| OCR Text |
Show 106 WAR FOR THE COLORADO RIVER So Watkins and his cohorts decided to hold their fire until they saw which way the wind was blowing on the other side of Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, the senator spent much of his time pounding the corridors of the House Office Building lobbying for votes. Often with him he took representatives sent to Washington by the Upper Basin states. Day after day, in pairs or alone, these emissaries tapped on the doors of congressmen, extolling the wonders of the grsp, pounding out their theme song that it would pay back every penny to the government, and the never-neglected ballad they knew so well about the land of the dinosaurs. The mail rooms in the basements of the House and Senate office buildings contained mountains of full sacks. Southern and Eastern congressmen suddenly found themselves digging into an issue called Echo Park because of alarmed constituencies. Brooklyn and Wish- ing Well, Mississippi, all at once had something in common. How many hundred thousand letters, telegrams, resolutions and petitions showered down upon the dis- tracted public servants will never be known. It was known, however, there were at least ten million members of organizations, clubs and associations who saw it as their bounden duty to protect an isolated canyon hole in a far off western desert from the inroads of com- mercialism and despoilment, and it was easy to believe that each one of the ten million had written his congress- man at least once. One article in the Congressional Record complained that conservationists had been swiping large amounts of sandstone from the top of Steamboat Rock in Dinosaur |
