Chapter 1

By Harry E. Sever

©1955 by Harry E. Sever and is cataloged in the Library of Congress under Catalog Card Number 54-10247.

"WHERE IN HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE GOING?  Who said you could come on my territory?  Explain yourself or get off my range."

The speaker was a tall, gaunt, be whiskered sheepherder perched on a lookout's point on a sheep range below Coyote Mountain.  The range overlooked the Columbia River near Rock Island in Rock Island Precinct.

The ragged herder spoke roughly to a well-clad, well-built man of about thirty, clean-shaven and well-dressed in a neat outfit branding him a civil engineer.  The young man was winded from carrying his tripod and transit up the steep hill.

"Take it easy, pardner" he said.  "Relax.  I'm not going to damage your property or trespass long.  We're making a survey for the dam we're going to build down there at the Island.  We need a benchmark up here on the hill to shoot our instruments at.  I can't see why you should object.  The dam will be a wonderful thing for you and the whole country.

"Dam be damned!  They could no more dam that river there in those rapids than they could fly to the moon.  I don't see why they want to spend taxpayers' money and pay you a good salary, to keep you well-fed and well-clothed in them fancy pants.  You look to me like a regular dude playboy, all shaved and powdered up like a pimp.  And it's taxpayers' money you're spending.  Look at me!  See how I live and dress to support you in luxury?  And here you are wasting your time and all that money --- and on my land, to boot -- on a fool's errand.  A damned fool errand.  If I didn't want someone to talk to I'd make you get the hell out of here."

"Oh, I wouldn't do that, pal.  Let's try and get along.  Why not talk while I set up my instruments and get my stakes set?  I need a permanent monument or bench mark" said the surveyor, as he cautiously but deliberately went ahead unpacking and setting up.  "Go ahead, unburden yourself while I work; it wont bother me.  I'd like to hear your beef, and after I get through with my work I'll tell you what I see from my squint at the picture."

The sheepherder shrugged.  "I ain't got nothing against you personal, I guess, except your fancy look and fancy airs and damn fool notions, and I guess your damn stakes or monuments won't do no good or harm neither.  The sheep'll soon shove ?em over and tramp ?em down.  So why should I worry?  Yeah, why should I worry?"  He put out his hand.  "Name's Dan McArthur.  What's yours?"

"Chester Evans.  Pleased to meet you, Dan.  Put ?er there.  Let's shake on a long friendship."

"Chester!   Fancy-pants name, too, but I shouldn't hold that against you.  Evans?  Bill Evans is the best and only friend I got left except old Shep and the dumb sheep.  Evans, huh?  By golly, you do look something like Old Bachelor Bill Evans.  Maybe there is something to that old story about him having the boss's daughter for a girl friend years ago."  He laughed.  "Who would a-thunk it?"

Chet smiled amiably.  "What are you insinuating?  You'd better not be reflecting on my parentage... at least not until I have time to look up Old Bachelor Bill, as you call him.  Where does he live??

"See that old tumbled-sown shack, that haywire weed patch that was once called a farm over there on the lower shoulder of the ridge?  That is, or was, his place.  He may be holed up there if he ain't to town or looking for work."

Suddenly, Dan reared up and dashed away, waving his arms in wide motions and shouting, "Yo, Shep, yo! Way out around ?em! Round ?em up!  Bring ?em back!"  He walked back toward Chet.

Dan's outburst had startled Chet.  He watched with interest as the dog worked.  "Smart dog you have there," he remarked.

"Yeah, smarter than some humans, but he's getting old and lazy.  Look at those damn sheep.  Shep's been around here long enough to do his work without being told, but if he and I both get to watching you... those sheep'll be scattered all over hell's half-million acres.  Guess I'll havta get tough with him."

"Hurry up, Shep," he shouted, "Keep going!"  Then to Chet again, "Some herders believe in beating hell out of their dogs.  But I hate to do it.  He's getting old and slow and hates to hurry and what's the use?  What does it buy you?  I've hurried and worried all my life and look at me.  Look at me, fancy pants.  What do your see?  What has it bought me?  Debt, dirt, rags and despair... that's what you and your high-taxing, high-spending Hover Republican administration has brought me.  Hoover Dam?  Damn Hoover!  And now you say you're going to build Rock Island Dam and at my expense.  Yeah, heah, go ahead.  It can't be done.  It's a physical impossibility.  Besides, the government is broke, busted.  Look at the national debt.  Look at my debts.  Look at everybody's debts.  The whole world is broke, I tell you, and now they're trying to build more dams to irrigate more land to raise more wheat, more wool, more meat... when we tot overproduction now and no price and no markets.  Oh, the fool meddling federal government.  It's almost enough to make a man see red.  Taxing and spending, taxing and spending."  He threw his arms up.  "I shouldn't get so worked up or you'll think I'm as crazy as the average loco sheepherder.  But honestly I ain't, and I ain't as ignorant as I seem.  I went past the eighth grade.  Sure, I'm ragged and dirty.  Been worked to death doing a three-man job in lambing time.  No time to bathe, even if I had enough water.  Them slimy new-born lams that I have to pick up and pack around get my clothes all greased-up this way.  But I don't mind.  You get used to it after a time."

"Have you and your family been in this territory long?," Chet asked.

"Long enough.  My father took up and bought these thousands of acres in the early days.  Started running cattle and prospected.  Then he broke out the sod and sage and started farming in a small way, first several hundred acres, then several thousand than wasn't rocky.  He laid the best back on top of that far ridge.  Other neighbors came in and prospered.  They built a schoolhouse and also used it for a church and community center for a dozen families.  They all had large families and worked hard too.  Taxes and farmin' cost were low then.  We did all with bunch- grass-fed cayuses and didn't have to pay for high priced gasoline from town.

"At first everybody prospered, built comfortable homes, sent their kids to school -- at least in the wintertime.  Prices were good, too, then.  No overproduction.  Dad had a lot of rough land that wasn't fit to farm, so he always kept a lot of cattle and always had a few carloads to sell off every fall.

"Yes, we were prosperous then.  But soon the land became cropped out and began to blow.  Then we had dry years with hot, burning winds and crop failures.  Farmers began to starve and drive away.  But Dad held on and bought out for a song those that were leaving.  Finally, he owned almost the whole range."

Dan picked up a clod of dirt, broke it up, and threw it away.

"Crops and prices became poorer and poorer, and farm wages became higher and help scarcer.  The land began to blow and drift worse every year.  The more land a person owned, the worse off he was.  Yes, Dad sure was land poor.  Tractors became our power, and we could farm more acres in less time.  But tractors and gas and combine harvesters cost a lot of money.  The more we farmed or tried to farm of those darned blowing sands, the poorer we became."

"Dad was busted and gave up the ghost... turned all his debts and drifting sands offer to me.  I couldn't raise enough wheat for seed, and I couldn't buy any, so I let the land go back to weeds to keep it from all blowing away.  Finally, I got hold of a few of these damned, dumb woollies.  My dad was a real cattleman, never had any use for sheep or sheepmen.  What would he think if he were alive and saw me now?  But it was the only thing left for me to do."

"My band of sheep increased gradually.  Weeds and then cheat grass took root on the farmed-out land and made some pasture.  I did pretty fair for a few years when I was first married, but the bottom dropped out of wool and lamb prices and we had a lot of doctor bills for the wife and babies.  Dad's long-term mortgages with interest came due, and I couldn't renew them.  The banker said the big loan companies wouldn't loan much money on farm lands and none at all on deserted fields grown up to weed and cheat as mine were.  He got tough.  Last year he took all the cash from the sale of my lambs and wool and wouldn't advance a cent to me for labor, feed or expenses."

"They'll come any day now and kick me off my range and take possession of the sheep.  They might as well... I can't shear them all alone, anyway.  As it is, I cared for the critters all year without any help from anybody.  I only stuck around because I felt sorry for them and old Shep.  Now I'm tired of working for nothing.  They can have the sheep."

"So, go ahead and stick up your stakes and monuments, and try to build you damned dam.  It can't be done, and I know it, but why should I care how much you knock yourself out trying.  Come to think of it, I haven't paid taxes for several years anyway, so it ain't my money your wasting."

"See that poor little lamb down there in that ravine?  Thank goodness it has quit kicking.  It will make a meal for some coyote.  There's another one that Johnny Clark won't get when he comes to bring me to mail."

"Johnny and I have a trade on.  Don't let this leak out to the banker.  The sheep are mortgaged, you know, and I can't sell, trade, or even give a sick one away.  I have to have some one that will bring me supplies, so every week Johnny comes out on his saddle horse with a few extra gunny sacks tied on, and packs back the bum lambs that are about sure to die on me anyway.  He doctors them up and seems to make them do quite well.  He has a theory that the soil here is lacking in iodine and some other mineral elements.  The veterinarian told him that was why so many of my lambs were born with goiter.  Goiter prevents them from nursing."

"Johnny says that's why I loose about one fourth of my lamb crop every year.  If I gave them mineral feed, with bone meal and iodine, at five bucks a hundred pounds... probably all salt at a half-cent per pound -- then the lambs wouldn't be born with goiter and born to die, poor innocent critters."

"But one thing sure, I don't murder ?em like some sheepmen I know.  I just let nature take its course.  If they live, they live.  If the die, they die.  Live and let live, that's my motto."

"Some big outfits gives every herder a jackknife with a long sharp blade to slit the throats of every twin and every big-throated bummer lamb.  They dig large pits near their maternity shed and fill them with hundreds of goitered lambs every spring.  Mass murder, mass burial."

"Not for me.  I can't draw blood.  I hate the sight of blood and pain.  Some farmers even kill off their old wore-out horses.  Not me."

He sighed and a pained expression come over his face.  "Chet, believe it or not, I've been accused of murder.  You wouldn't think it to look at me, would you?  By the way, you haven't seen anything in your travels of a middle-aged woman and two kids, a boy and a girl, wandering around lost, have you?"  He went on without waiting for an answer.

"You see, my family walked out on me, or went to the river and got drowned or something.  I reported it to the sheriff, but I didn't dare leave the sheep to go look for them.  The sheriff hunted all over but couldn't find any sign of them.  And I've looked in every ravine and canyon on this range.  God knows where they are."  He shuddered.  "I hate to think of coyotes and buzzards picking bones.  Might not all be sheep bones."  He picked up a rock and tossed it at the canyon.  "Who could have been so low," he said angrily, "as to accuse me of murdering them?"

Chet, during this one-way conversation, had set up his instruments and gone to work.  He was thankful that Dan had not been to hostile.   He had made considerable progress.

First, he drove a stake, neatly marked with figures showing distances and elevations.  Then, setting his transit above it, with the plumb bob hanging directly over a nail countersunk in the center of the stake-head, he figured his angles and estimated elevations.  All the while, he listened carefully to Dan's monologue.  He was glad no answers were required of him.  Sheep herders, Chet knew, didn't know the meaning of dialogue.  Accustomed to talking to themselves or to a dog, without expecting an answer, Sheep herders become expert in one-way conversation.

But now Dan had about run down and he needed an answer.

"Knowing me as you do from just this visit, you wouldn't accuse me of killing my family, would you?  I want to know.  Yes or no?"

"Positively no" Chet said without hesitation.  "I'm glad you told me your story.  I pronounce you innocent of any such accusations.  You've been an expert witness and cleared yourself in my eyes.  A sheepherder that won't beat hell out of his dog, that can't put a dying lamb out of its agony, or kill poor old worn-out horse would never murder his family.  On a stack of Bibles, I swear it.  You're innocent."

"Thanks for your verdict," said Dan, "I'm beginning to like you.  Too bad you were duped into working on such a fool errand.  You're just fooling the public, that's all, squinting through that instrument and scratching on that book like you thought you were doing something to earn your pay.  As I see it, it's nothing but a make-work proposition.  With no chance of completion.  Can't you see that white water in those rapids?  Ain't no one ever told you of the dozens of people, Indians and whites, who've already been drowned in these falls and rapids.  There's where some of our first Northwest river explorers met their doom, and that's where you'll meet yours if you actually ever get so foolish as to attempt to navigate or build there."

"Come on, Dan," Chet said, "don't be a doleful doubting Thomas.  I've been too busy with my calculations up to now to answer you, but there is an answer.  It would be a long story or perhaps a long argument and, even then, you probably wouldn't believe or understand.  I don't understand sheep raising any better than you do engineering and reclamation work, but I've been on other jobs similar to this and I can see the possibilities here.  My best and shortest answer to you is to stick around another ten, twenty or thirty years.  You'll see some great changes, great developments, great progress.  You'll see most of your statements disproven.  I'll probably be through here in a year or so and go to some far part of the world, but you'll likely stay around.  I might take a little time to make you a prophecy and you can see how far I miss it in time to come.  It's five o'clock and I'm through for the day.   I'll sit awhile longer and catch up on my part of the conversation.

He lit a cigarette and gestured out across the river.

"Looking down from where we sit, isn't it a wonderful sight?  Maybe you've seen it too often to appreciate it, but I haven't.  It takes my breath away and I've traveled around some.  A broad valley, a mighty river waiting to be harnessed, the railroad, the highway.  Aye, you can call it an amphitheater of the gods.  The place where great things will be done.  The center of a vast population to come.  Oh, that every hungry family suffering because of unemployment could have a home and a few watered acres in this great valley.  With water and this greenhouse, banana-belt climate, they could raise anything."

"I'd be willing to leave them here to survive or perish.  You probably know little of the big cities, the crowded tenement quarters, the hunger and suffering... places where people must steal, starve or depend on charity.  There's no work there, where work would be their salvation.  Here, nestled in this new watered land they would have their shade, shelter, and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.  With their meat and milk they need never worry about unemployment or prices and markets.  When they have all the necessities of life, prices, employment and markets are not so important."

"Of course, there are some so short-sighted, even in the high offices of our government, that they cannot see our present trouble is one of too little consumption, instead of overproduction.  They want to limit cultivation.  Perhaps they should limit cultivation of waste acreage by large capital, machinery, and a very few men; but they should never limit the planning, planting, and cultivation of homes, of independent homes.  When they do this they are limiting the safety, the development, the very existence of our country."

"Maybe you've heard bums say that it's easy to get by in the big cities with the help of the Red Cross, Salvation Army, Helping Hand missions, and bread and soup lines.  They say, why work?  But they're parasites on the backs of those who work just as sure as the big grafters are.  Income tax laws will some day be enforced to relieve the big grafters of their booty, and the money will be used to build dams, irrigate land, and finance homes for the poor who are willing to work.  This will be done soon, for the unemployed fast turn to parasites.  There has been a general awakening, and the powers that be know it.  They see that there must be a sudden change or they... the powers that be... will be no more.  So, money will be appropriated for these projects so as to prevent more unemployment and the furtherance of the dole system."

"With the completion of this dam and other nearby projects this will be a place where money, power, and culture will gravitate in days to come.  The Pacific States will eventually become as populous as the Atlantic states.  Nature has decreed it.  She laid out the country, the fertile lands and abundant waters, and the dam and power sites.  Engineers will utilize all such natural resources.  See that island in midstream?  It has been there for centuries.  Put there for a purpose.  How easy, how simple it will be to put in cofferdams temporarily on one side of the island, then one at the upper end and one at the lower, and run all the water around to the other side.  Then they'll pump out the water left between the two cofferdams, the bluff, and the island, and build that half of the dam across the dry river bed.  When that side is completed, they tear out the cofferdams.  The water will then flow through the open gates of the completed half of the dam.  Then we'll do the same with the last half.  It's so simple.  Yet you say it can't be done.  Nevertheless, the Rock Island Dam will be pushed, as far as they wish to go, within the next three years.  Other dams will be started and completed in time.  I don't expect you ro see all this now.  I'm sure you haven't made a study of economics, history, and industrial and agricultural growth and expansion as I have.  You may not have the inward eye yet to let you see as I can."

Dan stretched himself and answered, "No, that's a fact, pardner.  My natural eye is good.  I can see that speck out there is one of my old rambling ewes and not a clump of sage, and she is over a mile away... which is as good or better than you can do.  But when it comes to seeing things that aren't there, my eyes cant see them and I hope I never get that way.  I know of herders that have been led to their death following visions and mirages.  Some said they were just plain batty when they got that way.  Sometimes I've thought I felt it coming on, but I usually start counting the sheep or doing something to change my trend of thought and line of vision."

"Now you're trying to kid me, friend Dan.  In all seriousness, I wish I could make you understand that these dams and reclamation projects are our only salvation in this land of the unemployed.  You say this land is taxed to death and destruction.  Can't you see that these projects will bring untold wealth to the country?  It's easy to pay taxes when you have something to pay with."

"These projects will furnish labor for thousands, even, millions of unemployed.  About half of the initial cost will be paid out for labor, seven-eighths of that money will stay in the near vicinity going to the local merchants.  People that are destitute can spend only after they work and earn, and these projects will finish the work.  This comparatively small Rock Island Dam costing twenty-eight million, will bring fourteen million in cash to this community in the next few years.  Then there's another fourteen million to be spent for materiel and transportation.  That will give work to other people in different parts of the United States.  But all this is just a beginning; just the benefits of the building.  The real service mankind will receive from the dam will begin later.  It will be a never-ending source of new wealth, new agricultural and industrial development for posterity.  This desert will be given new life; it will be lighted, warmed, watered, and made to bloom.  It'll support millions of new families, who'll come and consume the products of their own farms and factories.  Factories are bound to be drawn to such a good climate, to cheap power and inexpensive locations."

"Logs will easily be stopped in the still water near the dam.  Box factories and paper mills will come in.  Logs won't be shipped back to Wisconsin to be made into paper for packing and wrapping apples, and then shipped here again at an annual cost of over a million dollars, more than one-half of which is freight.  It won't be long and the woolen socks you're wearing won't be made of native wool in far off Boston and shipped back to you at an exorbitant cost for transportation.  Not for much longer will hides be shipped away and shoes shipped back.  There is a world of raw products here.  Building materials are plentiful, and a new, prosperous, self-supporting empire of contented working-people will be built right here."

The engineer stopped suddenly and smiled.  "I've said my piece, and now that the sun is set and the pictures fade in the dusk, I'll be on my way or it will be cold beans for supper."

He rose, shouldered his paraphernalia, preparing to taking the long plunge back down the steep hill.  "Well, so long, maybe I'll be seeing you again sometime."  He strode off.

"I hope so" called the herder.  "Even fairy stories are interesting to a lonely sheepherder when someone tells ?em as you tell ?em.  You're like a darn preacher, believe everything you read.  Be sure to come back and tell me another one some day."  Dan stood up.

"Away out around ?em, Shep!" he ordered.  Then to himself, "Gosh, the darn woollies are scattered from hell to breakfast.  I shouldn't have left them for so long, but then a feller don't get to hear such stuff every day.  Rats!  He almost had be believin' him for a while.  "Yoe! Yoe! Way out there!  Hunt, ?em up!  We got to get these pesky critters all in before it gets any darker or the varmints will beat us to them.  Damn it!," he mumbled, "serves me right, stumbling around here in the dark.  I'll probably miss an' lose a half-dozen sheep just because I listened too long to that dam-maniac."

So, stumbling and mumbling to himself and his dog, he finally corralled most of the sheep for the night.  The corral was an ancient one.  Indians had camped there long before the coming of the white man.  Nature built the corral by casting up a precipice jutting highest in the west and extending long, sloping, arms northeast and south.  This had been finished by a crude wall laboriously built of rocks in those distant Indian days.  The gap or gate was closed by putting up four pole bars.

Dan put up the bars and found his way to his portable, makeshift home, an old rickety house wagon pulled up on a small level point overhanging a cliff.  Trickeling from a crevice in the nearby cliff was a weakly running spring that furnished him a little, a very little, water to drink and with which to do his cooking.  It was not a water system to his liking, but it would do until it dried up in early summer.  By that time he would have this part of the range fairly well grazed off and move to a range he was saving where there was quite a flow of water.  That place stayed damp all summer, even in the driest years, and he could always get water quite easily.  Of course, the hole drifted full of weeds, dust, sand and sheep pills from one season to another, but he had never failed to get it cleaned out in less than an hour and fill a rusty pail with the riley water that would quickly settle.

This night he felt quite different as he approached his rude home.  It had been a long and eventful day for him.  He felt a vague uneasiness, a stirring within himself.  He had been shown another's viewpoint.  Perhaps there was going to be some change eventually, a new order of things.  He hated to think of changes and the results to follow.  Dry-land farming and stock raising were all he knew, and he was afraid he was too old a dog to learn new tricks.  He didn't know anything about irrigation and hoped he would never need to learn.  That bunk about reclaiming the desert was all propaganda to justify those engineers in spending other peoples' money.  Six million dollars, he heard, was to be spent on one survey alone.  Well, let it come, whatever it was, better or worse.  It couldn't be much worse for him.  Those engineers were not living off of him.  He has quit paying taxes of any kind anyway.

Somehow, he couldn't help comparing himself with his new acquaintance, Chet Evans.  And the results of the comparison dissatisfied him.  Yet, it wasn't really his fault.  Born here in these hills, he had never had much chance.  Never had any pull, wasn't any relation of any big guy; anyone higher up.  His father had prospered in the earlier days with stock and wheat until the land ran out.  He could have gone away to school, but the dry years came, then the war and post-war slump.  It made him slump to think about it.

Those thoughts were running through his head as he did his homely tasks, his evening chores.  He picked his way from the corral around bolders and over rocks to the fuel pile of giant old sage brush trunks before his door.  There, he took up a monstrous load in one arm and grabbed a handful of hoarded dry grass from a sheltering box, his whole campsite having been trampled vegetationless.

He walked up the wagon tongue, the approach to his home, hesitated an instant as he turned the knob with his free hand, and opened the door.  He fumbled in a box on the wall, got a match and struck it.  He dropped his coarse fuel, lit his coal-oil lamp, opened the top of his stove, lit the grass... all with one match and a few motions... then started laying on the sage.  His home, now lighted showed up in all of its dinginess.  Its dimensions were about six by twelve, and he could stand fully erect and walk down the aisle in its center without bumping his head.  Yet he had to remove his hat or lose it.  The small stove was on the left as he entered, the lamp was on an upended box, which was also his combination reading and writing table.  Just behind the table, and near the rear of the wagon, was the bunk frame, built in the corner and extending along the wall.  On this was a tick and a half- dozen dirty blankets.  His built-in bench table and cupboard with its small stock of provisions and cooking utensils completed the furnishings.

Dan sliced a few pieces of bacon, peeled and sliced some potatoes, placing them together in one frying pan, cut several slices of hard bread, warmed up the morning coffee; and supper was ready.  Supper soon over, he took off his boots and gun belt and rolled in between the blankets.  His mind was too full for reading tonight.

"Yes!  This is a great country" he said aloud.  "They should let it go back to the Indians, coyotes and jack rabbits rather than go to the enormous expense of trying to make anything out of it.  They're doomed to fail.  And I've warned them before they started."  So, wondering and worrying, he fell asleep.

Chet Evans was tired and hungry as he walked home that evening.  However, he was earnestly thinking over his last words with the doubting shepherd.

"So it can't be done.  I'm a dreamer, and you're a practical man; but just a thought, my new friend.  The law of progress is ever onward, so rest assured the dam will be built.  He who goes with the tide keeps pace with the times, while he of little faith usually reaps the crop he has sown.