Hampton Sides, in his foreword to the recent spectacular photographic study of the Grand Canyon, Pete McBride’s The Grand Canyon: Between River and Rim, writes “Let’s not hide our light under a bushel: the Grand Canyon of Arizona is our mightiest of landscapes.”

Fact is, though, we are fortunate to have this “mightiest” landscape in the condition we enjoy and wonder at today. A marvelous national park protects 277 miles of the Colorado River and this landscape, but whether this would ever be so and how the park came to include the entire canyon makes for quite a story, and that is the tale told by historian Byron E. Pearson in Saving Grand Canyon: Dams, Deals, and a Noble Myth.

This is a book for historians, Grand Canyon aficionados, history buffs, and anyone interested in conservation politics. Plans to dam the Colorado River in the Canyon circulated for decades and came ever-so-close to success, but ultimately were thwarted, to the everlasting gratitude of those who love the relatively wild canyon we enjoy today. Even though I knew how the story of the efforts to put dams in the canyon ended, curiosity about the details of how that happened pulled me through Person’s account. Given the powerful forces pushing to dam the Colorado for power and money for the Central Arizona Project (CAP), reservoirs on the river in the Canyon seemed inevitable in the 1950s and much of the 1960s. The future of Arizona, of the Colorado River Compact, and political careers rode on the outcome of the CAP struggle.

The central question Pearson examines in the book is what exactly stopped the Grand Canyon dams in the 1960s, and if it was the pressure on Congress by conservationists led by the Sierra Club as is widely believed and generally accepted even by environmental historians. In his introduction, Pearson states that, “Stewart Udall did not remove the dams from the [CAP] bill in 1967 because he felt pressured, as is so often claimed; he did so because he needed to gain [Senator Henry M.] Jackson’s support to steer a CAP bill through Congress before he and Senator Hayden left office after the 1968 election.”

Hayden, who had long championed the CAP, was elderly and in ill health, and presumably Udall, who had differences with his boss Lyndon Johnson, planned to leave office as Secretary of the Interior regardless of how the 1968 election came out. The “noble myth” was that Udall dropped dams from the plan because of Sierra Club-led “preservationist” pressure. Pearson writes:

Noble myths, though unintentionally false, are designed to exhort the faithful to even greater heroic efforts to fight against perceived threats, in this case threats to the environment. Myths, once established and repeated, are difficult to disprove even when they conflict with documentary evidence because people become emotionally invested in them and desperately want to accept them as truth even if they fly in the face of the verifiable record.

Historian Pearson combed the documentary evidence for more than two decades to make the case that the “verifiable record” reveals that congressional politics and deals or no-deals led to abandonment of the dams, not primarily the herculean effort of conservationists to defeat them.

This is a story of political intrigue and machinations, and Pearson portrays the cast of characters and the roles they played with a dispassionate historian’s eye, polishing some of the luster off them as he does so. Central characters are dam advocates Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and his congressman brother Morris, both of whom were themselves strong conservationists on many issues that did not involve their home state of Arizona; Floyd Dominy, aggressive director of the Bureau of Reclamation who was a tireless advocate of dams anywhere; Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, who fought for years for the CAP, and; David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club who led the anti-dam forces.

While he entered the story late, Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs Chairman Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson of Washington vehemently rejected the idea that water from the Columbia River would ever be diverted to the Colorado River Basin to supplement the overly allocated Colorado River, and that stance dealt one of the ultimate blows to the building of dams that would impact the Grand Canyon. Dozens of other players come and go in the story.

Pearson’s research into the history of the Grand Canyon dam battles is exhaustive, impressive, and presented clearly. I kept asking myself as I read the intricate details of the politics of the dam story how he kept my interest, and concluded it is because the book reads like a detective story. I knew of course that the canyon survived without dams, but as the story unfolded that outcome seemed more and more surprising. Not only were the dams ultimately denied, but Grand Canyon National Park was expanded to include the primary dam sites, Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon. How did this happen? Pearson explains it and my curiosity was richly rewarded for sticking with him in his scholarly account.

Why should we care who gets the credit for “saving” the Grand Canyon? Pearson was driven to doggedly pursue the story because he is a historian, and historians don’t like myths that conflict with documentary evidence and a verifiable record. But beyond that, he suggests other reasons for clarifying the story. In his concluding paragraph he quotes Aldo Leopold, who wrote in his essay The Ecological Conscience that, “We speak glibly of conservation education, but what do we mean by it? If we mean indoctrination, then let us be reminded that it is just as easy to indoctrinate with fallacies as with facts.”

The “Sierra Club’s noble myth,” writes Pearson, “has outlived its usefulness."

We should heed Leopold’s words and “acknowledge the complexity of these events and rescind the opportunity that oversimplification of, and deviation from, the documented historical record has given to those who seek to exploit our national parks, monuments, and other sacred places.”

We live, after all, in the era of “alternative facts,” as Pearson points out. He does not accuse the Sierra Club of intentional deception – having worked so long and hard and taken so many risks (which Pearson describes, as in defying the heavy hand of IRS blowback for lobbying, which indeed fell on them). The conservation leaders and their followers believed theirs had been the deciding factor in the battle over the dams. But it was not, as Pearson convincingly argues. He writes:

Although a certain amount of hyperbole is to be expected in a battle as fiercely contested as this one was – and indeed, as I have pointed out, both sides engaged in it frequently – there are potential consequences for falsifying the historical record that those who repeat and embellish the Sierra Club’s heroic narrative have not considered. In a political milieu that has decisively turned to the right, and amid a social environment in which “alternative facts” are now a part of the American lexicon, remaining true to the historical record is more important than ever. People who create and perpetuate myths not firmly grounded in the primary sources are not just engaging in hyperbole, they are providing those who seek to exploit the natural world for short-term profit the ammunition they need to discredit the environmental movement as a whole, thereby increasing the threats to the very nature environmentalists have worked so hard to protect.

Protecting the natural world, as Aldo Leopold also famously pointed out, is a moral imperative, and I believe Pearson is right on the mark with this assertion.

There is no doubt that most who perpetuated the “noble myth” did not have the time, expertise, and motivation to look into the complexities of the story of the Grand Canyon dams. Only a professional historian and a dogged and dedicated scholar would pursue such a project, and I am thankful that Byron Pearson was moved to do so.

In the end, political expediency led Stewart Udall to strike the dams from the CAP legislation, but Pearson’s account certainly reveals how hard the preservationists worked for the cause, and whether they were the decisive factor or not, their dedication and persistence is undeniable. We have both hard-nosed politicians and crusading advocates to thank for the mostly wild canyon we so value today. Saving Grand Canyon is a significant addition to the literature of conservation history and the history of one of America’s “mightiest of landscapes.”