| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.4

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Public Power, Private Dams: The Hell's Canyon High Dam Controversy. By Karl Boyd Brooks. Foreword by William Cronon. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. xxviii + 290 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00.)

During the past two decades, numerous scholarly works have demonstrated the importance of dams to the conquest, settlement, and development of the American West. A relatively small but growing portion of this historiography examines proposed structures that, for various reasons, experienced political defeat and thus went unbuilt. Karl Brooks's Public Power, Private Dams is an intriguing addition to this literature. The author's subject is Hell's Canyon High Dam, which the federal government planned for the remote, rugged chasm that carries the Snake River and that defines a segment of the Idaho-Oregon border. A native son of Idaho, an attorney, a conservationist, a former Idaho state senator, and now an environmental history professor, Brooks brings impressive credentials to his project, and his provocative book does not disappoint. A political reaction against the New Deal, he contends, defeated Hell's Canyon High Dam and stalled federal government plans to remake, on a massive scale, the central Snake River. The argument is compelling, and Brooks buttresses it with careful research and a sophisticated analysis of the political economy of dams in the modern Pacific Northwest.

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