“California wants more power for her industries—”
“She’s welcome,” Old Jess stated smugly. “We ain’t hoggin’ no electric energy ’t I know of.”
“You are, if you interfere with the building of a dam of sufficient size and strength to conserve that power.”
Young Jess leaned forward, grinning impudently into Rawley’s face.
“Hell! There’s thousands uh miles up river that we ain’t doin’ a thing to. They kin build dams from here to Denver, fer all we care! That’s all poppycock, our interferin’. Everybody with ten cents in his pocket is talkin’ about buildin’ a dam in the Colorado. Why the hell don’t they go ahead and do it? We ain’t stoppin’ nobody!”
“You may be, without knowing it,” Rawley explained patiently, determined to educate them beyond their single-track idea, if possible. “I see how it looks to you, of course. But I’ll explain how it looks to the greatest engineers in the country, Jess. You remember I was rather keen for it, myself. It was out of my line, and I didn’t know.
“Now the fact is, you are attempting, with a certain amount of rock blown into the river from the sides, to dam a river second only to the Mississippi.
“I know, the Missouri is wider, but I am speaking now of the volume of water that passes through this canyon right here. It is a swift river, and it is a deep river. You don’t realize, any of you, just how deep and how swift it is, though you have lived beside it all your lives.
“Peter has spoken of the amount of money they are talking of spending to build a dam at Boulder Canyon, up here. The canyon there is as narrow as this; perhaps narrower. And to hold back the tremendous volume of water that flows past your door, engineers have said that they must go down one hundred and fifty feet, to bed rock, and start there to build their dam. They say that the dam will—must—to hold back the terrific pressure of water, rise something like six hundred feet above low-water mark. It will keep several thousand men working for eight or ten years to complete the dam, its spillways and main canals. It will cost around one hundred million dollars, and it will bring both protection and prosperity to thousands and thousands of people. That,” he declared, leaning forward, “is what it means to dam the Colorado.”
“It don’t mean that to us,” Old Jess stated, turning his quid to the other cheek. “We aim to show ’em something about buildin’ dams.” He grinned and showed yellow snags of teeth.