Originally published in The American Legion Magazine
Republished here by permission, thanks Jeff.
By Jeff Stoffer
No traffic will come. So Jacqui Krizo kills the
engine right in the middle of a paved county road, gets out and doesn’t
bother to shut the car door. She walks to the shoulder and gazes across
weed-blemished fields, parched in the hot August sunshine. She listens
carefully, like a nurse for a lost heartbeat. "It’s dead,"
she says. "Normally, you couldn’t park right in the middle of the
road, not this time of year, not here. The grain trucks would be going
up and down. Now you don’t even hear the frogs or the crickets. It’s
just dead."
Such was the condition of last harvest season when
irrigation water was denied to farmers of the Klamath Basin, located in
the fertile high country where Oregon and California meet. Fields
normally verdant with potato, barley, oat and alfalfa crops had to be
replaced by spindly, unmarketable cover-grains whose main purpose was to
keep the soil from blowing off the face of the earth.
The year was ruined here because a federal court
ruled last spring that the Endangered Species Act of 1973 plays like a
trump card over longstanding government guarantees to provide water for
farms. Around the 1,000-population town of Tulelake, Calif., those
guarantees were specifically written into homestead patents issued to
returning war veterans who have spent the last half-century building a
community and keeping an economy afloat in the imprint of a former lake
bottom.
Free Land for Veterans. The Klamath Basin’s
first wave of veteran homesteaders rolled in after World War I, when
honorably discharged soldiers and sailors received preference over other
applicants wanting in on the government’s offer of free, newly
reclaimed, irrigable land. An American Legion post in Tulelake was
formed to serve as a clearinghouse for negotiations between veterans and
the government. Legionnaires worked to reduce by half the per-acre fees
farmers had to pay back to the government to cover the cost of dam
construction. Groups of homesteads were awarded five different times
between 1922 and 1937, and another round was scheduled for 1942.
World War II delayed additional homestead movement
until 1946 when the first of three pickle-jar drawings at the armory in
Klamath Falls, Ore., determined who among that group of veterans would
become landowners and who would not. The land lottery was viewed as a
dual-edged act of postwar progressivism – both a thank-you to
Americans who helped save the world and an opportunity to populate the
basin with capable young men and women eager to "prove up" on
the small farms and pump vitality into the economy. Homestead veterans
of the Klamath Basin warranted a cover story in Life magazine on
Jan. 20, 1947, and the layout inside portrayed a quirky country-western
rendition of the Great American Dream – with Mom, Dad and the kids in
cowboy boots, jeans and hats, traipsing through the dirt; the house with
a white-picket fence was instead a single-pane wooden barracks left over
from Tulelake’s World War II Japanese Relocation Camp. For those
veterans whose names were drawn – exclusively children of the
Depression – the lottery was the chance of a lifetime. "Amid
scenes of anxiety and joy, out came the names of lucky veterans who …
are now established for life," the article observed.
Criteria for homestead eligibility included proof
of military service during World War II, at least two years of
experience in agriculture, at least $2,000 of personal capital, and
"habits of honesty, temperance, thrift and industry." Winners
needed to farm for five years in order to gain clear title. The old
relocation-camp buildings were available to homesteaders willing to haul
them off. Thousands applied for the three drawings between 1946 and
1949, and more than 200 homesteads were awarded in that span, planting a
fresh crop of young families in the basin.
"It was the most exciting thing that ever
happened to me," said Eleanor Bolesta, who was a 23-year-old
veteran of the Navy’s Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service
program when her name was drawn. Trained as an aviation machinist’s
mate, she and her husband, Charles, a disabled Marine veteran, were
barely making ends meet after the war. They were going through their
savings and racking up medical bills. Both had taken temporary jobs at a
post office in central California when her name was drawn – one of
only three women to receive a homestead in the program. "I never
dreamed I would own land. It was considered very valuable land and was a
wonderful opportunity for us, if we were willing to work."
The Decisive Act. Fifty-two years after the last
veteran’s name was drawn from the pickle jar – which holds a place
of honor in the county museum – farmers of the Klamath Basin returned
to the national media spotlight. But the spring 2001 story was not one
of postwar recovery. It was about betrayal. The same government that
drained Tule and Lower Klamath lakes nearly a century ago to expose new
farm land and build dams and canals to water it, simply closed off the
head gates. The reason: to protect two endangered species of
bottom-feeding sucker fish in upper Klamath Lake and to help threatened
coho salmon downstream, as well. It was a story that hit with tectonic
might among those who live and work in natural-resource-dependent
communities across America and fear they will be the next victims of the
Endangered Species Act’s single-species approach to ecological
balance.
"They couldn’t have done us any more harm
with an atomic bomb," says George A. "Pug" Smith, who
served as a Navy ambulance driver in the Philippines during World War
II. He was only 24 years old and full of hope when his name was drawn in
the land lottery of 1947. "I felt very fortunate to get one."
Now, years after Smith and fellow irrigators fully
paid off the irrigation project’s construction cost, he wonders if
this is when – and how – the promise breaks. "If we can
get the Endangered Species Act into perspective, it’ll save the
country," he says. "If not, we’re down the tubes. It’s all
politics. And you can never get the government to admit they made a
mistake."
A Progressive-Era Showcase. To drain 96,000
surface acres (about 13 miles by 15 miles) of lake and re-channel
streams feeding those water bodies, the lower Klamath Basin represented
bold engineering challenges – even for the indomitable spirit of the
Progressive Era. After the federal government bought up property and
acquired water rights from both states in the first decade of the
century, excavating the dams and channels by hand and by horse through
volcanic rock was no easy task. Rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, temperature
extremes and the sheer cost of the project were daunting. Labor was hard
to keep, especially when picking apples elsewhere often paid better. In
an essay for the Modoc County Historical Society, local historian Betty
Lou Byrne-Shirley described the Klamath as "one of the most
ambitious reclamation projects in the West during the first part of the
century."
President Theodore Roosevelt, who believed
balanced management of a fast-growing American West was achievable
through smart farming and the preservation of specially designated
natural reserves, once stated: "The object is not to lock up
natural resources but to use them in a way that would increase their
yield for the next generation. No wise use of a farm exhausts its
fertility."
The Progressive Era – America’s quantum leap
from the 19th to the 20th century – produced
such innovations as laws to protect wildlife from illegal hunting and
shipment. That was an issue in the early 1900s for Tule Lake, where
unrestricted commercial hunters harvested wild birds for their plumes
alone or to supply high-end restaurants with exotic meat. Not
coincidentally born around the same time were the nation’s first
federal bird reserves, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of
Reclamation.
The movement was all about places like the Klamath
Basin, which ultimately became home to nine dams, some 400 miles of
canals, dozens of pumps, drains, sumps, and ditches. But along with the
irrigation and flood-control structures came three national wildlife
refuges, the Modoc National Forest and Lava Beds National Monument. The
region evolved into a showcase for the harmony that can be struck
between progress and preservation. Tulelake, Calif., a community that
sprang to life by virtue of the irrigated farms and wildlife refuges
surrounding it, amply fulfilled the Progressive-Era vision for the 20th
century.
But we’re not in that century anymore.
Decision Without Debate. Veteran homesteader
Marion Palmer remembers a man who came by his family’s farm every so
often during the Depression. The man was selling suckers he had caught
in upper Klamath Lake. "You were dang glad to get them," said
Palmer, whose father, a World War I veteran, was granted a homestead
southwest of Tulelake in 1932. "Times were lean. People did
everything and anything they could to make money. And you either worked
or you starved to death."
Times had certainly changed by 1988 when the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service added short-nose and Lost River suckers to the
federal endangered species list. Eight years later, the southern Oregon
and northern California coastal coho salmon were listed as threatened
species under the ESA. Those designations meant farmers, who only use
about 2 percent of the downstream flow for irrigation, had to share
their water more generously with the fish during dry times. Growers
agreed to curtail irrigation during drought years to maintain minimum
water levels in the lake and streams. But a lawsuit filed later by
environmental, tribal and fishing groups produced a new biological
opinion adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2001. That
opinion called for even tighter restrictions on water delivery in the
basin. So tight, in fact, that no water at all would be available for
most of the basin’s farms and two of the wildlife refuges – even in
a normal precipitation year. That opinion, and the water-level
regulations that accompanied it, did not just tip the scales; it tipped
them over. "We didn’t realize what was happening until it
happened to us," said Bolesta, who relies on income from property
she leases to a neighbor who got virtually no water last year.
"Everyone was affected."
Irrigators appealed. But U.S. District Court Judge
Ann Aiken denied their request for an injunction on the grounds that
"… the law requires the protection of suckers and salmon as
endangered and threatened species and as tribal trust resources, even if
(the irrigators) disagree with the manner in which the fish are
protected."
After the ruling, the Klamath Water Users
Association issued a report questioning the kind of science in which
"fish require well over 100 percent of all the water in the basin
… Such requirements cannot be met by natural processes." The
irrigators argued that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation does not have
authority to re-allocate senior water rights from farmers to fish, that
the water-delivery system is owned and maintained by the irrigators and
not the federal government, and that the Klamath Basin crisis exposed
enough deficiencies in the ESA that the law "should be reformed or
discarded and re-drafted."
The biggest frustration in all of this, says Marty
Macy – a former Marine fighter pilot and president of the Tulelake
Growers Association – is that irrigators didn’t even have an
opportunity to publicly debate the decision, question the science or
strike a compromise. "Here we are in the 21st century,
and the only plan we could come up with is zero delivery? We, to this
day, do not know the process of how this opinion was arrived at. We were
not at the table."
Approximately 1,400 family farms went dry while
upper Klamath Lake filled to capacity last summer. Economic losses in
the basin were estimated between $250 million and $300 million.
"The worst thing it did was it ripped the heart out of our
financial institutions," explained Macy, the son of a homestead
veteran, who farms and sprays crops in the basin. "Confidence in
what we’re doing was lost. How are you going to do anything if you don’t
have any water?"
Without the usual influx of seasonal workers,
main-street businesses were equally jolted by the decision. "This
is an agricultural community," said Tony Giacomelli, owner of Jock’s
Supermarket in Tulelake. "That’s the business here. The sense of
community runs deep, and if this goes on one more year, the community
will be bankrupt … It’s shortening people’s lives, just the stress
of it. It’s a very emotional thing, very frustrating."
"We’re angry," Bolesta said. "How
would you feel if you lost your job, your retirement benefits and
four-fifths of the value of your home? Who knows what’s going to
happen next? There won’t be any rural America left if this keeps
up."
The Klamath Tea Party. Following the April 6
decision, thousands of farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers and national
media poured into the basin to protest the decision or bear witness to
the response. On May 7, some 18,000 people filled the streets of Klamath
Falls, Ore., for a "bucket-brigade" rally where a container of
water was filled from the upper lake and handed, one person to the next,
in a human chain through the city before it was dumped into the main
canal. Billboards with slogans like "CALL 911 SOME SUCKER STOLE OUR
WATER" started popping up along the highways. One storefront in
Tulelake proclaimed "Feed the feds … to the fish." A tent
city of protesters set up camp at the head gate. A relief fund was
established to help families in the most serious need.
The local sheriff’s department refused to
intervene, and the FBI had to be called in, after protesters snipped
through a fence and used a cutting torch to open a head gate that sent
water pouring into the canal. At 78 years of age, Eleanor Bolesta was
among those who broke in.
"It’s desperate times for desperate
measures … it appears to me that (people) are trying to save their
lives," Klamath County Sheriff Tim Evinger told The New York
Times, which was among the national media that covered the crisis.
The story dominated headlines in Oregon and northern California and
appeared in almost all major national newspapers, radio and television
news.
On Aug. 1, Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton
concluded that lake levels were high enough to release 75,000 acre feet
of water – about one-sixth of the normal delivery – from the upper
lake. The phrase "too little, too late" does not scratch the
surface. Most of the crops were lost by that time, and it was by far too
late to plant anything new. Some alfalfa came of it.
In the early fall, congressional leaders from both
states weighed in with federal budget requests to compensate farmers
devastated by the sucker ruling. But most of that push came after the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and – with troops on their way to
Afghanistan and New York City to repair – the nation’s budgetary
focus could not have been aimed in a more different direction than the
Klamath Basin. "I don’t think anybody is going to call this one a
walk in the park," Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said after he and Sen.
Gordon Smith, R-Ore., sent a letter asking Congress for $126 million in
aid for the basin’s farmers. Smith’s chief of staff said the request
for relief was a matter of trying "to make sure the farmers and
ranchers are still there next year. This doesn’t do much for the long
term."
"You don’t compensate a veteran who
survived the Bataan Death March by telling him we’re going to pay you
off so you can leave," said Macy, who, like many farmers in the
basin, think there’s much more to this than saving the suckers. Macy
said he believes basin farmers have been targeted for "rural
cleansing" by environmental organizations, federal bureaucracies,
Klamath and Yurok tribes who claim cultural and treaty rights to protect
the fish, along with politicians who resist digging into the ESA out of
fear they will be perceived as weakening it. "Once we took this
issue and started to look at all the layers and layers and layers, it
started to stink more and more," Macy said. "The hidden agenda
is to turn Tule Lake into an Everglades of the West."
"It’s going to happen everywhere in the
West," added Palmer, who served in Europe as an Army infantry man
during World War II. "It’s going to happen until someone gets
with hurt … when they see shelves go empty. That’s the urban society
we live in today."
Jacqui Krizo – a horseradish grower who is both
a daughter and daughter-in-law of homestead veterans – could not help
but acknowledge the irony of it all. "These are the most patriotic
people in the world," she said. "And here they are fighting
their government."
Still, Krizo explained, the veterans who populate
the lower Klamath Basin didn’t hesitate to hoist their flags in
solidarity when America went to war last fall. And after the events of
Sept. 11, tent-city protesters at the head gates began to break camp,
vowing to return after the first of the year if balance cannot be
restored in time for spring planting. They went into the winter hoping
their elected officials will come up with answers, hoping their future
isn’t permanently entangled in two different visions for the future of
farming, not just in the Klamath Basin, but everywhere in America.
"We knew how to co-exist with these species for many, many
years," Macy said. "We may not be biologists or botanists, but
we know our history … and we know that if we don’t stop it here, you’re
next."
Jeff Stoffer is the managing editor of
The American Legion Magazine.
Jeff Stoffer
Managing Editor
The American Legion Magazine
PO Box 1055
Indianapolis, IN 46206
317-630-1333
jstoffer@legion.org