The Apocalypse Factory

by Steve Olson

  Groves still had not announced who would build and operate Hanford when he called Matthias into his office in mid-February. “I have a promise from the Chief of Engineers that I can have anybody that you want in the Corps of Engineers who’s not on combat duty,” he told Matthias. “I wish you’d review the possibilities and recommend somebody to me.”

  The town of White Bluffs was named after the terraced cliffs on the left bank of the Columbia River. The Saddle Mountains rise in the distance. Courtesy of Jim Stoffels.

  Matthias nodded and turned to leave. Just as he was opening the door, Groves called to him “By the way, if you don’t find somebody I like, you’re going to have to take over that project.”

  Matthias hesitated for only a moment. He turned to Groves and said, “General, there isn’t anybody I can recommend.”

  “All right,” said Groves, “you’re it.”

  Matthias was hardly the obvious choice. Just 34 years old in the spring of 1943, he had joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but he did not think of himself as a military man. He served in the Wisconsin National Guard after college and then went into private industry, working on dams with the Tennessee Valley Authority and designing part of the Delaware Aqueduct. By the spring of 1941 he could tell he was going to be recalled to active duty, so he opted to enlist rather than being recalled. He thought he would serve for a year and then be done with it, but the attack on Pearl Harbor scuttled those plans. Given his background, he was assigned to work with the Corps of Engineers, where he caught the eye of General Groves while they both were working on the construction of the Pentagon. Six months later, he was in charge of building Hanford.

  Matthias had four huge tasks to complete. The first was to acquire the supplies and equipment he needed and have them shipped to the site. Groves had arranged for the Manhattan Project to receive the highest possible priority rating for materials acquisition, but Matthias struggled throughout the war to explain why he needed such expensive supplies for a project that he was not allowed to describe. A big boost was the completion of the Alaska Highway in 1942. For the next few years, massive construction equipment from Alaska rattled down the Columbia River rail line to Hanford.

  Second, he had to hire and house the thousands of construction workers who would build the plants. The soon-to-be-abandoned town of Hanford looked to be a good spot for a construction camp. It was on a broad plain next to the river and had been optimistically platted by its founders to be larger than Chicago. The site could house the barracks and trailers for the construction workers and then be abandoned when the startup of the reactors posed risks to anyone living nearby.

  Third, he had to build a permanent town to accommodate the engineers and operators who would build and run the plants. Here Richland, on the southern end of the land acquired by the government, was the obvious choice. It could be separated from the reactors by a safety buffer of more than 30 miles. And Hanford workers who did not rank high enough to live in Richland could live in the towns of Kennewick and Pasco a few miles farther down the Columbia.

  Finally, Matthias had to combine all these pieces to get the facilities up and running in time to make a difference in the war. When he set up his initial office at the site in February 1943, the production plants were still being designed. But the outlines of Hanford Engineer Works, as it would become known, were beginning to take shape. The reactors could go in what was labeled the 100 area at the far northern end of the site, along the right bank of the Columbia River. South of the reactors, on a broad plateau topped by a sharp ridge of basalt known as Gable Mountain, the plants for separating plutonium from the irradiated uranium could be built—this would be the 200 area. Finally, the safer facilities for producing the uranium fuel and conducting tests—the 300 area—could be just north of Richland, closer to the employees’ homes.

  It was the largest construction project ever undertaken in Washington State, larger even than the construction of Grand Coulee Dam the decade before. Yet Matthias had to keep the entire operation as secret as possible. On February 26, 1943, he walked into the offices of the Pasco Herald and asked to talk with the editor, Hill Williams. He told Williams that a huge plant was going to be built near Richland but that it had to remain absolutely secret. He wasn’t picking just on the Herald, he said—he was making the same request of all the other newspapers and radio stations in the Pacific Northwest. Don’t worry, he told Williams, as soon as the story breaks, you’ll be the first to know.

  That same day Matthias talked with the editor of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, and a few days later he visited the Yakima Morning Herald. Matthias and other officers talked to editors at the Kennewick Courier-Reporter, the Prosser Record-Bulletin, and the major papers in Seattle, Portland, and Spokane. All agreed to his request that they ignore a story that normally would have warranted banner headlines.

  The agreement was not foolproof. An article in the March 2 Seattle Times said that hundreds of displaced people were “protesting that they were getting ‘worse treatment than the Japs,’” many of whom were being forcibly relocated from western cities into internment camps. An April 1943 article on the land seizures in an Idaho newspaper led Matthias to lament that “trying to restrict publicity on this project is like keeping water in a sieve.”

  Still, the secrecy campaign was surprisingly effective. For the next three-and-a-half years, the word Hanford largely disappeared from the newspapers of the Pacific Northwest.

  THIS WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME the US government had upended the lives of people living along that stretch of the Columbia River. On October 16, 1805, Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the other members of the Corps of Discovery emerged from a difficult section of the Snake River to discover several hundred Indians camped at the river’s junction with the Columbia. After hauling out their canoes and making camp, they were welcomed by a delegation of about 200 Indians, who formed a half circle around the men and “Sung for Some time,” as Clark wrote in his journal. The next day, Clark and two men paddled 10 miles up the Columbia to the present-day site of Richland, passing lodges made of driftwood, reed mats, and furs. “This river is remarkably Clear,” Clark wrote. “I observe in assending great numbers of Salmon dead on the Shores, floating on the water and in the Bottoms.” To the north and east of the river stretched a plain backdropped by distant ridges with “no wood to be Seen in any direction”—the future site of Hanford.

  The tribe that occupied the area upstream of Richland was known as the Wanapum, or water people. They called the Columbia Ci Wana, which meant big water. A seminomadic tribe, they traveled west in the summer to pick berries and hunt in the mountains. In the fall, they returned to the Columbia to fish, preserve the salmon they caught, and manufacture tools. Along the riverbanks the Wanapum had pit-house villages, fishing sites, trading camps, quarries, food caches, and cemeteries. They traded, socialized, and intermarried with the many other Native groups that gathered at the intersection of the Yakima, Snake, Columbia, and Walla Walla rivers. Their young men journeyed to the nearby heights on spirit quests.

  The arrival of Lewis and Clark marked the first time white men had visited that part of the Columbia River, but the influence of whites had already been felt. Diseases introduced to the coastal tribes by traders and settlers had been decimating the inland tribes for several decades. From a population of almost 2,000 in 1780, the Wanapum declined in numbers to just 300 in 1870. By that time, members of Indian tribes throughout the Northwest had signed treaties forfeiting their claims to the land in exchange for out-of-the-way reservations. But the Wanapum never signed a treaty. They continued to travel from place to place, doing temporary work for hire, picking berries in the summer, and fishing in their accustomed spots on the Columbia. During the middle of the 19th century, as the tribe continued to decline, a Wanapum shaman named Smohalla began to preach a doctrine known as the Washat religion. If his people would shun the white man’s ways and live
as their ancestors had done, the dead ancestors of the Wanapum would return to life, and the world would be restored to how it was before the arrival of white men. Smohalla’s teachings spread widely among the inland tribes of the Pacific Northwest, contributing to the Ghost Dance religions that spread among the Plains Indians beginning in the 1870s.

  By the time Matthias arrived at the Hanford nuclear reservation in 1943, only about 30 Wanapum continued to occupy their winter camp on the Columbia. Mattias could logically have ejected them from the site, just as he had the white settlers. But Matthias had an unexpected affinity for the Wanapum. When they asked for access to their customary fishing grounds in the middle of the secret federal reservation, Matthias agreed, not even requiring that they undergo a security clearance. He provided trucks to bring the Wanapum onto the nuclear reservation and back to their camps each day. The Wanapum “insist on maintaining their independence . . . to fish on the Columbia River,” Matthias wrote in his diary. “I do not believe that their loyalty can be questioned.” After the war the federal government did bar the Wanapum from Hanford, sealing off their graves and cultural sites behind barbed wire fences. But during World War II at least, they were not totally excluded from their homelands.

  * Technically, the land around Hanford is shrub-steppe, not desert, but even people who grew up there think of themselves as desert dwellers.

  Chapter 9

  THE BUILDERS

  BILL PORTER KNEW HE SHOULD WORRY WHEN HE GOT OFF THE NORTHERN Pacific train in Pasco after a long ride from Tennessee. A group of workers was waiting to leave. “Suckers, suckers, suckers,” they chanted at the new arrivals.

  In the spring of 1943, newspaper advertisements and recruiting pamphlets began to appear in cities and towns across the country. “War Construction Project,” read one such advertisement. “NEEDED by E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company for PACIFIC NORTHWEST”:

  Laborers

  Millwrights

  Carpenters

  Sheetmetal men

  Reinforcing ironworkers

  Iron worker welders

  Structural iron workers

  Auto mechanics

  Auto oilers

  Heavy equipment mechanics

  Machinists

  Patrolmen

  Protective firemen

  Registered nurses

  Physicians

  “Living Facilities Available for all Persons Employed,” the ad stated. “Attractive Scale of Wages. Work week 54 hours. Time and one-half for work in excess of 40 hours.”

  Matthias needed tens of thousands of workers to build the facilities that the DuPont company was planning for Hanford. But many young, able-bodied men were at war, and Matthias was competing with other wartime construction projects across the country. Eventually, DuPont recruiters interviewed more than a quarter-million workers for jobs at Hanford and hired almost a hundred thousand. But many failed to arrive, and others left within a few days or weeks after they got a look at what the job entailed. With all the churn, the peak workforce was about 45,000 in May 1944.

  Known as “boomers” in World War II—the name given to men who moved around the country from one boom town construction project to another—they were a motley crew. Many of the male employees were over the maximum draft age of 37 years. Of the younger men, many were physically unfit for military service. Recruitment standards were low. Matthias once asked a recruiter, “Is it true that you people would hire a man as a carpenter if he could just identify a hammer?” The recruiter laughed. “No, we’re not quite that tough. If the man can convince us that his father would have known what a hammer was, we take him.”

  Many newcomers got their first surprise when the sun came up after their nighttime arrival on the train. Washington is a state divided by a common mountain range. The Cascade Mountains that roughly bisect the state from north to south squeeze the moisture out of the clouds blowing off the Pacific Ocean. The western half of the state, where most of the big cities are located, is green and sodden. The eastern half, where Hanford is located, is drier than west Texas. “I had thought there was a lumberjack behind every tree and salmon jumping out of the Columbia River,” said Claribel Chapman, who was living in Florida when she heard about Hanford and decided to move. “I had no idea there was a desert in Washington.”

  The next surprise was the weather. The basin in which Hanford sits is low and relatively warm in winter. But when the wind shifts into the northeast and arctic air blows from Canada, temperatures can drop below zero. In the summer, beneath a blistering sun, it can be well above 100. And the temperature is only the beginning. The contrast between wet and dry in Washington State can create fierce winds that roll down the eastern slopes of the Cascades like a runaway freight train. When the wind blew hard, dust storms the equal of anything in the Dust Bowl descended on Hanford. The workers called them termination winds, because as soon as the wind quieted, workers lined up to collect their termination checks and get out of town.

  By the summer of 1943, a strange alternative version of the town Hanford’s founders had envisioned was beginning to rise from the desert. Gigantic H-shaped barracks, each with beds for 190 people, spread like mushrooms across the tableland next to the river. Hundreds of hutments held 10 to 20 men each, and a nearby trailer camp had 3,600 lots. A ramshackle city, never meant to last more than a few years, began to take shape. It had banks, a hospital, power plants, barbershops, fire and police departments, a grocery store, a post office, baseball fields, and a swimming pool. Streets in the trailer camp were named after ongoing battles in the Pacific. Streets in the main camp had the names of military leaders—Eisenhower, Doolittle, Patton. It was the largest construction camp ever assembled in the United States and, briefly, the fourth largest city in Washington State.

  The construction workers put in nine-hour days Monday through Saturday, with Sunday work added as needed. Managers worked from 10 to 20 hours a day and rarely got Sundays off; some just stayed on the job permanently, especially since there was so little to do otherwise. Pay was about $1.00 an hour for laborers up to $1.85 for skilled workers such as plumbers, steamfitters, electricians, and bricklayers. The specialized welders known as leadburners made the most—$2 an hour.

  The Hanford construction camp on the banks of the Columbia River. Courtesy of the US National Archives and Records Administration / US Department of Energy.

  Despite severe manpower shortages, Matthias initially resisted hiring African Americans, even though an executive order signed by President Roosevelt in 1941 required him to do so. Few African Americans had lived in the area previously, and most of them were working for the Northern Pacific Railroad. Matthias also assumed that he would have to build separate housing if he recruited Black workers, which would add to his administrative tasks. It seemed easier to hire only whites.

  But soon the pressure to hire African American workers became too great, imposed both by Black leaders in the Northwest and by the need to get the job done. By the end of the war, about 15,000 African Americans had arrived to work at Hanford. Many lived in barracks in the construction camp designated for Black workers. Most of the others lived in a ramshackle part of Pasco. Though many moved away after the construction was done, about 1,000 African Americans still lived in Pasco in 1950.

  Hanford also had jobs for women, both white and Black, who made up about 10 percent of workers at the 1944 employment peak. They served as cooks, servers, secretaries, clerks, nurses, teachers, typists, and laboratory assistants. They lived in separate barracks, with a barbed wire fence and guards to keep the men out. To provide the women in the barracks with amenities that would keep them from leaving, Matthias hired a former dean of women at Oregon State University, Buena Maris, who tried to make the women’s lives as bearable as possible. She organized a library, sports activities, parties, and shopping trips to Pasco. Each barracks had a housemother who kept things running smoothly and tried to solve any problems that arose. When Matthias once asked Maris about the women’s hig
hest priority, she said that the camp’s gravel walkways were ruining their tightly rationed shoes. The next morning, Maris was amazed to see the walkways being paved with asphalt.

  A DuPont booklet for incoming women employees entitled “Dear Anne—a letter telling you all about life in Hanford” tried to counter the bad with the good:

  It isn’t an “easy life,” but it isn’t too hard a one, either. You won’t be “roughing it,” for a very sincere attempt has been made to care for the everyday needs of the personnel here.

  Come prepared to do your best, and to be a good sport about things. You’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you’re doing your part to bring Victory sooner, in a war job that is vital to our country.

  For the men, as one resident said, Hanford Camp “was like Saturday night every day.” Card and dice games spread throughout the barracks, while prostitution centered on the scrubby bushes down by the Columbia. The chief of police noted that workers “hit the booze very hard.” Closing time at the bars in the construction camp was 11, so early that many patrons did not want to leave. Windows were covered by metal bars so that the police could throw teargas inside to vacate the revelers. Intoxication was by far the most common cause of arrest but rarely led to dismissal given the need for workers. Drunks dried out overnight and went back to work the next day.

  To keep employees from leaving, Matthias tried to keep them entertained. The craft unions organized baseball teams—which were integrated, despite the lack of integration in most of the other social activities—and attendance at ball games approached that at big league games. When workers were told that they could build a hall for events, they took just three weeks to erect an auditorium that could accommodate 3,000 dancing couples. Mondays featured boxing or wrestling. Bands came to play on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, including national acts—Kay Kyser, Tiny Hill, Ted Weems, Jan Garber, and others.