The Power of Ice

A RIVER will not be halted. It will pause for a dam only long enough to bring up its forces from the rear. The most peaceful brook will fight, and so the railroad respects the runlet and leaves a hole for it in most obliging masonry.

The Wisconsin River, stopped by a moving wall of ice, gathered its waters until it had made a lake one hundred and twenty miles across right in the middle of Wisconsin. At that height it found an opening and carved a new and fantastic route for itself in the sandstone which now forms the beautiful Dells of the Wisconsin.

When a lobe of the glacier dammed the Niagara River, the Great Lakes rose and sought another outlet. They found it at Chicago, that being the lowest point on the divide which separates the waters of the Great Lakes from the waters of the Mississippi. And then, for hundreds of years, the tumultuous flood swept seaward across the site that is now known as Michigan Boulevard and its westward-leading streets. During the long period that the ice was melting, this western Niagara saw a rush of waters such as the eastern rapids had never known. Geologists have determined closely the limits of the channel.

In the case of the mighty Columbia, there was a different and novel turn to the watery drama. When it was dammed by mountainous ice, it rose a thousand feet or more and backed its water clear up into Canada. Finally it overtopped the high foothills of the Cordilleras, and then, finding an opening, it struck off directly at right angles to its old course and made a new channel for itself in the hard basaltic rock.

When the glacier retreated, and the surplus water was gone, the Columbia began flowing again in its old channel, leaving the temporary river bed standing high and empty in the mountainous scene. This dry bed is known as the Grand Coulee; and the upper part, now included in an irrigation project, is a canyon twenty-five miles long, eight hundred feet deep, and one to two miles in width. One end of it looks out upon the Columbia River, hundreds of feet below, and at the other end is the Great Dry Falls of the Columbia. The floor is flat and covered with a sparse and weedy growth.

If you have followed the Columbia all the way up from Astoria at the mouth, and have become accustomed to its bronze-colored walls with their basaltic shapes and textures, you immediately feel, as you roll along through the Grand Coulee, that you are riding on the bottom of a river. It is a complete Columbia River with no water in it. An island, Steamboat Rock, towers high above you.

The Great Dry Falls of the Columbia are three miles wide and four hundred and seventeen feet high. Scientists have estimated that when the Columbia was draining the Cordilleran glacier the volume of water that went over these falls was one hundred times that which goes over Niagara. We have now the stony skeleton of that bygone scene. As we stand on the high edge and look across the first two horseshoes, — there are several of them, — we see what it was like, and yet can hardly imagine it. A half-dozen Niagaras may be summoned up to give the mind a start, but they hardly serve the purpose. It is a fall without mist, or spray, or rainbows; and the vast silence does not give up a remnant of its roar. It is a great ghost of a fall. And it is fed by a river without water.

This fall of more than four hundred feet marks the break between the upper and lower coulee. The sight-seeing tourist might inquire how all this happened; and then again he might not. Most of us do not. We take scenery for granted. God just made it. But the one who knows something about glaciers has here a striking example of the stubbornness of ice and the willfulness of water.

This preview of the scenery brings us to a point where we can grasp the general idea of the Grand Coulee development as an irrigation project. In every project for irrigation by power, whether it be a farmer’s windmill with its elevated tank or something more ambitious, three things are essential — a source of water, a source of power, and a storage receptacle which is higher than the land to be irrigated. In this case the Columbia River provides the water, the dam with its big turbines and two electric plants turn part of the water into power, and the Grand Coulee, with dirt embankments thrown across each end, provides the elevated tank.

Visitors who come to the Grand Coulee marvel at the machinery and revel in figures, but many of them have no idea of how the Grand Coulee came into being. It is simply scenery. And no doubt many who are told the whole story regard it as a mere theory. Among these latter is the plump old veteran who has been given the job of delivering a short lecture to sight-seers at the Great Dry Falls.

Standing on a railed promontory overlooking the falls, he gathers the little group about him and repeats verbatim the lecture that has been written for him. When he is done he steps down from his station, and continues his talk by telling everyone that he himself does not believe a word of what he has been saying. He has ideas of his own. Those collections of gravel down there at one side of the coulee were not brought there by any age of ice. They were blown there by the wind. He has seen other collections of gravel like that and some pretty strong wind, and he knows what he is talking about. ‘No, sir; I have been around these-here parts too long to believe anything like that. They can’t tell me such stuff; nor any of that other nonsense about how God was up at this end of the coulee and down at that end a-pushin’ things round and ’playin’ checkers with Hisself.’

Near the dam they discovered a deposit of gravel which is now the biggest gravel pit in the world; and it serves to make all the concrete in the dam. I did not have the heart to ask our orator whether he thought the wind had blown that there.

CHARLES D. STEWART