and organized the Pend Oreille Drainage Association. They did not propose to drain and lower Lake Pend Oreille. They simply wanted to control the flood level so that their farms and towns would not be inundated. They employed engineers to study the physical conditions. And a great many people said loosely, "Go down to Albenai Falls and blow out those rocks and let the lake drain, and you will avoid floods." We have a very peculiar condition in Lake Pend Oreille. We would have a flood, and the river would come to a stand just above the lake at Clark Fork, but still the lake would continue to fill up and rise. And I am going to tell you a fact from my own personal observation. In the month of June in the year 1894, when we had the worst flood we ever had, I went with a gentleman hunting some horses. The country was not very well settled. But right along the bank of the river, there was a railroad tie camp, and there were some buildings there. They had been flooded about half way up. On the door there was a high water mark. The day we looked at it, it was down about an inch. The river had come to a stand, and started to fall. But down at Hope, and Sandpoint on Lake Pend Oreille, the lake rose 21 inches the same day and continued to rise for some time, and it backed up and flooded a great deal of country; indicating very clearly to everybody that there was a bottleneck in the lake and the lake was like a jug that filled up faster than it emptied.

So when we employed this engineer to go down and study the cost of removing the obstruction at Albenai Falls-that is not just a falls, but it is a place where the water runs swiftly between some big rock barriers. They call it a falls. It is a natural power site. So this engineer came back after conducting these examinations and reported to the people at Hope and Clark Fork and Sandpoint, and said that the difficulty was not at Albenai Falls, but it was 5 miles up the river at a rapids in main river at the mouth of Priest River; that the rapids at Priest River was a choke and a narrows and the river was dead until it reached that point, and then it ran fast. And he said it did not make any difference what happened at Albenai Falls; we would still get our floods and the lake would continue to back up. It was clearly demonstrated in every flood period that the narrows and rapids at Priest River retarded the outflow from the lake.

Then the Army engineers came in with a plan to put a dam at Albenai Falls. Let me remind the committee that this will not irrigate a foot of land. It is not for navigation. There is no navigation below that point. It will not do a thing but add some power and maybe firm up some power at the down-river plants. That is all that will be accomplished at Albenai Falls.

The reason I am before your committee at this time is to ask this committee, in authorizing these project on the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, to do it in an orderly way, to give us orderly development of the Clark Fork River, and the Columbia and its tributaries. We are spending money in a big way up in the headwaters of this river at a place called Hungry Horse, for flood control, to hold the water back. What they would do to us down there at this Albenai Falls would simply fill up the lake, so that when the flood waters come in, in the spring, as they did last year, and as they are doing this

year, the lake would be full of water and the flood pouring in would go that much higher and inundate the farms and town in the valleys and around the lake.

They tell us they would open the gate down there at the dam and let the water out, to control the flood levels of the lake and rivers. That is impossible. It cannot be done. I am going to show you why, and the engineers' report will show you why.

Here is a chart prepared by the Army engineers. You will notice that the level of Lake Pend Oreille extends right down to the mouth of the Priest River. From that point there is a fall, if you read this Army chart, of 17 feet, down to the axis of the Albenai Dam.

Now, what good will it do to open gates down at the Albenai Dam if you have got your channel narrowed and choked up and backing up, with dead water back here, backing up and piling up and inundating the lands around those towns, along the Clark Fork River, Lake Pend Oreille and the Pend Oreille River. And that alluvial soil up in the Clark Fork Valley must be considered. What is the good of opening the gates, if that is not the point of the bottleneck? You can open the gates at Grand Coulee or anywhere else downstream; it will not help us any. And the purpose of my coming before this committee and representing the people of all those towns and all that area along the Clark Fork Valley, around the Pend Oreille Lake and down the Pend Oreille River is to ask this committee to see to it that the water resources of the Clark Fork River are developed in an orderly fashion, and that we do the thing that is proposed by this committee and by the Congress and provide flood protection.

We have, if we develop the river in an orderly way a series of dams and water storage projects. The Hungry Horse project is being built now. From there on down the river, there is a Glacier View, Paradise Dam, the Noxon Rapids and Cabinet Gorge.

Cabinet Gorge has been investigated by the Bureau of Reclamation, was authorized by Congress, and it is a natural place for a dam. It will make plenty of power. It seems to be overlooked by the Army engineers.

Then we have Albenai Falls, and downstream we have Metaline Falls. We have a choice of seven projects, one is being built at Hungry Horse, and all these splendid natural potential waterpower sites and storage places that will store the water and provide flood control along the river, to protect our lands and not ruin them.

I will have to explain this to you. You have heard the other side. The other side has been financed and sent in here by the power interests, and I do not think there is hardly any exception. They are high pressuring, and low pressuring and exerting every other kind of pressure. Let me tell you why. There is a local power company which supplies the area, in eastern Washington and northern Idaho. I am one of the customers, because I run a little mine out there, and I pay about a cent and a quarter a kilowatt for my industrial power, when you add the demand charges. These power companies have a network of transmission lines built up over the years, supplying the towns, mines, lumber mills in all the vast area of what we call the inland empire, that wonderful manufacturing and farming area around the city of Spokane, which we call the capital of the inland empire. Their power

lines bringing power into Idaho come directly over the Albenai Falls project. Naturally, it will be to their advantage to have Albenai Falls built first. We get power for industrial use further up the river, at Clark Fork, and in the towns around the lake, over the company's high-power transmission lines in an arrangement whereby the Washington Power Co. delivers the power from Spokane to its transformer station at the town of Newport right near the Albenai Falls dam site. The Mountain States Power Co. buys the power from them here and carries it around the lake to the town of Sandpoint and on up to Clark Fork-power which it has obtained from the Washington Water Power Co., which is an Electric Bond and Share subsidiary.

Now, with their big transformer station at Newport, they can buy Albenai Falls power from the Bonneville Power Administration for 22 mills at the bus-bar, and retail it to light cònsumers at current rates, and if you buy up to $3 worth, you get in on a 3-cent rate. If you run a mine, as I do, at Clark Fork, you pay a cent and a quarter. Anybody can see with half an eye why they are moving heaven and earth and sending their paid representatives before this committee to rush through this Albenai Falls project and flood the people of north Idaho out.

What do they care about all this farming country and these towns when they have these big profits in sight?

Let me tell you something, gentlemen. I came there in 1890. That country was largely wooded. The settlers moved in there as we did, and they had to clear away the brush and timber and blast the stumps to clear the land. There was timber there. We could not sell any timber at that time in the early years. There was no market. The timber, mostly burned, had to be felled and logged and piled up. The stumps had to be cleared. That area on the map to be flooded that you see there represents the work of a generation of people.

Now let me read you the list of towns in there. I will show you on the map where these towns are. There is Clark Fork, Denton, Hope, Oden, Pack River, Kootenai, Sandpoint, Dover, Wrenco, Morton, Laclede, Sawyer, Thama, Priest River.

The CHAIRMAN. Pardon me right there, if you do not mind being interrupted.

Mr. WHITE. I do not.

The CHAIRMAN. The testimony the other day with respect to that project, in order to refresh the memory of the committee, showed that if there was any water backed up there, it would be protected by levees, as I recall.

Mr. WHITE. You could not levee that country.

The CHAIRMAN. Pardon me. I do not want to interrupt you. there would be a levee at Sandpoint. I think that is the place. not the place, Colonel?

Colonel GEE. Yes, sir.

The CHAIRMAN. And that would be the only levee necessary. you agree with that statement?

But

Is it

Do

Mr. WHITE. Yes, because they would just flood and abandon the rest of it, as it is impossible to hold water in that gravelly subsoil with a

levee.

Let me tell you. I was born behind a levee down in Louisiana.

View of the mouth of Priest River loooking across the Pend Oreille River 6 miles above the Albeni Falls Dam site.

The CHAIRMAN. We will get back to Louisiana in a few minutes. I want to get this for the record. The testimony the other day showed, and I want to get your view about it, that the only levee that would be required to prevent flooding of any of these areas, would be the levee at Sandpoint. What do you say about that? That is mentioned in the report.

Mr. WHITE. Well, knowing the nature of the ground, which is a loose gravel with a little skin of soil over it, I would say it is impractical and impossible to levee this land because it will burst out in springs. The one example of that is up at Bonners Ferry. They have what they call sandboils behind the levees-dykes we call them. The water percolates through the ground and boils up. We do not have silt like you have down on the Misssissippi and Louisiana. We have gravel, and the water percolates through there and boils up. It is out of the question to protect this land with levees.

Now, I want to tell you that there was a man, Oliver Ruen, who made a specialty of raising seed Irish potatoes and he cleared $35,000 each year on the crop on 200 acres of the land that will be completely inundated.

The CHAIRMAN. Feed?

Mr. WHITE. Seed. He waited to put in these crops in July after the water went off. He got on there in the latter part of June and plowed it up, and raised potatoes. But if you put this dam in at Albenai Falls and do not do anything to remove the bottleneck, there will be no crops, because the dam will hold the water over the land all fall. It will just be a mud flat. That is what it will be when they draw the water down. We are absolutely opposed to the Albenai Dam. Without removing that bottleneck at Priest River there is a blockade 6 miles up river. I am going to show you some pictures now, to illustrate what we are talking about.

The CHAIRMAN. You want to file a statement, do you, Mr. White.

Mr. WHITE. Yes. I want to prove to you that there is no doubt about what I say.

This picture shows the mouth of Priest River where the rapids begin. You are looking up Priest River. The Priest River country is where Grover Cleveland made the first forest reservation in the United States. Up the river was one of the finest stands of white pine in the United States. That was the beginning and the forerunner of our national forests.

Picture No. 2 is a view of the rapids in the main river. I want to show you that those are rapids. I want to show the committee also what can be done by a very light excavation. We do not ask them to dredge the bottom of the river. We simply ask them to go there as part of this project and excavate and widen the river channel so that when they open the gates down below at Albenai Falls they will absolutely control the flood level of the lake.

Mr. MCDONOUGH. Mr. White, are you attempting to say that the speed of the water at the rapids point prevents the normal flow of water from the lake down to Albenai?

Mr. WHITE. Yes. It is the choke in the main river channel by the narrows and rapids at Priest River that backs the water up above that point and causes the rapids below there. I am prepared to demonstrate that. The lumber companies when they were bringing the logs out of