ReThink History: Rivers Reborn

For three-quarters of a century, Americans threw concrete across the great salmon rivers of the West — the Columbia, the Snake, the Elwha, the Klamath — in the conviction that taming a wild river was part of the nation's destiny. The dams delivered cheap power, irrigated deserts, and tamed floods. They also blocked the salmon, drowned Native fishing grounds that had fed people for ten thousand years, and broke treaties the United States had promised to keep forever. Rivers Reborn is a 12-part ReThink History series on how that happened and how it was undone: why the rivers were dammed and the Manifest-Destiny faith behind it; who profited financially and who profited politically; the full ledger of what the dams gave and what they cost; the drowning of Celilo Falls and the broken treaties; and the hard question of why the dead salmon rivers of the Atlantic, a century earlier, never taught the West the lesson — ignorance, indifference, or greed. Then the turn: how Native nations who nev