Save Our Lakes

It seems to me, having spent most of my life in eastern Washington and working throughout the area, that the people who want to destroy our existing water environment have little or no direct connection to the Valley communities or to the Palouse. All they can talk about is the high cost of maintaining the dams and decline of the native fish population. It is time to start talking about the huge benefits, as done by Krista Meria at the recent 'Our Columbia Snake River System' luncheon.

None of the advocates for dam removal grew up in the Wawawai to Lewiston Snake River corridor. They have little first-hand knowledge of the river as it existed before Lower Granite Dam was completed, forming Granite Lake. I can, because my wife Linda and her relatives were the people who settled the fruit farms that grew up along the river corridor. I myself was on the river from Almota to Lewiston on the Whitman County side of the river from 1954 to 1961, the year I graduated from WSU, and then back again in 1967 until present in this area.

I have fished the Snake River during all of these years and honestly say from 1954 until the pool raised I did not see any Native Americans fishing while my father-in-law and I were on the river. Probably one good reason is because before the first pool was raised to form the lake you spent hours trying to catch a steelhead, salmon or sturgeon, and the fish were not plentiful. Nothing like today, when over a hundred boats are on the lake around the confluence and catching fish. Most of the Nezperce fishing was on the Columbia and Clearwater rivers.

How would you like to again see the the mud-ridden, smelly dead fish banks of the river as happened in 1992 when they tried a draw down that was a catastrophe, both to the river ecosystem and the landscape. Do you think the banks would ever be ridden then of weeds, trash and debris that would develop if the lake was no longer there? Come on folks in this area and the irrigators on the lower Snake that are allowed to use irrigation, we need to step up and let people know we do not want our lakes destroyed.

--Marvin J. Entel, Clarkston