Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities by Steven Hawley

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 113, no. 4 Portland, but also many lesser centers, and some, much boosted, that never developed. In the last quarter of the volume the coverage becomes more scattered, a reflection of the problem of identifying salience in more recent history. There are also maps treating, among other topics, national parks and forests, early irrigation schemes,the Dirty Thirties,aviation, the Cold War, and floating bridges. It is important to understand that a facsimile atlas is not, in itself, a product of recent research. Rather, it gathers and reproduces; it does not seek out new data and insights. This atlas begins, for example, with four nineteenth-century maps showing the distribution , as understood at the time, of Indian tribes. It does not consider what modern scholarship has to say about those distributions , or about the diffusion of epidemics, or about the changing distribution of Indian populations, or about the early occupation of the lands. To broach those topics with the scholarly competence necessary to address them with some authority, and to follow that scholarly track throughout, is to produce an entirely different type of atlas. It is also characteristic of this atlas, as of most other facsimiles, that it does not interrogate the maps it reproduces. In effect, the maps are taken at face value, with, to be sure, a little allowance for promotional excesses.But maps are not as transparent as they seem.They are cultural constructs and, as such, reflect cultural biases and agendas. They can be read and interpreted in very different ways. For the most part, Hayes steers clear of such analyses. He provides a set of maps and accompanying texts that draw, fairly conservatively, on current understandings. The reader is left with a compilation rather than an analysis. Probably this is as it should be. There is an enormous amount of useful cartographic and textual information in a Hayes atlas. In effect, he provides a vast pool of data that can be used in various ways. If one wants an overview of the cartographic record of Washington and Oregon, this atlas is now the obvious place to find it.One can spend delightful hours exploring and learning from its maps. The past of a complex region comes into some measure of spatial focus. If the reader comes to these maps as a cultural critic interested in cartographic texts and the biases and assumptions imbedded therein, he or she will find an enormous amount of raw material uncluttered by interpretations. If the reader comes with an interest in what modern scholarship has to say about the topics addressed in this volume,well,in this case he or she will be disappointed. The very courageous might begin to think about creating another type of atlas. That, however, is an enormous undertaking, as I, who spent years editing such an atlas, am only too well aware. A good facsimile atlas like this one will probably reach a large audience and have the capacity to excite a wide range of curiosities, some scholarly. If you live inWashington or Oregon and are curious about your regional surroundings, this is a book to own. Cole Harris University of British Columbia,Vancouver, Canada Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities by Steven Hawley Beacon Press, Boston, 2011. Maps, notes, bibliography. 272 pages. $26.95 cloth. The author divulges his point of view even before page one: his book is wrapped in a dust jacket featuring a black-and-white photograph of Lower Granite Dam on Washington’s Snake River. The image is ripped in two. Inserted between the dam on the left and muddy water on the right is a serene color image of forestlined ,mountain-backed Redfish Lake in Idaho.  Reviews Regardless of your perspective on dams, the vegetation-challenged basalt country of the Lower Snake River never resembled Redfish Lake, one of the West’s spectacular mountain pools. No amount of dam removal is going to facilitate the growth of Douglas firs in the Snake’s scabland canyons. It is a clever deception . Just in case you might still be wondering about point of view, Hawley invents the word “rewilding”for his subtitle.And if a...