a horse. The yard around the sign was littered with wrecked cars, washing machines, and bits of shattered furniture. The place belonged to Martin Louie, Sr., a former forest ranger and sobered-up alcoholic, a teller of Colville tribal legends and professional “informant” to legions of anthropologists.

Louie, at the age of eighty-six, was one of the last remaining Colvilles who, before Grand Coulee Dam, made a living spearing salmon in the upper Columbia River. I found him in bed on a drizzly spring morning in his leaky camping trailer, which was covered against the rain by a blue plastic tarp. The old man had rheumy blue eyes, patrimony from a Welsh grandfather who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He wore a blue T-shirt beneath a purple acetate shirt beneath a tattered green cardigan sweater, stained down the front with what looked to be spilled food and slobber.

His trailer had a view of Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake, which is what the federal government calls the bloated remains of the river behind Grand Coulee Dam. It is where Louie used to spear salmon.

“You askin’ me what did we do after the flood?” Louie said, looking up at me from his bed.

“We starved. We drank. My daughter-in-law’s son committed suicide. He blowed his brains out about three or four years ago with a rifle. I know two or three who committed suicide. Let me show you something.”

Louie got up and shuffled into the kitchen of his trailer. He said the federal government sends him food every month. From a shelf he grabbed a can of United States Department of Agriculture food aid labeled “PINK SALMON.” Louie shoved the can in my face.

“This is how you replaced our salmon!” he screamed. “You guys took all my food!”

Louie was not screaming at humankind in general. He was screaming at me, the sheepish white man in his trailer. As far as Louie was concerned, I was a member of that arrogant white horde that had castrated his river, killed his fish, and ruined his reservation.

Shortly after Louie shoved the PINK SALMON in my face, a Meals on Wheels van came to take him off to his food-program lunch in nearby Inchelium. The old man left mad. This was not what I had had in mind when I came home from Eastern Europe. Only a few months before I knocked on the door of Louie’s trailer, I had been watching and writing about ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. I had compared the Serbs to Nazis. I had been full of indignation, incredulous that humans could be so stupidly cruel to each other. Here, not more than 150 miles from the place where I was born and grew up, an angry old man was accusing me and my tribe of something that a reasonable European might call ethnic cleansing. Instead of artillery and rape and terror, we had used folk songs and concrete. Instead of numbing our collective conscience with plum brandy, as the Serb soldiers did, we had self-medicated with myths about empire.

Louie’s anger, I thought, was payback for the undeserved friendship and confidences that the men on the river barge had lavished on me. Because I was white, because I talked the talk of the engineered river, because I was from Moses Lake, the bargers figured I was one of them. The old Indian, for the same reasons, figured I had a hand in making a world where Colvilles had no salmon, drank to excess, and blew their brains out. Stupidly, I had given Louie good reason to be suspicious. In trying to ingratiate myself as his neighbor, I told him my family had lived in the Columbia Basin since the 1930s, that my father helped build Grand Coulee, and that I, too, had worked there.

Left alone in the dirt yard in front of Louie’s trailer, I decided to drive back to the dam. I had grown up hearing dark warnings about driving alone on the Indian reservation that lies north of Grand Coulee. Watch your car! Those Indians will steal it. Watch yourself on the roads! They are always drunk. But no one tried to steal my car and no one came close to running me over. My only unscheduled encounter on the reservation occurred on my drive back from Louie’s trailer. At a road construction site, the foreman of a Colville highway crew, out on a pothole-patching job, flagged me down and suggested that I not drive so fast.

When Grand Coulee Dam came into view, I tried to see it as the Colvilles have been seeing it for more than half a century: a greasy gray monstrosity surrounded by white people with new cars. At the city limits of Coulee Dam, a town built by the Bureau of Reclamation and still occupied mostly by white dam workers, the blowing dust and rusted junk of the reservation gave way to freshly painted houses, tidy green lawns, and the steady stitching of sprinklers. I stayed on in Coulee Dam for a few days, talking to whites about Indians.

In the town library I asked after a book that had been recommended to me by the Colville Reservation’s resident historian. The book explained how the Bureau had been in such a hurry to build the dam that it flooded out anthropologists who were examining Indian artifacts above Grand Coulee.

“Who told you we have that book?” the white librarian asked sharply, clearly doubting her library would harbor such information.

I told her the name of an Indian woman. The librarian, a woman in her late thirties, rolled her eyes and shook her head. Without a word, she indicated that I was a fool to believe that an Indian could know anything about a library. (The book was precisely where the Indian woman said it would be.)

Other whites around the dam volunteered similar views on Indians.

“They are kinda like colored people. They are lazy and they don’t want to work,” said a retired white telephone operator who has lived near that dam for more than half a century. “They are trying every way in the world to get money for nothing out of our dam.”

A retired engineer who worked for the Bureau of Reclamation at Grand Coulee told me that “they [the Indians] are privileged characters. Yeah, they got by pretty easy. You never saw many of them when the real work was going on. Only when it was over did they come sneaking back.”

Salmon, in Grand Coulee, seemed tainted by their association with Indians.

“I don’t give a good goddamn about salmon,” said Dick Taylor, owner of the Four Winds Guest House, a tourist motel with a view of Grand Coulee Dam. “I don’t know anybody around here who gives a goddamn about salmon. Salmon are what you see in the cans. Saving salmon, it doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should go way back in time to the horse and buggy. Then we could all walk around and step in horseshit.”

The Four Winds was full-up with families that came out to coulee country to feast on statistics about the dam. Enough concrete to bury Montana three inches deep. Enough to bury Texas one inch deep. The spectacle that drew most of Taylor’s clientele was produced by the Bureau of Reclamation and advertised as the “world’s largest laser light show.”

I joined Taylor’s tourists to watch the show. It began after the sun went down and families had stopped grazing at concession booths that included “Sigfried’s Funnel Cakes” and “Custer’s First Stand Indian Jewelry.” We all gathered in a park beneath the dam to watch needles of colored light dance around on the dam’s spillway, a screen that an announcer said was wider than four battleships placed end to end. Just as the show began, operators of the dam released a film of whitish water from the backed-up Columbia. It was just enough to coat the concrete screen, cover it like spilled milk on greasy black linoleum, and make laser lights show up nicely.

Despite the Bureau’s professed conversion from dam building to water conservation, the show was an unapologetic throwback. The narrator of the show was a honey-voiced old man who claimed to be the Columbia River.

“You have done what I could not accomplish alone,” the river voice said gratefully, thanking the Bureau for the wonder of Grand Coulee Dam. “Through your engineering skills you have diverted part of my course and spread my waters over the land. You have created the missing link in the cycle of life, the rainfall that nature could not provide. You have irrigated the land. You have made the desert bloom.”

The voice said, quite misleadingly, that all one million acres of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project were going to be completed and that the entire project had been an unqualified success. In a bit of Soviet-style revisionism, the voice did not explain that Hanford—with its drifting underground plumes of poison and its secret radiation releases—came to the banks of the river in the 1940s because of abundant electricity generated at Grand Coulee Dam. The voice made no reference whatsoever to the plutonium factory, located just 160 miles south of Grand Coulee. Like a disgraced Kremlin leader, Hanford was erased from memory.*

The voice did mention salmon and Indians, saying that “in stark contrast to the grand scope and vision of the project’s benefits came the hard realities of the trade-offs for such aspiring dreams.” It said towns were flooded and Indian fishing sites disappeared. But it did not say that Grand Coulee wiped out more salmon than any single structure in American history, nor did it explain that when fishing grounds were flooded and the fish disappeared, the Indians above the dam began a half-century skid into alcoholism, suicide, car wrecks, and death from preventable disease.

The more time I spent around Grand Coulee Dam, the more it seemed a Rosetta stone for the engineered West. It deciphered a history at once glorious and mean, egalitarian and racist, farsighted and blind. The spectacular early success of the dam guaranteed that it would spawn sequels—that the entire Columbia River would be fattened up between concrete. The dam also gave the federal government the strategic toehold it needed to take over the Columbia Basin. If the river was to be thoroughly throttled for the greater good, if the working stiff was to have electricity in his house and food on his table, Grand Coulee Dam proved that federal technocrats had to come in with serious money, elbow aside local boosters, and take control.

The dam’s most sobering lesson was personal. I could look at that wedge of concrete and see my tribe of Great Depression runaways as both the builders of a promised land and unrepentant participants in ethnic cleansing. What seemed particularly curious to me about the dam was that no one south of the Colville Reservation—down in irrigation country around Moses Lake, down at Hanford’s nuclear site—seemed interested in the whole story the dam had to tell. I asked a history teacher at Big Bend Community College in Moses Lake about local understanding of the dam and its consequences.

“There is a disconnect around here that drives me crazy,” said Brenda Teals. “My students grow up in a state of ignorance about what happened with the dam. Teachers have not been taught what to teach. Nobody knows because nobody knows. There is nothing said about what happened to the Indians. There is a feeling that it all happened somewhere else. Of course, the Indians are still around. But everyone tries to ignore them. They don’t look like majestic noble savages. They are poor, unattractive people with health problems. The Colville Reservation is another planet.”

Jeff Korth, a fisheries biologist for the Washington State Fish and Game Department, looked after many of the artificial lakes and reservoirs that were created by Grand Coulee’s irrigation system. He told me that the most consistently astounding aspect of his work is that people who live in the Columbia Basin “don’t know where they are. They are utterly unfamiliar with why they are able to live in the desert. They don’t know where the water comes from.”

In Rivers of Empire, western historian Donald Worster writes that mass amnesia and apathy about the origins and operations of federally built irrigation schemes are endemic across the arid West. “Power becomes faceless and impersonal,” Worster writes, “so much so that many are unaware it exists.”

Shortly after my morning with the Indian who accused me of stealing his salmon, I called on the white prosecutor and coroner for Ferry County, which has jurisdiction on part of the Colville Reservation. Allen Nielson described death scenes his work requires him to attend.

“Typically, what I see is a young Indian male with high blood alcohol and perhaps some drugs. He has been suffering from depression and unemployed for some period of time. It is usually a gunshot or a traffic accident. You can take a graduating class at Inchelium High [on the reservation] and in ten years they are all dead. It is absolutely staggering.”

Before the dam, each member of the Colville tribe ate, on average, about one and a quarter pounds of salmon a day, according to Verne Ray, an anthropologist who lived among the Colvilles in the 1920s.

The most sacred ceremonies of Colville religious life, along with the most intensive seasons of work and feasting, revolved around the summer salmon harvest. The heart of the catch was the summer chinook, the biggest and finest of Columbia River salmon. Whites called them “June Hogs,” and they often weighed sixty to eighty pounds. Most of the salmon were caught in traps or speared in white water around Kettle Falls, where the river boiled over and around a series of dikes created by giant folds of a hard stone called quartzite.

When the dam was finished and the upstream Columbia became a 150-mile-long lake, Kettle Falls disappeared, along with all the salmon. On the reservations, rates of suicide, fatal car accidents, alcoholism, drug addiction, divorce, and death by house fire soared to levels that stunned the anthropologist who had lived with the Colvilles before the building of the dam. Ray wrote that Grand Coulee Dam was built with “a ruthless disregard for Indians as human beings,” creating a dammed-up river that “drowned the culture it had nourished.”

The builders of Grand Coulee Dam treated the Colvilles with a disregard that found its way into the Bureau’s 1937 annual report on construction progress at the dam. It mentioned Indians only once—in a paragraph that also discussed “rules governing ownership of dogs.”

The dam flooded more than 21,000 acres of prime bottom land, where Indians had been living for perhaps as long as ten thousand years. In addition to Kettle Falls, the best hunting, farming, and root-gathering land disappeared. So did most tribal burial grounds. The Bureau of Reclamation decided, only at the last moment, to relocate Indian graveyards. It hired a Spokane funeral home to help the tribe quickly dig up bones and haul them to higher ground. The Bureau belatedly asked University of Washington anthropologists to catalog what was going underwater. They wrote that “the steady rise of the water level back of Grand Coulee Dam put a premium on speed. Many places had necessarily to be slighted or only superficially examined as the water lapped at our heels.”

After the flood, drinking water and phone service to some parts of the reservation were cut off for thirty years. None of the irrigation water diverted from the river by Grand Coulee Dam was made available to the Indians. All of the water—pumped daily during the irrigation season in quantities that would more than meet the needs of the entire city of Chicago—went to the non-reservation side of the Columbia. Reservation residents paid more than twice as much for electricity as did their (mostly white) neighbors across the Columbia in Grant County.

As the non-Indian side of the Columbia (the side where I grew up) attracted industry and farmers with its subsidized power and water, the economy of the reservation withered. Unemployment hovered at around 50 percent for decades. A chart of income distribution on the reservation in the early 1990s showed no middle class.

As part of an after-the-fact environmental impact statement that the Bureau of Reclamation prepared on Grand Coulee Dam in 1975 (forty-two years after work began on the project), Colville leaders were asked what the dam had done for them.

“Tribal members paid with their homes, their lifestyle, their foodstuffs, so that others could have jobs, incomes, and wealth,” the statement said. “The Indians are treated as non-persons.”*

Vern Seward was one-quarter Colville, the minimum “blood quantum” necessary to qualify as a registered member of the tribe. His three children did not qualify because their mother was white. Seward, who was seventy-six years old when I visited his house trailer on the reservation, did not speak the Salish language of the Colvilles, nor did he know much about the tribe’s traditional religion, which saw the Creator in the salmon that surged upstream in the Columbia.

What defined Seward as a Colville was resentment. He resented the Bureau for victimizing the Colville tribe. He resented the Colville tribe for living like victims. Feeding his anger was an uncanny memory. With greater precision and with more passion than anyone I came across on the reservation, he described what it was like to spear salmon before Coulee Dam drowned Kettle Falls. He could remember, he told me, because he had been thinking about it for sixty years. He remembered because the circumstances of his dislocated life allowed him a single season at the falls.

“I only had one summer,” he said, “to live like an Indian.”

In 1932, the same year my father rode a westbound boxcar, Seward was bumming his way into Washington State aboard a freight train full of migrants. He was escaping an Indian boarding school where he had been learning—since the age of six—how to be a perfect white man.

In a sense, he learned his lessons well. An exception to the rule of want among the Colville, he found work as a teenager at Grand Coulee Dam running a jackhammer, learned blueprint reading in the navy, and spent the bulk of his life off the reservation as a construction boss. For nearly twenty years, he was a superintendent for federal projects that built and repaired houses on Indian reservations across the Northwest. Seward retired with money in the bank and a government pension. He could afford a late-model Buick, an air-conditioned mobile home, and the fanciest satellite dish I saw on Colville land.

His blue single-wide trailer house stood on the bank of the Columbia, about six miles downstream from Grand Coulee Dam. Each morning when he drank his coffee and looked out the kitchen window of his trailer, he saw the river through the black steel mesh of his satellite dish.

Despite his relative prosperity, Seward was not comfortable with what he had made of himself. He drew a federal paycheck most of his life, yet he hated the federal government for damming the Columbia. He lived in the cracks between white and Indian cultures, annoyed by both, completely conversant with neither, a hybrid creation of the engineered West.

When Seward answered my knock on his front door, he reminded me of no one so much as my father. Like my father, he wore a thick flannel shirt, even in hot weather, and he was half deaf. He and my father wore the same make of flesh-colored hearing aids, the ones that fill up ears like gobs of bathtub caulking. They spoke in the same slow rhythms of the blue-collar West: “See, in them days, we. . . .” Seward, like my father, loved Roosevelt above all politicians, living or dead.

The youngest of seven children, Seward was sent from the reservation to an orphanage in Spokane when he was two years old. Four years later, he was dispatched to a federally run Indian boarding school. His father, a white man from Nebraska, had divorced his mother, a woman who was one-half Colville, “because she drank too much. My father couldn’t support seven of us. He sent me away. I can remember seeing him twice in my life and my mother three times.”

The school that Seward attended near Salem, in western Oregon, was part of a national network of federal boarding schools that operated under the guiding philosophy that “the way to ‘civilize’ the Indian is to take Indian children, even very young children, as completely as possible away from home and family life.”

At the school, he was drilled like an Army draftee. When he arrived at age six, he was given a wooden gun, a brown high-collared military uniform, and ordered to march in formation to meals, church, and his dormitory. He worked in the school’s dairy or the cornfields or the orchard or in the kitchen, and attended four hours of classes a day.

Along with about 27,000 Indian children across the country, Seward was an inmate in an educational system that was unique for any group of American children. According to a scathing 1928 report that led to wholesale reform in Indian education, “among no other people . . . are as large a proportion of the total number of children of school age located in institutions away from their homes.”

The report said almost all Indian children were malnourished, poorly taught, incessantly regimented, and severely overcrowded in dormitories where tuberculosis and infectious eye disease were epidemic. Their mail was opened, they were subject to brutal discipline, and there “was a constant violation of the children’s personalities.” Always, they worked to keep their schools solvent—given that Congress refused to spend more than eleven cents a day to feed them. “The labor of children as carried on in Indian boarding schools,” the report said, “would constitute a violation of labor laws in most states.”

Seward’s best friend at the school, Archie Silverthorn, a member of the Flathead tribe from western Montana, was gang-raped by a group of older boys at the school who helped supervise the younger students. Seward remembers that he joined his terrified friend in reporting the rape to a priest and to the superintendent of the school. Seward said that the older boys denied the assault, and were not punished.

“That night after we told on them, three of the older boys took us to their room, stripped us, and beat us with their belts and buckles. They said, ‘If you ever say anything to anyone else, you’re going to get it twice as bad.’ We learned to keep our mouths shut.

“Archie and me were nine years old at the time, and we wanted to run away. We were always getting beaten, and we were always hungry. But we didn’t know just what to do to run away.”

It took Seward six years to work up the nerve to run. In the midst of the Depression, he walked six miles to the city of Salem and boarded the first boxcar he saw. He bummed food in rail yard camps in Portland and Seattle. Everyone he met was hungry and looking for a place to live. He had lost all contact with his parents and siblings on the reservation, and he did not know if he would be welcome there. But Seward had nowhere else to go. A freight train dropped him off in Republic, Washington, on the northern edge of the Colville Reservation. A sympathetic train conductor drove him to Kettle Falls and introduced him to an Indian fisherman.

“I had never seen the Columbia River until I came back. I never had the least idea about fishing until I saw all the Indians camped near Kettle Falls. That falls was just a steady roar all the time. It fell about twenty feet. There were awful big salmon jumping up that falls. I couldn’t believe they could jump that high. I really couldn’t believe my eyes. They were all the way from twenty to sixty pounds. My impression was how can they get that much speed in that current to jump the falls? How can they swim once they landed?”

Joe Adolph, a Colville fisherman, put Seward to work collecting firewood and pulling fish from the J-shaped baskets suspended out over Kettle Falls to catch jumping salmon. Seward was terrified by the river.

“I was afraid of slipping off the wooden scaffold that was built out over the rocks in the falls. If you slipped off that scaffold, you didn’t have a chance. It took me quite a number of days before I would take the chance to go out and pick up the salmon. They were hard to pick up because they were so big. I pulled out about four a day. It was a coupla weeks before I went out there with a spear. It was twelve foot long. If the fish jumped close, I would take a shot.”

When the run of big chinook salmon in the falls ended in July, Seward traveled downstream with another fisherman, Baptist Louie, to spear smaller salmon in their spawning beds. Seward learned to spear at night by firelight.

“We were in a flat-bottomed boat that had a piece of burning pitch hanging out over the water. Natural fire has no reflection for spearing. We could see the salmon down about twenty feet in the river and they looked white in the firelight. I got so I could spear six to ten of them a night. We dried the fish in the sun, using the smoke of rotten wood to keep away the blowflies and the bees. All that fish was packed away for winter.”

The summer by the river was the first time that Seward remembers being happy.

“I never had so much lovin’ in my life as from those Indian families. They were really parents to me. They took me into their homes just like I was one of their own. There was nobody to beat on you, to tell you what to do, and force you to do what you didn’t want to do. You just live in peace and quiet and with friends. I have never lived that way since.”

While Seward was fishing by night with a spear, Roosevelt approved sixty-three million dollars to begin construction on Grand Coulee Dam. Word spread on the reservation that there would be free electricity for all Indians. Seward, like several other Colville Indians who fished in the Columbia in the early 1930s, does not remember hearing that the dam was going to kill all the salmon and flood Kettle Falls.

After wintering with an Indian family, Seward never returned to Kettle Falls to fish. He found a job on Roosevelt’s payroll, living in a federal work camp on the reservation, making thirty dollars a month with board and room. He built roads near the dam site. It was the first time he can remember having cash in his pocket.

“God bless old Roosevelt. He took care of the people when there was no work and no money. It was the best thing to ever hit this country.”

As the boomtown of Grand Coulee rose from the mud, Seward became a Friday-night regular on B Street. Indians were not allowed to drink in the Silver Dollar Saloon or to dance with the dime-a-dance girls, but Seward said he was white enough to pass.

“I learned how to dance from those girls. It wasn’t cheap. In them days a dime was a lot of money. The songs weren’t very long. Maybe a minute. By the time you got eight or nine dances, you were broke.”

Seward also remembers helping a group of his Indian friends take revenge on white dam workers who were believed to have raped two Indian girls. Thanks to his white skin and an offer of free whiskey, he was able to lure a big redheaded dam worker out of a dance hall in the reservation town of Nespelem. Once outside Seward helped hold the dam worker while his Indian friends cut a big X in the man’s back with a pocketknife.

Seward hired on at the dam as a laborer in 1935. He was only seventeen years old. He got the job by lying about his age and failing to mention his Indian blood. With a pick and shovel, he cleaned clay off granite bedrock. Later he became a high-scaler, making seventy-five cents an hour operating a jackhammer, drilling holes for dynamite while hanging from a rope harness on the cliffs above the dam site. He took home $9.80 a week, “the biggest money ever for an Indian.”

On a swing-shift night in 1936, a white man who was running a jackhammer next to Seward fell to his death. He fell more than three hundred feet, landing on his back on top of reinforcing steel bars that protruded from the rising concrete foundation of the dam.

“With sixteen jackhammers goin’ you couldn’t hear nothing. But I seen him fall. There was three of them bars sticking through his body, two through his chest and one through his stomach. There was a steam shovel working down there and they tied ropes around the teeth of the shovel and around his arms and legs, trying to lift him off those bars. They tore him all apart. We was watching from up above. It made me half sick. I have had dreams all my life of people laying there with something sticking through them.”

Seward harbors an acid regard for white Bureau engineers like Vaughn Downs.

“I always despised them. They would come around the workingmen and shoot off their mouths, like they knew everything there was to know. They were there to suit themselves. They were there to change this river. They didn’t know that the Indian people was depending on salmon for their winter food, and they didn’t care.”

Keeping his resentments to himself, Seward stayed on at the dam and saved most of his money. Like my father, he used his savings to attend a welding school. When World War II came along, Seward joined the Navy as a submarine mechanic. He did not return to the reservation until 1946. By then, the dam was finished, Kettle Falls was flooded, the salmon were gone, and the reservation was sliding into despair.

“I saw quite a change in the Indians when I came back. I would say that alcohol got a hold of 60 percent of them. Without fishing, they had no interest in what they were doing. Families were breaking apart. Everybody was becoming what I call a ‘reservation Indian.’ The reservation Indian don’t care for nobody or nothin’. I was drinking a lot, too. My best friend, Johnny Reynolds, and his dad Hiram, ran off the road when they were drunk. Killed ’em both. That is what made me get away from here. I went to Alaska and got into the Operating Engineers Union. I was lucky to get out.”

Electricity generated by Grand Coulee Dam is worth about five hundred million dollars a year. Although half of the dam sits on reservation property, none of the power earnings was allotted to the Colvilles.

Under the original scheme to build the dam, the Indians were supposed to have received a fair cut. The dam, under the first plan, was to have been constructed by the state of Washington under the Federal Power Act. That 1920 law specifically required that a state must pay Indian tribes annual fees based on the amount of electricity produced on reservation land.

The Federal Power Act, however, was circumvented when the federal government took control of the dam away from Washington State in 1933. Harold Ickes, then both secretary of the Interior and director of Roosevelt’s new Public Works Administration, wrote a most unusual letter—from himself to himself. The letter said the dam would be an exclusively federal project and that the Bureau of Reclamation would build it. The Federal Power Act no longer applied. No law required the Bureau to pay anything to the Indians for power revenue that the dam might earn.

For a year or two, however, it seemed that well-intentioned officials in Washington would make sure that the Colvilles would not be shafted by this legal technicality. At a congressional hearing held on the Colville Reservation in 1933, white bureaucrats and white lawmakers listened sympathetically to tribal elders who demanded that the federal government give the Colvilles a share of what Grand Coulee earned.

“This dam comes in here and we are wiped out,” Pete Lemry, a Colville fishing chief, told the hearing. “I do not see why . . . we do not hold an equity in that power site that comes in at Grand Coulee. I do not think it is justice. . . .”

“I should say you are entitled to it,” replied the chairman of the hearing, Senator Burton K. Wheeler.

“I think we ought to get a ten percent royalty out of the Coulee proposition, if they give the Indian his just dues,” Lemry added.

Senator Frazier of North Dakota, in response, said: “That should be looked into by the Indian Department.”

It was looked into back in Washington. Memos were written and meetings held. With belated sympathy for the Colvilles, Ickes asked the supervising engineer of the Grand Coulee project to make sure that Indian interests in the dam “be given careful and prompt attention so as to avoid any unnecessary delay.”

The delay lasted sixty-one years.

It ended only after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the government had failed to make “fair and honorable dealings” with the Colvilles. Two years later, in the fall of 1994, after the Justice Department and the Bonneville Power Administration agreed to a negotiated settlement with the Colvilles, Congress approved a lump-sum payment of fifty-three million to the tribe, along with an annual payment of about fifteen million dollars.

It was far less than 10 percent of the estimated five billion dollars’ worth of electricity the dam had generated since 1942, but it was the largest settlement of its kind in American history. The Colvilles voted overwhelmingly to accept it.

Seward, who moved back onto the reservation in 1982 when he retired from the construction business, voted to take the money. He expected five thousand dollars as his share of the lump sum, along with more than fifteen hundred dollars a year for the rest of his life.

Was it enough?

“If a person wanted money and what-not, he would say it is a fair price. It is the best we were likely to get. But it does not bring back the river or the salmon. It is not a fair price for the torture we went through. No, it is not a fair price.”

The Columbia, as it flowed past Seward’s mobile home, roiled and curled in dangerous eddies—stirred up from its tumble through the turbines in nearby Grand Coulee Dam. To control erosion, the Bureau of Reclamation lined the bank of the river with a formidable wall of jagged rocks and chunks of concrete. The erosion barrier, called riprap, gave the Columbia, as it passed beside Seward’s trailer house, the hemmed-in feel of an irrigation canal.

Seward hated the coming of the riprap. It kept him from going down to the river to fish for the rainbow trout that were planted in the river to replace long-gone salmon.* He slipped on the rocks and hurt his leg. After that, he made peace with the rock barrier by staying off it and staying away from the river.

In compensation, he became acquainted with a family of woodchucks that settled in the rocks just beyond the window of his mobile home. Seward fed them and watched them play while he drank his morning coffee.

The Bureau spread an herbicide along the bank to control weeds. The woodchucks all disappeared.

“When I look at that river,” Seward told me, “there is an awful lot of wicked thoughts go through a person’s mind.”

The bitterness of the Colville tribe about dams has diminished a bit in recent years. Downstream from Chief Joseph Dam, salmon sometimes returned to the river in fishable numbers. After a 2008 agreement with the Bonneville Power Administration and a local utility that operates two dams on the mid-Columbia, the Colvilles received forty-three million dollars to build a hatchery on the river that was expected to restore chinook salmon to some tribal waters. Colville leaders said that by 2017 or so, they hoped there would be enough of the big salmon in the river for a ceremonial, spiritual, and nutritional rebirth.