by Martin Doyle
What Campbell didn’t appreciate at the time was that his little rock dams on Hay Creek were replicating the work beavers had done before the West was settled, when fish and grass were, if not abundant, at least far more plentiful than they are today. In those days, beavers thrived, and their dams created streams that were little more than stairsteps of dams, ponds, and meadows. When a beaver builds a dam, the upstream pond of slowed water gradually fills with sediment. The downstream dam holds the water level just high enough to keep the ground slightly wet, grasses begin growing, and the pond becomes a grassy meadow with a narrow stream flowing through it. The natural landscape of the western high desert, with the prolific beavers doing their hydraulic engineering work, was a patchwork quilt of grassy meadows and burbling brooks in the valleys and sagebrush on the uplands, rather than the plain blanket of sagebrush and negligible damp gullies that now dominates.
Europeans created this existing landscape, foremost by removing beavers. The first settlers on the western landscape were trappers, who took the beavers with extraordinary thoroughness. In response to the European craze for beaver-pelt hats, explorers and trappers moved through eastern Oregon and southern Idaho in search of beaver. They removed 18,000 beavers from the area during 1823–1829 and took thousands more in the 1830s. But by the 1850s, trappers were scraping to find a few hundred animals. Thanks to the transatlantic demand for beavers, they were virtually eradicated. Without benefit of constant maintenance, beaver dams throughout the American West were lost, along with all of the lush grass and trees in the valleys. As the dams decayed and were washed away, the sediment-laden meadows were eroded, leaving behind a lunar-like landscape of barren gullies.9
When Campbell bought the entire Silvies Valley Ranch in 2007, he gradually became more aware of this history of beavers. He found remnant beaver dams and meadows in the region, and he noticed references to beavers in old descriptions of his property. As he got the ranch back into working order by rebuilding barns, roads, and hundreds of miles of fences, he took on the gullied streams on the property. Because Campbell already had backhoes and bulldozers working throughout the ranch, he figured he might as well fix up a few of the creeks on the ranch for trout. “Yeah, initially I was in it for the fish,” he chuckles as he walks along the recently restored Flat Creek.
On this creek, and on others at the ranch, Campbell is taking the approach he used years earlier: building a series of rock weirs across the gullies, spacing them along the valley just often enough to form artificial beaver ponds and meadows. And it has worked. Fish are now present in the restored Flat Creek, but the grass is the most impressive. Campbell is doing the beavers’ work in Silvies Valley. The rock weirs he built across the streams create habitats for trout, but they also back up water in the stream. When streams are trenched and incised, spring rain and snowmelt quickly flow downstream and the floodplain soils are perched too high for vegetation to capture any of the shallow groundwater. The rock weirs slow down the flow enough to saturate the soils, and the groundwater is backed up so that it flows very slowly, just beneath the surface of the silty floodplain soil. As the groundwater rises, the sagebrush dies off, unable to survive in such moist soils, and native grasses spring up. No planting needed; just add water. When one of the ranch’s cowboys describes going by Flat Creek a year after the restoration, he says, “I was walking around and it was all green. And it wasn’t just grass; it was hay.”
The most gripping experience at Flat Creek is listening to the sounds. Water gurgles over the weir, trout and otters splash as they surface, and what seems like countless birds are chirping and whistling in and out of the area as breezes rustle the tall grass. Campbell has done the impossible. He did what the Willowemoc Club, the CCC, the University of Michigan, the Corps of Engineers, and countless engineers weren’t been able to do. More than simply restoring a stream, he restored an ecosystem.
Scott Campbell’s streams are unlike almost any other restoration project. Stream restoration in all corners of America has become as complicated as open heart surgery; heavy construction equipment proliferates, spewing diesel smoke as restorationists flay open riparian corridors and cut down riverfront trees to make way for backhoes and bulldozers. The whole process is guided by equations and computer models that will lead to reconditioned, sinuous, presumably restored streams. After all of this work, most stream restoration projects are successful only by declaration. Restored streams are inevitably marked with a respectable sign emblazoned with the logos of the agencies and firms involved in the work, the obligatory billboard announcing ecological victory. But aside from the signs, evidence for ecological success of most stream restoration projects can be hard to find.
Scott Campbell has gradually learned all this. He attends restoration conferences and reads all of the literature. He has come to think it is all crazy. Van Cleef and Hubbs, along with countless other engineers, had built structures in streams based on the thinking that they were the key missing ingredient. Campbell has taken a big step back and guessed that what was wrong in the stream was a symptom of a broader problem in the landscape and that beavers might be the missing ingredient: restore the beavers, he reasons, or at least the effect of the beavers, and the streams will follow. Campbell’s approach is radically out of the ordinary, deliberately different from what others are saying should be done. And it works.
As importantly, the strategy works for Campbell as a rancher, who has to think in terms of animal unit months (AUMs)—that is, the capacity amount of feed—to graze a cow for a month. Typically, in this area of Oregon, Campbell needs five acres per AUM, which he can either use himself or lease to another rancher for $25 for the year. Therefore, typical grazing land is worth $5 per acre per year. Along Flat Creek, before he started working on it, there were 600 acres of riparian grazing land. Assuming five acres per AUM with typical grazing in this semiarid land, and $25 per AUM, Campbell could count on the Flat Creek meadow grazing land being worth roughly $3,000 per year.
In 2013, three years after Flat Creek was restored, the math has changed. He now has 3 AUM per acre instead of 5 acres per AUM. At $25 per AUM, Flat Creek meadow now generates $45,000 per year as grazing land. Furthermore, as the cowboy had noted, this land is growing hay. Campbell now gets a cutting of hay off the meadow and can still put cattle out to graze afterward. He is now baling from 1 to 1.5 tons of hay per acre from the 600-acre meadow, and hay is netting over $120 per ton, leaving Campbell with over $70,000 worth of hay that he can either sell or use for his own cattle. In 2013, when the entire region was in for a long drought and most ranchers were faced with either buying hay to support their herd or selling it off at reduced prices, stream restoration helped Campbell ride it out. As he captures it, “I’ve been able to increase my production in these restored areas by a factor of ten. And I’m getting the trout too.”
All of this success is a return on an investment. And for Campbell, keeping the investment side of the equation down is just as important as getting results. He spent about $100,000 per mile on restoring 1.5 miles of Flat Creek and over 3 miles of nearby Camp Creek. But Campbell and his hired hands are always looking for ways to get the work done for less money. Steve, a soft-spoken ranch hand at Silvies Valley who did a lot of the actual construction work on the streams, gives a sly grin when he nods at the work being done on another stream on Campbell’s ranch, “We’ve got it down to about twenty thousand a mile now.”
Though Campbell knows that other restoration efforts are investing in re-meandering and planting willows, for him, “The return would have to be massive for that level of investment.” Instead, Campbell has been doing as little as possible to generate positive returns. He guesses that most of his stream restorations will pay for themselves in two to three years. But he is always quick to point out that he is getting the hay, the grazing, and the increased land value, all in addition to what he was initially after: the trout. He is getting what all the other restoration projects are after; but by doing it differently, h
e is getting a whole lot more for a whole lot less.
Most people involved with stream restoration don’t fool themselves into thinking it is an economically sustainable enterprise. At $1 million a mile with unknown ecological benefits at a time of shrinking government coffers or housing bubble collapses, it’s doubtful that such environmental political experimentation can—or should—be sustained decades into the future. But in the dusty ranchlands of eastern Oregon, Scott Campbell may have developed a true restoration economy.
Other ranchers are watching Campbell’s restoration work not just because his approach is new, but because it genuinely seems to work. A few ranchers were really irritated at first, but in time they have come around to see the benefits. Some of the ranchers at the branding are starting restoration projects on their own lands. Over a post-branding lunch of elk steaks and potato salad, a neighboring rancher begins to describe why he and other ranchers are interested in stream restoration. Why are they voluntarily doing what the government has to require people to do back East? The first reasons he gives are what might be expected: a sense of pride, and the truism that good ranchers are always thinking about how their ranch will be not just next year, but in fifty years. These are the pat answers explaining why ranchers and farmers should be expected to manage their lands sustainably. The answers have been used many times before, often unconvincingly to outsiders. But then this rancher runs his cold blue eyes across the vast, open horizon—in the distant way that only cowboys seem able to do—and says something profound about restoration in the ranches of the West: “The big reason is political sustainability. Most ranchers just want to be left alone to do their work, be with their family, and ranch. If the public is aware that ranchers are managing their lands better than agencies would, then there’s a better chance ranchers will get left alone. That—being left alone because people trust you’re doing what’s right—that’s a big part of sustainability for western ranching.”
And it may just be that Scott Campbell figured out a way to make some ranches in the semiarid West more sustainable. In the beginning, Campbell was no different from the vacationing trout fishermen of the Catskills—just a wealthy businessman trying to make trout fishing better at his weekend cabin. But his discovery that stream restoration was central to restored grasslands for his cattle took the problem from raising more trout to having a healthier ecosystem. His streams of trout had led to streams of grass and restored an economy in the process.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
People who work on and around rivers love their jobs. They also love telling people about their jobs, which is what made this book possible. I mention many of these people directly, but others played even more important educational and logistical roles behind the scenes.
Cap’n Bill Beacom cuts a powerful wake across the Midwest; his arrangement of my trip on the Christopher Parsonage down the Mississippi River was a favor I can never repay. Beyond that, Bill answered countless questions with his bottomless knowledge of anything relating to rivers and barges. The crew of the Parsonage included some of the most savvy river scientists I have ever met—none more so than Howdy Duty and Donnie Randleman, who patiently tolerated me in their wheelhouse.
Joe Gibbs and Susan Dell’Osso taught me about levee districts, Daryl Armentrout and Zyg Plater about the TVA, Patrick Malone about textile mills, Ben Copp about cattle and grazing, Adam Riggsbee and Todd BenDor about mitigation banking, and Marty Reuss about the history of the Corps of Engineers. Brian Chaffin guided me through the Klamath by raft and by car, and I would have far less appreciation for tribal water without his scholarly work and his enthusiastic guiding. Chuck Podolak and Disque Deane did their best to educate me about western water and the Colorado River, while Jeff Muehlbauer and Ted Kennedy took me on a raft down the river to make sure I learned it as well as a southerner could. The finest ranch in the United States is, hands down, Silvies Valley Ranch, where Sandy Campbell is one of the kindest and most generous people I’ve met.
I had the great fortune to spend a year at the Institute for Water Resources at the Corps of Engineers as a Frederick Clarke Scholar. While there I acquired enormous institutional knowledge of navigation and flood control, along with some time to start digging into the history of the Corps and the opportunity to pester Gerry Galloway with many questions. In addition, Luna Leopold patiently corresponded with me about the early days of geomorphology while Reds Wolman regaled me with similar stories during my visits to his office; I regret that I didn’t finish the book before both of them passed away.
A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed me the intellectual space to start writing, while the librarians at the Lake Pleasant Public Library on the banks of Lake Pleasant, New York, gave me the literal space to write much of the first draft.
My incipient career in rivers was set in motion by Doug Shields amid long days in the Mississippi delta, learning about Humphreys, Twain, Muddy Waters, and Faulkner while also learning about shear stress and hydraulic habitat. From there, I was guided by the first-class scholars Jon Harbor and Emily Stanley. I had the great fortune of spending almost a decade in the geography department at the University of North Carolina, where I benefited by endless sidewalk conversations about water and history with Larry Band, John Florin, Steve Birdsall, and Chad Bryant.
My riverine friends and colleagues elsewhere—particularly Rebecca Lave, Morgan Robertson, Frank Magilligan, Lauren Patterson, Jack Schmidt, Robb Jacobson, and Will Graf—have been powerful resources for all things related to rivers and society. Beaver meadows and dam removal gave me an excuse to know Gordon Grant, and I’ve benefited tremendously from that friendship.
My PhD students for the past fifteen years have been, without exception, extraordinary. On top of their own scholarly abilities and accomplishments, they have shown exceptional patience with my endless historical distraction and tangents.
Matt Weiland and Don Lamm—my publisher and agent—have made me as much of an author as possible, overcoming my shortcomings with their skills. Remy Cawley’s surgical editing was necessary, to say the least. Some of my colleagues provided invaluable reviews of earlier versions of chapters—Jim Salzman, Rebecca Lave, Jeff Mount, Will Graf, Ben Copp, and Brian Chaffin.
My parents took me canoeing on the Buffalo River of Arkansas in a great big yellow canoe—an experience that set my life in the right direction. They then pushed me to write and rewrite. My brother, Wyatt—also a river scientist—has taught me the Missouri River, and river fisheries, as only a big brother could.
My kids have spent many hours with me pulling oars on Lake Pleasant, rolling a kayak on the Sacandaga, and tipping rocks on the Eno. Whether they enjoyed it or just tolerated it, I appreciate their companionship just the same.
Finally, twenty years ago, Carrie Blomquist canoed the Upper Missouri River with me. Since then she has humored my inordinate enchantment with rivers, hopefully knowing that it is surpassed only by my fascination with her.
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
10: © Matthew Heberger
63: © Mississippi Levee Board
85: © Mississippi Levee Board
170: © Chicago History Museum, ICHi-000698
201: © Associated Press
237 (left): Courtesy of the Library of Congress
237 (right): Courtesy of the Library of Congress
261: © Richard Marston
277: Courtesy of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, www.aldoleopold.org
281: © Johns Hopkins University
NOTES
Chapter 1: Navigating the Republic
1Jefferson to Washington, 15 March 1784, in Thomas Jefferson Papers, Library of Congress American Memory website, https://memory.loc.gov/. Note that the spelling of Potomac has changed through the centuries, and I have used the current preferred spelling throughout the quotes.
2A great, readable account of Washington’s trip through the region is summarized in J. Achenbach, The Grand Idea: George Washington’s Potomac and the Race to the West (New York: Si
mon & Schuster, 2004), 47–120; the quote is at p. 114.
3H. Adams, Life of Albert Gallatin (Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott, 1879), 56–58.
4Washington to Jefferson, 29 March 1784, George Washington Papers, Library of Congress American Memory website.
5The three men would eventually go on to be formative in the government they helped construct: Hamilton was the first Secretary of Treasury, Madison served in the House of Representatives in the first Congress, and Jay was the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
6John Jay, Federalist No. 2, in The Federalist Papers, ed. C. Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 2003), 32.
7Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 11, in The Federalist Papers, 79.
8With the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in 1789, unless a function was explicitly given to the national government, that function was the responsibility of the individual states.
9C. C. Weaver, “Internal improvements in North Carolina previous to 1860,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science 21, no. 3–4 (1903): 121–27, 161–79.
10A. Parkman, History of the Waterways of the Atlantic Coast of the United States (Alexandria, VA: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers National Waterways Studies, 1983), 20–25.
11G. R. Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951), 32–55.
12Parkman, History of the Waterways of the Atlantic Coast, 33–34.
13J. F. Stover, American Railroads (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 6–7.
14P. L. Bernstein, Wedding of the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 304.
15Packet boats on the Erie Canal typically had three horses, carried no freight, and traveled quickly. Line boats cost less (about two-thirds less), had only two horses, and were much heavier, but they traveled more slowly. Letter from Karl Brunnhuber at Erie Canal Museum in Syracuse, New York; additional descriptions of traveling on the Erie Canal in this era can be found in F. Deoch, New York to Niagara, 1836: The Journal of Thomas S. Woodcock (New York: New York Public Library, 1938).