Parker Dam turns 70
Construction created Lake Havasu, but displaced tribe

More than eighty years ago, a fast-growing Los Angeles looked to the Colorado River to satisfy an almost unquenchable thirst for water. The result was the Parker Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct, a 242-mile manmade river that can carry as much as a billion gallons of water per day to the metropolitan areas of southern California.

It was one of the greatest engineering feats of all time, a fact recognized by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1992, which named the aqueduct one of the seven “wonders” of American engineering.

Almost as an afterthought, the dam gave birth to Lake Havasu, and in turn Lake Havasu City, still growing strong at 56,000 residents and counting. 2008 will see the 70th anniversary of the completion of Parker Dam; the aqueduct was finished three years later, in 1941.

Yet this stunning example of mankind’s ability to bend nature to its will did not come without a price. When Lake Havasu began to form behind the newly completed Parker Dam, it flooded not just barren desert, but forests, grasslands, and the ancestral lands of the Chemehuevi Indians, inhabited for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years.

“The dam has done a lot of things�”it brought us tourists and recreation,” said Charles Wood, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribal Council. “But there’s still this underlying sense of displacement. Our home is out there in the middle of that lake.”

As the lake rose behind the dam, its waters spread into the wide and fertile Chemehuevi Valley. According to Kathleen Blair, refuge ecologist with the Bill Williams River National Wildlife Refuge, what was lost under the floodwaters were willow and cottonwood forests, and one of the few grassland areas in the entire region.

“It was one of the richest, widest valleys around, and now it’s all underwater,” Blair said. “The forests have either been drowned by the dams or replaced by agriculture or cities.”

Far below where jet-skiers now skim over the placid waters of Lake Havasu, wild turkeys and prong-horned antelope once roamed on land and river otters swam and hunted in the then-untamed Colorado. “People don’t even realize they were here,” Blair said, of the now-extinct otter and antelope.

More than 7,000 acres of fertile valley land�”deeded to the Chemehuevi Indians by the federal government in 1907�”vanished under the waters as well. “Anything that was farmable was lost,” said Wood.

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