constructed mass housing, forced to keep up lawns or let them go to weed 

 and .given electric heat and fuel bills, as well as appliances which Ihev 

 could not financially maintain. On top of it, they had been separated from 

 the^atural world of which they had been a part. Their former homes had 

 been burned and the woods and streams in which they had hunted and 

 fished, were under the waters of the reservoir. 



The Army engineers, the governor of Pennsylvania and many 

 non-Indians in and out of government, tried to convince the Senecas not 

 only that the flood control dam and the reservoir were progress, but that 

 their own change of living was also progress. They had moved upward in 

 the world. They were living, they were told, in full modern ranch houses 

 that many white people would envy. No longer were they living like poor 

 people in the woods. They should be happy. And besides, as so many 

 non-Indians, including the engineers said again and again at the time, the 

 Senecas had been wasteful. They had wasted good land. They had not 

 used it for big productive farms, for housing developments or for 

 industry. Why should anyone feel sorry for them? 



Now in recent years I have heard the same kind of remarks made by 

 city people in the East about the American West. Even if they know some 

 of the realities of the productive use of land, water and other natural 

 resources in the West, they tend to dismiss it. They know that 

 westerners raise cattle and sheep, that the forests and mountains produce 

 timber and all kinds of minerals for the consumer goods on which they 

 depend, that Idaho sends them potatos and Washington sends them apples. 

 But all of that disappears in the bigger image of emptiness of unused and 

 wasted land. They get that image from movies and television programs 

 and from flying across the country at^ 39,000 feet altitude in 747's. Down 

 below, on the whole, is nothing. Just an occasional road or a solitary 

 twinkling light in the darkness of the night. Of course there are cities 

 here and there, and there is quite a little hyperbole in the making of my 

 point. But demographics statistics are on their side. 



The intermountain West, by and large, is still relatively sparsely 

 populated, which on the one hand reflects an absence of intensive 

 industral exploitation, and on the other hand, at this moment in histroy, 

 signals immortal danger to the West, as it has existed. The reason is 

 obvious. As we catapult forward in an age of accelerating technology and 

 expanding demands and needs, our country is looking for places to put 

 things and to do things that will have adverse impacts on the quality of 

 life. Where population is sparce, there is space. There is also less 

 political muscle to offer opposition, and there are also fewer people to be 

 adversely affected by such things as MX missile installations, 2000 

 megawatt power plants, coal gasification and liquefication complexes and 

 atomic and toxic materials waste dumps. 



But that is only part of the scenario in the simpler days of the youth 

 of our republic, was that we would be a nation of husbandmen. That 

 dream faded from most of the East even before Jefferson died. It has 

 since proved unrealistic in most of the country. But in many parts of the 

 West, in somewhat modified form, Jefferson's dream has been permitted to 

 thrive. At least until now. Where life is still based, by and large, on a 

 ranching-farming economy, much of the heritage and many of the visions 

 of our founding fathers are still strong. 



