Grand Coulee Dam & Lake Roosevelt ~ Washington State

The Grand Coulee is considered by many people to be the most remarkable legacy of the Ice Age floods.

The Columbia River Basin of eastern Washington had been a region of scattered small towns, tracts of scablands and occasional farms whose occupiers struggled to produce decent crops on those patches of land covered by adequate soil. With less than 10” of annual precipitation, good crops were harvested only in years of above normal rainfall. There were many dry years and farmers often gave up.

In 1926 Washington’s U.S. senators secured an appropriation for the study of Columbia Basin irrigation, and in 1931 the Army Corps of Engineers issued a report favoring the pumping plan and a dam at Grand Coulee. At that time, extreme drought conditions were bringing dust storms and electric power shortages to the Pacific Northwest. The nation was in the grip of a savage economic depression and in 1933 Franklin D. Roosevelt became President.

An advocate of large scale public works projects to stimulate the economy, Roosevelt was attracted to hydroelectric power. But the $400 million price tag for the Grand Coulee irrigation project daunted him, and he endorsed a smaller dam for electric power – one that could be enlarged later. In July 1933 the government approved $63 million for the project, which would be supervised by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation.

But progress didn’t come without a price. Beginning in the winter of 1939 about 400 isolated farms and 10 small communities – with a total population of between 3,000-4,000 (including Indian tribes) – would be forced to relocate from Boyds, Daily, Fort Covile, Gerome, Gifford, Inchelium, Keller, Kettle Falls, Lincoln, Marcus and Peach. Few of the private property owners who lost their land felt that the government had paid them enough for their homes. Some of the human cost was captured on a newsreel that was distributed nationally in 1940, showing an elderly couple leaving their longtime home, the wife weeping while the house burned in the background.

In May 1941, the Bonneville Power Administration hired folksinger Woody Guthrie to promote the federal dams on the Columbia. Like most members of his generation, Guthrie regarded an undammed river as a resource going to waste. The issue was who should build the dams: private power companies of the federal government. The power companies had a stable of influential lobbyists. The government had Guthrie.

“Roll along, Columbia, you can ramble to the sea. But river, while you’re rambling, you can do some work for me.”

Guthrie spent a month traveling around the Columbia Basin. He wrote 26 songs in 30 days (and was paid a total of $266.66). The most famous of these is Roll on Columbia, Roll On, sung to the tune of Goodnight Irene and later adopted as the state folksong of Washington. But it was in Ballad of the Great Grand Coulee that Guthrie most eloquently celebrated the government’s role in harnessing a “wild and wasted stream” in order to make life better for “the farmer and the worker, and all of you and me.”



Mr. & Mrs. Warren Clifford

Government-owned farm units on the Columbia Basin Project were offered for sale to qualified applicants. To be eligible, applicants had to have farming experience, be physically and mentally fit, have good character references and a net worth of at least $3,700. Veterans received preference over non-veterans. Mr. & Mrs. Warren Clifford (pictured left) were the first settlers to establish a home in the Pasco Unit of the Columbia Basin Irrigation Project – 1948.