DitchInTime

†† Title of speech given on February 2, 1939, by Denver Water special counsel Glenn Saunders.

Many Denver antagonists regard Glenn Saunders as a Machiavellian plotter. It is a fact that he is one of Colorado’s shrewdest water lawyers. . . . He is tough, devious, and dedicated. . . . Saunders has a way of making people mad at him and there are times when his public utterances have been viewed as indiscreet. . . .

Close associates of Saunders say he isn’t the ogre his critics depict. He simply doesn’t have time to be a goodwill ambassador while battling for Denver’s interests, and he firmly believes that Denver has always acted in good faith and abided by all laws.

The foothills area from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins is one of the perfect climates for thinking and living in the world. It is constantly attracting thousands of people who must have water.

When it comes to the history of western water, there is a select and short list of celebrities. Two of the best known are John Wesley Powell, explorer, naturalist, and author of the Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States in 1878, and Floyd Dominy, legendary commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation in the mid-twentieth century. While they were unquestionably historically significant figures, they both owed some portion of their celebrity status to their good fortune at falling into the hands of gifted and persuasive writers. In Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, Wallace Stegner told readers the tale of John Wesley Powell, a heroic and farsighted figure of the nineteenth century who recognized the limits of the West’s water and courageously defied the bullies and blowhards who insisted that the region’s resources were infinite, and Stegner’s readers have, for decades, applauded and cheered Powell. In Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner told his readers the tale of Floyd Dominy, a twentieth-century reincarnation of those bullies and blowhards whom Powell had been unable to defeat, and Reisner’s readers have, for decades, booed and hissed Dominy.

The name Glenn Saunders should join the select and short list of water history celebrities—because his work transformed the western landscape, and because his complexity puzzles us and makes us think. Neither Stegner nor Reisner could have handled him in a manner that would have given their readers a clear cue as to whether they should boo and hiss, applaud and cheer, or offer some jumbled combination of those two lively forms of expression.

The year 1918 carries double weight in the history of Denver Water: first, in the autumn of that year, the City and County of Denver purchased the Denver Union Water Company, and the Denver Water Board came into being; and second, a few months earlier, a thirteen-year-old Glenn Saunders got his first job through “a near neighbor” who happened to be the chief engineer of the Denver Union Water Company. Few summer jobs held by teenagers have launched an institutional tie of greater consequence for a person and for an entire region. “In the summer of 1918,” Glenn Saunders reminisced seven decades later, “I was employed to watch the float gauges on the clear water basins in the Capitol Hill Pump Station in Denver, which supplied water to everything east of the South Platte River.” The float gauges had to be watched carefully because “there were many wood-stave conduits” in the system. “If one of them broke,” Saunders said, “it needed to be known immediately,” and thus it was the job of the gauge-watcher to send out an instant alarm when a noticeable drop in pressure indicated trouble.3

After he completed law school at the University of Michigan in 1929, Saunders returned to Colorado and worked, first, in the city attorney’s office with a special assignment to the Denver Water Board. In 1937, “he took over full responsibility for the board’s water rights development.”4

Glenn Saunders stands beneath a bridge near Kremmling in November 1936, looking out at the Colorado River.

Over the next decades, he watched over and tended to the whole system as vigilantly and intensely as he had once watched over and tended those pressure gauges, sending out an instant alarm when he detected signs that the system was in jeopardy. He was an unflagging advocate for the cause of securing water for the clients of Denver Water. The well-being of Colorado rested on the well-being of its capital city, Saunders believed, and thus Denver’s access to Western Slope water dwarfed the concerns of farmers and nature lovers. His claims for Denver’s importance went nationwide in scale: “Our growth,” he said, “is as much to the advantage of the United States as it is to Denver.”5

Saunders played a crucial role in the city’s major transmountain diversion projects from the Fraser, Williams Fork, and Blue Rivers in the Colorado River Basin. His single-minded energy was so striking and so effective that he was at once a force reshaping nature and a force of nature. Whether he battled his counterparts on the Western Slope who wanted to keep water in its basin of origin to support their own plans for economic development, or faced off against environmental advocates who wanted to put the brakes on development so that water would flow unrestricted in streams and rivers, Saunders used every legal, political, and rhetorical weapon he could devise. When it comes to a wholehearted and unyielding campaign of a public official on behalf of the water-managing organization that employed him, Saunders played at the top of the major leagues. He was one of the most forceful and, accordingly, one of the most controversial figures in western water history.

And, in a proposition that some might initially dispute, he was a complicated person, impossible to categorize in a simple way.

For residents on the Western Slope, however, placing Glenn Saunders in a simple category presented itself as one of life’s easier tasks. Especially in the 1950s and the early 1960s, the language used by his opponents to characterize Saunders calls into question the premise that Americans once operated in a serene and civil arena of public discussion, a treasured tenet of twenty-first-century nostalgia. Saunders, wrote William Nelson in the Western Slope’s Grand Junction Sentinel in 1955, refused to “accept any limitations.” Under his direction, “Denver has attempted every means that came to mind in the past thirty years to steal Western Colorado water.” Denouncing Saunders’s “usual ruthless tactics,” the Grand Junction Sentinel editors said that “his screaming is infantile and silly,” a form of posturing intended “to make Denver citizens think he is a gallant knight riding a white charger to defeat those selfish barbarians west of the mountains.” There would be no chance of statewide unity, the Sentinel said, “as long as Saunders runs the Denver Water show on the theory that might makes right and to the devil with anyone who disagrees.”6

Of course, when it came to harsh and sharp-edged remarks, Saunders gave as good as he got. Headed toward one showdown, when Saunders insisted that the origin of the conflict lay in the “selfish motives” of the Western Slope advocates and their “narrow and provincial” point of view, his use of the adjectives selfish, narrow, and provincial demonstrated the enthusiasm that pots often have for calling kettles black. Both Saunders and the Western Slope folks put their home areas first; the Western Slope people just had the poor luck to be defending the wrong subregion. Even when he spoke of legal transactions that left experienced lawyers befuddled, he used terms of seeming simplicity: “Western Colorado interests” conducted “a continuing effort” to “prevent the development” of “water to which we are clearly entitled.” It is interesting to contrast the certainty of Saunders’s assertion with a description of this particular showdown (the litigation leading up to the Blue River Decree of 1964) by an astute and thoughtful reporter: “Many distinguished lawyers and water experts are confused by all the ramifications of the Blue River water battle.” The more confused they were, the more Glenn Saunders scented opportunity.7

Some episodes of Saundersian bluntness leave the reader nearly breathless. On one occasion, Saunders was taking a deposition from the executive director of Trout Unlimited, Robert Weaver. To Saunders, the fact that Weaver had not been born in Colorado meant that he had little standing to criticize the practices of the Denver Water Board (a curious position in itself for a man who spent his career supporting the need for more water in order to accommodate the needs and desires of newcomers to the state). This line of questioning brought Weaver’s attorney, J. Kent Miller, into a memorable exchange with Saunders. Trying to place Saunders’s belief in the legitimacy of the native-born into a longer historical context, Miller asked him, “Did the Indians require a permit from your ancestors to settle in Colorado?”

“No,” replied Saunders. “We killed them off and conquered them because we were stronger and more aggressive and if they rise again, I am willing to do that again.”

Miller may have felt a moment’s tilt toward speechlessness, but he pressed on: “So your property rights are superior because of your ability to conquer?”

His ability to conquer, Saunders explained, derived from “my superior intellect and physique, this is exactly right, the same as your folks. That is why we are here, too. We are superior people and we should be proud of it and use it well, and I am not ashamed of being superior to some of the people I have seen in this world.”8

This exchange, it may be useful to point out, occurred in 1974, not 1874. In fact, Saunders was a fluent speaker of the language of nineteenth-century westward expansion.

“As we get more civilized,” he said in 1944, “we’ll need more water. It always happens that way.” Even when twentieth-century words like ecology entered his expressions, they produced no noticeable softening of his point of view. “We are living . . . in an uninhabitable area,” Saunders said in 1971. “We changed the ecology to get what we have here, to improve our environment.”9

Readers may now be puzzling over my earlier assertion of Saunders’s complexity. Saunders may seem to fit every specification as an uncomplicated advocate for the building of dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and treatment plants for the benefit of the Denver Water Department and its service area. At this point, he may seem to be the embodiment of W. E. B. DuBois’s great aphorism, “It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force.”

In a textbook of environmental history published in 1999, historian John Opie quotes a person he only identifies as “a local Colorado attorney” named Glenn Saunders. Opie is a member of an earlier generation of environmental historians who were themselves committed supporters of environmentalism and whose historical writings thus made a clear distinction between bad guys (heartless pursuers of profit who forced their will on nature) and good guys (principled souls who opposed the despoliation of nature). Thus, when he quotes at length from this fellow named Saunders, Opie’s approval of the sentiments in the quotation is unmistakable. In this passage, Saunders was expressing his opinion of a new dam, the Narrows, proposed by the Bureau of Reclamation to benefit a comparatively small number of farmers on the eastern plains of Colorado. (Readers in the habit of skipping over long block quotations should make an exception for this one!)

The people who support these boondoggle projects are always talking about the vision and principles that made this country great. “Our forefathers would have built these projects!” they say. “They had vision!” That’s pure nonsense. It wasn’t the vision and principles of our forefathers that made this country great. It was the huge unused bonanza they found here. One wave of immigrants after another could occupy new land. There was topsoil, water—there was gold, silver, and iron ore lying right on top of the earth. We picked our way through a ripe orchard and made it bare. We’ve been so busy spending money and reaping the fruits that we’re blind to the fact there are no more fruits. By trying to make things better [by building dams], we’re making them worse and worse.10

In its wholehearted, no-holds-barred condemnation of American exploitation of nature, this was a quotation certain to earn the approval of historian and environmental advocate John Opie. Asking a few background questions about the speaker would only have led to trouble, ruining a perfect quotation.

In multiple field tests, I have asked audiences to listen to this quotation and, from it, deduce where Saunders registered in the spectrum of opinion on nature and its uses. This exercise will consistently yield the answer, “He was a strong environmentalist and opponent of dam building.” When told that Saunders actually spent his career getting dams built and fighting environmentalists, these audiences are presented with one of life’s prime opportunities to reckon with the complexity of historical figures.

The passage that charmed John Opie most likely came to his attention through a reading of the very popular book on water projects in the West, Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. Unlike Opie, Reisner did pay attention to the bigger picture of Saunders’s identity, recognizing him as “the man who championed water development for fifty years in Colorado.” To explain the curious relationship between the goals that drove Saunders’s career and the very lively quotation that John Opie seized upon, Reisner offers the proposition that the Narrows project was so terrible, particularly in its cost–benefit ratio, that it made a new man of Saunders. “As he readily admits,” Reisner wrote, “it changed his whole way of looking at things.”11

It would be nice to know if that were true. Before we accept it, it would be important to remind ourselves that the Narrows Dam was a competing project that might intrude on Denver Water’s plans. Furthermore, Saunders had always been intensely critical of the federal government, and he and the Bureau of Reclamation struggled for years over the operation of the bureau’s Green Mountain Reservoir on the Blue River. So, while Reisner’s change-of-attitude explanation is thought provoking, a continuity-of-attitude hypothesis may be more convincing, since giving the Bureau of Reclamation fits had been a long-running enthusiasm and a source of considerable satisfaction for Saunders. Similarly, Saunders held a clear preference for urban and domestic use of water over agricultural irrigation; there was thus nothing particularly novel in his challenging a dam that would offer no advantage to Denver.

When it comes to peering into the human soul, the equivalent to X-rays, MRIs, or CT scans awaits a higher level of engineering. The project of figuring out what lay behind Saunders’s late-in-life condemnation of the American exhaustion of natural resources will be an endless one. It is unmistakably true that Saunders had an expert theatricality (not uncommon in gifted attorneys) that allowed him to shift rhetorical style and tone as some opportunities closed down and others opened up. Was his spirited reappraisal of the pioneer heritage of the United States a matter of Saunders choosing a new script for the mid- and late 1970s? Or was he simply enjoying the opportunity to pick up a two-by-four and whale away at his old rival, the Bureau of Reclamation?

Whatever Saunders was doing, he was not cooperating with any simple efforts to categorize him.

In 1965, eleven years before the Narrows Dam controversy, Glenn Saunders put on public record the most striking evidence of his complexity. The setting was, at first glance, entirely improbable: Saunders was in Vail, giving a principal speech at the second annual Colorado Open Space conference, sponsored by the Colorado Mountain Club. The invitation itself deserves a moment of wonder: the most visible advocate of damming and diverting Western Slope rivers in remote, scenic locales was going to give a keynote speech to a group of environmentalists fighting to preserve the open spaces in which Saunders and his allies wanted to place dams.

The wonder only deepens when we contemplate the content of Saunders’s speech. He recognized the devotion of his audience to the preservation of “natural beauty” and to “conservation.” With equal directness, he acknowledged “his lifelong devotion to developing the water system for Denver at the expense of the most beautiful streams in Colorado.”

Halfway through the newspaper’s report of the summary of this speech, nearly half a century after Saunders delivered it, one moves to the edge of one’s seat, wondering what on earth will happen next. In a room seeming to contain people so dramatically in opposition, would Saunders be shown to the door while the moderator of the conference announced an unscheduled coffee break, during which a speaker who made a better fit to the occasion would undergo an emergency recruitment?

On the contrary, Saunders and his audience stuck it out. He said that the attendees at the open space conference were the kind of group “that can give us a better world.” In solidarity with them, he declared his belief that “the world is a temple left to us as a sacred trust.” But the sacred trust could not be honored until human beings recognized that they themselves were the greatest threat to the earthly temple. “As long as we have so little intelligence as to limiting the population,” Saunders declared, “we cannot expect the kind of society we want.” Americans believed that there must be “more people, more prosperity, more and more and more and more. . . . Never is there the civilized idea,” he lectured, “that at some point we should be able to stabilize population, economy, numbers—without destroying the attunement of the human race to the whole universe.” If Americans truly wanted to create the kind of society they desired and protect the environment, Saunders explained, the solution was as clear as the alternative: “Reach for the cause bringing about the horrible condition. Otherwise people like me will be out to destroy the natural beauty of the country.”12

Consider the context of late September 1965. Saunders gave his speech to the Colorado Open Space conference on September 25, and the newspaper story summarizing it appeared on September 26. Three days later, another story appeared, with the headline “Leave Granted to Saunders by Water Board.” It would not be the wildest guess to speculate that learning of Saunders’s speech at Vail had annoyed the members of the Denver Water Board to the point where they thought that they might enjoy a little break from his company. Until people could limit their numbers, he had said to the open space advocates, “grim necessity requires me to destroy the basic values for which you all strive.” It was and is hard to take in the idea that the most widely recognized official of the Denver Water Board had said such a thing on public record. It might also be reasonable to suppose that the board was not thrilled that their staff attorney and de facto spokesman also had a private practice beyond the commissioners’ control. And yet the stated reason for granting a leave of absence was entirely unrelated to the speech or Saunders’s practice. Saunders was a “chronic asthma sufferer,” and the leave was given for “health reasons” because “board members felt he was near collapse.” This timing is striking. When Saunders spoke at Vail, did his blunt honesty there arise in part from a sense of his own frailty and mortality? Can such a question ever receive even a hint of an answer?13

Readers now finding themselves moved to rescue Saunders from historical obscurity by celebrating him as a farsighted and courageous prophet of the dilemmas of an expanding human population should, however, reckon with the next layer in the man’s complexity. In an article in The Denver Post in 1967, reporter Lee Olson wrote of Saunders’s thoughts about the burdens posed by human numbers: “He concedes there is a population problem in the long run. He sees birth control, coupled with deliberate efforts to improve the population, as logical.” Saunders told the reporter that “the day is coming when we will control not only the volume but the quality of our population.”14

Saunders seems to have been an enthusiast for eugenics, the deliberate breeding of a human population in favor of certain traits and characteristics. This is a stance that once had many admired supporters, with Theodore Roosevelt as one of the most prominent, voicing his concerns about the “race suicide” of white Americans who were failing to reproduce with proper competitive pep. By the 1960s, the casting of some groups of people as superior and some as inferior, in the manner of Saunders’s lively remarks on the conquest of Indian people, had become a matter of considerable discomfort and dismay. Curiously, like Roosevelt, who had struggled as a child against illness and frailty, Saunders claimed status as a specimen of genetic superiority while enduring a lifelong struggle with frailty. But he was also, in the Rooseveltian manner, an athlete, dominating the action on Denver handball courts as he often dominated the action in courts of law.

His respiratory problems did not interfere with living a long and productive life, and Saunders continued to work long after his retirement. In writing the history of a public official, stating when they took their offices and when they left those offices is usually a matter of simple and elemental factuality. Not so, however, with the complicated Glenn Saunders. The process of his departure from the position of lead counsel for Denver Water is hard to reconstruct with precision. After his 1965 leave of absence, in February 1966, The Denver Post carried the headline “Water Counsel Eased Aside.” Eased aside, of course, is quite a different verb from fired or terminated or dismissed. “The Denver Water Board graciously eased its veteran attorney, Glenn G. Saunders,” the reporter summarized this transaction, “out of any policy-making or managerial functions and made him an outside legal consultant with offices removed from the water department.” He would, however, “enjoy the same salary.” Saunders said “he was happy with the board action because it will help him to regain his health.” The board’s goal was to narrow the scope of his authority: “He will continue to represent the department,” the Post said, “but he won’t have a voice in how the department is operated,” a doubtful prediction given Saunders’s forceful personality and deep interest in the affairs of the Denver Water Board. It was an overly hopeful notion and perhaps an overly rosy rendition of the truth. Years later, an obituary for Saunders recounted the story rather differently: “In 1966, Saunders sent the water board into turmoil when he quit and took with him the city’s best water attorneys to form the 17th Street law firm of Saunders, Snyder, Ross & Dickson.” After formal declarations of an “easing aside,” “that firm sold its advice back to the water board for hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.”15

Whatever the true circumstances of his departure from his post, Saunders’s Western Slope opponents were not comforted or reassured by news of Saunders’s shift in status. In an editorial, the Grand Junction Sentinel repeated its usual characterization: “Saunders was long considered to be a virtual dictator in water board affairs.” A technical change in his status meant little: “Outspoken, shrewd, and ruthless,” Saunders would “never relent in his efforts to get as much water as possible for the capital city.” Rather than being fooled by an administrative shuffling, “western Colorado organizations must not relax their vigilance one minute.”16

In truth, it was not easy to detect much in the way of change in Saunders’s visibility or in his central role as Denver Water’s legal representative. Three years later, the board formally recognized Saunders’s retirement at age sixty-five, which would certainly have been a peculiar ritual to observe if Saunders had actually severed his connection to the board in 1966. “He’s unlikely to head for a rocking chair with his drive and dedication,” the board said, prophesying accurately this time, in its formal recognition in 1969; “it’s likely he will remain an important force in Denver’s water future.”17

Even though The Denver Post carried a headline announcing “Water Attorney Will Retire” on August 27, 1969, there were many occasions in the years after 1969 when Saunders represented the Denver Water Board in court, presented a plan for a particular project to the board, or announced the department’s policies. In 1973, four years after Saunders’s ostensible retirement, when several environmental groups and cities came together to file a suit challenging the legitimacy of Denver Water’s transmountain diversions, Saunders asserted the city’s rights and dismissed the arguments of the suit. “The Board has the authority to divert . . . water from the Western Slope,” Saunders was quoted in the article, with no evident slippage either in his authority to speak for Denver Water or in the force with which he spoke. “He added that Denver has no obligation to consult Western Slope voters on its water rights decisions.” When this suit came to trial two years later, the Rocky Mountain News reported that the “young attorney” J. Kent Miller was “pitted against the savvy Glenn Saunders, 71,” who had been the Water Board’s “special counsel for forty-five years.” Nine years after he had been “eased aside,” and six years after his official retirement, Saunders’s level of activity on behalf of his employer did not seem dramatically diminished.18

Glenn Saunders at age fifty-nine in 1963. For many Coloradans of the era, his was the face of the Denver Water Board.

Glenn Saunders was often singled out as the public face of the Denver Water Board, and his outspokenness made him a very visible figure. “Glenn Saunders IS the Denver Water Board,” the editors of the Grand Junction Sentinel wrote, encapsulating a widely shared opinion. “Whatever he decides, the Board does.” This was an exaggeration; Saunders was only one person—albeit one very active, visible, and audible person—working for a big and complicated organization. But his historical role in the expansion of the water supply and delivery system for the city of Denver was genuinely and provably enormous. Thousands of people who have lived, worked, and prospered in Denver are indebted to a man whose name they do not recognize. In truth, the degree of his departure from public memory is unsettling. One thorough, detailed, and reliable history of Denver, for instance, published in 1990, the year of his death, does not have the entry Saunders, Glenn in the index.19

At the time of his “retirement,” the Denver Water Board noted that the existence of “a metropolis” in “a semiarid location” with “meager water supplies” was “a tribute to men such as Glenn G. Saunders.” “Friends and enemies alike,” the board said, “respect Saunders and most would label him one of the nation’s most brilliant water attorneys.” In a resolution passed September 15, 1969, the manager of Denver Water and the board declared that Saunders’s “zeal and unlimited dedication to the best interest of the Water Department warrant[ed] the establishment of an appropriate memorial.” Thus, the board resolved, “The Board of Water Commissioners of the City and County of Denver shall, and does hereby, authorize the selection and designation of an appropriate water facility in the Water Department to be known and named in honor of GLENN G. SAUNDERS.” The next step would be the “selection of an appropriate water facility” to be “named in his honor.”20

Other priorities seized the attention of the Denver Water Board, and the resolution to select a facility to name after Saunders fell by the wayside. Indeed, it is difficult to conjure up a statement that would fit in the constrained space of a brass plaque or a stone panel and, at the same time, adequately address Saunders’s complexity. Moreover, by the 1970s, the rapid pace of change in American attitudes toward nature would have made it a challenge to find the right tone and emphasis with which to celebrate the heritage left by a man who had offered for the public record many very blunt condemnations of popular trends of his times. In 1958, contemplating early moves toward the Wilderness Act of 1964, Saunders asked, “How can any right-thinking American give serious consideration to wilderness legislation which will hamper [necessary] water development?” Proposals for wilderness, he proclaimed, offered “but one striking example of the damage which will be done to our economy, if we fail to curb the present threatening trend to restrict use of our federally owned natural resources for the exclusive benefit of our people.” As the environmental regulations of the 1960s and ’70s announced Americans’ changing views of the environment, Saunders did not fall into step. In 1975, speaking of the impact of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, he reiterated his view that “requiring all these unnecessary environmental impact statements is upsetting the entire economy of our country.” 21

With his name attached to statements such as these, the scripting and orchestrating of the dedication ceremony for a Saunders Tunnel, a Saunders Reservoir, or a Saunders Treatment Plant would have strained the talents and shaken the morale of the most fluent, nimble, and conciliatory of speechwriters and event planners. And yet those speechwriters would also have been able to draw on a stockpile of quotations from Saunders in which he spoke for collaboration and cooperation. “All efforts should be made to try to resolve the controversial issues,” he said in December 1963. “Avoidance of a long and bitter court battle would be in the best interests of all parties.” Denver and the Front Range should “sit around a table and try to iron out some of the major issues.”22

Since long and bitter court battles seemed to be the habitat in which Glenn Saunders thrived (“This is what I enjoyed most about the practice of law: the adversary proceeding,” he acknowledged as an old man, “the vigor of a head-to-head contest.”), his expression of a preference for a more congenial, less litigious way of dealing with water conflicts unavoidably evokes skepticism.23

And yet, whether or not those statements were heartfelt, they accurately forecast the future for Denver Water in which unilateral action would yield to negotiation, and “sitting around tables trying to iron out some of the major issues” would become, in a post-Saunders world, the major line of work for the agency’s leaders. Did this mean that there had been a fundamental and institutional change? Or did it mean that a pleasant and well-tailored velvet glove had been fitted over an unyielding iron fist? Here is a riddle as challenging as the conundrum posed by the complex character of Glenn Saunders.

Was there any substance in Marc Reisner’s theory that, late in life, Glenn Saunders reversed his attitude toward dams? A memorable story told by Saunders’s longtime law partner, Jack Ross, calls Reisner’s model into doubt. Very near the end of his life, the Water Law Section of the Colorado Bar Association notified Saunders that he had been elected “to the newly created Ancient and Honorable Order of the Water Buffalo.” Though “gravely ill,” Saunders “turned on his dictating machine and responded by thanking them for the honor.” But he was not instantly convinced that they had made the right “choice of symbolic animal.” “He said,” Ross reported, “that the buffalo was merely a beast of burden, while the beaver would have been a better choice for a symbol, because it is an industrial, self-starting builder of dams.” There are a number of clues that the conversion Reisner thought that he observed in Glenn G. Saunders registered just a step or two short of complete.24