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In the capable hands of Paul Pitzer, the fight for Grand Coulee Dam and the story of its construction is a vital, animated saga of people striving for dazzling goals and then working to build something spectacular. These visionaries accomplished their objective against the backdrop of the worst economic depression in the nation's history. The dam and the extensive irrigation network it supports stand today as a monument to their dreams and labors.

Details the destruction of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest by well-intentioned Americans who saw only the benefits of the dam-building, power plant and irrigation projects, not realizing the longterm effects of killing the river.

Includes report of Chief Engineer of Reclamation Service to Commissioner of Reclamation on proposed Columbia River basin project, Jan. 7, 1932 (p. 69-143).

The real life story of Gaby Rodriguex, the teen who faked her pregnancy as part of a sociological experiment.

The pioneers who took up homesteads on the raw sagebrush land of the great Columbia Basin were men and women of real fortitude and courage. Their struggles to make homes and raise crops, with the great scarcity of water which then existed, is an epic to match that of other earlier Western pioneers. Laura Tice Lage (1896-1985) was a child of ten when the Joseph W. Tice family moved to a homestead north of the present town of Othello, Washington. Other homestead lands nearby were being rapidly taken up. She retained vivid memories or those early years, and in Sagebrush Homesteads she recounts many of the experiences of her parents and other homestead families between 1906 and 1914. With these pioneers, the reader will again walk those dusty roads, through both humor and pathos, and a wealth of homestead lore.