Before the Project
The Everglades of the West
Ten million birds, three hundred and fifty thousand acres of water, and the rock that held it all in.
Before the Klamath Project there were two lakes and their marshes across more than 182,000 acres, thirty feet deep in places, held behind a basalt reef and losing upwards of 520,000 acre-feet a year to the air. The Deputy Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service told Congress in 2022 what this country used to be called: the Everglades of the West.
This page sets out what this country actually was before the Klamath Project, and what its water was already doing — because almost every argument about this Basin starts from an assumption about that, and most of those assumptions are wrong.
Every figure below is sourced — to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Bureau of Reclamation's own project history, and the ornithologists who were here photographing it in 1905.
What this place was
What abundance looked like
It is difficult now to picture what stood here, so it is worth setting the numbers down.
At the turn of the last century this Basin supported up to ten million waterfowl — the largest concentration of waterfowl in the world. Not the West. The world. In 1905 the Oregon ornithologist William L. Finley was here photographing them, and described the region as “the greatest feeding and breeding ground for waterfowl on the Pacific coast.” Even by September 1958, long after the draining had begun, the official count reached 5.8 million birds in a single month.
Around them: more than 350,000 acres of shallow lake, marsh and tule; the largest wetland complex west of the Mississippi; and the largest concentration of wintering bald eagles anywhere in the lower forty-eight states. Eighty per cent of everything moving on the Pacific Flyway came through here, and still does.
The water was deep enough to work. Lower Klamath Lake carried a seventy-five-foot steamer — the Klamath, launched at Klamath Falls on 29 July 1905, sixty-nine tons, running the lake as part of the rail-and-stage line into town until 1909, when she was moved up to Upper Klamath. Lumber went south to Lairds Landing on the spring flow and hay came north in the season, on the same water.
And beneath all of it, the reason for all of it: volcanic soil laid down by Mazama ash into an old lakebed, and water standing over it for ten months of the year. The wocus and the tule fed the people who lived here. The marsh fed the birds. The springs fed the c'waam and the koptu. Abundance on this scale is not an accident of climate — it is what happens when a basin cannot drain and the rock holds the water in.
Ten million birds did not come here because the country was beautiful. They came because the water was here, and the water was here because the rock would not let it leave.
Who calls it that
The phrase is not the District's. It belongs to the people who manage the refuges and to the organizations that campaign for them, and it is used in evidence to Congress.
- U.S. Fish and Wildlife ServiceStephen Guertin, Deputy Director for Policy, testifying to the House Committee on Natural Resources, 8 March 2022: the Service's Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex, six refuges throughout the Basin, “has been referred to as the ‘Everglades of the West’ because of its biological diversity and importance to the Pacific Flyway as a staging area for millions of waterbirds.”
- National Fish and Wildlife FoundationKlamath Basin Restoration Program — the same phrase, and the reason for it: the Basin hosts upwards of 80 per cent of the waterfowl migrating on the Pacific Flyway.
- Bird Alliance of OregonThe refuge complex is the largest wetland complex west of the Mississippi. Its founder, William Finley, persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to set aside 81,000 acres of marsh at Lower Klamath as the nation's first waterfowl refuge.
- WaterWatch of OregonUses it too — a basin of more than 15,750 square miles, six refuges, and some of the most biodiverse wetland in the State.
- Where the phrase came fromIts origin is not settled. The trail runs back to William L. Finley, the Oregon ornithologist who photographed this Basin in 1905, wrote for the Atlantic Monthly about the market hunters shooting egrets and grebes for the millinery trade, and persuaded Theodore Roosevelt — a fellow Audubon member — to create the refuge in 1908. Accounts of that period describe the marshes he photographed as already “known as the Everglades of the West.” The District has not found the first printed use and does not claim to know it.
- U.S. Geological SurveyWaterfowl migration on Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuges, 1953–2001 — standardized aerial surveys from 1953. Lower Klamath and Tule Lake “historically supported some of the greatest autumn and spring concentrations of migrating waterfowl in North America.”
The District quotes them because they are right, and because the description settles a question before it is asked. This was never dry country that irrigation made green. It was one of the great wetlands of the continent, and everything that has happened here since 1905 has happened to a wetland.
The evidence on this page is drawn together in the District's briefing, The Everglades of the West: what the basin actually is, how its water works, and what the historical record shows — Gene Souza, Executive Director, Klamath Irrigation District.
A lakebed before it was farmland
Ancient Lake Modoc once filled this basin and drained south, into the Pit River — until the Medicine Lake shield volcano blocked that path roughly ten thousand years ago and the outlet shifted west. Ash from Mount Mazama and the Cascades settled into the lakebed and built the deep volcanic soils the Basin is known for. What was left was held back by rock: two reefs at the head of Link River, the Mesegander reef at Lake Ewauna, the Snow Goose reef, and the Keno reef below that.
Behind those reefs stood Lower Klamath Lake at some 88,900 acres of marsh and open water, and Tule Lake — which Frémont named Rhett Lake — a closed Great Basin sump with no surface outlet, running between 88,000 and 120,000 acres and thirty feet deep in places.
Lower Klamath was navigable, and it flowed both ways. Held up by the Keno reef, spring flows carried lumber south to Lairds Landing; when the flow out of Upper Klamath Lake fell away in the season, water ran back toward the Klamath River and hay could be floated north. That is not a river system as most people picture one, and the Project that was laid over it has to be understood against it.
The irrigation project re-plumbed a wetland. It did not import water to dry land.
Congress understood exactly what it was authorising. Approval of the Klamath Project required, among its conditions, that Oregon and California cede the lakebeds and that Congress approve destroying the navigability of Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes. That is the language of the record. The Project was not asked to find water in a dry country. It was authorised to take a lake apart.
What the marsh was already using
There is an assumption underneath most argument about this Basin: that irrigation introduced a consumptive demand which had not been there before. The measurements do not support it.
Total evapotranspiration from the Basin's lakes, wetlands and refuges runs on the order of 0.7 million acre-feet a year. Historical evaporation from Lower Klamath Lake alone was measured at three to five feet a year in 1908. Open water and marsh give up more water per acre than grain does. Draining this Basin and farming it did not raise consumptive use. If anything it lowered it.
There is one comparison that makes the scale plain. Lower Klamath Lake covered somewhere between eighty and eighty-nine thousand acres before it was drained, and it evaporated on the order of 240,000 to 267,000 acre-feet every summer. That is roughly what the “A” Canal delivers in a year. One lake, giving up to the air each summer about what this District's main canal carries in twelve months — and doing it every year, before a single acre was farmed.
Set the numbers side by side and the picture is close to net zero. Natural evaporation off Lower Klamath ran over 267,000 acre-feet a year and off Tule Lake much the same again, against under 440,000 acre-feet from all the developed farmland and refuges together — before counting the agricultural return flows, which averaged more than 99,000 acre-feet before 2001, or the Lost River contributions. Measured against the river's average flow, the Project consumes less than 3.3 per cent.
The honest framing is not that the Project took water from the river. It re-timed and relocated water the natural system was already consuming — and stored what used to evaporate.
Land-cover and basin evapotranspiration rates from USGS (Risley and Gannett, SIR 2006-5036; Gannett, SIR 2007-5050); historical evaporation from Quinton and Hall (1908); undepleted natural flow from Perry and others for the Bureau of Reclamation (2004). Assembled in the District's briefing, The Everglades of the West.
And when the storage did come, the United States did not build it and did not pay for it. Copco approached the federal government about a dam and was told there were plans to regulate the lake but no funds available, and no knowing when there would be. So the power company built it — about $312,000 into the structure, some $325,000 by completion, against a total obligation the company estimated at a million dollars. Stoutemyer and Dent recorded the result in the government's favour without apparent irony: by that contract the Klamath Project secured, “without any cost whatever,” a very valuable and very necessary storage reservoir. The dam and the land under it were deeded to the United States on December 26, 1928, by John C. and Nina C. Boyle.
Where the rest of this is told
The water was here. The ditches were dug and paid for privately. The distribution works were built on the landowners’ guarantee and repaid to the last dollar. The storage was a gift from a power company. What the United States supplied was credit, and it got that back.
Found an error? The District would rather correct the record than defend it. Contact us.