Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West

by Nies, Judith

  Among Shultz’s portfolio at Bechtel were the Metals and Mining Division and Bechtel Power. According to Laton McCartney in Friends in High Places, Shultz grilled the members of the Power Division about new coal technologies and the Metals and Mining Division about coal. America had stunning reserves of coal, and American utilities were still getting 60 percent of their electricity from coal. In short, Bechtel decided to buy a coal company, and the company it chose was Peabody Coal, America’s largest coal producer. The new technology that could change the economics of coal was the coal-slurry pipeline, which Bechtel had built in the first place. No longer would utilities have to build expensive railroads to transport coal to their new plants. As it had done with nuclear plants, Bechtel planned on an international market. Russia and China had huge reserves of coal as well as plenty of rain and groundwater.

  Although Kennecott Copper didn’t want to sell Peabody Coal, a year after Shultz stepped into the president’s office at Bechtel, the US Justice Department declared that Kennecott Copper was in violation of antitrust laws. Its ownership of Peabody Coal created barriers to entry in the coal industry and was in restraint of trade. Kennecott would have no choice but to sell Peabody Coal. Although there were not many suitors who both were big enough to buy it and would not be in restraint of trade themselves, a few came forward. The Tennessee Valley Authority was one prospective buyer; Amax Metals was another. Then came a bid from a new entity, a private holding company called Peabody Holding, a consortium of six companies that had been put together solely to purchase Peabody Coal. The companies were Bechtel, Newmont Mining, Boeing Corporation, Fluor Engineering, Williams Technologies, and Equitable Life Insurance. Forbes said the deal had been engineered by the president of Newmont Mining, but Fortune said it was George Shultz who actually pulled it off when it looked as though the deal would come apart. Peabody Coal was sold for $1.2 billion, $800 million in cash. As a private holding company, Peabody Coal was now private, not obliged to issue profit-and-loss statements or public reports.

  By the end of the 1970s Bechtel was in the unique position of having built four of the major power plants on the Colorado Plateau—Mohave, Navajo Generating Station, Four Corners, Coronado—and the Black Mesa coal-slurry pipeline, and it now owned the coal company that mined the coal that supplied two of them. Most important, it was about to begin building the $8 billion Central Arizona Project, the largest civil engineering project since the Hoover Dam, which would require the coal and electricity of the Navajo Generating Station to power the fourteen pumping stations that would lift the Colorado River over three mountain ranges into Phoenix and Tucson.

  Like Bechtel, Peabody Coal had a substantial political presence. It owned coal mines in ten states, and the twenty senators and dozens of congressmen of those states were aware of the company’s interests. In addition, in other states where they didn’t have mines, Peabody supplied coal to some of the largest utilities in the country, and those utilities had political relations offices. As a result Peabody Coal had a significant government affairs department.

  A new narrative began to appear in Sunday supplements in which the Hopi were good Indians who wouldn’t turn off their power and the Navajo were the bad Indians who would shut things down. The dominant narrative was of an old-fashioned range war on these remote Indian reservation lands. Photographers were brought to see and photograph bullet holes in the signs on the Hopi reservation. The Navajo supposedly showed the corpses of dead sheep that had been killed by the Hopi. Much of the faux range war was orchestrated by Evans and Associates, a public relations firm in Salt Lake City that was on retainer to the same utilities that owned and operated the four generating stations, organized under the umbrella name of Western Supply and Transmission.

  In 1980 the Bechtel Corporation was a major supporter and behind-the-scenes fund-raiser for the presidential candidacy of California governor Ronald Reagan. They were well rewarded for doing so. Caspar Weinberger, Bechtel’s legal counsel, left to become Reagan’s secretary of defense, and Ken Davis, head of Bechtel’s Nuclear Division, was appointed assistant secretary in the Department of Energy. By then George Shultz was chief executive officer of the Bechtel Corporation, the most important of Bechtel’s three operating companies,* and second only to Steve Jr. in authority. In 1982 George Shultz left Bechtel to become President Reagan’s secretary of state. It was during the 1980s that all efforts to amend or soften the relocation law were defeated.

  Many former Bechtel executives held lesser posts throughout the Reagan government, particularly in the Departments of Energy and Interior, particularly the Office of Surface Mining and Enforcement. Consequently, Bechtel’s influential presence in Washington accounts for not only the difficulty the Hopi and Navajo had in presenting alternative views of the “range war,” but also for the consistent failure, despite many efforts, by several prominent senators and congressmen to modify the original legislation. The narrow resource base of the West was a worry. The water and power infrastructure depended on cheap coal in distant locations. In the case of Arizona, the Central Arizona Project depended primarily on the massive coal beds that lay beneath the Hopi and Navajo reservations. The people who lived close to the coal would have to be moved. Coal strip mining and sheepherding are not compatible occupations. After the passage of the Hopi Land Settlement Act of 1974, the physical partition of the Executive Order Reservation and the removal of the Navajo seemed unstoppable.

  The Navajo chairman, Peter MacDonald, was eloquent and effective in explaining conditions on the ground to the Senate committee as they considered bills to amend or reauthorize the relocation program that, although it was called the Navajo Hopi Relocation, primarily affected the Navajo:**

  I believe the performance of the Relocation Commission, however well intentioned, has made a more terrible situation than we started out with earlier. Everything is so bad. I know that you members of the committee sense this just by listening to your questions and also hearing the responses from the Commission. . . . They can’t even give you a figure that they can agree upon as to how many people are really affected, what their needs are, where they are, what they are doing, what their problems are. . . . It has been that way for a number of years and I don’t know that it is ever going to improve.

  The Navajo legal services attorneys inform me that the problems we have seen in the past with faulty housing construction by contractors and incompetent inspection by the Commission continue to appear today. . . . [Among the] problems are concrete not level; holes in the foundation through which rodents enter; plumbing leaks; inadequate insulation; repairs costing $75,000, doubling the cost of the house.

  In one instance the contractor was paid but abandoned the project with the home left roofless. . . . Contractors aren’t bonded. They don’t complete warranty work. . . . The Commission told the two relocatee families that they should sue the contractor. . . . Too many people are hurting. Too many people are dying because they are not able to find a way out of the situation in which we have put them.

  Senator Dennis DeConcini of Arizona agreed. During an earlier public hearing, he had called the law inhumane. “There are many problems which have developed in the course of the effort to carry out this law, a law which, in this Senator’s judgment is not a humane law. . . . I have argued for a change in the law for a long time. . . . I am still convinced that our moral obligation to these citizens of our country deserves nothing less than the most humane treatment. I will continue to push for that kind of change.”

  In the House, Congressman John McCain also agreed: “Congressman Udall and I offered a comprehensive settlement last year, but subsequently withdrew the bill [HR 4281] for lack of support.” The congressional summary report noted that “support for the measure was not forthcoming from the [Reagan] administration or from Senator Barry Goldwater.”

  Senator Alan Cranston of California introduced a bill that would have placed a moratorium on the relocation of the Navajo for an eighteen-month period. Again the co
mmittee report noted, “Senator Goldwater took exception to this bill.”

  Soon Peter MacDonald was being investigated by the IRS, supposedly set in motion by Senator Goldwater, and then sued for fraud for having personally profited from a ranch that he bought with tribal funds. The first person to testify at his trial over tribal corruption was a vice president of Peabody Coal. By the time the Reagan administration was over, Peter MacDonald would be serving jail time, Peterson Zah was again Navajo chairman, and there were no more official objections from the Navajo Tribe to relocation. The Navajo resisters were on their own.

  On the other hand, the Hopi chairman, Ivan Sidney, inadvertently testified that the coal and the land dispute were working out well for the Hopi: “I was honored to be in the same city and the same room three weeks ago signing the renegotiated contract with Peabody Coal that would bring more revenue to both the Navajo and the Hopi for the coal that we own jointly as a result of this land dispute.”

  COAL AND THE GRAND PLAN

  The common denominator in the Grand Plan was Bechtel. A photographer took a rare picture of Steve Jr. and Secretary of Interior Stewart Udall outside the Four Corners Plant in Farmington, New Mexico, when the expanded plant opened in 1968. Although Utah International had built the first units, Bechtel had built two new giant units, which, at 2,250 megawatts, made Four Corners one of the largest power plants in the United States. The two new units were copies of the Mohave plant that was already under way in Laughlin, Nevada.

  As soon as the Four Corners plant was completed, Bechtel moved its workers to the new power-generation plant in Laughlin, Nevada, and the site of the Black Mesa slurry pipeline that would supply it. Then a year or two later it moved its workers to a site near Page, Arizona, where it began construction of the Navajo Generating Station, which was completed in 1974. At the same time it shifted workers to St. Johns, Arizona, for construction of the Coronado Generating Station. All four power plants, along with two nuclear plants, were part of a larger energy design called the Grand Plan, organized by twenty-three utilities to provide electricity for the booming West.

  The utilities of Western Energy Supply and Transmission, located in Los Angeles, were among the largest in the country and were designing the energy infrastructure for the next thirty-five years. The West in the 1960s had entered a state of permanent boom. West Coast ports had been the staging areas for the Korean War during the 1950s and for the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The infusion of military contracts, aerospace industries, and other military bases had provided the yeast for jobs, population growth, booming housing, and a speculative land industry. The economies of the western states were flourishing thanks to the US government and military. At the same time, the political culture of the population that grew in the new Sunbelt cities was conservative, focused on small government, self-reliance, and low taxes. As author Wallace Stegner said, the westerner’s attitude toward the federal government is pretty much “Give us the money and leave us alone.”

  Despite the extent of the resources, no Indians were getting rich from resource extraction. Despite promises that leases for uranium, coal, oil, and gas would bring in millions of dollars to the tribes and create thousands of jobs, a visit to the reservation reveals the illusion of those promises. Authors Bob Gottlieb and Peter Wiley later characterized the Grand Plan as a failure, saying it marked “a raid on resources that would outstrip the 19th century and turn some of the most beautiful and scenic areas of America into a vast industrialized energy colony under the control of major corporations headquartered in cities hundreds of miles away.”

  By the time the Hopi and Navajo were coming to Washington to try to change the legislation that would affect the future of their lands and their people, they were dealing with a huge international company with contacts in Washington at the highest levels. Bechtel had forty thousand employees in twenty countries building the infrastructure of the free world. It was often described as a company with its own foreign policy, and soon its foreign policy was America’s foreign policy.

  It had no public stockholders, issued no annual report, and submitted no quarterly forms to the Securities and Exchange Commission. It was the twentieth-largest corporation in the United States but was still a family business. Many of its operations were viewed as opaque, even by its own employees. Complaints made outside the company were echoed inside. D. J. Hallett, controller of Bechtel Corporation, wrote a memo to Steve Jr. expressing his concerns about the attitude toward transparency and open communication: “The Bechtel organization wishes to operate with a ‘low profile’ [in its] exposure to the business world. I consider this low profile aspect, together with the general secrecy surrounding a private company, is often used as an excuse by management for not communicating essential information.” He criticized the company culture of treating all information as confidential information. “As a multi-national company, we must improve overseas communications by developing managers who . . . understand customs and practices of the countries they are working in.”

  Operations on Indian reservations are like operations in a foreign country: pliable government agencies, lax environmental enforcement, lack of access to media, weak tribal structures. As the environmental movement grew in the 1970s and ’80s, the company seemed to view environmentalism with the same hostility it viewed labor unions or communism. Therefore, when several nonprofit Indian and environmental organizations asked Peabody Coal for information about the terms of the leases on the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations and the amount of water that would be pumped out of their land to transport coal, they could not get copies of the leases or the water rates. The Interior Department claimed the leases were confidential and not available to the public.

  In the era of transnational corporations, the methods of separating indigenous peoples from their lands and resources are many, and often quite legal—at least to those making the laws. When native lands, like those of the Hopi and Navajo, hold important energy resources, the human rights and environmental impacts take place far from mainstream media.

  Although northern Black Mesa and the Colorado Plateau might appear to be some of the most isolated land remaining in the United States, Bechtel has had a long and profitable history there. Hoover Dam made Bechtel an engineering legend and still looms large in its institutional memory. The dam created a small group of construction-company millionaires who understood long-range infrastructure planning and how to open the federal Treasury to execute it. Yet as Marc Reisner wrote in Cadillac Desert, “The Colorado River is a metaphor for our time. The age of great expectations was inaugurated at Hoover Dam—a fifty year flowering of hopes when all things appeared possible. And one could say that amid the salt-encrusted sands of the river’s dried up delta, we begin to founder on the Era of Limits.”

  Unexpectedly, the era of limits began to be publicized by a small group of Navajo resisters who organized themselves into the Independent Diné Nation. Even though many of the signatures on their proclamation were in the form of a thumbprint, their understanding of the situation eventually became a larger awareness of climate change caused by carbon levels in the atmosphere and accompanying drought. “Our Mother Earth is continuously raped by the exploitation of coal, uranium, oil, natural gas. Our Father Sky has been contaminated by the poison from burning coal and the radiation from uranium mining. Our sacred water has been abused, so now there is no certainty for the future generations.”

  Although Roberta Blackgoat, Katherine Smith, Pauline Whitesinger, and the many Benallys, Yazzies, and Begays who signed the Declaration of Independence of the Big Mountain Diné Nation on October 28, 1979, were invisible to American media, over the next thirty years they became visible at the United Nations, at the European Parliament, and at the newly established Commission on Indigenous People in Geneva. They were emblematic of an international issue of native peoples with rich resources that global corporations wanted and successfully extracted. At the same time, many became aware that the decimation of land-based
cultures and the knowledge of their people was a huge and irretrievable loss.

  *Organizational chart of Bechtel, Caspar Weinberger Papers.

  *In an oral interview at the Kennedy Library, the interviewer did not ask McCone about Oxcart because the project was still secret information.

  **A scavenger mine is a former commercial mine whose claim has run out, but may still have a lot of valuable ore that could be extracted using small-scale, modern mining processes.

  *The three operating companies are Bechtel Incorporated, Bechtel Corporation, and Bechtel Power Corporation.

  **During the same hearings the head of the Relocation Commission, Hawley Atkinson, said that the commission had received 4,449 applications. Because the applications were from heads of households and the average number was 4 in a family, it meant that more than 16,000 Navajo were affected. The Hopi chairman said only 36 Hopi had applied for relocation.

  CHAPTER 12

  ROBERTA BLACKGOAT’S WORLD

  Roberta Blackgoat’s sheepherding camp is gone now, but it was located some eighteen miles south of the Kayenta Mine in the area around Big Mountain, at seven thousand feet the highest point on Black Mesa. It was February 1991 when I first went to see her, driving from Flagstaff with her daughter Vicki Blackgoat, who skimmed along ungraded roads, skirted deep canyons, and at one point saw the road vanish entirely into a swiftly running stream. “Washed-out dam,” said Vicki matter-of-factly as she gunned the accelerator and slammed into the stream and up the steep bank on the other side. Vicki, who was a graduate of Dartmouth College, had grown up on the reservation and seemed to remember every turn and rise in the road, although it had been at least fifteen years since she had lived there full-time.