"Information for Settlers," says the sign over a door of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation headquarters in fast-growing little Ephrata, Wash. (1950 pop. 4,584). The word settlers, as used there, is no nostalgic recall of old frontier days. Inside the door sit the 1951 settlers themselves, sun-weathered men & women who have come to Ephrata in search of a new frontier—the irrigated farmland created out of sagebrush desert by Grand Coulee Dam. They ask sober, practical questions, but in their eyes glows the same high excitement that built the U.S. The bureau believes that they are only forerunners of millions or tens of millions who can be given farms and homes in what is now desert.
The new frontier has new sounds: the hum and roar and clatter of powerful machines; for the sagebrush country around
Ephrata was not readymade for man. It was made ready for man by spectacular engineering, and now men are moving in. More than a million acres are being prepared for the settlers, land so productive that 50 acres or less will support a family comfortably.
New Province. As soon as the settlers are in, the whole parade of U.S. life will march in behind them. The villages in the sagebrush will grow into fair-sized towns. They will need houses, stores, schools, churches and skilled workers. The U.S. will gain not merely new farmland; it will add a whole new province as productive as one of the lesser states.
This is only a sample, says the Bureau of Reclamation, of what its new machines, methods and concepts can do for desert country. Encouraged by recent successes, irrigation experts are now convinced that the rapidly growing U.S. can expand almost indefinitely within its present boundaries. West of the Rockies alone, they believe, 50 million acres can be watered into life. This would be like adding to the U.S. a new country comparable in agricultural productivity to France or prewar Germany.
New Tricks. The bureau's early projects were dams that watered lands downstream through canals flowing by gravity. Such "gravity sites" are almost gone, so the bureau has developed new tricks. Last week three of its greatest projects were close to completion. Each of them has a different trick for making rivers behave, and the three tricks combined form the engineering strategy that can give the U.S. new frontiers in the arid parts of the West.
Grand Coulee Dam is the biggest dam anywhere. Viewed from the gorge below, it looks like the biggest thing on earth. Over its spillway, 1,650 feet wide, the great Columbia River sweeps majestically, a curve of green water up to 17 feet thick. It falls so far (320 feet, twice the height of Niagara) that it seems to fall slowly. The roar of the falling water, though loud, is as smooth as the sound of surf on a distant beach.
Viewed from the canyon's high rim, the dam looks too small to create, as it will, a patch of mottled green land nearly as big as Connecticut. But all modern irrigation dams look small when compared with what they do. They accomplish their ends by geographical judo, playing on the weaknesses of their rivers.