The Impacts of Energy Development 



' Alvin Joseph];, Jr. 



DON PEOPLES : I am delighted this morning to have a chance to introduce 

 your keynote speaker. He lives in Connecticut during the winter but 

 spends the summer in northeastern Oregon. He's a former editor of 

 America n Heritag e Magazin e and is now a director and senior consultant 

 with American Heritage Publishing Company. He has authored and written 

 a number of books and articles on American Indians, political history, the 

 history of the West and the current day western environmental 

 conservation subjects. Among the books that he has authored are the 

 Indian Heritage of America , The Patriots Chiefs and recently. On The Hill . 

 The biography that goes with your speaker is a long and impressive one, 

 and I am looking forward to hearing his keynote address. It gives me a 

 great deal of pleasure to introduce to you, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., as your 

 keynote speaker this morning. Mr. Josephy. 



ALVIN JOSEPHY : Hi folks. It's a very great pleasure for me to be back 

 in Butte. I come back here every-so-often. I go back to when I think 

 Butte had the greatest restaurant west of Chicago, the Rocky Mountain 

 Cafe. I don't know what happened to it, but it sure was a wonderful 

 landmark here about 25 years ago, anyway. And also all the mines were 

 then underground. But I know that Butte is one of the real great centers 

 of the West and it's always very pleasant for me to be here. 



I would like to begin this morning by telling you a story about 

 another part of the United States. Some years ago in the 1950's the U.S. 

 Army Corps of Engineers wanted to build a large earthen-fill flood control 

 dam on the Allegheny River, along the border of New York and 

 Pennsylvania. It so happened that the reservoir that the dam would create 

 would flood approximately one-half of the Allegheny Reservation of the 

 Seneca Indians, taking not only their best farm lands along the river 

 valley, but good hunting grounds and the bulk of their homes and ancient 

 cemeteries, where their ancestors and many of their most revered patriot 

 leaders were buried. The engineers' plans drew many protests, not only 

 from the Seneca and other Indians around the country, but from many 

 non-Indians, particularly because the Corps' action was going to violate 

 our country's then oldest exisiting treaty. One that had been made by 

 President George Washington with the Senecas in 1794, guaranteeing them 

 that no one would ever take any of the reservation land without the 

 approval of the tribe. Because of the nation's interest in what was 

 happening. 



I visited the dam site and the reservation several times to write a 

 story for a national magazine, and I will never forget my first visit. Now 

 understand if you can that the New York and Pennsylvania areas around 

 the reservation were generally like any partly rural, partly urban region 

 of the East. I drove through very familiar non-Indian countryside, an 

 area actually where oil had been discovered 100 years before where the oil 

 industry had first been developed in this country, and where it is still in 

 evidence, though in today's terms it is relatively small. 



