{"id":4572,"date":"2026-08-04T13:25:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T21:25:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/klamathid.org\/home\/?page_id=4572"},"modified":"2026-08-04T15:54:59","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T23:54:59","slug":"everglades-of-the-west","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/klamathid.org\/home\/home\/history\/everglades-of-the-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Everglades of the West"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Before the Project<\/p>\n

The Everglades of the West<\/h1>\n

Ten million birds, three hundred and fifty thousand acres of water, and the rock that held it all in.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n

This page sets out what this country actually was before the Klamath Project, and what its water was already doing \u2014 because almost every argument about this Basin starts from an assumption about that, and most of those assumptions are wrong.<\/p>\n\n

Every figure below is sourced \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n

\u2190 Back to History<\/a><\/p>\n\n

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What this place was<\/h2>\n\n

What abundance looked like<\/h3>\n\n

It is difficult now to picture what stood here, so it is worth setting the numbers down.<\/p>\n\n

At the turn of the last century this Basin supported up to ten million waterfowl<\/strong> \u2014 the largest concentration of waterfowl in the world<\/a>. Not the West. The world. In 1905<\/strong> the Oregon ornithologist William L. Finley<\/strong> was here photographing them, and described the region as \u201cthe greatest feeding and breeding ground for waterfowl on the Pacific coast.\u201d<\/em> Even by September 1958<\/strong>, long after the draining had begun, the official count reached 5.8 million birds<\/strong> in a single month.<\/p>\n\n

Around them: more than 350,000 acres<\/strong> 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.<\/p>\n\n

The water was deep enough to work. Lower Klamath Lake carried a seventy-five-foot steamer<\/strong> \u2014 the Klamath<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n

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.<\/strong> Abundance on this scale is not an accident of climate \u2014 it is what happens when a basin cannot drain and the rock holds the water in.<\/p>\n\n

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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.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

Who calls it that<\/h3>\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n