Fishing the Bureau's New Lakes, Columbia Basin

The Columbia Basin Project, authorized by Congress in 1943 and delivering its first irrigation water in 1952, remade roughly half a million acres of central Washington's high desert into farmland — and in the process created dozens of lakes, canals, and reservoirs where none had existed. Grand Coulee Dam backed the Columbia into the 150-mile-long Franklin D. Roosevelt Lake; pumped water below the dam filled Banks Lake inside an ancient coulee (a wide, flat-bottomed canyon carved by ice-age floods); from there hundreds of miles of canals fanned east and south across the project area, all of them quickly stocked with fish.

The two agencies named on the cover reflect a formal arrangement struck in 1952, when the Bureau of Reclamation signed a Memorandum of Understanding transferring fish, wildlife, and recreational management of its project lands to the Washington Department of Game — the state agency responsible for game fish and hunting from 1932 until 1987, when the Legislature renamed it the Department of Wildlife. The federal agency built the water infrastructure; the state agency stocked it and set the fishing rules. This brochure is the public face of that deal.

The terrain in the cover photograph is basalt, the bedrock of the entire Columbia Plateau — a layer cake of ancient lava flows nearly two miles thick. The scoured, channeled landscape visible here was carved by catastrophic floods from glacial Lake Missoula, a natural ice-dammed lake in present-day Montana that repeatedly broke free and drained in days, releasing more water than all modern rivers combined. Geologist J Harlen Bretz spent decades defending this flood hypothesis against a skeptical geological establishment; a group of doubters toured the scablands in 1965 and sent him a telegram reading "We are all now catastrophists!" He received geology's Penrose Medal at age 96 in 1979. The Bureau of Reclamation, with no apparent sense of irony, then put water back into some of these same ancient channels as part of the irrigation system.

Only the cover is scanned here. The script lettering, bold orange block type, and blue duotone cover photograph place this in the late 1950s to early 1960s — standard mid-century federal promotional printing — though no date appears on the cover and the interior pages may hold dateable evidence.