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Show 174 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER Only a handful of hardy people had visited Dinosaur National Monument before the crsp bill was introduced in Congress, and the conservationists began their fight to save the great canyons from being submerged under hundreds of feet of water behind Echo Park Dam. Now, in the summer of 1954, the road into the monument was packed with all manner of vehicles. By the end of July, more than thirty-five thousand persons had crowded into the small preserve,189 and they continued to arrive until the cold of the northern desert shut them out. One of the tourists who viewed the site of Echo Park Dam was President Eisenhower. The idea of looking at it had come to him while he was doing sonie trout fish- ing in Colorado, and so one morning he took off in his plane from the summer White House. With him went Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson, himself a Utah boy, and some officials of the Bureau of Recla- mation, as well as Interior Secretary McKay. A presi- dential spokesman said the one-day trip had been de- signed to let the President have a first-hand look at reclamation projects and the sites for future develop- ments. But the presidential plane had not got off the ground before the political nature of the trip was ap- parent. Only three stops were scheduled - Grand Junction, Colorado; Casper, Wyoming; and McCook, Nebraska - and at each of these pauses, the Republican candidates were on hand to let the chief executive anoint them. They were duly photographed shaking hands with Mr. Eisenhower. The "Columbine" flew low over Echo Park with the presidential nose near a window. But during the long day's aerial journey, the President said nothing about the crsp. The Denver Post expressed the hope that the President |
