Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

Author:Adam Weymouth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

The bedrock of Rock Island, out there in the middle of the river, was once earmarked as the foundation for what John F. Kennedy declared would be “the greatest dam in the free world.” The Rampart Dam, first conceived in the 1950s, would have created the largest artificial lake on the planet, a record it would still have held today. Bigger than Lake Erie. Bigger than Macedonia. Ten million cubic feet of concrete, 530 feet high and 4,700 feet across—almost a mile. The lake would have stretched upriver for 280 miles, flooding the Flats beyond Fort Yukon, and would have taken twenty years to fill, its waters leeching out across the watershed as though the very earth had sprung a leak.

The Alaskan senator Ernest Gruening had told the state legislature with authority that the land was ripe for inundation as it contained not more than ten flush toilets. This was almost certainly an overestimation.

“Search the whole world,” he continued, “and it would be hard to find an equivalent area with so little to be lost through flooding.”

This was wilderness in the sense of godforsaken, more akin to where Moses wandered than some untouched, untamed Eden. The lobby group North of the Range recommended that developers “come forward with both guns blazing,” which must have been a wonderfully liberating way to express yourself when compared to these days of cumbersome PR and environmental impact assessments. Yet a federal report found that: “Nowhere in the history of water development in North America have the fish and wildlife losses anticipated to result from a single project been so overwhelming.” The 36,000 ponds of the Yukon Flats provided nesting grounds for over one and a half million ducks, as well as geese and cranes and waders. “Did you ever see a duck drown?” the dam’s proponents sniggered. There were nine villages upriver that were slated to be flooded, 1,200 villagers to be evacuated, and the lives of thousands more changed forever as the salmon stopped returning. Salmon can leap prodigiously, but not 530 feet. For several years they would have arrived at the foot of the dam, beating their brains against the concrete, and then they would stop coming. But hey, salmon don’t drown either.

One study calculated that the dam would produce more than five times the quantity of power than the state of Alaska could consume. A legislator remarked, in private, that the dam would have served its purpose if it was blown up on the day it was completed, because in the end it was primarily a project conceived to channel federal money to the state. A brochure produced by Yukon Power for America (membership for schoolchildren at twenty-five cents a head) waxed breathless about its recreational potential: “Freshwater boating and sailing… hunting lodges and fish camps on scenic shorelines… marinas, dock and float plane facilities—all accessible by rail, highway and air.” Of all the claims, this was perhaps the most delusional: that this vast new lake, hundreds of miles into the

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