POWER: Shasta Dam

Out of the tumbled mountains of Northern California, among which Mount Shasta’s snowy crest is the noblest (14,161 ft.), rush three sturdy rivers—the Pit, the McCloud, the Sacramento—to unite under the latter’s name in a deep valley just above Redding, Calif. Since 1866 engineers have dreamed of throwing up a dam below the rivers’ confluence, to stabilize the water supply of the whole fertile Sacramento Valley. Besides irrigation and flood control, hydroelectric power would be a byproduct, perhaps making profitable the mining of iron ores now locked in the wild Siskiyou Mountains north of Shasta.

Last week, after years of promotion by Californians, the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation (Department of the Interior) gave the go-ahead signal to Pacific Constructors, Inc., a 12-company syndicate which successfully bid $35,939,450 for the erection of Shasta Dam. Final moneys for this purpose were voted by the last Congress. The project, which will do for Northern California what Herbert Hoover’s Boulder Dam does for Southern California, is now entirely financed by the Federal Government, which hopes to get the money back from water sales in 40 years.

The project will cost in toto upwards of $170,000,000. Materials for the dam were not included in the builders’ contract, will be bought separately by the Government. The Southern Pacific’s railroad tracks and Western Union’s wires must be expensively rerouted through a tunnel west of the dam. A long system of canals and transverse ditches will be dug, to carry water not only to Sacramento Valley farmers but far south into the San Joaquin Valley, whence waters have been diverted to thirsty Madera, Fresno, Tulare, Kings and Kern counties.

Shasta Dam will be one more world wonder for Californians to boast about—more than half again as vast a bulk of masonry as the Great Pyramid, only 167 ft. lower than Boulder Dam (world’s highest: 727 ft.), only 700 ft. shorter at the crest than Grand Coulee (world’s longest: 4.200 ft.). World’s No. 2 Dam in these respects, it will be No. 1 for the height of its overflow: 480 ft., or thrice the fall of Niagara.