How the Klamath Dams Came Down

Yahoo

25-03-2025

Anita Hofschneider and Jake BittleIllustrations by Jackie FawnGrist
This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News.
PART I — FISH AND PAPER
At 17 years old, Jeff Mitchell couldn't have known that an evening of deer hunting would change his life — and the history of the Klamath River — forever.
Over Thanksgiving week in 1974, Mitchell and three friends were driving home to Klamath Falls, Oregon, when their truck hit black ice, careened off the road, crashed into a ditch, and rolled over violently, throwing Mitchell from the vehicle and knocking him unconscious. When he woke up, Mitchell's leg was pinned underneath the pickup truck, and he could feel liquid pooling around him. At first he thought it was blood. Then he smelled the gasoline. A concerned bystander walked up to him with a lit cigarette in his mouth. 'My god, I'm going to burn up,' Mitchell thought. The crash put two of his friends in comas, while the third had emerged unscathed.
If not for the black ice that nearly killed him, Mitchell might never have helped launch one of the biggest victories for Indigenous rights and the contemporary environmental movement in North American history: the demolition of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a degraded 263-mile waterway that winds through Mitchell's ancestral homeland and that of four other Indigenous nations. He might never have witnessed the fruit of that victory, the largest dam removal in United States history, when nearly 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and concrete finally came down in October of last year, more than 100 years after the first dam was built. He might never have seen the restoration of one of the largest salmon runs on the West Coast, an event that set a profound new precedent for how the U.S. manages its water.
As climate change causes more extreme swings between wet and dry weather, straining scarce water resources and threatening the survival of endangered species, it has forced a reckoning for the thousands of dams erected on waterways across the country. These dams were built to produce cheap power and store water with little regard for Indigenous rights or river ecosystems, and they continue to threaten the survival of vulnerable species and deprive tribes of foodways and cultural heritage — while in many cases only providing negligible amounts of electricity to power grids. For decades, Indigenous peoples and environmentalists have highlighted how these structures destroy natural river environments in order to generate electricity or store irrigation water, but only recently have state politicians, utilities, and bureaucrats begun to give serious credence to the notion that they should come down.
The removal of the four dams on the Klamath, which were owned by the power utility PacifiCorp, represents the first real attempt at the kind of river restoration that Indigenous nations and environmentalists have long demanded. It is the result of an improbable campaign that spanned close to half a century, roped in thousands of people, and came within an inch of collapse several times. Interviews with dozens of people on all sides of the dam removal fight, some of whom have never spoken publicly about their roles, reveal a collaborative achievement with few clear parallels in contemporary activism.
The fight began, however improbably, with Mitchell's accident.
After several surgeries, he found he couldn't get to his university classes on crutches, so he moved back home to Klamath Falls. Not knowing what else to do, Mitchell, an enrolled citizen of the Klamath Tribes, trained to be a paralegal and began attending council meetings for his tribal government. His job was to take notes during meetings at the tribe's office, a repurposed beauty shop in the town of Chiloquin along the Klamath River.
But a year later, a resignation on the tribal council thrust Mitchell into the leadership body. Suddenly, the 18-year-old was a full-fledged tribal council member, setting policy for the entire nation and getting a crash course in Klamath history.
'I wanted answers,' he said. 'I wanted to know why my homelands were gone.'
The Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin-Paiute tribes had been forced to cede 22 million acres of land to the United States in 1864, after settlers violently claimed their territory. The 1864 treaty established a 2.2 million-acre reservation in what is currently Oregon and secured the tribes' fishing, hunting, and trapping rights, but that reservation got whittled down further over the years due to fraud and mistakes in federal land surveys.
By 1954 — three years before Mitchell was born — the Klamath Tribes no longer existed on paper. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States 'terminated' the Klamath and more than 100 other tribes. The bipartisan termination movement aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eliminating their status as sovereign nations, removing their land from federal trusts, and converting tribal citizens into Americans. Much of what remained of the Klamath's ancestral homelands was taken by the federal officials and turned into national forests or sold to private interests.
By the time Mitchell joined the tribal council in 1975, the Klamath Tribes were about to head to court, arguing that the federal government's termination policy had no effect on their fishing, hunting, or trapping rights. They were also fighting for their rights to Klamath River water. 'Marshes were drying up because water was being taken and diverted,' Mitchell said. 'We had to protect water rights so we could protect fish and animals and plants and other resources that we depended on.'
The Klamath River had once hosted one of the West Coast's largest salmon runs, with thousands of adult Chinooks swimming upstream every autumn. But in 1911, a local power utility called the California-Oregon Power Company began to build a hydroelectric dam along the river, erecting a 10-story wall of tiered concrete that looked like the side of a coliseum. Over the next few decades, the company built three more dams to generate added power as its customer base grew in the farm and timber towns of the Pacific Northwest.
Together these four dams blocked off 400 miles of the Chinook salmon's old spawning habitat, depriving them of access to the rippling streams and channels where they had once laid eggs in cool water. Before the dams, nearly a quarter of the Klamath Tribes' diet came from wild salmon.
'In a blink of an eye, you're talking about losing one-quarter of all your food source,' Mitchell said. 'I just sit back and think, It must have been one hell of an impact on my people.'
In 1981, six years after Mitchell joined his tribal council, a report crossed his desk, which had been relocated from its makeshift beauty parlor digs to those of an old movie theater. The study, conducted for the federal Department of the Interior, provided official confirmation for what Indigenous leaders and tribal members already knew: The dams were responsible for the missing salmon.
'Although the builders of the dam promised to provide fish-passage facilities, none were built,' the report read. 'There is no evidence that any consideration was given to the fish loss suffered by the Indians of the Klamath Indian Reservation despite continued protests by the Indians and by officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the Indians.'
The Klamath Tribes were still busy in court defending their water rights, and they were making headway in their fight to regain their status as a federally recognized tribe. When Mitchell discussed the report with other tribal council members, they agreed that they probably had grounds to sue either the utility that built the dams or the federal government that allowed construction to happen. But suing over the missing salmon would mean spending money that the nation didn't have.
So Mitchell filed the report away and moved on with his life. He got married, had kids, and the Klamath Tribes regained their federal recognition in 1986. Government services like health care and housing were rebuilt from the ground up, and the tribes successfully gained endangered species protections for two Klamath Basin suckerfish that were critical to tribal tradition. But the river's water quality continued to decline, and the Klamath Tribes continued to fight for its water rights in the court system with no end in sight.
By the turn of the century, Mitchell was in his 40s and serving as tribal chairman. It was then that he received a letter from PacifiCorp, the company that had absorbed the California-Oregon Power Company and now owned the dams: Would the Klamath Tribes like to join meetings to provide input on the company's application for a new dam license?
Mitchell didn't have to think about it. He said yes.
The Klamath River watershed begins as a large lake in what is currently southern Oregon. It winds its way south through the northern edges of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for more than 250 miles before emptying into the Pacific Ocean in what is now northwest California. The lake provides a haven for C'waam and Koptu — gray suckerfish with round, blunt noses that exist nowhere else on the planet — and its vast expanse of surrounding marshes are a stopover for migrating tchikash, such as geese and ducks. Every fall for thousands of years, as the mountain forests flashed gold and red, tchíalash, or salmon, raced upstream through the cold mountain waters and laid their eggs, feeding the people who lived along the riverbanks.
In 1901, a local newspaper called the Klamath Republican said the fish were so plentiful that they could be caught with bare hands: 'Five minutes' walk from Main Street brings one to the shores of Klamath rapids, where every little nook, bay, and tributary creek is so crowded with mullets that their backs stick out of the water. … Mullets, rainbow trout, and salmon — splendid fish, giants of their size, and apparently anxious to be caught.'
By then, white settlers had spent decades seizing land and water from the tribes and manipulating the landscape. Once they had established a permanent hold on the Klamath River, the settlers set about draining lakes and diverting streams to service industries like agriculture, mining, and timber. The federal Bureau of Reclamation then established a massive irrigation project at the head of the river and, within a few years, settlers cultivated thousands of acres of alfalfa nourished with irrigation water. Today, the basin produces mostly beets and potatoes, the latter often used for french fries.
The four dams constructed over the first half of the 20th century held back water from the lower reaches of the Klamath, forcing salmon to navigate a smaller and weaker river. Salmon also need oxygen-rich cold water to thrive, but the water of the Klamath grew hotter as it sat in stagnant reservoirs and flowed shallower down toward the Pacific, which made it harder for salmon to breathe and reproduce. This warm water also encouraged the growth of toxic algae and bristleworms that emitted microscopic parasites.
The dams blocked off the upstream Klamath, making it impossible for adult salmon to swim back to their ancestral tributaries. As they raced upstream toward the frigid mountain waters, they ran into the earthen wall of Iron Gate, the southernmost dam on the river, flopping against it futilely. Over the decades, these conditions drove the fish toward extinction, threatening the survival of a species that was central to the Yurok, Karuk, and Shasta peoples who had lived around the downstream Klamath Basin for thousands of years.
This might have remained true forever were it not for a quirk of federal bureaucracy. In order to run dams, power companies in the U.S. must secure a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation's independent energy regulator, and those licenses have to be renewed every 30 to 50 years. In 1999, the license for the Klamath dams was less than a decade away from expiring.
The California-Oregon Power Company, the utility that built the dams, had passed through a series of mergers and acquisitions since its founding in 1882, eventually becoming part of a for-profit regional company known as PacifiCorp, which owned power plants across the Pacific Northwest. In order to keep running the Klamath dams, PacifiCorp needed to secure new state water permits, get operational clearance from federal fish regulators, and solicit feedback from local residents, including the Klamath Tribes, which again had federal recognition. For most hydroelectric dams, the process was lengthy but uncontroversial.
Jeff Mitchell had other ideas. He wanted the company to install fish ladders, essentially elevators that would allow the salmon to pass through the dams. The power company had promised to build them nearly a hundred years before, when construction was still underway, but had never followed through. He wasn't the only one who was frustrated. While the Klamath Tribes lived farthest upstream and no longer had access to salmon, there were other tribes on Klamath tributaries — the Karuk, the Hoopa, and the Yurok — who could still fish but had been watching their water quality decline and salmon runs dwindle.
The Hoopa and Yurok tribes had spent years in court fighting each other over land. But when they all crowded into windowless hotel conference rooms to hear PacifiCorp's plans, the tribal representatives quickly realized they had the same concerns.
There was Leaf Hillman, the head of the Department of Natural Resources for the Karuk Tribe, who had grown up eating salmon amid increasingly thin fish runs. 'It was a struggle,' he said, recalling the meager amounts of fish he and his uncle would catch on the river. 'Frequently all the fish that we got were given away or went to ceremonies before any of them ever got home.'
There was Ronnie Pierce, a short, no-nonsense, chain-smoking Squamish woman who was trained as a biologist and structural engineer and now worked as a fisheries biology consultant for the Karuk Tribe. Pierce had short, slicked-back hair, wore champagne-colored glasses and black leather boots, and had zero patience for corporate-speak. 'I went through your draft application, and I can't tell if a goddamn salmon even lives in the Klamath River,' she once told company executives.
Then there was Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe. A tall, charismatic man with a resemblance to Tony Soprano, Fletcher had spent years building up a Yurok program for studying and managing the river's fish population before taking the helm of the tribal government. Fletcher knew the fishery was one of the only economic drivers for the Yurok nation, and a decline in salmon meant unemployment, exodus, and, eventually, cultural collapse. 'As one of our elders put it, the Klamath River is our identity as Yurok people,' Fletcher said.
The group quickly noticed a pattern: Company executives' eyes would glaze over when the tribes discussed the cultural importance of salmon. In March of 2001, during a public comment process that lasted more than a year, Mitchell submitted a formal comment to PacifiCorp that argued, 'Fish passage on the Klamath River has been 'blocked' and interferes with the property rights and interests of the tribe.' The company responded to his comment in an official report by saying, 'Comment noted.'
Pierce took to storming out of the room every time she got fed up with the company. Once, she got so upset at a meeting in Yreka, California, that she slammed her binder shut and drove several hours home to McKinley Grove, California, more than 400 miles away. She had little tolerance for the ignorance some PacifiCorp executives revealed about the landscape their dams had remade. 'Where's Blue Creek?' one of them asked in one meeting, clearly unfamiliar with the sacred tributary within Yurok territory. The pristine tributary, which flowed through conifer-covered mountains and across expanses of smooth rock on its way toward the Klamath main stem, was one of the most beautiful places in the entire river basin, and the first refuge that salmon encountered as they entered from the Pacific.
''Blue Creek? Where is Blue Creek?'' Pierce snapped. 'You are really asking that? You dammed our river, killed our fish, attacked our culture, and now you ask where Blue Creek is?'
As the license meetings continued, Pierce wanted the group to take a harder line. She invited Hillman, Fletcher, and other tribal officials to dinner at her home in California. Over drinks, the group strategized about how to deal with PacifiCorp.
'You guys are fools if you go for anything but all four dams out,' Pierce said. 'You've got to start with all four — and now — and the company pays for it all. That's got to be the starting position.'
It was a radical idea, and one with no clear precedent in American history. Hillman, the Karuk leader who worked with Pierce, knew that for many farmers and politicians in the West, dams symbolized American conquest and the taming of the wilderness. He couldn't see anyone giving that up. But he felt inspired by Pierce, who was so hardheaded that the Interior Department once threatened to pull the Karuk Tribe's funding if the nation kept employing her, according to one dam removal campaigner.
Pierce's vision that evening propelled the dam removal campaign to ambitions that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, but she wouldn't live to see it realized. She soon received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and just a few years later she would find herself sitting with Hillman and others around that same table, making them promise to get the job done. She wanted them to scatter her ashes on Bluff Creek along the Klamath River after the dams were removed, no matter how many years it took.
'A lot of us tried to emulate her, how she was,' Hillman said. 'There was no surrender.' The campaign would need Pierce's determination to survive after her death. The fight was only heating up.
The year 2001 arrived at the start of a megadrought that would last more than two decades and transform the American West, sapping massive rivers like the Colorado and driving farms and cities across the region to dramatically curtail their water use. This drought, which scientists say would be impossible without climate change, delivered the worst dry spell in the Klamath's recorded history. All along the river's banks, forests turned brown and wildfires sprang up. Small towns lost their drinking water. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that 'signs of desperation are everywhere … birds are dying as ponds dry up in wildlife refuges … sheep grazing on bare ground run toward the road when a car stops, baaing furiously and wrapping their mouths around the strands of barbed-wire fence.'
That spring, the federal government shut off water deliveries to Klamath farmers in order to protect endangered salmon and suckerfish on the river. The once-green fields of the basin, which had bloomed thanks to irrigation water from the vulnerable river, turned to dust. The earth cracked.
With no water, farmers were forced to abandon their beet and potato fields. More than 200,000 acres of crops shriveled, wiping out as much as $47 million in farm revenue and driving up potato prices as the harvest in the Klamath collapsed. Dozens of farmers filed for bankruptcy, school enrollments plummeted, businesses closed as farm families fled the region, and reports of depression and suicide skyrocketed.
Farmers and their supporters gathered by the thousands to stage a series of protests at the federal canal that released water from Upper Klamath Lake. First, they organized a ceremonial 'bucket brigade,' led by girls from the local 4-H agriculture club, stretching 16 blocks from the lake into an irrigation canal. On multiple occasions, including the Fourth of July, protestors used a chainsaw and blowtorch to force open the headgates of the canal and siphon a small amount of water. It wasn't enough to save anybody's farm, but it was enough to prove they were serious.
When local authorities sympathetic to the farmers refused to intervene, U.S. marshals were brought in to guard the canal and quell protests. For the rest of the summer, locals loudly floated the idea of open revolt to overthrow the government.
'The battle of Klamath Falls will go down in history as the last stand for rural America,' said one resident in an interview with The Guardian. The New York Times adopted the same narrative: An article that summer described the endangered animals as 'all-but-inedible, bottom-feeding suckerfish' and framed the fight as one between environmentalists and hardworking farmers, erasing the tribes from the narrative altogether.
At Klamath Tribes' headquarters in Chiloquin, half an hour from the headgates of the Bureau of Reclamation canal, Jeff Mitchell and other tribal leaders warned tribal citizens not to go into town. There had always been tensions with settlers over water, but now the farmers were blaming the tribes for the death of their crops, since the tribes were the ones that advocated for the protection of the endangered fish.
One afternoon that December, three drunk men drove through Chiloquin in a metallic gold pickup truck and used a shotgun to fire shots at the town. 'Sucker lovers, come out and fight!' they yelled. They shot above the head of a child after asking him if he was Indian.
In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney intervened. The former congressman from Wyoming maneuvered to open the headgates and divert a full share of irrigation water to the farms, regardless of how little water would be left in the Klamath for salmon and suckerfish. The 2002 diversion dried out the lower reaches of the Klamath just as salmon were starting to swim upstream from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. The low water levels resulting from Cheney's decision heated up the river even more and made conditions prime for a gill rot disease, a fungal infection that thrives in warmer temperatures. As the salmon crowded into these small stretches of water, packed more densely than usual, they contracted the disease and gasped for air. Cheney's water diversion was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and Congress would later ask the vice president to speak about his role in the fish kill. He declined.
The Yurok saw the effects first. Adult salmon weighing as much as 35 pounds surfaced with their noses up and mouths open in the hot, shallow drifts. After they dove back down, they then rose to the surface belly-up. Hundreds of dead salmon appeared in the river, then thousands. Within weeks, tens of thousands of dead salmon piled up on the riverbanks and became food for flies as their flesh baked in the sun. When their bodies turned gray and their skin ruptured, meat bubbled out, and birds pecked at their eyeballs. The stench was overwhelming.
'It was a moment of existential crisis, it was a form of ecocide,' said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who was a college student working on the river that year.
A week earlier, a judge had sentenced the three men who shot their guns at the child in Chiloquin. They admitted their attack was motivated by racism and received 30 days behind bars and community service.
As the fight in the Klamath unfolded, PacifiCorp had continued to slog away on its attempt to relicense the four Klamath dams. After years of back-and-forth, the company closed in on finishing its draft application. It mailed copies to everyone involved in the more than 200 meetings held by the company. The application was so long that it filled several binders in multiple cardboard boxes. When Ronnie Pierce stacked the binders on top of one another, they were taller than she was.
The application was comprehensive, but Pierce, Mitchell, Fletcher, and others noticed that despite the massive die-off of salmon they'd just witnessed, the company still had not committed to build the fish ladders it had promised almost a century earlier.
'That's when we decided to go to war with PacifiCorp,' said Mitchell.
On January 16, 2004, more than 80 years after the first dam was built, members of the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa tribes gathered at the Red Lion in Redding, California, a two-star hotel off the freeway with a Denny's and trailer parking in the back. They were joined by Friends of the River, a tiny nonprofit and the only environmental organization willing to stand with the tribes at the time.
As the tribes and farmers fought with PacifiCorp and the George W. Bush administration, one major player had escaped notice altogether, ducking responsibility for destroying the river's ecosystem and remaining largely in the shadows. That was PacifiCorp's parent company, ScottishPower, which owned the utility from across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away.
Leaf Hillman had learned about ScottishPower during a meeting with a PacifiCorp executive in the company's Portland, Oregon, headquarters. Frustrated that she wouldn't consider dam removal, Hillman asked to speak to the executive's boss. 'If you're going to talk to my boss, you're going to have to go to Scotland,' she replied, laughing. As he sat in the meeting at the Red Lion, he could still hear her laughter.
Six months later, Hillman and his allies walked through immigration at Glasgow Airport. A United Kingdom customs officer asked them to state the purpose of their visit.
'We're here to get those damn dams off the Klamath River,' Dickie Myers of the Yurok Tribe replied.
This is Part I of a five part series. This story was first published in Grist