Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West
Page 31
123“Corporal punishment was given”: Ibid., 137.
125“Dear Mr. Phelps”: John Boyden Papers, University of Utah Library, Peabody Coal Company File, No. 823, Box 56, Folders 1–4, quoted in C. Wilkinson, Fire on the Plateau, 300.
126“The Navajo tribe has systematically”: US Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, Partition of Navajo and Hopi 1882 Reservation, May 14, 1973, 26.
127“The locus of Hopi policy”: Mark Panitch, Washington Post, July 21, 1974. Because it was happening on Indian reservations, the extent of the ecological damage and the interrelatedness of burning coal, pumping water, and air pollution were not well understood or publicized. Instead, what reached the public through newspapers, Sunday magazines, and the occasional television piece was a fabricated story about a range war between the sheepherding Navajo and the ranching Hopi.
128“I need not remind this committee”: US Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, Partition of Navajo and Hopi 1882 Reservation, 25.
129“There is evidence”: Locke, 352.
130“Three hundred miles at fifteen miles day!”: Ruth Roessel, Navajo Stories of the Long Walk, 103–104.
132Carleton insisted that Steck clean up: In 1865, Steck wrote to a New Mexico politician describing the failure of Navajo internment. See top paragraph on p. 256 for his letter.
133shipments of supplies disappeared without a trace: The reputation of the Indian agency was one of the worst in Washington. Corrupt, with low morale, and inefficient, the Indian agents were drawn from a pool of former soldiers with discipline problems, deteriorating drinkers, and others of little education or prospects. The pay for an Indian agent was about fifteen hundred a year, the same as a clerk in a dry goods store. But unlike the clerk, the Indian agent handled thousands of dollars in Indian annuities and supplies. The Indian agents gave a cut to the politicians who helped them get the job and to suppliers who sent substandard goods. From the beginning, as one historian observed, “a more perfect recipe for corruption could not be found.” Navajo who came to Fort Wingate with ration tickets were turned away.
CHAPTER 9. LEARNING FROM LAS VEGAS
138Helen Stewart was the unlikely owner: www.reviewjournal.com/news/helen-stewart, February 7, 1999.
140His unsavory reputation: www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/contested_elections/089William_Clark.htm.
141“He is as rotten a human being”: Mark Twain, quoted in Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events, edited by Bernard DeVoto, 45.
142Photographs of the town from the 1920s: Special Collections, Lied Library.
146“Now this dam is just a dam”: Joseph E. Stevens, Hoover Dam: An American Adventure, 46.
148Called a “natural engineer”: Robert L. Ingram, A Builder and His Family, 1898–1948, Being the Historical Account of the Contracting, Engineering, and Construction Career of W. A. Bechtel, 4.
150Tony Cornero arrived in Las Vegas: James Roman, “The Original Wise Guy,” Chronicles of Old Las Vegas, 51.
151“It set the stage”: Andrew J. Dunar and Dennis McBride, Building Hoover Dam: An Oral History of the Great Depression, 232.
152“They sent me an invitation”: Ibid., 233.
152“Potent in its charm”: Las Vegas Age, May 3, 1931.
152“He saw a Las Vegas of classy, carpeted casinos”: Las Vegas Review-Journal, February 7, 1999, www.reviewjournal.com/news/tony-cornero.
154“They will work under our conditions”: Quoted in Stevens, Hoover Dam, 72.
155at least fifty cases of carbon monoxide poisoning: Dunar and McBride, Building Hoover Dam, 317–320.
158“Twelve hundred men with modern equipment”: Frank Crowe quoted in the PBS American Experience documentary on the Hoover Dam, www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/hoover/.
158“This morning I came, I saw and I was conquered”: Roosevelt quoted in Michael Hiltzik, Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century, 372.
161“There’s a lot of desert”: Innovation America, “Bechtel’s Man at the Nevada Site,” America’s Journal of Technology Commercialization, www.innovation-America.org.
161104 nuclear reactors from thirty-one states: Department of Energy Information, www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3.
CHAPTER 10. CHINATOWN 2
164“It was amazing to me”: Stephanie Tavares, “Q&A, Pat Mulroy,” Las Vegas Sun, May 1, 2009, 16.
165“Everything the city did was legal”: Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, 65.
166“Wicked dust storms”: Alissa Walker, “The Los Angeles Aqueduct Turns 100,” Nov. 7, 2013. Also, NPR, Nov. 3, 2013, “How an Aqueduct Turned Los Angeles into a Garden of Eden.”
167Thirty years earlier: Infrared satellite map, US Geological Survey Map, 1981, NASA-LandSat-3 No. 36114-As-SI-2050, author copy.
170“prior appropriation” doctrine: deBuys, 165. See Ambler, 214, for Indian priority dates.
170Pop Squires of Las Vegas represented Nevada: Correspondence to Nevada governor, 1922, Special Collections, Lied Library.
172The numbers are posted every day: www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/hourly/mead-elv.html.
172scheduled for completion in 2014 but delayed until 2015: Las Vegas Review-Journal, September 5, 2013.
173“DON’T WRECK YOUR BOAT”: Lake Mead National Park newspaper, February 2010.
174“Low water doesn’t mean no water”: www.nps.gov/lake/naturescience/lowwater.htm.
177“They said Hoover Dam was going to silt up”: John McPhee, The John McPhee Reader, 323.
180security is central: Climate change has changed the meaning of security.
180“We are on the verge of a new form of desertification”: William DeBuys, A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, 8.
181“I remember having Harry in high school”: Author notes from presentation to Gene Segerblom at the Nevada Women’s History Celebration of 2010 in Las Vegas.
185“The thing I kept hearing”: Emily Green, “Not This Water,” pt. 4 of “Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst.”
186“[This] isn’t a new idea”: Emily Green, “The Equation: No Water, No Growth,” pt. 3 of “Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst.”
186“An Owens Valley cannot. . . occur in Nevada”: Emily Green, pt. 4 of “Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst.”
187Pat Mulroy assured a Senate Committee: Pat Mulroy announced her decision to retire in September 2013. “Pat Mulroy to Retire,” Las Vegas Sun, Sept. 23, 2013.
188“Pat Mulroy was in Washington this week”: Henry Brean, “Federal Officials Cut Water Delivery for Lake Mead, Speeding Reservoir’s Decline.”
CHAPTER 11. THE BECHTEL FAMILY BUSINESS
190“He had offers for $90 million”: Quoted in Tim O’Grady, “Children of Las Vegas.”
190“This is a city of fifty-year old men”: Ibid.
191contractors “whose offices were in their hats”: “The Earth Movers,” pt. 1, Fortune, Oct. 1943.
191“We will build anything”: Fortune, March 1951, quoted in Laton McCartney, Friends in High Places: Bechtel, America’s Most Secret Corporation and How It Engineered the World, 55.
192America’s energy resources lay beneath Indian reservations: Marjane Ambler, Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development.
195“A man with holy war views”: I. F. Stone’s Weekly, November 7, 1960, quoted in McCartney, Friends in High Places, 97.
196Three-fourths of uranium: Kate Tuttle, “The Feds, Uranium,” Boston Globe, Oct. 5, 2010. See also Leslie Macmillan, “The Tainted Desert,” Tufts Magazine, winter 2012.
196Stewart Udall was holding special hearings: “Uranium Miners Suffering Described at Hearing.” See also Navajo-Hopi Observer, March 14, 1990; and Navajo Times, March 15, 1990, 2.
196“The nuclear industry was so incestuous”: McCartney, Friends in High Places, 104
.
197McCone became head of the CIA: Although McCone was a Republican, a Catholic, and a supporter of America’s intervention in Vietnam, he opposed the coup against President Diem and resigned from the CIA in 1965. He claimed no knowledge of the CIA’s Operation Mongoose under the Kennedys, the secret plot to destabilize the Cuban government and assassinate Castro. John McCone, oral history interview, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.
197One moonless night in northern Nevada: John McPhee, Annals of the Former World, 111–112.
198“As we looked back”: Ibid.
200Brown and Root, a Texas construction firm: Robert Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 606, 618.
203It owned coal mines in ten states: Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Keystone Coal Industry Manual, 1984, 896.
205“I believe the performance”: Peter MacDonald testimony, US Congress, “To Reauthorize Housing Relocation Under the Navajo Hopi Relocation Program and for Other Purposes,” Senate Hearings on S. 1236, December 9, 1987, 23, 51.
205“There are many problems”: Dennis DeConcini testimony, US Congress, “To Reauthorize Housing Relocation Under the Navajo Hopi Relocation Program and for Other Purposes,” Senate Hearings on S. 1236, May 19, 1987, 5; John McCain, 4; Ivan Sidney, 24.
207“Give us the money”: Wallace Stegner, The American West as Living Space, 9.
208“a raid on resources”: Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, Empires in the Sun, 46.
208“The Bechtel organization wishes to operate”: Letter of C. J. Hallett, Caspar Weinberger Papers, Library of Congress.
209The Interior Department claimed the leases were confidential: One Navajo Tribal Council member publicized a lease clause regarding the coal-slurry line and sale of Indian water rights that required separate approval by the tribal council: “The Southern California Edison Company, as a proposed purchaser of Black Mesa coal for operation of a new generating plant to be constructed by said company at Mohave, Nevada would not purchase the coal at the present high rates Sentry Royalty Company would have to charge on the basis of present high freight rates and the required cost of constructing a railroad from the vicinity of Flagstaff, Arizona. It is therefore in the best interest of the Navajo Tribe to grant to the Sentry Royalty Company the right to construct a slurry pipeline in lieu and instead of a railroad, and to authorize the use of water (which has already been discovered in deep drilling by said company in the said leased area of the Navajo reservation) and sale thereof the Sentry Royalty Company in an estimated amount of 2,500 to 3,000 acre-feet annually.”
209“Our Mother Earth”: Excerpt from Proclamation of the Big Mountain Diné Nation, Declaration of Independence, Oct. 28, 1979. Author copy with signatures, courtesy of J. R. Lancaster.
CHAPTER 12. ROBERTA BLACKGOAT’S WORLD
211“Those are to catch rainwater for the sheep”: Author visit, February 16–19, 1991.
213“rude shelters known as hogans”: Cited in Healing v. Jones case summary LexisNexis, 6 of 50. “The Navajos were originally of an aggressive nature, although not as warlike as the Apaches. It was because they had become embroiled in a series of fights with white men that they were banished to Fort Sumner in 1863. By 1882, however, they had curbed their hostility to the Government and to white men and, in general, were peaceably disposed, except for their proclivity to commit depredations against the Hopis, as described below. Desert life made the Navajos sturdy, virile people, industrious and optimistic. They were also intelligent and thrifty. . . . In the main, however, they were semi-nomadic or migratory, moving into new areas at times, and then moving seasonally from mountain to valley and back again with their livestock. This required them to live in rude shelters known as ‘hogans’ usually built of poles, sticks, bark and moist earth” (emphasis added).
214“Those are places like us”: In “Geopolitics Comes Home,” Gottlieb and Wiley described the Grand Plan “as another of those exciting geopolitical visions, like the Pacific Rim strategy, spun out of the fertile relationship developed between Washington and the largest private corporations.” Robert Gottlieb and Peter Wiley, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West, 46–47. Anita Parlow in an author interview described Black Mesa energy development and the Indian removal as “a domestic example of a global paradigm.”
215Proclamation of the Big Mountain Diné: Author copy, dated October 28, 1979.
216“Let’s go look for some concrete”: Author notes, Feb. 21, 1991.
217“From our first meeting”: E-mails, telephone calls, and personal interview with Martha Blue, 2002–2010. See also Roberta Blackgoat in Judith Nies, Nine Women: Portraits from American Radical Tradition, 293–297.
223“That’s where I went to school”: Author interviews, February 1991 and March 1993.
224“The Hopi are a timid and inoffensive people”: Case summary, Healing v. Jones, LexisNexis, 6 of 50.
225CERT, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes: Peter MacDonald with Ted Schwarz, The Last Warrior: Peter MacDonald and the Navajo Nation, 228–233; author interview with Lucille Echohawk, CERT, February 27, 1991; annual report, CERT.
227“I never met Peter MacDonald”: Senator George McGovern, telephone interview by the author, May 23, 1993.
228“an Oriental potentate”: John R. Emshwiller, “Chief Under Fire,” Wall Street Journal, Jan. 5, 1989, 1.
231“Are we going to have to listen to you all day?”: Accounts of the Hanson’s stockholders meeting. Zoe Brennan, “Furious Hanson on the Warpath,” Daily Express, Feb. 1, 1996. Tom Sevenson, “Insults Fly,” The Independent, Feb. 1, 1996.
235“She was a hero”: Daniel Peaches, letter to the editor, Navajo Hopi Observer, May 1, 2002.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS
Boyden, John S. Papers. Special Collections, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT.
———. Papers. University of Utah Library, Salt Lake City.
Hayden, Carl. Papers. Arizona State University, Tempe.
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston.
Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library. Austin, TX.
National Archives and Records Administration. College Park, MD.
Special Collections, Lied Library. University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Squires, Charles P., and Delphine Squires. Papers. Lied Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Weinberger, Caspar. Personal papers. Manuscript Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
Congressional Quarterly Almanac. 93rd Cong., 2nd sess., 1974.
Constitution of the State of Nevada, Article 10, Section 5. “Tax on Proceeds of Minerals; Appropriation to Counties; Apportionment; Assessment and Taxation of Mines.” Reno: State of Nevada, 2003.
US Congress. Hearings Before the Special Senate Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce. Pt. 10, Nevada-California. November–December 1950; February–March 1951. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1952.
———. Report of the Committee on Interior to Accompany S. 692, a Bill to Set Up a Special Three-Judge Court. 85th Cong., 2nd sess. Report No. 1942. June 23, 1958.
———. “To Reauthorize Housing Relocation Under the Navajo Hopi Relocation Program and for Other Purposes.” Senate Hearings on S. 1236, May 19, 1987. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1987.
———. “To Reauthorize Housing Relocation Under the Navajo Hopi Relocation Program and for Other Purposes.” Senate Hearings on S. 1236, December 9, 1987. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1987.
US Congress, Hearings Before Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. To Authorize Partition of Surface Rights of Navajo Hopi Indian Lands. And to Provide for Allotments to Certain Paiute Indians and for Other Purposes, September 14–15, 1972. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1973.
US Congress, House Committee on Interior and Insular Aff
airs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs. Partition of Navajo and Hopi 1882 Reservation. 93rd Cong., May 14–15, 1973. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974.
US Department of the Interior, Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement. Environmental Impacts and Proposed Permit Application for the Black Mesa–Kayenta Mine, Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations, Arizona. May 1990. In vol. 2 of Comments and Responses. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1991.
US District Court for the District of Arizona. Case Summary and Decision in “Healing v. Jones.” 210 F. Supp. 125 (1962).
US Supreme Court, Jones v. Healing et al., 373US758, June 3, 1963.
OTHER SOURCES
Akeman, Tom. “US Driving Off 10,000 Indians; 2 Tribes Struggling over Coal-Rich Land.” Sacramento Bee, October 20, 1985, A1.
Allen, Paul Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Ambler, Marjane. Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990.
Anderson, Susanne. Song of the Earth Spirit. Introduction by David Brower. San Francisco: Friends of the Earth Books, 1973.
Arrington, Leonard, and Davis Bitton. The Mormon Experience: A History of the Latter-day Saints. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979.
Associated Press. “Arizona Power Plant Ranks Among Nation’s Dirtiest.” Arizona Republic, April 14, 2000.
August, Jack L., Jr. “Carl Hayden, Arizona, and the Politics of Water Development in the Southwest, 1923–1928.” Pacific Historical Review (1989).
“AuH2O.” New Yorker, April 25, 1988, 43–73.
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams. 1903. Reprint, New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
Balkenk, Eric. “A World Beneath Lake Powell Is Being Resurrected.” High Country News, October 3, 2013.
Barboza, David. “Macao Surpasses Las Vegas as Gambling Center.” New York Times, January 23, 2007.
Beam, Alex. American Crucification. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.