The Battle for the Washtucna Coulee
A railroad and the government clash over a plan to turn a vital transportation artery into an irrigation reservoir.
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.
The O.R.N. (Oregon Railroad and Navigation) executive, operating, traffic, and legal officials are making a grand inspection of the Washtucna Coulee, which the reclamation service of the government has asked the road to abandon so that it can be used as a reservoir for irrigating about 100,000 acres west of it. The coulee is 30 miles long. The government proposes to divert the water from the Palouse River into it and to store it there for irrigating purposes in the summer. The railroad has a line down the bottom of the coulee. It has asked the government for $300,000 to pay for moving the road out of the coulee, but so far the government has refused to pay such a sum and has offered $100,000.
“The government proposes to divert the water from the Palouse River into it and to store it there for irrigating purposes in the summer.”
The tension between existing infrastructure and large-scale agricultural development remains a constant theme in the Tri-Cities. The Washtucna Coulee issue mirrors modern regional debates over water rights and the environmental and economic costs of transforming the desert landscape for irrigation.
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