This edition of SP&S’ along-the-way brochure proudly features Bonneville Dam, which was completed in 1938, on the cover. That dam, which produces electricity for the Pacific Northwest, was one of the proudest accomplishments of the New Deal.
Click image to download a 8.8-MB PDF of this brochure.
The Corps of Engineers, which built Bonneville, made a last-minute decision to include fish ladders for migratory salmon, without which much of the Columbia River salmon would have been wiped out. (The Bureau of Reclamation did not include fish ladders with Grand Coulee Dam, resulting in the destruction of the upper Columbia fishery.) Despite Bonneville’s fish ladders, salmon numbers fell to very low levels. But in 2015, nearly a million chinook salmon swam upstream passed Bonneville Dam, more than in any year since the dam’s completion.
I wonder why the SP&S showed a Curtis Jenny as their “airplane”? It was designed and built during WWI and was long obsolete by 1938. It seems like a DC-3 or Lockheed Electra, both modern passenger planes in use in 1938, would have been more up to date. Maybe they were trying to illustrate how archaic and flimsy they believed airplanes still were. If so, they were in for a big shock less than 10 years later.
Jim