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Show 102 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER did not like the idea of the Reclamation Bureau, or any- one else, invading a national shrine. The names of these aroused citizens could not have been contained in the New York City telephone directory. It did not matter that only a few of them had ever heard of the place called Dinosaur National Monument, that only a few hundred persons had ever seen it, or that Congress had always been pinchpenny when it came to appropriating money for it. By the time the House hearings were held, the name was on everyone's lips. Highway 40, a treacherous piece of macadam winding a tortuous route through the deserts of western Colorado and Utah, was jammed with tourists on their way to this secluded acreage lost in a wilderness of gigantic and virtually inaccessible canyons as deep as the pits of Hades. There were at this suddenly-famous reserve no accommodations for such a crowd, and rangers and a few motel and camp operators in the area found them- selves at the mercy of a wildeyed throng, all seemingly bent on falling off Steamboat Rock before it was im- mersed in five hundred feet of dammed-up water. The congressional sponsors of the grsp soon saw that the only course open to them was a counter-attack, and they launched it. From that moment on, the presses of the Government Printing Office were overburdened with pieces extolling the virtues of Echo Park Dam, and the soundnss of the great project that would make a Garden of Eden of the forgotten wastes of the Upper Basin. All these pieces were for the Congressional Record, and thus the dinosaur tracks plodded across those pages day after day, scents of political perfume added to their musty flavor, and tinted with the colors of irresponsible as- sertions and unfounded claims. |
