The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower

By the summer of 1953, when Brower and other Sierra Club members got to Vernal, Utah, and met up with Hatch, the river outfitter had bought several 27-foot-long pontoon rafts. He refashioned them for the river and hired his sons, college kids, and local youth to guide the visitors down the river. The passengers were a “heterogeneous and colorful collection of individuals,” according to one account, and they “came in all ages, shapes and sizes with a sprinkling of small fry for seasoning.”³ Brower brought along two of his sons—Ken, who was nine, and Robert, who was seven. They rode old school buses with no suspension upriver to Lily Park in Colorado. After lunch, everyone was fitted with life preservers, gear was stowed on the rafts, and Hatch declared, “Now we’re safe, now we’re on the river.”

They shoved off. The raft ride got bumpy at Tepee Rapids and rougher at Big Joe Rapids, Harding Hole, and the Warm Springs Rapids. The trip took several days, allowing time for the rafts to stop for hikes up Starvation Valley and Meeker’s Cave, where pictographs and petroglyphs and other artifacts remained from ancestral tribes. They camped at Rippling Brook, Anderson Hole, and Harding Hole. Bus Hatch was the evening’s star, recounting campfire yarns of Butch Cassidy and his gang, who had hidden here. A grandson, Tom Hatch, remembered that his grandfather “couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, but he could sure cuss and tell stories.”⁴

The trip ended at Echo Park, a luxuriant green canyon of cottonwoods and grasses surrounded by steppes of high-desert sagebrush. Here the Green and Yampa Rivers merged, and downstream they boiled down Whirlpool Canyon and beyond for 20 miles. Echo Park featured Dinosaur’s most striking geological masterpiece, Steamboat Rock. It was a sandstone monolith that rose abruptly 800 feet over the confluence of the Green and Yampa Rivers. The waters surged around three sides of the rock. For years after the controversy, when editors chose an image to represent the Echo Park conflict, they chose photographs of Steamboat Rock.

The proposed dam would be two miles downstream. The dam builders, the Bureau of Reclamation, described the Echo Park Dam as the “workhorse” that would drive its entire collection of dams and reservoirs in the upper Colorado River basin. It would be the mightiest of the dams north of Hoover and Lake Powell, rising 690 feet, costing $165 million, and creating a 107-mile-long reservoir.⁵ It would not bury Steamboat Rock, but it would reduce the monolith to a modest peninsula rising above the blue reservoir. The Echo Park Dam would pay for itself by producing hydroelectricity, which meant that a second dam had to be built farther down the river within Dinosaur at Split Mountain to catch and store the water to regulate flow downstream.

Nearly everyone who floated down the Yampa and Green came out of it with a new appreciation for the canyons. Brower was no exception. Two days after his return, he was still not getting any work done because he was so enthralled, he told one friend. “I have never had a scenic experience equal to that one.”⁶ Now, finally, he recognized why it needed to be saved.

Others in the conservation community were also beginning to awaken to the dangers at Echo Park and Split Mountain. News coverage of environmental and conservation issues was moribund in those days except for work by iconoclastic writers such as Bernard DeVoto, the first to sound an alarm in the July 22, 1950, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. In a story headlined “Shall We Let Them Ruin Our National Parks?” DeVoto wrote that Glacier, Grand Canyon, Mammoth Cave, and Dinosaur were all in danger. Referring to the Yampa and its beautiful canyons, he argued: “The deep artificial lakes would engulf the magnificent scenery, would reduce by from a fifth to a third the height of the precipitous walls, and would fearfully degrade the great vistas. Dinosaur National Monument as a scenic spectacle would cease to exist.”⁷

A year later, Sierra Club member and former president Harold Bradley and several of his children rafted the Yampa with Hatch. Near the whitewater of Whirlpool Canyon, Hatch pointed to a series of metal ladders that climbed the sandstone walls and explained that this was the site of a proposed dam. The Bradleys, who had reveled as they careened down the Yampa, were stunned that this canyon could be lost. “For sheer breathtaking beauty, color and variety, there is no other canyon run in the country to equal this one,” Bradley declared.⁸

Bradley pestered Brower and the Sierra Club to mount a campaign against the Dinosaur dams. Brower was not the only one who hesitated. John Muir may have been a rabble rouser when he created the Sierra Club in 1892, but his descendants for decades had preferred influence over confrontation, quiet, gentlemanly, closed-door negotiations and compromise as opposed to angry public protests and harsh accusations in public forums. After World War II, a new generation was taking over, but Bradley’s proposal was still a formidable change. Routine club decisions were made by the Executive Committee of the board of directors, but the elected board also took advice from several committees composed of members, including the Conservation Committee. Edgar Wayburn remembered one night in 1952 when up to forty members of that committee gathered to discuss the degree to which the club would join the fray. Like many that night, Wayburn was worried. Hardly anyone had been to Dinosaur, hardly anyone knew very much about it. They argued that night and eventually recommended that the club fight. The board agreed. “We realized in this campaign that we had to become national if we were going to succeed in this and other things that we saw ahead of us,” said Wayburn.⁹

By the summer of 1953, when Brower was on the river, the new Eisenhower administration and in particular its new Interior Department secretary, Douglas McKay, were deciding whether to back the dam builders. Eisenhower had been neutral and had campaigned in 1952 against twenty years of Democratic federal spending, including high-priced dams. McKay, the former governor of Oregon, was also difficult to figure. He had been a surprising choice as interior secretary. The one-time Chevy dealer from Salem did not impress journalist Elmer Davis. After attending McKay’s first press conference, Davis declared, “This man does not know the lower outlet of his alimentary system from a hole in the ground.”¹⁰

Brower focused on influencing the president and McKay. As summer turned to autumn, he produced a steady stream of correspondence, communication, and even a film. Wilderness River Trail was produced by a professional photographer, Charles Eggert, and it was a slick presentation of the glories of the high, sun-whitened canyon walls and the swift, aquamarine rivers. To counter claims that the rivers were too wild for any but the most adventuresome, the two Brower kids were seen often in the footage shot. The film, said Brower later, was “the most important thing we did in offsetting the Bureau of Reclamation’s propaganda; it was the hardest thing they had to fight.”¹¹

By now, McKay had ordered one of his new undersecretaries, Ralph Tudor, to investigate the Dinosaur project. An engineer who had designed the Bay Bridge connecting San Francisco to Oakland, Tudor spent three days floating down the Yampa and sleeping under the stars by the river. He was beguiled by the river canyons and, like many, flummoxed by their recent history.¹²

President Woodrow Wilson had created Dinosaur National Monument in 1915, setting aside 80 acres that contained a quarry with an amazing graveyard of dinosaur fossils. Paleontologist Earl Douglass of the Carnegie Museum had discovered them in the summer of 1909, and over the next fifteen years he identified more than four hundred Jurassic period dinosaurs and excavated more than twenty complete skeletons.¹³ It was a great paleontological discovery, one that a century later still drew more than 250,000 visitors each year to the quarry and its exhibits in one of the most isolated places in the country.¹⁴ In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appended another 203,885 acres, including the Green and Yampa River canyons, an area nearly as vast as the five boroughs of New York City. For legal and political reasons, the name “Dinosaur” was retained. The monument also remained nearly unknown because there were no roads into it.

The president and Congress would have to approve any dams in Dinosaur, a condition that many saw as no more than a technicality even if Eisenhower objected.¹⁵ The nation was enamored with dam builders and entranced by the mighty structures with names such as Bonneville, Boulder, and Grand Coulee.¹⁶ Western politicians were besotted by the engineers who could bring back bloom and life to a region of dust and depression. Between 1928 and 1956, Congress authorized the Bureau of Reclamation to build seventy-seven dams and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build hundreds more. The barriers were erected to irrigate the West’s sagebrush country thirsty for rainfall; the rivers bottled to prevent destructive flooding on the Columbia, the Tennessee, the Red, and other streams; the water squeezed to supply hydroelectricity. Electricity had become so cheap in the Northwest that no residents there insulated their homes; power consumption in the United States was the highest in the world, and an electric bill in Seattle was eight times lower than in New York City for the same number of kilowatts. For a representative or senator lucky enough to get a dam authorized in his district, it meant a bonanza in campaign contributions from the engineering and construction firms that won the multi-million-dollar contracts. Pork-barrel politics dictated that representatives and senators vote for new dams either in gratitude or in expectation of similar largess. Dams in the first half of the twentieth century had changed the face of America. Historian Marc Reisner calls this change “the most fateful transformation than has ever been visited on any landscape, anywhere.”¹⁷

And who was going to stop this juggernaut now, even if it scarred a national park or monument that had been set aside for its singular natural beauty? The National Park Service was charged with protecting Dinosaur, but it answered to McKay in the same executive-branch department as Reclamation. Whereas the dam builders had a budget of $205 million in 1953, the Park Service made do with $33 million.¹⁸ Parks were beloved, but the Park Service had no clout in Congress. Conservationists were equally unprepared. Since Theodore Roosevelt had left office in 1909, they seemed always to be on the defensive. Muir and the Sierra Club had lost a decisive battle in 1913 when Congress allowed the city of San Francisco to dam the beautiful Hetch Hetchy Valley within Yosemite National Park. Since the end of World War II, conservation organizations had been fighting just to preserve what they thought they had already protected, battling loggers in Olympic National Park and resort developers in Jackson Hole National Monument (later Grand Teton National Park). Ranchers were overgrazing federal land; roads were carving out pristine wilderness; and few heard conservationist’s objections. Today there are more than twelve thousand environmental organizations in the United States, many with huge staffs, and together they spend $15.5 billion annually. In contrast, the Sierra Club in 1953 had seven thousand members, one employee (Brower), and a budget of less than $100,000. The rest of what constituted the conservation movement consisted of a variety of local or specialized organizations. Although these organizations often joined under the same banner, many had conflicting missions, serving everything from garden clubs to hunting and fishing lodges and even bird-watchers. Plus, this was the 1950s, populated by what sociologists labeled the “silent” generation, in which conformity trumped protest and acceptance of the status quo overruled unseemly dissidence.¹⁹

It was no surprise, then, that as much as Tudor had relished his journey down the Yampa, he recommended and McKay quickly accepted sacrificing the Dinosaur river canyons and erecting the two proposed dams. The dams were simply too important as part of what the Bureau of Reclamation was calling the “Colorado River Storage Project.” The project was a massive, $3 billion package of reclamation plans, storage dams, and power facilities spread across six western states. Salt Lake City and the Wasatch Range would be funneled water; ranchers in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah would be able to irrigate exhausted range land; hydroelectricity would allow miners to better exploit natural resources; construction jobs would bolster local incomes, support greater services, and lower taxes from Wyoming to Arizona. Despite the loss of a scenic but remote river canyon, the project could be a bonanza, the equivalent of what the Tennessee Valley Authority had done for the Southeast.²⁰ Tudor and McKay emphasized that Echo Park was necessary for the project for one major reason—less water would be lost through evaporation there than at any other alternative sites for dams.²¹ They sent the plan to Congress, and hearings were scheduled to begin in 1954.

McKay would later admit that he and other dam supporters were caught off-guard by what happened next. Essentially, the conservation movement awoke in 1954. A range of journalists, environmentalists, and historians have called the year 1954 and the clash that was soon being led by Brower a “milestone” or “watershed” in the American conservation or wilderness movement.²² In the January issue of the Sierra Club Bulletin, Brower warned members that it was the time to stop compromising and to fight over Dinosaur. “There’s a touch-and-go election coming up in 1954,” he wrote. “We must all make it clear that conservation isn’t partisan, it’s American.”²³ The loose assemblage of garden clubs, fishermen, and bird lovers began to coalesce in what would eventually become an alliance of seventy-eight organizations. The outrage focused on the decision to invade a national park sanctuary; some called the Colorado River Storage Project the gravest assault on the national park system since it had been created in 1916. At a January 4, 1954, press conference in Washington, D.C., representatives of thirty-two of those groups voiced their united support for the campaign. Charles Collison, director of the National Wildlife Federation, declared, “There’s going to be one hell of a fight over this.”²⁴

Dam supporters also readied for the conflict. Backing for the dams was strong in eastern Utah towns such as Vernal, which bordered the national monument. Residents complained that a “fanatical group of nature lovers” opposed a project that would produce growth and wealth for their community. Bus Hatch told Brower that his neighbors were complaining that “those damn Californians are trying to steal our water” and that “we already have too much scenery in Utah anyway.” Support for dams throughout the Rocky Mountains had always been steady, and many in the region worried that a loss at Dinosaur could spell troubles elsewhere. “If we back down on Echo Park,” said George Pughe of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, “we’ll just get shoved around on other things.” Congressman Wayne Aspinall, who represented the Western Slope of the Colorado Rockies and headed a key committee in the House of Representatives that would decide the issue, was even more adamant. Deleting the Echo Park Dam, he said, would be “handing conservationists a tool they’ll use the next 100 years.”²⁵

Hearings were to begin in the House on January 18, 1954, and in the Senate in the spring. Brower had had a year of work already on Dinosaur, and he carefully considered what he should say. Most organizations wanted to stress the beauty of Dinosaur and how the dams would intrude into a national sanctuary. Brower agreed, but he wanted to go further—not just to defend, but to attack. McKay had based his support on the issue of evaporation, so Brower explored that issue for weaknesses. The science of evaporation rates was at best inexact. What was most interesting to Brower was the testimony given three years earlier by retired U.S. general Ulysses S. Grant III. The grandson of the famous Civil War general and president was a former engineer with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Grant now worked for the American Planning and Civic Association, which opposed the Dinosaur dams. Grant had found an error in the Bureau of Reclamation’s math on evaporation rates at the various dam sites. The most likely alternative to the two dams at Dinosaur was downstream at little-known Glen Canyon on the Arizona–Utah border, where the bureau also wanted to build a dam. In place of the Dinosaur dams, a higher dam with a larger reservoir could be built at Glen Canyon. Bureau engineers estimated, however, that this second option would cause far more water to be lost through evaporation, measured as an estimated 165,000 acre-feet per year more. But Grant pointed out that the bureau had failed to subtract the amount that would be lost at Echo Park and Split Mountain if those dams were not built. The evaporation rate was low, only 95,000 acre-feet per year. The bottom line was that by eliminating the loss at those two dams, the difference between the two alternatives was only 70,000 acre-feet per year, which made the difference between the two projects negligible.²⁶

Brower talked to evaporation experts. They warned him to be cautious. The strongest advice came from Luna Leopold, the son of the late wilderness advocate Aldo Leopold and a nationally recognized hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Leopold was disgusted with the dam builders, but as a government official he needed to be careful. He was willing to help Brower, but only secretly, and he warned Brower not to argue with Reclamation engineers. They knew far more and would win any technical argument. He especially urged caution on the evaporation issue, calling it “the height of folly to argue with the bureau.” He said the odds were that Reclamation engineers were more likely to be right than anyone the Sierra Club could find. “We can afford to be conservative,” agreed Harold Bradley, who had initiated the Sierra Club involvement in the Dinosaur dispute. Just showing photographs of what would be lost in Echo Park would be enough to win the argument.²⁷

None of this counsel impressed Brower. He felt that he had been told to “stick to your bird-watching.”²⁸ No one quite understood Brower. He had already demonstrated his willingness to take risks, even to gamble when confronted with personal danger. For years, he had climbed mountains. He had been a part of an elite climbing corps in the Sierra Club dedicated to first ascents. He rarely backed down from a challenge.

The House Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation hearing convened in mid-January. It would draw sixty-two witnesses, who testified over nine days in a hearing room crowded and cramped. Tudor, the first witness for the Department of the Interior, argued that the Echo Park and Split Mountain projects made the best economic sense. “The choice is simply one of altering the scenery of the Dinosaur National Monument without destroying it,” he said. There were alternative sites, a number of them, and he produced charts listing them as well as their attributes and drawbacks. “In the final analysis the increased losses of water by evaporation from the alternative sites is the fundamental issue upon which the department has felt it necessary to give any consideration to the Echo Park Dam and Reservoir.” He continued, citing detailed statistics on storage capacity and evaporation rates to justify his case.²⁹

Brower took copious notes, and the next day he reviewed the transcript when it became available. He was amazed by Tudor’s testimony. Although some of the numbers on evaporation rates were slightly different, Brower realized that Tudor had come “up with the same kind of error that had been made before and that General Grant had detected.”³⁰ The bureau still had not taken into account that if the dams at Echo Park and Split Mountain were not built, there would be no evaporation loss. It had failed to subtract the numbers from their calculations.

Tudor and other dam supporters spent two and a half days describing the benefits of the dams. Then the opponents had their turn. Many were passionate. Grant testified and again mentioned that the evaporation numbers remained suspect. Subcommittee members ignored the comment. Two of Harold Bradley’s adult sons, David and Stephen, showed photos of their river trips. “Echo Park is a temple which has been many millions of years in the building,” said David Bradley.³¹

The committee was into its second week of the hearing before it was Brower’s turn late on a Tuesday afternoon, January 26. He was nervous. “I did not take my pulse that day, but I knew it was there,” he recalled.³² He began his testimony by reminding the subcommittee of Tudor’s comments that the dams would not change Dinosaur. If that is the case, he argued, neither would a dam in Yosemite National Park between El Capitan and Bridalveil Falls. “After all, the ground would still be there, and the sky, and the distant views,” he said. “All you would have done is alter it, that is, take away its reason for being. Maybe ‘alter’ is not the right word. Maybe we should just come out with it and say ‘cut the heart out.’ ”

Then Brower, defying the expert’s advice not to argue with Reclamation’s figures, questioned the evaporation rates, not only in the comparisons between the projects but also in the estimates of how much would be lost by building a higher dam at Glen Canyon. Congress, he said, would make “a great mistake to rely upon the figures presented by the Bureau of Reclamation when they cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide.”

There was very little reaction from members of the subcommittee. Some may have been confused because the numbers Brower was providing in his testimony were different from those in the mimeographed statement Brower had prepared and distributed. Brower explained he had been revising them since he finished the statement the day before. The discrepancies were frustrating to some of the subcommittee members. The afternoon was coming to a close. They agreed to reconvene the next morning. They would see if Brower was really willing to continue with this assault.³³

The next morning, a blackboard had been placed prominently in the hearing room. In addition, Cecil Jacobson of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Denver office was in the room. Jacobson had been summoned to respond to Brower’s charges about the evaporation rates.

Brower willingly used the blackboard and scratched out his numbers again. Now his opponents on the subcommittee were more ready, although their amazement remained.

“Are you an engineer?” asked Representative Arthur Miller of Nebraska.

“No, sir, I am an editor,” replied Brower, adding that he was using ninth-grade math.

“You are a layman, and you are making that charge against the Bureau of Reclamation?” asked Representative Wayne Aspinall.

Added Representative William Dawson from Utah: “There are some 10,000 employees in the Bureau of Reclamation and 400 engineers in Denver, who have been investigating these sites and working on them. . . . [T]his is like taking the pistons out of the engine if we delete Echo Park, [and then] we must say that those engineers are all wrong.”

“My point is to demonstrate to this committee that they would be making a great mistake to rely upon the figures presented by the Bureau of Reclamation when they cannot add, subtract, multiply, or divide,” said Brower. “My point is not to sound smart, but it is an important thing.”

When it was Jacobson’s turn, he admitted to one small error, one so small he would only call it a “misprint.” He disputed Brower’s math—not the way he had added and subtracted, but the fact that he had even tried to tackle the complex formulas that went into estimates of how water evaporated. These formulas needed higher mathematics than what Brower had used, including a combination of algebra, plane geometry, trigonometry, and calculus. “You cannot use ratios and run the old slide stick and get any answer you want,” said Jacobson.

Dawson did not care. “It would surprise me if he does not know figures any better than you say he does.”³⁴

The subcommittee moved on. The many dam supporters were satisfied that Jacobson and the bureau had successfully rebutted Brower’s charges. Conservationists felt otherwise. Brower’s logic had the ring of truth, and they were sure that it would be persuasive over time. Further, they believed that they had found a new leader for their attacks. Howard Zahniser, who headed the Wilderness Society, was so elated he sent a telegram to the Sierra Club and praised Brower’s David-and-Goliath performance. “Salute him well,” wrote Zahniser. “He certainly hit the giant between the eyes with his five smooth stones.”³⁵

Nevertheless, Brower needed further proof of his claims.

He turned to Richard Bradley, another of Harold Bradley’s sons. Richard Bradley was a physics professor at Cornell University who knew almost nothing about the esoteric science of evaporation. He spent weeks talking to hydrology experts and reading the technical literature. He concluded that evaporation formulas, especially on a reservoir that had not yet been built, were extremely difficult to calculate.³⁶ The rate of error, he estimated, could be as high as 25 percent. It was, he wrote to his father, “evaporation-shmevaporation.” He was convinced, after his long study, that no one—and he emphasized those words—knew what really happened on a real lake. The Bureau of Reclamation, he concluded, had been brilliant in selecting this issue to document much of its case because no one could conclusively dispute the findings.³⁷ In other words, the Reclamation engineers held all the cards. Brower should not have challenged their numbers. And then Bradley received a letter that changed everything.

The message came from Floyd Dominy, then an acting assistant commissioner at Reclamation and soon to be one of Brower’s greatest nemeses. Dominy, who was known to play political games that undercut those ahead of him, wrote a letter that acknowledged that the evaporation numbers were wrong. The bureau had failed, as Grant and Brower had pointed out, to subtract the evaporation levels for Echo Park and Split Mountain. Then Dominy went further. He essentially agreed with Brower’s contention that the amount of water that would be lost from the surface of a large lake behind a dam at Glen Canyon had been overstated. The bureau’s numbers were now very close to Brower’s.³⁸

At Interior, Tudor was furious. “The rumor continues that some heads will fall in the bureau,” Luna Leopold told Brower. Leopold was so heartened by the victory that he was now openly working with Brower. Tudor had to publicly admit the mistake. Yet, despite the error, Tudor and McKay continued to support the Echo Park and Split Mountain dams, and they seemed to continue to have the backing of a silent Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Dinosaur dams remained preferable to a higher dam at Glen Canyon.³⁹

Brower was fairly certain that the engineers had not just been sloppy. Had they lied? “I don’t know what’s going on in their heads,” he replied when asked that question many years later. “I’ll use the General Grant line: I am forced to infer that they knew they were lying. I don’t think that they could otherwise have been so stupid.”⁴⁰

More important was the victory won not just by Brower but by the conservation community. His brilliant, bullheaded, near-arrogant strategy worked. The enemy was wounded, the challengers were heartened. It was still too early to tell who would win, but this issue was now a fight, the greatest for conservationists since Hetch Hetchy thirty years earlier, now being led by John Muir’s heir apparent.