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Show HUNGRY HORSE PREDICTION 39 With its unequaled resources the Upper Basin was one of the largest potential industrial areas in the world. The Reclamation Bureau had ignored this factor in the crsp plan, but Secretary Brannan did not ignore it.46 "In some areas [of the Upper Basin]," Brannan told the Bureau, "the use of water for industrial purposes may also be found to produce greater benefits than other uses." After questioning the soundness of the Bureau's method of estimating indirect benefits from the project (such as recreation), Brannan riddled the Basin Ac- count idea. Such an account, he declared, had no real bearing upon the justification for, or the desirability of, the projects covered by it, nor upon the amount to be withdrawn from the Treasury to construct the projects.47 Under the Basin Account plan as proposed by the Bureau, no credits would accumulate for the first seventy years, Brannan pointed out, and added: "This, it seems to us, casts further doubt upon the meaning and utility of an account such as the one proposed." Brannan was a westerner. He understood the needs and the problems of the West. A desire to use the re- sources of the West judiciously and with regard to good business principles dominated his thinking. He also knew Mike Straus, and he was fully aware that the Bureau had only one goal: the complete dominance of the western economy through the control of water.48 The Federal Power Commission was even more con- demnatory of the Reclamation Bureau's methods than the Department of Agriculture. The 'Indirect benefits'" of the crsp, as set down by the Bureau of Reclamation, were something pulled out of the sky. The Bureau had to have something like |
