The Grand Coulee Canal Dream
A bold proposal to divert the Columbia River into the Grand Coulee to irrigate millions of acres of desert land.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
A gigantic enterprise to irrigate the Big Bend country and to shorten the Columbia river 100 miles has been started at Spokane. The scheme is to divert the water from the Columbia river into the Grand coulee, re-entering the Columbia just below Priest rapids. This will make a ship canal of sixty miles but the cost will be only $700,000. The natural formation of the Grand coulee, which is once known to have been the Columbia river bed, makes the project feasible. With the Grand coulee thus turned into a navigable river, it is estimated that 2,000,000 acres of dry land in the south and west, for a distance of sixty miles, can be easily irrigated.
“The natural formation of the Grand coulee, which is once known to have been the Columbia river bed, makes the project feasible.”
While this 1892 scheme was arguably ahead of its time, it reflects the long history of human ambition to reshape Washington's arid geography through massive infrastructure, a precursor to the actual Grand Coulee Dam built decades later.
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