The Legacy of Hanford

In mid-October of 1805, after being saved from starvation by Indians, the exhausted Corps of Discovery led by Captains Lewis and Clark finally reached the Columbia River Basin--gateway to the Pacific. The success of their two-year quest to chart the nascent American Empire was now assured. As the powerful current pushed their canoes to the ocean, they entered the high sagebrush desert, teeming with deer, elk and wild horses. They were astonished by countless salmon, some weighing over 100 pounds, in the crystal clear water--more than in any river of the world.

While camping nearby, Clark wrote in his journal, "We were obliged for the first time to take the property of the Indians without consent or approbation of the owner." He reasoned that "the night was cold and we made use of a part of those boards and Split logs for fire wood." Before, Lewis and Clark had scrupulously "made it a point at all times not to take any thing belonging to the Indians." But the temptation was too great, setting an ominous precedent.

On January 16, 1943, Gen. Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Project, chose Hanford, in eastern Washington near the Lewis and Clark campsite, for the world's first large nuclear reactor. The area, the traditional wintering grounds of many Indian people, offered key elements Groves was looking for: plenty of water and electricity from the Columbia River dams, and sufficient isolation that nuclear accidents were regarded as tolerable. The Indians were promptly banned from their homes and from religious, fishing and medicine-gathering sites, and farmers were uprooted. Within about two and a half years the Hanford "B" reactor had made enough plutonium to destroy Nagasaki, Japan, on August 9, 1945.

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