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Reviews
NORTHWEST PASSAGES: A HISTORY OF THE SEATTLE DISTRICT U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS, VOLUME II 1920–1970
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by William F. Willingham
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| U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 2006. Illustrations, photographs, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, index. 158 pages. Free PDF download at http://www.nws.usace.army.mil/ (Who We Are/History) |
| Spanning 99,000 square miles from Puget Sound to western Montana, the Seattle District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has managed water resources since 1896. Its civil works have included the region's most massive canal locks and harbor jetties. Its military engineering has ranged from forts to highways, airfields, and nuclear reactors. Corps historian William F. Willingham told the story of the district's founding in the first volume of Northwest Passages, published in 1992, and Northwest Passages Volume II is his sequel. Taking the story from 1920 to 1970, it follows the construction giant through a half-century of big construction and intergovernmental dispute. |
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Willingham has written a fact-filled account with balanced reporting that neither praises nor blames. Corps engineering, he finds, has always been controversial. But where academic critics have emphasized stout opposition to federal projects, Willingham, like a good engineer, is less concerned with wrangles in Congress than with the technical challenge of doing what the corps needed done. The divisive politics in Willingham's study are mostly seeded by agency rivals. In 1929, for example, water users played the corps against the Bureau of Reclamation in an attempt to influence a ten-dam plan for the upper Columbia River. Publicly, the corps and bureau won praise for "a perfectly unbiased attempt" to mediate disputes among water users (p. 12). Privately, however, the corps accused the bureau of smearing its professionalism. The grand design of the bureau, according to a corps commander, was to "take all glory and credit [and] crush the ED [Engineer Department] into the mire" (p. 12). Still, the corps persevered and in 1930 produced a $711 million plan for the Columbia that included Bonneville and Grand Coulee dams. |
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River basin studies allowed the corps to transition from single-purpose navigation improvements to multipurpose flood dams, storage reservoirs, hydro facilities, and municipal projects. A 1933 flood that ravaged Tacoma jumpstarted an ambitious plan to dam the Puyallup River at Mud Mountain. Originally the corps had hoped to complete the project for under $4 million. Finished in 1948 for $13 million, Mud Mountain became the tallest rock fill dam in the world. Another costly but remarkable project was the famed ALCAN Highway, which moved munitions into Alaska during World War II. From March to November 1942, under punishing conditions in rugged terrain, 10,000 road-building engineer troops in seven regiments completed a 1,543-mile supply line. Meanwhile at the Manhattan Project's nuclear complex near Hanford, Washington, the Seattle engineers played a more secretive role. Forty-five thousand laborers populated the instant city. With 780,000 cubic yards of concrete and 40,000 tons of structural steel, the corps built 554 industrial structures, 52 miles of electrical transmission lines, and 386 miles of roads. Recruiting civilian labor was the corps' steepest challenge. Project engineer Norman Matthias was "expressly forbidden to divulge the purpose of the project to anyone, military or civilian" (p. 39). Even the Seattle district's irate commander was excluded from knowing the construction details. |
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After 1945, as Washington State boomed with aluminum and aircraft manufacturing, the corps resisted a federal plan to reorganize river construction under a civilian Columbia Valley Authority. The corps deftly outmaneuvered the reclamation bureau at McNary and Chief Joseph dams. At Libby, Montana, however, the dam building stalled while diplomats debated the consequences of backing Kootenai River into British Columbia, flooding Canadian farmland. Libby Dam darkly foreshadowed the opposition that plagued the corps throughout the era of increased public environmentalism. Revived in 1966 and completed for $383 million in 1975, Libby Dam became the Seattle district's most expensive project to date. |
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Willingham's valuable book shows rare sympathy for the nation's most embattled builder. Where others dismiss the corps as a brutish tool of big government, Willingham sees problem solvers. Regrettably, the paperback is badly designed with muddy, inadequately captioned photos. Oddly, the only color graphic is a photo of the district commander in a foreword that misses the point about the politics that have always vexed water construction in the Pacific Northwest. |
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| Todd Shallat
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Center for Idaho History and Politics,
Boise State University |
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