[Secretary of the Interior 1961 Annual Report for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

HE FISCAL YEAR ENDED JUNE 30

f
1961 annual report
I
1 7
THE SECRETARY OF THE
INTERIOR
STEWART L. UDALL
Resources for
Tomorrow
1961
Annual Report
THE SECRETARY OF THE
INTERIOR
Stewart L. Udall
For the Fiscal Year Ended
June 30, 1961
THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
WASHINGTON
Dear Mr. President: Transmitted herewith is the annual report of the Department of the Interior for the fiscal year 1961.
In preparing this summary of departmental activities we have been mindful of the statement in your special message to the Congress on natural resources that wise investment in a resource program today will return vast dividends tomorrow.
As you have said, our country has been generous to us in this regard—and we cannot now ignore her needs for future development.
In the year just past we have made great strides toward the sound conservation and development of our water, our land, our forest, and our mineral resources.
But perhaps more importantly we have laid the groundwork for programs just getting under way which in the years ahead will assure America of adequate resources to meet its growing needs.
Sincerely,
Secretary of the Interior.
The President, The White House.
in
Contents
PART I
Resources for Tomorrow...................................... 3
PART II
Annual Reports of the Bureaus and Offices of the Department of the Interior
Office of the Assistant Secretary—Water and Power Development ..................................................... 79
Bureau of Reclamation................................. 82
Bonneville Power Administration...................... 145
Southwestern Power Administration.................... 165
Southeastern Power Administration.................... 170
Office of Saline Water............................... 172
Office of the Assistant Secretary—Mineral Resources ....	179
Geological Survey.................................... 181
Bureau of Mines...................................... 223
Office of Oil and Gas................................ 263
Office of Minerals Exploration....................... 266
Office of Minerals Mobilization...................... 269
Office of Geography.................................. 271
Office of Coal Research.............................. 273
Office of the Assistant Secretary—Public Land Management .	275
Bureau of Indian Affairs............................. 277
Bureau of Land Management . ......................... 319
National Park Service................................ 357
Office of Territories................................ 389
The Alaska Railroad.................................. 403
Office of the Assistant Secretary—Fish and Wildlife....... 405
Fish and Wildlife Service............................ 407
Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife............... 411
Bureau of Commercial Fisheries....................... 429
Office of the Administrative Assistant Secretary.......... 447
Office of the Solicitor................................... 453
Resources Program Staff................................... 456
Oil Import Administration................................. 458
Index..................................................... 461
v
Part I
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW
Resources for Tomorrow
The Department of the Interior has the prime function of planning for the future of America and working to conserve the natural resources which sustain its life.
But because so much of what is happening inside America today is drowned out by the clamor of an embattled world, it is only recently that we have become aware of a growing internal crisis which deeply affects the lives of all Americans.
This “Quiet Crisis” concerns a battle being waged against us from within by the forces of natural progress and explosive growth. In its wake across America this battle has left polluted rivers and lakes, disappearing open space, overcrowded parks, declining resources, the threatened extinction of certain species of our wildlife, and dwindling opportunties for the outdoor experiences which through the years have had such a profound influence in shaping the national character of America.
At Odds With Our Environment
Never before has man been so at odds with his environment as we are in America today. In the short span of a hundred years—the century that bridges our great westward expansion and the present day—we have created forces hostile to nature that, given full sway, could in time make us strangers in our own land.
A great poet has written of our continent: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”
As we survey the developments of the past two decades, we are driven to the inescapable conviction that the land which we and our forebears knew will not be “ours” for long unless we arrest the forces that would alter and blight it and despoil its fruits.
3
4 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
We are seeing the face of America change. This has been going forward rapidly, as we all know, since the end of World War II. For example, today more than a million acres of land each year is being converted from open space into industrial and commercial developments of various kinds.
Let us look at another of the changes. Forty years from now it is predicted that 85 percent of the people of this country will be living in urban centers. Consider how this movement will affect, among other things, the great problem of our water needs. We can anticipate these needs will double with our population growth in the next 20 years; they will quadruple in the next 40 years. Already there are areas where growth has been checked because of water shortages. Only in recent years have we realized that water is a resource with limitations.
There is the question, too, in this movement to urban centers, of how the enormously increased requirements for electric power will be met. Here the projected growth in demand even far outstrips our future water needs.
This again indicates the crises that we face in terms of conservation. Indeed, how our cities grow and how we use our resources will determine in the long run what kind of lives our people lead and what kind of people we are.
If we are to maintain man’s proper relationship with nature, it is plain that we must broaden the role of resource planning in the management of our national affairs.
One of the greatest natural resource challenges of the 1960’s is to insure that the urban population of America has open spaces near their teeming metropolises where a few quiet hours can be spent.
6 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
The American continent has, from the beginning, been hospitable to mankind. Its glories and its gifts have made possible the kind of life we know in America today. But the good earth will remain good only so long as we make it so.
A Forecast of Things to Come
Many years ago, Theodore Roosevelt summed up the challenge which we face today when he said: “To skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them.”
Each element of the “Quiet Crisis” in which we are now involved represents, at this stage, no more than a serious inconvenience, together with an uneasy prospect of the future. But—taken together—they add up to a circumstance that threatens the wellsprings of our national existence.
The history of man’s progress is, in large measure, the chronicle of his emotional and physical relationship with the land—and, through the land, with himself and his fellow man. In America, we found a virgin continent with magnificent landscapes and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of natural resources. A good many of the qualities which we ascribe to our national character—humility, the sense of fair purpose and fair play, generosity, to name a few—are based to large degree upon our finding of the bounties of this land.
But what of America in the 20th century? How can we measure ourselves against traffic jams, blight, smog, polluted streams?
If a measurement is made, can we find ourselves otherwise than wanting in our environment of today ?
At no time has a society achieved so much in the way of material progress—but at the same time allowed so many of its basic values to fall by the wayside.
And—in the strict accounting—one of the most vital of the values we have allowed to slip away is our oneness with the land—the utilization of the land’s resources to give the American people the maximum of enjoyment, understanding, and inspiration from the sites and objects inherited from our past.
Time To Call a Halt
Admittedly, we must move ahead with the development of our land resources. Likewise, our technology must be refined and stimulated. But in the long run life will succeed only in a life-giving environment.
The beauty of nature and nature’s works has always been an inspiration in American life. The park resources of America and the responsibility for their protection and enhancement rests with the Department of the Interior as one of its greatest resource challenges of the future.
8 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
We can no longer afford unnecessary sacrifices of living space and natural landscapes.
The sad truth is that development tends to outrun planning in our society. More often than not the wrecker’s work is done before the conservationist and the planner arrive on the scene.
If we are to maintain man’s proper relationship to the land, it is plain that we must insist that our developers be more conservation-minded, and we must broaden the role of resource planning in the management of our national estate.
In our haste to build new factories and roads and suburbs we must take care that man’s need to 'refresh himself in his natural environment is not foreclosed, and that our basic resources—water, timber, fuels—are not unnecessarily diminished.
President Kennedy has called for one last great effort in the 1960’s to finish the conservation work begun by Theodore Roosevelt who long ago counseled Americans to “set apart forever for the use and benefit of our people as a whole rich forested lands and . . . the flower-clad meadows of our mountains.”
“This nation,” the President said, “cannot lose sight of its natural resources—its land, wood, and water—while building its military might. We hold the sword, and we are determined to maintain our strength and our commitments. But we also hold in our hands the trowel.”
This spirit motivated the first major conservation accomplishment of President Kennedy’s administration—the creation of a magnificent National Seashore Park on the ocean sands of Cape Cod, in an area close to major population centers of the East.
Through this action, one of the most beautiful of America’s remaining unspoiled open spaces will be preserved for all time for the use and enjoyment of this and the generations to come.
But at every hand near our growing centers of population similar opportunities are slipping through our fingers. Once land development has begun it is invariably “too late,” for land prices quickly soar beyond the public purse.
Cooperative Effort Is Needed
What strategy, what plan of action, will save enough space for all of our people ? Leadership from our public men is, of course, indispensable. Federal action is needed to round out our national park and wildlife refuge systems and to develop fully the recreation and timber potential of our forestlands.
We must also have aggressive State park expansion programs to reserve new parklands before they are pre-empted. Municipal lead
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW 4-	9
ership, too, is essential if we are to provide adequate city park systems and enough fringe open space to permit our cities to expand gracefully.
We also need—and here the burden falls heaviest on local leadership—creative and farsighted use of zoning regulations and land use plans to compel the speculator and developer to put people first and ensure that adequate space is allotted to playgrounds and parks.
Government can provide the main thrust, but individuals must play a creative role if we are to ensure an adequate heritage for all Americans.
If our growth in the years ahead is to leave America a better, rather than a poorer, place in which to live, we must give far more attention to our uses of land and water, forests, fish and wildlife, parks and wilderness, minerals and fuels, and we must embark, while time allows, on an active preservation of the remaining open spaces which surround our populated areas.
In the future we can live in a land which is still worthy of being called “America the Beautiful” ... or our cities can be hemmed in by a billboard-studded wasteland running monotonously from one super-city to another. The choice is ours—and the time to make the choice is now.
New Horizons
Under the vigorous leadership of the Kennedy Administration, this Department, in close collaboration with other Federal, State, and local agencies, is moving rapidly toward new horizons of resource conservation and development concerned not only with wildlife and natural resources, but with man himself.
The significance of our concern with the human resource has been well expressed by Wallace Stegner, the distinguished novelist, when he wrote:
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the last remaining wilderness be destroyed, if we permit the last of our forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases, if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or extinction, if we pollute the last clean air or dirty the last clean streams or push our paved roads through the last of the silence.
“Not many people are likely any more to look upon what we call progress as an unmixed blessing. Just as surely as it has brought us increased comfort and more material goods, it has brought us spiritual losses and it threatens to become the Frankenstein that will destroy us.”
10 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
Land and Recreation
One of the most important segments of this vigorous new program is concerned with our relationship to, and our use of land.
In his special message to the Congress on natural resources in February 1961, President Kennedy pointed out that he had instructed the Secretary of the Interior, in cooperation with the Secretary of Agriculture and other appropriate Federal, State and local officials and private leaders to:
•	formulate a comprehensive Federal recreational lands program;
•	conduct a survey to determine where additional national parks, forests, and seashore areas should be proposed;
•	take steps to insure that land acquired for the construction of Federally-financed reservoirs is sufficient to permit future development for recreational purposes; and,
•	establish a long-range program for planning and providing adequate open spaces for recreational facilities in urban areas.
Action to bring about these long-needed improvements in our recreational land planning and management is well under way.
At the same time, programs are being accelerated which will result in the more productive use of our public land. The Federal Government has responsibility for nearly 770 million acres of such land, much of it devoted to a variety of essential uses. But, for a number of reasons, some 477 million acres of public domain lands remain vacant, unappropriated and unreserved. Obviously, this represents a vital national reserve that should be devoted to productive use now and maintained for future generations.
To bring about this end, the Department of the Interior has taken steps in this Administration to:
—accelerate an inventory and evaluation of the nation’s public domain holdings to serve as a foundation for improved resource management;
—develop a program of balanced usage designed to reconcile the conflicting uses—grazing, forestry, recreation, wildlife, urban development and minerals, and,
—accelerate the installation of soil conserving and water saving works and practices to reduce erosion and improve forage capacity; and to proceed with the revegetation of range lands on which the forage capacity has been badly depleted or destroyed.
Meeting Our Water Problems
Today in the United States we are using more than 300 billion gallons of water a day. By 1980, we will need 600 billion gallons a day.
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW +	11
This is going to be one of our most critical problems in the years ahead.
Water problems in one form or another touch all 50 States of the Union. In some areas it is a problem of availability, in others of salinity or quality; it may be a problem of maldistribution or in some cases a problem of excess. Regardless of the cause, as a Nation, we can no longer regard with parochial indifference the increasing imbalance between the supply and the demand for water in the United States.
At the same time, our available water supply must be used to give maximum benefits for all purposes—hydroelectric power, irrigation and reclamation, navigation, recreation, health, home and industry. If all areas of the country are to enjoy a balanced growth, our Federal Reclamation and other water resource programs will have to give increased attention to municipal and industrial water and power supplies as well as irrigation and land redemption. This Department, with the full cooperation and support of President Kennedy, is taking steps to speed the development of a balanced program to meet our water needs.
Already, as another major conservation achievement of this Administration, approval of the Congress has been won for pollution control legislation. This comes at a time when pollution of our country’s rivers and streams has—as a result of our rapid population and industrial growth and change—reached alarming proportions. To meet all needs—domestic, agricultural, industrial, recreational—we shall have to use and re-use the same water, maintaining quality as well as quantity. In many areas of the country we need new sources of supply—but in all areas we must protect the supplies we have. The newly enacted pollution control legislation will, in the years to come, help make this possible.
At the same time, in an equally important action, the Congress authorized a $75 million program which enables the Department to greatly accelerate its wTork toward development of the best and most economical processes and methods for converting saline and brackish water into water suitable for beneficial consumptive purposes.
The Act instructed the Secretary of the Interior to place emphasis on the conduct, encouragement, and promotion of fundamental scientific research and basic studies looking toward solutions of saline water conversion problems. To this end, at President Kennedy’s request, a panel of his Science Advisory Committee has been working with the Department to assure the most vigorous and effective research and development program possible in this field.
617939 0—62-----2
12 4- ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
Seated at his desk in the White House, President Kennedy presses a special button, made of magnesium extracted from sea water, to start fresh water flowing from the water conversion demonstration plant at Freeport, Tex., on June 21, 1961. With the President are Dr. Leland Doan, president, and (r) Dr. A. P. Beutel, vice president of Dow Chemical Company.
An example of the progress now being macle in this vital area may be seen in the fact that in June 1961 President Kennedy pressed a button at his desk in the White House which set the machinery in motion—across the nation at Freeport, Texas—of the first saline water demonstration plant constructed by the Federal Government
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW +	13
in cooperation with private industry—a million-gallon-a-day plant that is already in the Freeport municipal water system.
Within months, dedication ceremonies were held marking completion of construction of a 250,000-gallon-a-day plant to demineralize the brackish well water at Webster, S. Dak., and construction was nearing completion on a second million-gallon-a-day sea water conversion plant at San Diego, Calif. Building of two additional plants in New Mexico and North Carolina is scheduled to begin in the coming fiscal year.
Science Advisor Appointed
Strengthening of still another vital water resource program—that dealing with oceanography—was assured during the year with the appointment of the noted scientist, Dr. Roger Revelle, as Science Advisory to the Secretary of the Interior.
Serving as the first science advisor in the history of the Department, Dr. Revelle is on leave of absence from his post as director of the University of California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
For the past several years, he has also been dean of the University’s School of Science and Engineering at La Jolla, and, in addition to his contribution to the Department’s work in oceanography, he will advise on and coordinate the numerous programs in other scientific fields.
Electric Power
In his 1961 message to the Congress on natural resources, President Kennedy had this to say in regard to electric power:
“To keep pace with the growth of our economy and national defense requirements, expansion of this nation’s power facilities will require intensive effort by all segments of our power industry. Through 1980, according to present estimates of the Federal Power Commission, total installed capacity should triple if we are to meet our nation’s need for essential economic growth. Sustained heavy expansion by all power suppliers—public, cooperative, and private—is clearly needed.
“The role of the Federal Government is supplying an important segment of this powTer is now long established and must continue . . .
“Hydroelectric sites remaining in this country will be utilized and hydroelectric power will be incorporated in all multiple-purpose river projects where optimum economic use of the water justifies such action.”
A night scene at Grand Coulee Dam symbolizes the hydroelectric challenges faced by the Nation today. With three times as much potver considered necessary in 20 years, the full hydroelectric potential of the Nation tvill play an important part in meeting these needs.
At the same time, the President directed the Secretary of the Interior to develop plans for the early interconnection of areas served by the Department’s marketing agencies with adequate common carrier transmission lines; to plan for further national cooperative pooling of electric power, both public and private; and to enlarge such pooling as now exists.
In an initial move to comply with this directive, the Department established a special task force to study the feasibility of interconnecting the lines of the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest and those of the Central Valley Project in California.
Realizing the need to improve the existing transmission system, both public and private, the Department appointed a committee to begin studying possibilities of standardizing equipment in operations of an extra high voltage system. It invited private power interests to name a comparable committee to cooperate in an initial effort to standardize voltages looking toward eventual construction of a common carrier power grid.
An encouraging development resulting from this action came in September when the Edison Electric Institute outlined plans for a 10-
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW +	15
year program of transmission line construction which could well open the way for a major cooperative planning effort of inter-connecting and pooling facilities of public systems with those of private industry.
In a statement issued following the Institute’s announcement, the Secretary of the Interior declared:
I am encouraged to learn of these new plans for pooling and interconnection of the Nation’s power company systems. Since President Kennedy issued his message on natural resources in February of this year, there has been an increasing awareness on the part of the entire utility industry of the need to make optimum use of the Nation’s electric power facilities.
It is timely that both public and private sectors of the power field are looking beyond mere interconnection of lines and are considering the mutual advantages of extra-high voltage transmission. Many countries in western Europe have already proved the mutual benefits attainable by such cooperation.
The logical next step is a cooperative industry-governmental effort to plan for the full utilization of the present and future facilities of private industry, consumer-owned utilities, and the Federal Government. These public agencies represent nearly 25 percent of the Nation’s electric power industry. Such a move would be in the interest of sound, complete, overall planning. Wherever practicable, these major lines should be operated on a common carrier basis.
Meanwhile, the Congress approved-construction on an all-Federal basis of the backbone transmission lines required to market the power generated by the giant five-State Colorado River Storage Project, and steps were immediately taken to expedite planning and progress toward completion of the undertaking. Simultaneously, the Department urged public agencies and private power companies to cooperate with it in working out a transmission system beyond the basic backbone system that will ensure the economic growth of the Colorado Basin, and promote the stability of the entire power industry.
A first step was taken toward the development of a striking new conservation tool for our electric power resources with the undertaking of studies looking toward so-called “pump-back” storage systems which permit the use of generation capacity during slack demand periods to build power reservoirs which can be pumped back into use at peak periods of power use.
The Challenge of the future
These, then, are a few examples of how the Department of the Interior is moving as speedily as possible to develop our national resources for tomorrow. There are many others. For instance, new trails are being blazed for the American Indian through implementation of a Kennedy Administration task force report calling for greater emphasis on Indian education and the wider use and development of natural resources on the reservations.
16 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
In Reclamation, work is under way to schedule a progressive, orderly program of starting new projects to meet accumulated demands.
Similar actions are under way in regard to the conservation and development of our minerals, our fuels, our helium resources, our forests, and our wildlife. In the following pages, all of these vital programs will be discussed in detail, and the progress shown.
From its earliest days as the “housekeeping” agency of the Federal Government and through the period when it played an important role in the winning of the West, this Department has, in effect, become the “Department of the Future.”
Its responsibilities in regard to natural resources have become not only national but international in scope.
The Department—at this challenging period in its existence—recognizes that the demands of a growing industrial society at home, as well as the nation’s commitments to defend freedom abroad, presents it with the most serious resource demands.
Whether our physical and spiritual resources prove adequate to meet our needs tomorrow will be determined by the decisions we make—or fail to make—today.
This is the moment of decision in resource conservation.
Our actions toward this goal during the challenging 1960’s will determine the character—and the achievements—of this nation for many years to come.
Our Outdoor Recreation Needs—Planning for T omorrow
Under Theodore Roosevelt, a million and a half acres of outdoor wilderness was added to our national park system. Woodrow Wilson’s administration provided a record 5.3 million acres of this precious resource, and under Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation was enriched by an addition of another 3.5 million acres in our national parks.
But from the end of World War II until the start of President Kennedy’s administration, America has added but 93,000 acres to its system of national parks.
During this period we as a people have failed to keep our trust for the future—failed to act with the traditional conviction and knowledge that America’s strength flows from its streams, its mountains, its forests—from the land itself.
The majesty and wilderness of Cape Cod has successfully been preserved for public use by present and future generations through dynamic action to create a series of new National Seashores.
The cumulative effect of this neglect on the tomorrows to come may be seen in the fact that population projections indicate that in the next four decades the demand for municipal parks and playgrounds will increase 4 times, the demand for State and county recreation centers will increase 16 times, and the need for wilderness and seashore parks will be 40 times greater than it is today.
For nearly a score of years, the growing current needs for outdoor recreational space and facilities have, on a national basis, been largely neglected or ignored—to say nothing of the total inadequacy of planning for the far greater requirements of the future.
Today, we are losing a million acres of open space each year to various kinds of developments. Obviously, the trend from open space to “asphalt jungle” cannot be allowed to continue at this pace.
"One Last Great Effort”
In 1961, the Department of the Interior acted with all possible speed and vigor to respond to President Kennedy’s call for “one last great
18 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
effort” to round out the conservation programs given their start under Theodore Roosevelt.
In less than a year, a new seashore area has been added to our national parks system; a wetlands acquisition act is offering new protection to our waterfowl; expanded programs are under way in soil conservation, resource management and land use; and, by administrative order, millions of acres of public lands have been made available at low cost for park and recreational—as well as educational—purposes.
The Department’s National Park Service increased its efforts during the year to preserve, while there is yet time, such outstanding and spectacular areas as: Padre Island, Tex.; Point Reyes, Calif.; Oregon Dunes, Oreg.; and Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear Dunes in Michigan.
At the same time, the Department also was giving increased attention to the need for recreation areas readily accessible to centers of population in the East. Among such areas under consideration are the Allagash country in Maine; Tocks Island in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York; and Between-the-Rivers in Kentucky and Tennessee.
In the West and Midwest, efforts are going forward for new parks and recreation areas such as the Canyonlands of Utah; the Great Basin of Nevada; Rainbow Bridge of Arizona and Utah; Jemez-Bandelier in New Mexico; the Ozarks River in Missouri; and a Prairie National Park in Kansas.
Footing the Bill
This generation in the coming decades has a “last-chance” opportunity to save perhaps 15 or 20 million acres for national parks, another 2.5 million acres for national recreational areas, more than a million acres for national parkways and scenic roads, and 4.5 million acres for wildlife refuge areas. The program even if spread out over the next few decades will be costly, but the costs will rise with each year of delay.
To help meet these costs—and to speed the program of land acquisition—the Department has proposed legislation to permit some Federal funding device specifically earmarked for this purpose; not for national park and recreation areas alone, but for State and local use as well. This would form the basis for a nationwide Federal grants-in-aid program that would be available to all levels of government on a matching basis for the acquisition of “open spaces.”
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW +	19
The wild lakes and mountains, too, represent an intrinsically valuable resource asset in America and our efforts to preserve a portion of this pristine grandeur must be increased.
Quite recently, a number of our States have shown indications of their growing awareness of the “Quiet Crisis” in the field of outdoor recreation. Ten years ago, the States were spending only $10 million annually on parks and recreational areas. In 1960, the figure rose to $87 million, and in the calendar year 1961 it is expected to total an investment of some $110 million in the preservation and maintenance of mountain, seashore, lake, and river park areas.
In these programs, a variety of financing methods are being used. Minnesota is earmarking gasoline taxes for park land acquisition and development. Wisconsin is financing its future parks from a 1 cent tax on cigarettes. Missouri uses a portion of property taxes. A $75 million bond issue in New York provides $20 million for State parks and $40 million for grants to counties and municipalities on a 75 percent State and 25 percent local matching basis. Michigan’s $10 million park acquisition and development bond issue will be retired by a $2 annual sticker fee and a single 50-cent admission charge.
Legislation providing multi-million dollar bond issues for park and conservation purposes has been passed from New Hampshire
20 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR to California, including New Jersey’s aptly-named $60 million “Green Acres Bond Act of 1961.”
Combined Effort Required
Actually, as President Kennedy lias said, what is required is a pooling of funds and effort by local, State and Federal governments if present and future recreational needs are to be met.
In recognition of this fact, the National Conference on State Parks, the American Institute of Park Executives, and other groups and organizations are cooperating with the Department in the organization of a new program known as Parks for America.
Parks for America represents a concerted national effort to seek authority and money to bid successfully in the competitive land market while suitable parklands are still available, and to defend existing parks against the threatened encroachment of commercial development. At the close of the fiscal year, the new program was gaining considerable momentum across the country.
Nationwide Planning
At the same time, as an integral part of Mission 66, the Department’s National Park Service is preparing a nationwide plan for parks, parkways, and recreation areas to be published early in 1962, outlining a program that would provide all segments of our present and future population with adequate and readily available outdoor recreation areas. In the studies leading to the plan, the Service is working closely with the President’s Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission.
The report will present a list of specific potential sites as well as recommended sites for consideration as parks, parkways and recreation areas of local, State and national significance in each of the 50 States. Following its publication, the National Park Service expects to cooperate with the States in the preparation of State recreational plans.
Creating a New "Shoreline”
The Department of the Interior has long been concerned about our vanishing shoreline—the rapid movement of coastal lands into uses which deny public enjoyment and appreciation.
Water is one of the major recreation attractions in the United States—a lake for boating, fishing, swimming, or for a scenic setting for a family picnic or campsite—and today the man-made reservoir
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW +	21
lakes of the Department’s Bureau of Reclamation are in a sense creating a new and growing inland shoreline, one which now totals more than 7,000 miles devoted to public use.
The scope of this development may be brought into clearer perspective when it is considered that in California three projects alone— Shasta, Trinity and Whiskeytown Lake—are creating some 520 miles of shoreline, more than the straightline distance between New York City and Detroit, Michigan, in the Middle West.
Some idea of America’s appreciation of this major new recreational resource may be seen in the fact that, in 1960, nearly 25 million visits were recorded at 177 Bureau of Reclamation recreational areas, and this figure was considerably exceeded in calendar year 1961.
22 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
Recreation on Public Lands
To provide still further recreational resources, the Department during the year inaugurated an intensive program for expanded recreational use of public lands.
In the past, a stumbling block in the progress of State and local programs was their inability to finance expensive land acquisition. To remedy this, the Department introduced a new pricing schedule for the sale to State and local governments of public lands expressly for outdoor recreation. Such tracts and areas can now be purchased from the Department’s Bureau of Land Management for $2.50 an acre. Leases are 25 cents an acre per year. But the lands must be dedicated to outdoor recreation for the public use of all Americans as a condition to their acquisition from the Federal Government.
As an additional stimulus, Congress has raised the total acreage that a State can acquire annually from the Government for use as parks. The limit of 640 acres per year has been raised to 6,400 acres per year and temporarily lifted to 12,800, with a minimum of six sites, for 1961 and 1962.
A unique action affecting the use and management of public land was taken early in 1961 with the formal designation by the Secretary of the Interior of a 92-square-mile Federal-State cooperative land and wildlife management area in south-central California.
The area—lying about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco—has been designated the Caliente National Land and Wildlife Management Area. Representing the first formal Federal-State land and wildlife area in the United States, it will consist of nearly 60,000 acres of public lands administered by the Department’s Bureau of Land Management in cooperation with the Fish and Wildlife Service and the State of California. Through a cooperative program, the Department and the State will develop the wildlife, recreational and other natural resources of the land.
Following this initial move in the inauguration of a new type of public land management program, the Department during the fiscal year had under consideration 25 similar proposals covering approximately 850,000 acres in California.
Recreation Potential on Indian Lands
Many of the Indian reservations, because of their size and geographic location, offer outstanding possibilities for recreational developments. Major types of recreational potentialities include camping, boating, hunting, fishing, and all types of water and winter sports.
The geographic range includes the semitropical environment of
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW + 23
the Seminole reservations in southern Florida, the desert landscape of the Papago Reservation in Arizona, and the alpine areas on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming. It also encompasses the vast and colorful semidesert areas on the Navajo Reservation and numerous wilderness and scenic areas on reservations in Arizona, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming, and other States.
In the past, only limited progress has been made in developing these recreational resources. Outstanding examples are the tribally developed Monument Valley tourist enterprise on the Navajo Reservation in northern Arizona, and the fishing, hunting, and camping facilities that have been made available for public use on the Fort Apache Reservation in the east-central portion of the same State.
During 1961, however, there was evidence of rapidly growing tribal awareness of the benefits to be realized from such developments. At the close of the fiscal year, several additional tribes had plans in preparation, or under consideration by the Department, for the development of recreational facilities.
Unquestionably, in the years ahead, the Indian reservations will play a steadily widening and growingly fruitful role in meeting the nation’s recreational needs.
Expanding Our Wildlife Resources
Wildlife plays a unique role in America’s outdoor recreational activities. For this, if for no other reason, it is a resource we have a responsibility to pass on to those who follow us.
But our wildlife, too, is facing its own “Quiet Crisis.” Large numbers of species can be maintained only if there are large areas of the habitat they require. For example, wetlands are a vital requirement of many forms of wildlife. Great flights of waterfowl are just some of the creatures which need these areas. A wetland inventory published during the year by the Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service listed 38 game and furbearing species reported by the various States as making use of one or more of the 20 types of wetlands.
Yet drainage and destruction over the years has taken a heavy and evergrowing toll.
The Department is moving ahead on a wetlands acquisition program to guarantee the existence of a network of key areas required to maintain a large population of waterfowl. At present, there are about 3.5 million acres of land in Federal refuges and about 2 million acres have been acquired by the States. It is estimated that at least another 7 million acres are required in public control.
Pressures on the migratory bird resources of America are increasing annually. Without adequate breeding grounds in the potholed prairies of North America and Canada, scenes of resting ducks in hunting grounds may disappear.
Funds for Acquisition
The Department’s Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife has worked closely with the four Flyway Councils—which represent the States—on acquisition plans, setting up priorities and making decisions as to who will buy which areas with Federal and State funds. These plans will be reviewed annually to keep them up to date. Currently, it is planned that the Federal Government will acquire 4.5 million acres and the remaining 2.5 million will be purchased by the States.
Federal wetland acquisitions are financed from the revenues from annual sales of duck stamps. With receipts expected to average $5 million to $6 million a year and the cost of the 4.5 million acres for Federal acquisition estimated at $227 million, simple arithmetic clearly shows that acquisition under this arrangement would require from 38 to 45 years provided the land were still available and there was no increase in land prices.
To meet this problem, the Congress—in one of its major conservation actions of 1961—approved a Departmental proposal that it be
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW + 25
allowed to “borrow” funds against future duck stamp revenue to speed up wetlands purchase.
With a 7-year advance of $105,000,000 under this program, the Department of the Interior will be enabled to make a major contribution to the preservation of wildlife as a recreational resource for tomorrow.
The "Growing Giant”
Marine sport fishing—the “Growing Giant”—is becoming “big” not only from the standpoint of the number of anglers it is attracting, but also because of the large number of industries—boats, motors, fuels, food, tackle, housing, charters, and numerous other services— it supports.
Today marine sport fishermen catch half a billion pounds of fish a year—and spend more than half a billion dollars doing it. Obviously, this is not only a form of outdoor recreation available for everyone—but also an economic resource of considerable importance to the national economy.
As our human population expands, future added needs in recreational angling will be largely met in two areas—from salt water species along our coasts and through improved management of the reservoirs now existing and to be created.
In the Department of the Interior, we have launched an expanding program of salt water sport fishery research, and we are developing plans for similar comprehensive research into reservoir fishery management.
Through these and other research and action programs, the Department is moving to assure “fish for the future” as a part of the general conservation and expansion of our recreational resources which President Kennedy has listed as among the vital needs of our national strength and vitality in the years to come.
The Growing Urgency of the Water Problem
Unless ways are found to save more fresh water and to convert salt water cheaply into fresh, the United States only 20 years from now will lack enough water to meet its needs.
In 1961, the need was emphasized when drought laid a searing hand across the upper plains area from nothern Wyoming to Canada, while maintaining a 3-year reign over the thirsty lands of the Southwest.
Pressures on the sports fishery resources of America by its ever-growing population makes it imperative that programs of the Department to meet these needs are pressed forward.
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW + 27
It was further underscored when, early in the year, the Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources published its report on an intensive 2-year water study in which the Department of the Interior and other agencies participated.
The committee found evidences of already substantial areas of water shortage in many of the river basins in the western half of the United States. Its water supply-demand studies showed that full development of all available water resources in five regions of the West will be required by 1980 or earlier if the needs of the growing population are to be met and the projected expansion of economic activity achieved.
The report also estimated that by the year 2000, three other regions—including one area east of the Mississippi—will be added to the list of those in which full development of available water resources will be required if the projected demands are to be met.
Advance Warning by the President
In his precedent-setting special message on natural resources early in his new Administration, delivered in February long before the 1961 drought impact was fully apparent, President Kennedy expressed concern lest more immediately recognized problems compete adversely with the long-range challenge of water resource development. “The problems of immediacy,” he said, “always have the advantage of attracting notice—those that lie in the future fare poorly in the competition for attention and money.” Under the circumstances, he called for the fullest participation and cooperation of Federal, State, and local governments and private interests in wisely and effectively facing up to our natural resource problems—and in particular, those concerning our water supplies.
“The task is large,” President Kennedy declared, “but it will be done.”
The task is large. The Senate Select Committee estimated that the minimum requirement for dealing with the water supply and pollution abatement problems would involve the need for 315 million acre-feet of reservior capacity for river regulation by 1980, and an additional 127 million acre-feet between 1980 and the year 2000. This 40-year estimate of minimum, nationwide storage needs is roughly five times the total water storage capacity built by the Department’s Bureau of Reclamation in the 58 years between 1902 and 1960.
The capital costs appear large, too, if the offsetting benefits are considered separately.
The Select Committee estimated that new capital investments of $12 billion would be required by 1980 to build the required minimum
617939 0—62-----3
28 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
POPULATION GROWTH IN RECLAMATION STATES
from44million in 1960 to
PACIFIC COAST/
STATES UP72%/
71 million in 1980
MOUNTAIN STATES UP67%
: PLAINS r' STATES I UPA-3%
109 million in2000
I MOUNTAIN L.
PACIFIC \ STATES UP1S9% I
COAST \ UP176%\
I PLAINS j STATES UP 106%
TOTAL U.S. IN
1980-261 million (up45^)
I2000-383million(upll3^)
Based on Dept, of Commerce data
storage capacity, and an additional $6 billion by the year 2000, for a grand total of $18 billion. Municipal and industrial sewage treatment works under the same program, which calls for water of relatively high quality in all the nation’s streams, would require new investments estimated at $42.2 billion by 1980, and an additional $39.4 billion between 1980 and the year 2000, for a grand total of $81.6 billion.
Required capital investments, therefore, for a minimum program of additional water storage and water pollution control facilities between now and 1980 amount to roughly $3 billion annually, con-
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW + 29
siderably more than is being invested today, even under the accelerated Kennedy Administration program for the fiscal year 1961.
Prompt Action by the Department
The Department of the Interior reacted promptly to President Kennedy’s challenge with the following actions in the water resource field:
1.	Budgetary requests were initated to provide funds in both fiscal years 1961 and 1962 to accelerate project planning and development, to expedite construction of starts on new, needed water resource projects.
2.	Steps were taken to increase both the emphasis on and activity in engineering research, especially that associated with reducing loss of valuable wTater resulting from waste by evaporation, by transpiration of water—“stealing” weeds and trees, and by seepage losses and other wasteful irrigation practices.
3.	Efforts were launched on a broad legislative front to authorize new water resource projects and to spell out new water policy, including an Administration proposal to create a Water Resources Council in the Executive Branch, to prescribe comprehensive planning on a river-basin basis, and to provide grants-in-aid for expanded planning by the respective States.
Results in the Making
Complex water resource facilities cannot be built in a day, or a year, and sometimes not even in decades. But at midyear, concrete results already were apparent in the Kennedy Administration’s evolving water resource development program. The 1961 drought and Administration spokesmen were making water resource development a matter of immediacy.
Fiscal year 1961 funds for the Department’s Bureau of Reclamation were reprogrammed to provide, within the Congressionally-approved appropriations, additional planning and construction work on needed projects.
This rescheduling permitted initiation of design and specification work leading toward a new construction start on the Red Bluff Diversion Dam, first step toward supplying water for the Tehama-Colusa Canal of the Sacramento Canals unit, Central Valley Project in California, and initiation of advance planning on the Wichita Project in Kansas. The latter is an $18.2 million project to furnish urgently needed supplemental municipal and industrial water supplies to the city of Wichita.
30	+ ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
AGRICULTURAL REQUIREMENTS
1980
CROP YIELDS
+42%
CROP ACRES	+20 Million
DOMESTIC&EXPORT NEEDS +60to90%
2000
CROP YIELDS	+75%
CROP ACRES	+63 Million
CLEARING OF FOREST (acres) +73 Million not recommended
DOMESTIC & EXPORT NEEDS +90 to 190%
Source: Report to Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources, Dec. 1959
Mid-March revisions in the 1962 budget also resulted in appropriations requests for $900,000 for stepping up project investigations throughout the 17 Western States; funds to accelerate the $96 million Canadian River Project to deliver supplementary water to 11 municipalities in Texas; for moving ahead by two years the delivery of water to the 33,960-acre Ainsworth Unit in Nebraska; for expediting construction of transmission lines in three major river-basin systems, and for other purposes.
The irrigated farms of the West offer quality foods and fibers, nonsurplus crops, and high-v alue specialty agricultural products to the Nation. These irrigated acres loom large in meeting our increased food needs of the future.
In mid-February, design and specifications staffs of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Denver Engineering Center went on a 6-day, 58-hour week to speed up contract awards.
First water deliveries were made this spring from the Corning Canal of the Central Valley Project to water users in southern Tehama County in California, and from the new Southside Canal on the 22,000-acre Collbran project in western Colorado.
President Proposes Planning Act
The greatest emphasis to Administration efforts to meet the water challenge and provide sufficient resources for tomorrow came in midJuly when President Kennedy delivered to the Congress his proposed “Water Resources Planning Act of 1961,” the most far-reaching water policy legislation sent to the Congress by the White House in many years.

32 + ANNUAL REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR
Having an important bearing upon all water and related land conservation and development activities, the proposed Act would:
1.	Establish a Cabinet-level Water Resources Council. The Council would be the keystone in a comprehensive structure for water resource planning within river basins and would provide overall guidance and standards for planning, consistent with existing law.
2.	Authorize the President to create, at the request of the Governor of one or more affected States or of the Council, a river basin water resources commission for any region, major river basin, or group of related river basins in the United States. These commissions, composed of representatives of the States and Federal agencies concerned, would be charged with preparing and keeping up to date comprehensive, integrated plans for Federal, State and local development of water and related land resources. Also they would recommend long-range priorities for basic data collection and analysis and for investigation, planning and construction of projects; and, finally,
3.	Provide encouragement to the States to fully and effectively participate in water and related land resource planning through financial assistance to aid in their planning.
This river basin planning would require that any plan take into account domestic, agricultural, energy, industrial, recreational, fish and wildlife, and other water resource conservation and developments. It would enable the Congress—within the Federal sphere of responsibility—to decide upon the many individual project developments on the basis of full information as to the overall needs and timing for basin development. States and local interests—within their respective spheres of responsibility—would be enabled to do likewise.
“We have a national obligation to manage our basic water supply so it will be available when and where needed and in acceptable quality and quantity—and we have no time to lose,” President Kennedy wrote the Congress. “The planning authorized by this legislation will provide a vital tool for achieving effective water resources management.”
Saline Water Conversion
On June 26, President Kennedy acted to attack the water problem on another front when he forwarded to Congress proposed legislation to expand and extend Federal efforts in the saline water conversion program. “This bill,” the President stated in a letter of transmittal, “will provide the Department of the Interior with a wide variety of tools to attack the saline water conversion cost barrier.
It contemplates a major acceleration of current programs of basic and. applied research, and permits the construction of conversion plants far larger than any now in existence to test the feasibility of known and yet to be developed processes.”
In September, the Congress responded by passing Public Law 8t-295 which authorizes the expanded program and provides for an appropriation of $75 million to achieve its aims.
In mid-1961, President Kennedy participated in cermonies marking the dedication of the nation’s first saline water conversion demonstration plant at Freeport, Tex. “This is a work,” he said at that time, “which in many ways is more important than any other scientific enterprise in which this country is now engaged. It serves the interest of men and women everywhere. It can do more to raise men and women from lives of poverty and desperation than any other scientific advance.”
The Freeport plant is the first sea water conversion plant in the United States capable of producing 1 million gallons of fresh water
One of the greatest resource challenges of the coming decades is to provide new sources of potable water for a growing America. The Department is constantly seeking new and economical methods for converting sea water to fresh water in plants such as the one above at Freeport, Tex., the first saline-water conversion demonstration plant in the Nation.
34 + ANNUAL REPORT OP THE SECRETARY OF THE INTERIOR per day, and the first to regularly supply the water needs of a U.S. municipality.
As recently as the late 1930’s, it cost between $4 and $5 to convert a thousand gallons of sea water into fresh.
Since then, equipment, fuel, and labor costs have increased several fold.
Despite these increases, cost of the Freeport product water is presently estimated at $1-$1.25 per 1,000 gallons, including 20-year amortization charges.
Thus it can be seen that important gains are being made in reducing costs. With improved techniques, more experience, and larger plants, it is aniticipated that conversion costs—in the foreseeable future can be still further reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 cents per 1,000 gallons.
In addition to the Freeport plant, four other sites have been selected for demonstration plant testing. They are at San Diego, Calif.; Webster, S. Dak.; Roswell, N. Mex.; and Wrightsville Beach, N.C.
During the year, a second plant was completed and dedicated the 250,000-gallon-a-day facility to desalt brackish well water at Webster, S. Dak.—and work was nearing completion on a million-gallon-a-day sea water desalination plant at San Diego, Calif. At the same time, contracts had been let for design of the New Mexico and North Carolina plants, with work on this construction scheduled to start in the new fiscal year.
Other Legislative Efforts
Throughout the year, a steady flow of legislative reports to the 87th Congress gave the Department of the Interior’s endorsement to proposed legislation to authorize additional water resource development projects for the AVest. These Administration-backed authorization proposals included:
The $135 million Navajo Indian irrigation project and the $86 million initial stage of the San Juan-Chama project in New Mexico and Colorado, to supply new and supplemental water to a total of 231,530 acres of land in the Southwest, including extensive Indian reservation acreage.
The $170 million Fryingpan-Arkansas project to provide supplemental irrigation water to 280,000 acres in Colorado’s Arkansas River Valley, and other multipurpose benefits.
The $81.5 million mid-State multipurpose Reclamation project to deliver water to 140,000 acres in central Nebraska.
RESOURCES FOR TOMORROW + 35
The $183 million modification of the Garrison Diversion unit of the Missouri River Basin project in North Dakota, which would supply water to an initial stage development of 250,000 acres.
The $45.5 million Bums Creek project, to build a reregulating reservoir and hydroelectric power plant on the Upper Snake River near Idaho Falls, Idaho.
The Need for Research
Research to provide an adequate scientific basis for decision-making is a primary need in solving the practical problems of water-resource management. Water knowledge is needed to establish and maintain scientific hydrology at a level that will assure advances in our understanding of the dynamic processes in nature which affect the occurrence, movement, quality, and usability of water. Without this information, much conservation effort with water, soils, and other resources will be of uncertain value.
The solution of water supply and pollution problems will continue to require the gathering and compiling of basic data, such as the first nationwide compilation of streamflow data by principal drainage basins, recently completed by the Department’s Geological Survey. Perhaps of equal economic importance is the series of reports dealing with the frequency and magnitude of floods which, together with a series of flood inundation maps, provide essential data for planning protective works and for proper zoning of flood plans.
This basic research work of the Geological Survey ties in closely with the saline water program. Its studies on water quality and water resources help to determine areas where saline water