10 THEY AUDVU BION? BULL Fae 
Echo Park Wins — Wichita Loses 
IN THE CLOSING sessions of Congress, the House of Representatives once 
again demonstrated that it will not be swayed by political log-rolling. The 
bill to authorize the Upper Colorado Project, which had previously passed 
the Senate, was killed in committee, and did not even come up for a vote. 
Once again the threat to Echo Park and the Dinosaur National Monument 
(included as part of the river control project) was averted. This is the pro- 
posal that Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas, and Newsweek writer Raymond Moley, 
have condemned as “the biggest boondoggle of all time.” However, the vic- 
tory is only a temporary one; proponents of the dam are sure to bring the 
measure up again in the next session. 
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CONSERVATIONISTS SUFFERED a major defeat when Congress permitted, for 
the first time, the invasion of a National Wildlife Refuge. Bowing to the 
demands of the U.S. Army, our representatives passed the Army Public 
Works bill, which slices 10,700 acres from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife 
Refuge and transfers the land to adjoining Fort Sill for use as a target 
range. As Mrs. Margaret Nice pointed out in her excellent article on this 
subject in the June-July Nature Magazine, the area represents the finest 
part of the refuge, including several lakes, four mountains, the best camp- 
ground, and the main entrance. Mrs. Nice was especially incensed by the 
outright falsehoods put forth by proponents of the measure, who tried to 
pretend that the acreage represented waste land, and that the U.S. Army 
had no other place to go. 
In “Conservation News and Notes” in the June issue of our Bulletin, 
Raymond Mostek pointed out that this refuge was originally established by 
President Theodore Roosevelt, and has become a haven for herds of bison, 
elk, antelope and deer, to say nothing of flocks of birds. The Society sent a 
formal letter of protest to the Armed Services Committee and to the Ap- 
propriations Committee, and many individual members wrote to their Con- 
gressmen, but to no avail. 
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ANOTHER LAST-MINUTE DEAL in Washington was the authorization by the 
Federal Power Commission of the construction of four dams in Hell’s Can- 
yon. Significantly enough, permission was given several days after Con- 
gress adjourned, although it is doubtful that either House would have been 
able to prevent this action. For, as the Chicago Daily News pointed out a 
week later, “Two states ... goofed on Hell’s Canyon.” Neither Idaho nor 
Oregon made any attempt to protect this scenic wonder as a State Park, 
National Park, or National Monument. The canyon is 8,000 feet deep in 
spots — deepest canyon in the United States — and contains some of the 
wildest rapids of the Snake river as it plunges between the two states to 
its juncture with the Columbia. Yet the entire section consisted of either 
