Broadened Vista

Before a battery of TV and movie cameras in the Cabinet Room of the White House, President Eisenhower and Canada's Prime Minister John G. Diefenbaker last week signed the outgoing Administration's last, and perhaps most meaningful, treaty. It was "the first time in history," said Diefenbaker, that two nations had agreed to share, on anywhere near so grand a scale, in "the development of an international river." It was more than that: it was an agreement that could result in a better life for scores of thousands of citizens on both sides of the border.

For 16 years, on and off, the U.S. and Canada had been talking about a treaty providing for cooperative development of the Columbia River, and the failure to agree on such a treaty had slowed up the growth of the U.S. Northwest. Example: the Libby Dam project in northwestern Montana had been stalled for a decade because Canada was reluctant to see a U.S. dam built on the Kootenai River, a Columbia tributary that rises in Canada, crosses into the U.S., then swings northward across the border again.

Forestalling the Floods. In volume of flow and hydroelectric potential, the Columbia ranks high among the earth's mightiest rivers. Each year it discharges into the Pacific enough water to cover the entire state of Texas a foot deep. But the flow is uneven: in the spring, swelled by the melted snows of the Rockies, the Columbia becomes a fierce torrent, sometimes overflowing its banks and causing costly flood damage.

The new treaty will enable the U.S. and Canada to realize more of the Columbia's vast power potential and to forestall the spring floods, too. Under the treaty's provisions, Canada will set about building three storage and power dams, and the U.S. will go ahead with Libby Dam. Over the course of its 60-year lifetime, the treaty envisions U.S. and Canadian power and flood-control projects costing a total of some $4 billion. Canada will receive one-half of the electric power generated by U.S. projects built under the treaty.

Opening the Way. For the U.S. Northwest, the treaty broadened a vista that first opened in 1792, when Captain Robert Gray, fur trader from Boston, steered the schooner Columbia past the dangerous reefs at the river's mouth and named the mighty stream after his ship. John Boit, fifth mate of the Columbia, wrote prophetically that "This River in my opinion, wou'd be a fine place for to sett up a Factory." The Columbia became a vital artery of the region's fur trade, and then of the salmon-canning and lumber industries, but only in the 1930s, with the construction of a series of big power dams on the Columbia, beginning with Grand Coulee, did men really begin to tap the Northwest's great industrial potential. The new treaty opens the way to further development of that potential, promises to make the Columbia River region a finer place "for to sett up a Factory," than Mate Boit could have imagined.

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