Dammed Memories

A Montana river, transformed.

A boat pauses on the flat water of Milltown reservoir. An unknown photographer at an unknown moment early in the 20^th century frames the glowering cliff, the high water backed up against the dam's spillway, and the peak of the powerhouse roof. Later, the photographer—or someone else—scrawls a cryptic prophesy: "It will be his grim desire, rather than his talent, that will succeed." In the dim corner of the image the words "Ripple, Ripple" ride the waves.

William A. Clark built the Milltown Dam at the confluence of the Clark Fork of the Columbia and the Blackfoot River a century ago. In 1906, Clark's grim desire had already made him a fortune in Butte's copper mines and secured him a seat in the U.S. Senate (through a notorious bribery scheme). The dam consolidated his downstream empire, feeding electricity into a massive lumber mill and the power-needy homes and businesses of Missoula. It also submerged over 600 acres of land. Under its rising waters went homesteader John McCormick's bottomland farm and the fading traces of the old Indian trail followed by Meriwether Lewis and company on their 1806 return trip.
CREDIT: Image courtesy the Demmons Collection, Bonner School, Bonner, Mont.
Return a hundred years later and face upstream, with the dam at your back. The lazy Clark Fork current meets the quick water of the Blackfoot River at a thumb of exposed mud and bleached branches. The waters are coming down. On April 7, the generators in the powerhouse sent their final pulse of power along the lines. Two months later, the dam operators opened the flashboards and the sluice gates began to draw down—and permanently empty—the reservoir. These events marked the commencement of the massive cleanup effort, the remediation of what the Environmental Protection Agency calls the Milltown Reservoir Sediments Operable Unit. The problem lies in the mud.
Photograph by Caitlin DeSilvey.
Clark's upstream success contributed in no small part to the eventual unmaking of the dam and the most visible symbol of his downstream power. In 1908, a spring flood scoured millions of cubic yards of mining waste and toxic sediment from the banks of Butte's Silver Bow Creek and the upper reaches of the Clark Fork, where Clark's company had been copper mining since the 1870s. The river carried its load of heavy metals 120 miles to dump most of the sediment behind the owner's new dam. Mud laced with arsenic, copper, lead, zinc, cadmium, and manganese drifted to the bottom of the reservoir.
Image courtesy the Demmons Collection, Bonner School, Bonner, Mont.
The heavy metals settled in a crowded landscape. By 1930, two lumber mills (Clark's original enterprise and a rival mill owned by the Anaconda Company) and two railroads (the Northern Pacific and the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul) occupied the narrow valley floor. Settlements of millworkers and their families were crammed in the gaps between rail and mill to provide the human labor needed to keep them running. Milltown (sometimes called "Finntown") was a community of Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Quebecois immigrants on the Blackfoot banks of the reservoir. The reservoir that lapped against the workers' backyard fences was their swimming hole and fishing haunt, skating rink and hunting territory. It was also a sink of toxic waste that would eventually find its way into their wells and their bodies and start the process that now brings Milltown to the brink of another radical landscape transformation.
Image courtesy the Library of Congress/Northwestern Energy.
The companies that inherited responsibility for the Superfund cleanup, ARCO and Northwestern Energy, will pay the $100 million-plus that it will take to remediate the contaminated sediments. When the project is complete in 2010, the worst of the sediments will be scraped away, the dam torn out, the powerhouse demolished, the banks of the river recontoured and revegetated. The elaborate remediation and restoration effort aims to restore the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork Rivers to a "naturally functioning, stable system." A landscape of industrial production will be turned over to the gentler economies of recreation and environmental conservation. The braided channels of the reservoir—the river's adaptation to its constrained circumstances—will be unraveled and straightened, the secret eddies and water meadows ironed out.
Photograph by Mike Kustudia.
People who live in Milltown and the other small communities near the dam await the impending changes with a mixture of nervous anticipation, celebration, and sadness. The fluid medium of memory anchors people to this place and is not so easily cast aside. Locals affectionately called the power-dam reservoir the "pond." A streetcar (run on electricity generated at the dam) once carried Missoula residents 10 miles upriver to join Milltown for ice-skating parties, bonfires, and hockey games. Children swam illicitly off the dam's spillway, dared rope-swing plunges, borrowed boats for fishing expeditions, and sun-bathed on the booms of the dam pond. A favorite swimming hole below the covered span of the Milwaukee rail bridge cooled generations of local children. Bruce Hall, who lives just upstream of the reservoir, recalls the "rock-throwing place" where he and his sons used to spend winter afternoons skittering stones across the ice.
Image courtesy the Demmons Collection, Bonner School, Bonner, Mont.
Until a few years ago, it seemed as though the Superfund cleanup might allow the dam and the reservoir to remain in place. A survey conducted by the University of Montana in 2001 found that 69 percent of residents in the Milltown area supported this plan. Local environmentalists—and, eventually, the Environmental Protection Agency—were equally convinced that the dam needed to come out.
"Restore the River, Remove the Dam," broadcast the bumpers of Missoula's fleet of Subarus. A rival sticker, "Save the Historic Milltown Dam," appeared more often on upstream pickup trucks (although there was plenty of crossover stickering). Cheeky eco-purists, like the owner of this car, upped the ante with "Restore the Valley, Remove Missoula"—why limit the restoration of the Clark Fork river ecosystem to the removal of one little dam? A few Milltown area residents posted the "Remove Missoula" sticker too, tapping into an old tension between their small, working-class, industry-dependent community and the larger and relatively liberal Missoula, home of the main campus of the University of Montana.
Photograph by Caitlin DeSilvey.
Some of the people who live near the reservoir recognized early on that the dam would need to give way to the river. But that doesn't make the loss of a familiar landscape any easier. "I think about all the other people in Milltown and Bonner and how that old pond has kind of quietly helped shape the course of our lives," says Chuck Erickson, who has lived near the reservoir since he was a teenager. "My love of water and playing in the river led me to become a Navy Hard Hat Diver." He's philosophical about the loss. "It's going to be a big change, but like most of the big changes in life we get through them and become better people because of them. The rivers will still be there, and they will go on quietly influencing people's lives, helping to build memories, different than ours but still just as precious."
Photograph by Caitlin DeSilvey.
The restored river may come to resemble the landscape Meriwether Lewis encountered on July 4, 1806, when he passed through on his way up the Blackfoot. Two-hundred years on, the confluence looks exposed and raw, the water 9 feet from the top of the banks of the redundant reservoir, the swaths of sediment beginning to bake dry in the sun. One stubborn fisherman tries his luck out on the spit.
Even when the restoration is complete, the residue of William Clark's grim desire will persist in the 4 million cubic yards of sediment left behind. There's just too much to remove it all. Richard Hugo, the poet denizen of a Milltown bar, wrote: "A town needs a river to forgive the town." With the transformation of this landscape, Milltown will have a free-flowing river again. Somewhere in the cool air above the current, the ghost of the reservoir's flat water will remember it otherwise. Ripple, Ripple.
Photograph by Caitlin DeSilvey.

The Clark Fork River Superfund site begins in the scarred hills of Butte, Mont., and ends 120 miles downstream behind the century-old Milltown Dam. (Here's a map.) A plug in the river just east of Missoula, the dam traps a thick deposit of contaminated sediments washed down over the years from Butte's copper-mining industry. The cleanup of the Milltown terminus of the Superfund site began quietly on June 1 when dam operators opened the gates and the waters of the reservoir began to drop. When the project is complete, the dam will be gone and $100 million will have been spent to remove the toxic sludge and restore the river system. What does it mean to restore an inhabited landscape? And what happens to the memories that live there? Click here to read a slide-show essay on the Clark Fork River.