I.

This story was produced by Grist and co-published with Underscore Native News.

At 17 years old, Jeff Mitchell couldn’t have known that an evening of deer hunting would change his life — and the history of the Klamath River — forever.

Over Thanksgiving week in 1974, Mitchell and three friends were driving home to Klamath Falls, Oregon, when their truck hit black ice, careened off the road, crashed into a ditch, and rolled over violently, throwing Mitchell from the vehicle and knocking him unconscious. When he woke up, Mitchell’s leg was pinned underneath the pickup truck, and he could feel liquid pooling around him. At first he thought it was blood. Then he smelled the gasoline. A concerned bystander walked up to him with a lit cigarette in his mouth. “My god, I’m going to burn up,” Mitchell thought. The crash put two of his friends in comas, while the third had emerged unscathed.

If not for the black ice that nearly killed him, Mitchell might never have helped launch one of the biggest victories for Indigenous rights and the contemporary environmental movement in North American history: the demolition of four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, a degraded 263-mile waterway that winds through Mitchell’s ancestral homeland and that of four other Indigenous nations. He might never have witnessed the fruit of that victory, the largest dam removal in United States history, when nearly 1.5 million cubic yards of earth and concrete finally came down in October of last year, more than 100 years after the first dam was built. He might never have seen the restoration of one of the largest salmon runs on the West Coast, an event that set a profound new precedent for how the U.S. manages its water.

As climate change causes more extreme swings between wet and dry weather, straining scarce water resources and threatening the survival of endangered species, it has forced a reckoning for the thousands of dams erected on waterways across the country. These dams were built to produce cheap power and store water with little regard for Indigenous rights or river ecosystems, and they continue to threaten the survival of vulnerable species and deprive tribes of foodways and cultural heritage — while in many cases only providing negligible amounts of electricity to power grids. For decades, Indigenous peoples and environmentalists have highlighted how these structures destroy natural river environments in order to generate electricity or store irrigation water, but only recently have state politicians, utilities, and bureaucrats begun to give serious credence to the notion that they should come down.

The removal of the four dams on the Klamath, which were owned by the power utility PacifiCorp, represents the first real attempt at the kind of river restoration that Indigenous nations and environmentalists have long demanded. It is the result of an improbable campaign that spanned close to half a century, roped in thousands of people, and came within an inch of collapse several times. Interviews with dozens of people on all sides of the dam removal fight, some of whom have never spoken publicly about their roles, reveal a collaborative achievement with few clear parallels in contemporary activism.

The fight began, however improbably, with Mitchell’s accident. 

After several surgeries, he found he couldn’t get to his university classes on crutches, so he moved back home to Klamath Falls. Not knowing what else to do, Mitchell, an enrolled citizen of the Klamath Tribes, trained to be a paralegal and began attending council meetings for his tribal government. His job was to take notes during meetings at the tribe’s office, a repurposed beauty shop in the town of Chiloquin along the Klamath River. 

But a year later, a resignation on the tribal council thrust Mitchell into the leadership body. Suddenly, the 18-year-old was a full-fledged tribal council member, setting policy for the entire nation and getting a crash course in Klamath history. 

“I wanted answers,” he said. “I wanted to know why my homelands were gone.”

The Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin-Paiute tribes had been forced to cede 22 million acres of land to the United States in 1864, after settlers violently claimed their territory. The 1864 treaty established a 2.2 million-acre reservation in what is currently Oregon and secured the tribes’ fishing, hunting, and trapping rights, but that reservation got whittled down further over the years due to fraud and mistakes in federal land surveys. 

By 1954 — three years before Mitchell was born — the Klamath Tribes no longer existed on paper. In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States “terminated” the Klamath and more than 100 other tribes. The bipartisan termination movement aimed to assimilate Indigenous peoples by eliminating their status as sovereign nations, removing their land from federal trusts, and converting tribal citizens into Americans. Much of what remained of the Klamath’s ancestral homelands was taken by the federal officials and turned into national forests or sold to private interests. 

By the time Mitchell joined the tribal council in 1975, the Klamath Tribes were about to head to court, arguing that the federal government’s termination policy had no effect on their fishing, hunting, or trapping rights. They were also fighting for their rights to Klamath River water. “Marshes were drying up because water was being taken and diverted,” Mitchell said. “We had to protect water rights so we could protect fish and animals and plants and other resources that we depended on.” 

The Klamath River had once hosted one of the West Coast’s largest salmon runs, with thousands of adult Chinooks swimming upstream every autumn. But in 1911, a local power utility called the California-Oregon Power Company began to build a hydroelectric dam along the river, erecting a 10-story wall of tiered concrete that looked like the side of a coliseum. Over the next few decades, the company built three more dams to generate added power as its customer base grew in the farm and timber towns of the Pacific Northwest. 

Together these four dams blocked off 400 miles of the Chinook salmon’s old spawning habitat, depriving them of access to the rippling streams and channels where they had once laid eggs in cool water. Before the dams, nearly a quarter of the Klamath Tribes’ diet came from wild salmon. 

“In a blink of an eye, you’re talking about losing one-quarter of all your food source,” Mitchell said. “I just sit back and think, It must have been one hell of an impact on my people.”

In 1981, six years after Mitchell joined his tribal council, a report crossed his desk, which had been relocated from its makeshift beauty parlor digs to those of an old movie theater. The study, conducted for the federal Department of the Interior, provided official confirmation for what Indigenous leaders and tribal members already knew: The dams were responsible for the missing salmon. 

“Although the builders of the dam promised to provide fish-passage facilities, none were built,” the report read. “There is no evidence that any consideration was given to the fish loss suffered by the Indians of the Klamath Indian Reservation despite continued protests by the Indians and by officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs on behalf of the Indians.”

The Klamath Tribes were still busy in court defending their water rights, and they were making headway in their fight to regain their status as a federally recognized tribe. When Mitchell discussed the report with other tribal council members, they agreed that they probably had grounds to sue either the utility that built the dams or the federal government that allowed construction to happen. But suing over the missing salmon would mean spending money that the nation didn’t have. 

So Mitchell filed the report away and moved on with his life. He got married, had kids, and the Klamath Tribes regained their federal recognition in 1986. Government services like health care and housing were rebuilt from the ground up, and the tribes successfully gained endangered species protections for two Klamath Basin suckerfish that were critical to tribal tradition. But the river’s water quality continued to decline, and the Klamath Tribes continued to fight for its water rights in the court system with no end in sight.

By the turn of the century, Mitchell was in his 40s and serving as tribal chairman. It was then that he received a letter from PacifiCorp, the company that had absorbed the California-Oregon Power Company and now owned the dams: Would the Klamath Tribes like to join meetings to provide input on the company’s application for a new dam license?

Mitchell didn’t have to think about it. He said yes.

II.

The Klamath River watershed begins as a large lake in what is currently southern Oregon. It winds its way south through the northern edges of the Sierra Nevada mountain range for more than 250 miles before emptying into the Pacific Ocean in what is now northwest California. The lake provides a haven for C’waam and Koptu — gray suckerfish with round, blunt noses that exist nowhere else on the planet — and its vast expanse of surrounding marshes are a stopover for migrating tchikash, such as geese and ducks. Every fall for thousands of years, as the mountain forests flashed gold and red, tchíalash, or salmon, raced upstream through the cold mountain waters and laid their eggs, feeding the people who lived along the riverbanks. 

In 1901, a local newspaper called the Klamath Republican said the fish were so plentiful that they could be caught with bare hands: “Five minutes’ walk from Main Street brings one to the shores of Klamath rapids, where every little nook, bay, and tributary creek is so crowded with mullets that their backs stick out of the water. … Mullets, rainbow trout, and salmon — splendid fish, giants of their size, and apparently anxious to be caught.” 

By then, white settlers had spent decades seizing land and water from the tribes and manipulating the landscape. Once they had established a permanent hold on the Klamath River, the settlers set about draining lakes and diverting streams to service industries like agriculture, mining, and timber. The federal Bureau of Reclamation then established a massive irrigation project at the head of the river and, within a few years, settlers cultivated thousands of acres of alfalfa nourished with irrigation water. Today, the basin produces mostly beets and potatoes, the latter often used for french fries.

The four dams constructed over the first half of the 20th century held back water from the lower reaches of the Klamath, forcing salmon to navigate a smaller and weaker river. Salmon also need oxygen-rich cold water to thrive, but the water of the Klamath grew hotter as it sat in stagnant reservoirs and flowed shallower down toward the Pacific, which made it harder for salmon to breathe and reproduce. This warm water also encouraged the growth of toxic algae and bristleworms that emitted microscopic parasites.

The dams blocked off the upstream Klamath, making it impossible for adult salmon to swim back to their ancestral tributaries. As they raced upstream toward the frigid mountain waters, they ran into the earthen wall of Iron Gate, the southernmost dam on the river, flopping against it futilely. Over the decades, these conditions drove the fish toward extinction, threatening the survival of a species that was central to the Yurok, Karuk, and Shasta peoples who had lived around the downstream Klamath Basin for thousands of years.

This might have remained true forever were it not for a quirk of federal bureaucracy. In order to run dams, power companies in the U.S. must secure a license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, the nation’s independent energy regulator, and those licenses have to be renewed every 30 to 50 years. In 1999, the license for the Klamath dams was less than a decade away from expiring. 

The California-Oregon Power Company, the utility that built the dams, had passed through a series of mergers and acquisitions since its founding in 1882, eventually becoming part of a for-profit regional company known as PacifiCorp, which owned power plants across the Pacific Northwest. In order to keep running the Klamath dams, PacifiCorp needed to secure new state water permits, get operational clearance from federal fish regulators, and solicit feedback from local residents, including the Klamath Tribes, which again had federal recognition. For most hydroelectric dams, the process was lengthy but uncontroversial. 

Jeff Mitchell had other ideas. He wanted the company to install fish ladders, essentially elevators that would allow the salmon to pass through the dams. The power company had promised to build them nearly a hundred years before, when construction was still underway, but had never followed through. He wasn’t the only one who was frustrated. While the Klamath Tribes lived farthest upstream and no longer had access to salmon, there were other tribes on Klamath tributaries — the Karuk, the Hoopa, and the Yurok — who could still fish but had been watching their water quality decline and salmon runs dwindle.

The Hoopa and Yurok tribes had spent years in court fighting each other over land. But when they all crowded into windowless hotel conference rooms to hear PacifiCorp’s plans, the tribal representatives quickly realized they had the same concerns. 

There was Leaf Hillman, the head of the Department of Natural Resources for the Karuk Tribe, who had grown up eating salmon amid increasingly thin fish runs. “It was a struggle,” he said, recalling the meager amounts of fish he and his uncle would catch on the river. “Frequently all the fish that we got were given away or went to ceremonies before any of them ever got home.”

There was Ronnie Pierce, a short, no-nonsense, chain-smoking Squamish woman who was trained as a biologist and structural engineer and now worked as a fisheries biology consultant for the Karuk Tribe. Pierce had short, slicked-back hair, wore champagne-colored glasses and black leather boots, and had zero patience for corporate-speak. “I went through your draft application, and I can’t tell if a goddamn salmon even lives in the Klamath River,” she once told company executives.

Then there was Troy Fletcher, executive director of the Yurok Tribe. A tall, charismatic man with a resemblance to Tony Soprano, Fletcher had spent years building up a Yurok program for studying and managing the river’s fish population before taking the helm of the tribal government. Fletcher knew the fishery was one of the only economic drivers for the Yurok nation, and a decline in salmon meant unemployment, exodus, and, eventually, cultural collapse. “As one of our elders put it, the Klamath River is our identity as Yurok people,” Fletcher said.

The group quickly noticed a pattern: Company executives’ eyes would glaze over when the tribes discussed the cultural importance of salmon. In March of 2001, during a public comment process that lasted more than a year, Mitchell submitted a formal comment to PacifiCorp that argued, “Fish passage on the Klamath River has been ‘blocked’ and interferes with the property rights and interests of the tribe.” The company responded to his comment in an official report by saying, “Comment noted.”

Pierce took to storming out of the room every time she got fed up with the company. Once, she got so upset at a meeting in Yreka, California, that she slammed her binder shut and drove several hours home to McKinley Grove, California, more than 400 miles away. She had little tolerance for the ignorance some PacifiCorp executives revealed about the landscape their dams had remade. “Where’s Blue Creek?” one of them asked in one meeting, clearly unfamiliar with the sacred tributary within Yurok territory. The pristine tributary, which flowed through conifer-covered mountains and across expanses of smooth rock on its way toward the Klamath main stem, was one of the most beautiful places in the entire river basin, and the first refuge that salmon encountered as they entered from the Pacific.

“‘Blue Creek? Where is Blue Creek?’” Pierce snapped. “You are really asking that? You dammed our river, killed our fish, attacked our culture, and now you ask where Blue Creek is?” 

As the license meetings continued, Pierce wanted the group to take a harder line. She invited Hillman, Fletcher, and other tribal officials to dinner at her home in California. Over drinks, the group strategized about how to deal with PacifiCorp. 

“You guys are fools if you go for anything but all four dams out,” Pierce said. “You’ve got to start with all four — and now — and the company pays for it all. That’s got to be the starting position.” 

It was a radical idea, and one with no clear precedent in American history. Hillman, the Karuk leader who worked with Pierce, knew that for many farmers and politicians in the West, dams symbolized American conquest and the taming of the wilderness. He couldn’t see anyone giving that up. But he felt inspired by Pierce, who was so hardheaded that the Interior Department once threatened to pull the Karuk Tribe’s funding if the nation kept employing her, according to one dam removal campaigner.

Pierce’s vision that evening propelled the dam removal campaign to ambitions that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier, but she wouldn’t live to see it realized. She soon received a terminal cancer diagnosis, and just a few years later she would find herself sitting with Hillman and others around that same table, making them promise to get the job done. She wanted them to scatter her ashes on Bluff Creek along the Klamath River after the dams were removed, no matter how many years it took. 

“A lot of us tried to emulate her, how she was,” Hillman said. “There was no surrender.” The campaign would need Pierce’s determination to survive after her death. The fight was only heating up.

III.

The year 2001 arrived at the start of a megadrought that would last more than two decades and transform the American West, sapping massive rivers like the Colorado and driving farms and cities across the region to dramatically curtail their water use. This drought, which scientists say would be impossible without climate change, delivered the worst dry spell in the Klamath’s recorded history. All along the river’s banks, forests turned brown and wildfires sprang up. Small towns lost their drinking water. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times wrote at the time that “signs of desperation are everywhere … birds are dying as ponds dry up in wildlife refuges … sheep grazing on bare ground run toward the road when a car stops, baaing furiously and wrapping their mouths around the strands of barbed-wire fence.”  

That spring, the federal government shut off water deliveries to Klamath farmers in order to protect endangered salmon and suckerfish on the river. The once-green fields of the basin, which had bloomed thanks to irrigation water from the vulnerable river, turned to dust. The earth cracked.

With no water, farmers were forced to abandon their beet and potato fields. More than 200,000 acres of crops shriveled, wiping out as much as $47 million in farm revenue and driving up potato prices as the harvest in the Klamath collapsed. Dozens of farmers filed for bankruptcy, school enrollments plummeted, businesses closed as farm families fled the region, and reports of depression and suicide skyrocketed. 

Farmers and their supporters gathered by the thousands to stage a series of protests at the federal canal that released water from Upper Klamath Lake. First, they organized a ceremonial “bucket brigade,” led by girls from the local 4-H agriculture club, stretching 16 blocks from the lake into an irrigation canal. On multiple occasions, including the Fourth of July, protestors used a chainsaw and blowtorch to force open the headgates of the canal and siphon a small amount of water. It wasn’t enough to save anybody’s farm, but it was enough to prove they were serious.

When local authorities sympathetic to the farmers refused to intervene, U.S. marshals were brought in to guard the canal and quell protests. For the rest of the summer, locals loudly floated the idea of open revolt to overthrow the government.

“The battle of Klamath Falls will go down in history as the last stand for rural America,” said one resident in an interview with The Guardian. The New York Times adopted the same narrative: An article that summer described the endangered animals as “all-but-inedible, bottom-feeding suckerfish” and framed the fight as one between environmentalists and hardworking farmers, erasing the tribes from the narrative altogether. 

At Klamath Tribes’ headquarters in Chiloquin, half an hour from the headgates of the Bureau of Reclamation canal, Jeff Mitchell and other tribal leaders warned tribal citizens not to go into town. There had always been tensions with settlers over water, but now the farmers were blaming the tribes for the death of their crops, since the tribes were the ones that advocated for the protection of the endangered fish. 

One afternoon that December, three drunk men drove through Chiloquin in a metallic gold pickup truck and used a shotgun to fire shots at the town. “Sucker lovers, come out and fight!” they yelled. They shot above the head of a child after asking him if he was Indian.

In 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney intervened. The former congressman from Wyoming maneuvered to open the headgates and divert a full share of irrigation water to the farms, regardless of how little water would be left in the Klamath for salmon and suckerfish. The 2002 diversion dried out the lower reaches of the Klamath just as salmon were starting to swim upstream from the Pacific Ocean to spawn. The low water levels resulting from Cheney’s decision heated up the river even more and made conditions prime for a gill rot disease, a fungal infection that thrives in warmer temperatures. As the salmon crowded into these small stretches of water, packed more densely than usual, they contracted the disease and gasped for air. Cheney’s water diversion was a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and Congress would later ask the vice president to speak about his role in the fish kill. He declined.

The Yurok saw the effects first. Adult salmon weighing as much as 35 pounds surfaced with their noses up and mouths open in the hot, shallow drifts. After they dove back down, they then rose to the surface belly-up. Hundreds of dead salmon appeared in the river, then thousands. Within weeks, tens of thousands of dead salmon piled up on the riverbanks and became food for flies as their flesh baked in the sun. When their bodies turned gray and their skin ruptured, meat bubbled out, and birds pecked at their eyeballs. The stench was overwhelming.

“It was a moment of existential crisis, it was a form of ecocide,” said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who was a college student working on the river that year.

A week earlier, a judge had sentenced the three men who shot their guns at the child in Chiloquin. They admitted their attack was motivated by racism and received 30 days behind bars and community service.

IV.

As the fight in the Klamath unfolded, PacifiCorp had continued to slog away on its attempt to relicense the four Klamath dams. After years of back-and-forth, the company closed in on finishing its draft application. It mailed copies to everyone involved in the more than 200 meetings held by the company. The application was so long that it filled several binders in multiple cardboard boxes. When Ronnie Pierce stacked the binders on top of one another, they were taller than she was.

The application was comprehensive, but Pierce, Mitchell, Fletcher, and others noticed that despite the massive die-off of salmon they’d just witnessed, the company still had not committed to build the fish ladders it had promised almost a century earlier.

“That’s when we decided to go to war with PacifiCorp,” said Mitchell.

On January 16, 2004, more than 80 years after the first dam was built, members of the Karuk, Yurok, Klamath, and Hoopa tribes gathered at the Red Lion in Redding, California, a two-star hotel off the freeway with a Denny’s and trailer parking in the back. They were joined by Friends of the River, a tiny nonprofit and the only environmental organization willing to stand with the tribes at the time. 

As the tribes and farmers fought with PacifiCorp and the George W. Bush administration, one major player had escaped notice altogether, ducking responsibility for destroying the river’s ecosystem and remaining largely in the shadows. That was PacifiCorp’s parent company, ScottishPower, which owned the utility from across the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of miles away. 

Leaf Hillman had learned about ScottishPower during a meeting with a PacifiCorp executive in the company’s Portland, Oregon, headquarters. Frustrated that she wouldn’t consider dam removal, Hillman asked to speak to the executive’s boss. “If you’re going to talk to my boss, you’re going to have to go to Scotland,” she replied, laughing. As he sat in the meeting at the Red Lion, he could still hear her laughter.

Six months later, Hillman and his allies walked through immigration at Glasgow Airport. A United Kingdom customs officer asked them to state the purpose of their visit.

“We’re here to get those damn dams off the Klamath River,” Dickie Myers of the Yurok Tribe replied.

V.

In the summer of 2004, water flowed through the 90-foot-wide gates of a hydropower dam along the Tummel River in Perthshire, Scotland. Salmon and sea trout swam safely past the turbines on their way upstream, wiggling up and down the fish ladders required by Scottish law. 

The difference wasn’t lost on Jeff Mitchell, who was visiting the dam for a press conference highlighting how ScottishPower’s subsidiary, PacifiCorp, had refused to install those same fish ladders in their dams on the Klamath River.

As they toured Scotland demanding that the company remove its subsidiary’s dams in Oregon and California, Mitchell and his allies from the Klamath River Basin were surprised to meet an outpouring of empathy and support. The Scottish people knew and loved salmon — so much so that Glasgow’s coat of arms had two salmon on it. A local Green Party leader embraced their cause, filing a parliamentary motion criticizing ScottishPower for its hypocrisy. At one point, The Herald, Scotland’s longest-running newspaper, even gave ScottishPower’s CEO a nickname: “Stops Salmon Leaping.”

“If it wasn’t for these fish I wouldn’t be here today. My people would have died off a long time ago,” Mitchell told reporters during their visit. “We can’t walk away from this and we will not walk away from this.”

The pressure campaign produced immediate results, with left-wing members of the Scottish Parliament calling on political leaders to intervene in favor of the tribes. After the tribes’ visit in July, PacifiCorp’s chief executive officer, Judi Johansen, had told news media that “all options [were] on the table, including dam removal.”

But the momentum did not last. The following spring, ScottishPower executives decided to pivot back to a focus on United Kingdom energy markets and offload some of their assets. They sold PacifiCorp for $5.1 billion, washing their hands of the Klamath River crisis.

The new owner of the dams was a far more familiar face. The firm that now owned PacifiCorp was called MidAmerican Energy Holdings, and it was controlled by Berkshire Hathaway, the massive conglomerate owned by billionaire Warren Buffett.

VI.

Mitchell, Troy Fletcher, and their fellow tribal leaders knew at once that they had to adjust their strategy. During their campaign in Scotland, they had tried to stir up moral outrage over the death of the Klamath salmon, arguing to ScottishPower executives and Scottish citizens that the company needed to put the needs of the fish above its own profits. That argument didn’t seem like the right fit for Buffett, whose reputation was that of American capitalism personified: He made his fortune riding the swings of the free market, and every year thousands of Berkshire shareholders converged on the company’s Nebraska headquarters to get stock tips from the so-called “Oracle of Omaha.” 

After doing some digging, Craig Tucker, a spokesman for the Karuk Tribe, discovered that Buffett’s family seemed to have an affinity for Indigenous people. Buffett’s youngest son, Peter, was a composer who had written music for the 1990 film Dances With Wolves, plus an eight-hour documentary on Native Americans helmed by Kevin Costner. Tucker also discovered that Peter and his brother, Howard, had co-sponsored the Buffett Award for Indigenous Leadership, a cash prize recognizing Indigenous leaders.

In an attempt to get Buffett’s attention, Tucker nominated Leaf Hillman for the award for his work restoring salmon on the Klamath. Hillman made it to the final round, but in the days leading up to the awards ceremony, Tucker got ahead of himself and told a few journalists that Hillman was being considered for the Buffett prize. The flurry of media attention scuttled Hillman’s chances, Tucker said.

The tribes’ strategy was multipronged, combining loud protests with quiet legal maneuvering. In 2007, Hillman and his son, Chook Chook Hillman, drove to Omaha to disrupt Berkshire’s annual shareholders meeting. When they arrived, local police pulled their RV over and told them to behave. “We’ll be watching you,” Chook Chook recalled one officer saying. The Hillmans were required to stand in a designated “free speech” spot for protestors down the road from the auditorium as Buffett fans walked by. “Get a job!” one passerby shouted. Another woman spit on them.

The hostile response inspired Chook Chook to train with the Indigenous Peoples Power Project, which schooled Native activists in nonviolent protest, to strengthen his civil disobedience skills. The following year, he managed to address Buffett directly during Buffett’s annual town hall before thousands of Berkshire shareholders, but the tycoon rebuffed Chook Chook and the other protestors, telling them the government and not Berkshire would determine the dams’ fate. The protests in Omaha became so disruptive that Berkshire representatives flew to the Klamath Basin to ask Chook Chook and the other activists to stay away from Nebraska.

But Mitchell, Fletcher, and the others had discovered an argument that Buffet couldn’t dismiss so easily. They’d spent years immersing themselves in the intimate details of how the dams operated, poring over company filings and utility commission reports. They found that by the turn of the 21st century, the dams had become, in Mitchell’s phrasing, “losers.” The dams generated at most around 163 megawatts of electricity during the wettest years, or enough to power 120,000 homes, far less than the average coal or gas plant. That was just a small percentage of the power that PacifiCorp generated across its six-state fleet — and even less in dry years, when the turbines couldn’t run at full capacity. Even with recent renewable energy requirements in California and Oregon, the dams didn’t really move the needle compared to the more powerful solar, wind, and natural gas assets the company was adding.

PacifiCorp’s relicensing fight at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission had been playing out for almost seven years. But tribal leaders were simultaneously pursuing another strategy: persuading federal fish agencies to impose new environmental rules on the company’s license. This would make the dams even more expensive to operate, leading to thinner margins, and open up PacifiCorp to pressure from its utility customers to consider dam removal.

“If anything would change Berkshire Hathaway’s mind,” said Mitchell, “it would be a good business decision.”

Thanks to the dogged work of advocates like the late Ronnie Pierce, there were years of documentation of the devastating ecological effects of the Klamath dams, and state and federal governments had ample evidence that the dams had been in violation of the Endangered Species Act as well as the Clean Water Act. In early 2006, responding to the dire state of the river’s fish population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service mandated that PacifiCorp build fish ladders around the dams in order to avoid killing off the salmon altogether. California and Oregon then told the company that they would not grant it permits under the Clean Water Act unless it cleaned up its reservoirs, which were contaminated with toxic algae.

These decisions meant hundreds of millions of dollars of added costs for PacifiCorp — the bill for the fish ladders alone would exceed $300 million. The company contested them, leading to a lengthy FERC hearing that pitted almost a dozen tribes, government agencies, and environmental groups against the utility. During the hearing, PacifiCorp argued it could trap adult fish below the dams and transport them upstream on the river by truck instead of building fish ladders. The company also argued that salmon had never swam that far upstream before the dams existed. 

The tribes believed that the company’s proposals for handling the salmon were ludicrous, but they also knew they would need more than studies and statistics to persuade the judge in the FERC hearing to rule against the company. That summer, the tribal leaders took the hearing judge and executives from PacifiCorp on a boat ride up the river to give them a firsthand look at what the dams had done. The day was so hot that they almost cut the trip short, but Mike Belchik, the Yurok Tribe’s biologist, insisted that the judge see the Williamson River, which drains into Klamath Lake, far upstream from the PacifiCorp’s dams. When they arrived, the water in the undammed river was cool, and large trout were leaping in droves. 

“Your Honor, this is where the salmon are going to. This is the prize right here,” Belchik remembers the group telling the judge. “This place will sustain salmon.” 

The judge in the FERC hearing ruled against PacifiCorp in September of 2006. The company would have to pay for the costly dam improvements, and the tribes now had the leverage they’d been working for. The company could keep operating the dams in the meantime with a series of one-year license extensions, but it had to fix the issues on the river if it wanted a new license.

”This is going to be the thing that really motivates PacifiCorp to negotiate,” said Craig Tucker, the Karuk Tribe’s spokesman, in a statement at the time.

Faced with the mounting cost of running the dams and an onslaught of negative press, PacifiCorp brass deputized Andrea Kelly, a trusted company veteran and an expert in utility law, to find a solution. Company leaders tasked her with exploring potential settlements that would maximize revenue for PacifiCorp while minimizing the costs of regulatory paperwork, lawyers’ fees, and public-image maintenance.

‘If anything would change Berkshire Hathaway’s mind, it would be a good business decision.’

Kelly had read all the same paperwork as Fletcher, Mitchell, and Pierce, and after PacifiCorp’s regulatory losses, she came to the same conclusion that the tribes had — it might be cheaper to remove the dams. But she didn’t say so just yet. First, in late 2007, PacifiCorp commissioned a confidential study that compared the cost of dam removal to that of the fish ladders and river cleanup that the federal agencies were demanding. The analysis, which has never been made public in full, found that meeting the agencies’ fish and water conditions would be significantly more expensive than the cost of removing the dams, provided the company didn’t have to cover the whole removal bill. 

The study also found that trying to relicense the dams was a massive financial risk. The tribes’ campaign had made the dams so controversial that Oregon and California were almost certain to keep opposing the license. The inevitability of additional protests and litigation meant that PacifiCorp would likely need to spend hundreds of millions more to get through the FERC process. Even then, there was no guarantee it would get its new license.

To protect its customers and investors from the costs of a protracted fight over the Klamath, PacifiCorp’s best option was no longer trying to keep the dams up, but figuring out how to get them down.

VII.

As the tribes worked to put PacifiCorp on defense, they were also trying to forge a truce with an aggressive adversary: the farmers of the Klamath Basin, who just years earlier had been on the brink of starting an all-out armed conflict with the tribes and the federal government to control the basin’s scarce water.

Troy Fletcher, the Yurok Tribe executive director and longtime tribal leader, had spent decades fighting with farmers for the water the tribe needed — and was legally owed — to build up its struggling fisheries. But Fletcher was also amiable by nature, and as years of conflict passed, he realized that the animosity between the tribes and the farmers wasn’t serving either of them. The tribes had spent millions of dollars on litigation and lobbying against the farmers’ interests — and had blasted them in the news media for years — but had no more water to show for it.

“It didn’t make any of us sleep any better, because the big issues were still out there, and we still had to resolve them,” he said. 

In 2005, as the FERC dam relicensing process rolled on, Fletcher and other tribal leaders found themselves stuck in another series of meetings with farmers and ranchers from around the Klamath Basin. The Bush administration had brought the groups together in an effort to achieve a long-term resolution to the contentious water issues and avoid more violence. For once, tribal members and agricultural interests weren’t meeting at protests or sparring in the press, but rather sitting across the table from one another in the same windowless conference rooms, eating the same bad food, and filling their coffees from the same pots. 

During one meeting, in a room full of tribal leaders and farmers, Fletcher decided to propose a truce: Why didn’t the two sides stop criticizing each other publicly, and start talking? 

In the months that followed, Fletcher befriended veteran farm lobbyist Greg Addington, whom the Klamath farmers had hired after the 2001 water war to serve as their advocate. Addington had spent almost his entire career lobbying on behalf of farming interests, but he knew the farmers could not afford a repeat of their standoff with the government. He and Fletcher started talking over beers in the evening and playing golf. It wasn’t long before Klamath water issues came up.

Farmers had gotten cheap power from the hydroelectric dams for decades, but now PacifiCorp, which wasn’t making much money off the systems, was trying to raise their rates. Fletcher was getting pressure from his environmentalist friends to support the rate increase because it would hurt the farmers who were sapping the river, but he didn’t like the idea of the farmers going bankrupt. He decided to strike out on his own: In private conversations with Addington, he vowed that the Yurok would support continued power subsidies for the farmers if Addington and the farmers supported the removal of the dams. PacifiCorp was screwing the tribes and the farmers, he told Addington — so why didn’t the two join together?

“Nothing brings people together like a common enemy,” Fletcher said. “We’ve been in the fight for ages, but we can’t afford to litigate for decades and watch our fish continue to die.” The farmers began to back the tribes’ campaign for dam removal, and in return the tribes backed them on the power-rate issue.

“I believed that Troy cared about the ag community in the Klamath Basin, and it made me really want to care about the tribal community,” Addington said.

The truce soon opened up a broader dialogue between the farmers, the tribes, environmentalists, and fish advocacy organizations on the Klamath. The stakeholders on the river had been trying to solve each of these crises on its own, suing each other whenever their interests came into conflict, but now they began to talk about a comprehensive settlement deal that would put an end to the litigation. Everyone would have to give up something, but everyone would get something they needed.

VIII.

The final piece to the Klamath puzzle was the Bush administration, which controlled Klamath irrigation through a canal system run by the Bureau of Reclamation and would play a key role in any water settlement. Both farmers and Indigenous nations had come to detest the administration — the farmers for the 2001 water shutoff and the tribes for the subsequent fish kill caused by Vice President Dick Cheney’s emergency diversion of water to the farmers. 

The crisis was a stain on the administration’s record in the water-stressed West, and Bush was desperate to resolve the tensions in the Klamath. The president directed Dirk Kempthorne, a compromise-oriented Idaho governor brought in to run the Interior Department during Bush’s second term, to defuse the Klamath conflict — even if it meant departing from the traditional Republican line on water issues, which was unconditional support for dams and agriculture.

Kempthorne and his deputies flew to the Klamath Basin to join the settlement talks, but they got a frosty reception. Despite Fletcher and Addington’s breakthroughs, the alliance was still fragile.

In early 2008, Fletcher, Mitchell, and Hillman met with senior Interior officials at Klamath Falls, near the headquarters of the Klamath Tribes. John Bezdek, a senior Interior Department lawyer, asked for tribal leaders’ thoughts on a long list of items in the proposed settlement, including water deliveries to farmers and ecosystem restoration.

But Fletcher wanted something more from them. Staring at the Interior bureaucrats from across the table, he laid it out for them straight. The negotiations had made progress, he said, but without a guaranteed agreement to remove the dams, a larger water settlement was impossible. Somebody would need to force PacifiCorp’s hand.

“You guys need to get this done for us,” Fletcher told the two Bush administration officials.

Bezdek said he would try. He and another Interior bureaucrat, Michael Bogert, flew to Portland to visit Robert Lasich, the president of PacifiCorp and the boss of the company’s Klamath czar, Andrea Kelly. The two government officials felt like they had momentum: With federal agencies insisting that the company provide fish passage, and the once-rebellious farmers now calling for dam removal as well, it seemed like the company would have to acquiesce.

But as soon as they entered Lasich’s office, the PacifiCorp executive rebuffed them, saying the utility would never abandon the dams unless Interior came up with a deal that worked for the company.

“You’re asking us to voluntarily walk away from revenue-generating assets,” he told them, Bezdek recalled. “If you want this to happen, you two need to man up and put something real on the table.” Bogert later made Bezdek a T-shirt that said, “MAN UP.”

In a last-ditch effort to work out a deal, Bezdek called a meeting with PacifiCorp’s Andrea Kelly and representatives from the two states at a federal conservation training center in Shepherdstown, West Virginia — a site so remote that negotiators had to walk 15 minutes to a bridge and stand on its railing to get cell service. 

Bezdek also invited three lawyers representing the Yurok Tribe and a few conservation groups, but they didn’t get to join the settlement talks until the last day, when most points had already been decided. PacifiCorp’s Kelly was the only woman there, and there were no tribal leaders present, a fact for which Fletcher, of the Yurok Tribe, would later upbraid Bezdek and the Interior bureaucrats.

Behind closed doors in Shepherdstown, Kelly reiterated the company’s conditions for dam removal. The company did not want to spend more than $200 million, she said. It also wanted full protection from any legal liability that resulted from the dam removal project, which would detonate dynamite on century-old structures and release millions of tons of sediment and algae into a fragile river ecosystem.

For three days, Bezdek and Kelly hashed out how dam removal would work. The solution to the money problem came from California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who agreed to issue a state bond that would raise $250 million. That money, combined with $200 million PacifiCorp would get from its customers in Oregon, would cover the costs. The liability problem was harder: PacifiCorp refused to conduct the dam removal itself. In order to appease the company, the parties ended up settling on the idea that the federal Bureau of Reclamation itself would remove the dams and assume the risk.

‘If you want this to happen, you two need to man up and put something real on the table.’

After days of exhausting talks, the parties brought the framework to Interior Secretary Kempthorne, who secured Bush’s blessing to approve it. This was a stunning reversal from six years earlier, when Cheney had caused the fish kill to protect the interests of Klamath farmers. The Bush administration and the states were able to tout the deal as a solid business decision — Oregon’s governor called the deal “a model … of how the federal and state governments and private industry can work together.”

“President Bush made clear to me that we were there to solve problems,” said Kempthorne. “We never took a position other than to say that we supported a business decision.” At the Bush administration’s final White House Christmas party in December of 2008, the president shook hands with Michael Bogert, one of the senior Interior officials who had worked on the negotiations. 

“It’s a good deal,” Bush told Bogert.

The 2008 accord represented a triumph of diplomacy and compromise in a region that just a few years earlier had been on the verge of war. The settlement, finalized across two legal agreements, not only promised to remove all four PacifiCorp dams from the Klamath River, but also called for a billion dollars in federal funding to restore the decaying parts of the river ecosystem, undoing a century of damage. 

The deal guaranteed water deliveries to the Oregon farmers during all but the driest periods, laid out a plan to protect salmon and suckerfish during droughts, and returned 90,000 acres of forest land to the Klamath Tribes. The basin tribes, environmental nonprofits, commercial fishing groups, and irrigators all endorsed it. The state governments of California and Oregon gave it their blessing in a matter of months as well. 

But not everyone was happy: The residents of conservative Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, were angry that PacifiCorp was going to drain the reservoirs that gave them lakefront property and a place to water ski. Some farmers around Upper Klamath Lake hadn’t received the water guarantees they were seeking. And the Hoopa Tribe, a nation that had also campaigned for dam removal, walked away from the settlement talks, frustrated that PacifiCorp would not have to bear the whole cost of dam removal. 

Mitchell, too, had reservations about the company walking away with its hands clean, and about the fact that the deal had come together with no tribal leaders present. But in his eyes, the benefits far outweighed the costs.

“This gave us the pathway of getting these dams out and restoring this watershed more quickly than fighting a much longer battle where fish may not survive,” he said. “If it took us another 10, 15 years to do this, we may lose those fish completely.”

The only step left was to get Congress’ approval for the settlement deal, which would unlock a billion-dollar infusion of restoration funding. After so many years of hard-fought negotiations, the campaigners, assured by their federal allies, thought that passing a settlement bill through Congress would be straightforward by comparison. 

They had no idea what lay ahead.

IX.

In February of 2010, Jeff Mitchell shook California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hand before reporters at the state capitol building in Salem, Oregon, with the governor of Oregon and the secretary of the interior looking on. 

“Hasta la vista, Klamath dams,” Schwarzenegger said as he leaned over to sign the agreement to demolish the four dams, settle rights to the river’s water, and return land to the Klamath Tribes. Beneath the capitol dome, the former bodybuilder joked that, even for him, the deal had been “a big lift” to get over the finish line.

The mood in Salem that day was ecstatic. After years of protest and negotiation, the entire basin — the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath tribes, the region’s conservative farmers, and environmentalists — had come together behind a plan to take the dams down, and they’d brought both the federal Department of the Interior and the dams’ corporate owner over to their side. Because the deal hinged on millions in federal restoration funding, as well as a legal directive to let Interior take the lead on dam removal, the last remaining step was for Congress to pass a bill that authorized the demolition and allocate money to restore the river to its original undammed state.

Later that year, the Republican Party scored a resounding victory in the 2010 midterm elections, riding a wave of backlash against the election of Barack Obama two years prior. Many of those elected to the congressional majority that emerged in the House of Representatives were partisans of the far-right Tea Party movement. They advocated a scorched-earth opposition to the Obama administration’s entire agenda, rejecting bipartisan achievements like the Klamath deal, despite its origins in the Bush administration.

“I think there was a whole lot of just blocking of anything that could be a potential positive legacy for the Obama administration,” said Leaf Hillman, the former vice chairman of the Karuk Tribal Council. “Congress was hell-bent on making sure he got nothing to be proud of.”

Like many legal settlements, the Klamath deal had an expiration date at the end of 2012. If Congress didn’t ratify the deal and the settlement lapsed, the parties had to start all over again to negotiate a new one. After the 2010 election, a few years suddenly didn’t seem like much time at all. 

The Republican resurgence also elevated a man Mitchell knew well: Greg Walden, a longtime congressman for the Oregon side of the Klamath Basin and now an influential leader in the House Republican caucus. For years, Mitchell had known Walden as a fierce advocate for the state’s agricultural interests and a critic of the Endangered Species Act. The two men had spoken about fish issues on the river, but Mitchell had never felt like Walden cared much about what he had to say. Still, Walden had expressed his support for the Klamath settlement when it came together in 2008, saying that the negotiators “deserved a medal.”

“He kept saying, ‘If you guys can develop an agreement, I’ll do my job and I’ll get it through Congress and get it funded,’” recalled Mitchell.

Walden had been engaged on Klamath issues since the 2001 water crisis, and had secured funding for financial relief and infrastructure in the basin. He had even enabled the dismantling of a very small dam on a tributary in Chiloquin, Oregon. As a high-ranking Republican and the member representing Oregon’s side of the basin, he seemed to be in an ideal position to advance a bill that would ratify the settlement. But despite urging from farmers, tribal leaders, and other elected officials, Walden failed to push for the settlement — a decision that many advocates saw as an attempt to block dam removal. Before long, he became public enemy number one for the settlement parties, who soon found themselves forced to extend the ratification deadline to the end of 2015.

In the summer of 2013, after multiple years of stagnation in Congress, Oregon Democratic Senator Ron Wyden held a public hearing on the Klamath deal in an attempt to generate some forward momentum. Mitchell, Hillman, and Troy Fletcher of the Yurok Tribe came to Washington to testify in support of the deal and urge legislators to pass it.

“We hope that you will work with us to make sure that [the settlement] gets passed,” said Fletcher in his impassioned remarks to the Senate natural resources committee. “People have got to move off their entrenched positions.” 

Part of the reason for Walden’s resistance to moving the agreement through the House was that the landmark Klamath agreement, which brought together dozens of parties, was still not inclusive enough for his tastes. The settlement, he said, had left a number of groups out, including local residents who lived around the dams. Most important to him were a small group of farmers and ranchers that worked land upstream of Upper Klamath Lake and had walked away from initial settlement talks. 

In an attempt to satisfy Walden, Oregon’s governor deputized Richard Whitman, the state’s lead environmental official, to work out a separate deal that would resolve a water conflict between these farmers and the Klamath Tribes. Over the next two years, with the other campaigners waiting in the background, Whitman dutifully managed to negotiate an irrigation settlement the holdouts could accept.

Walden praised the settlement and suggested he would help push through the broader Klamath deal, including the dam removal, according to Whitman. Then he never did.

“Congressman Walden refused to move legislation notwithstanding that we had satisfied his conditions,” said Whitman. “He never lived up to that commitment.”

Walden said he did not recall making this commitment to Whitman and defended his engagement on the settlement. He said that even if he had backed the settlement, it would never have made it through Congress with a dam removal provision. There were a slew of dam supporters in charge of House committees at the time, and since 2013 Walden’s counterpart on the California side of the basin had been the far-right Doug LaMalfa, a former rice farmer and stalwart supporter of western agriculture. LaMalfa was dead-set against the dam removal agreement, and his constituents were on his side — residents of Siskiyou County, California, which was home to three of the dams, had voted 4-to-1 against dam removal in a symbolic local referendum.

“It just hit a brick wall, and that brick wall was just the realities of control of Congress,” said Walden. “I kept saying … ‘I realize you want to blame me, but tell me the path.’”

As the extended deadline got closer, Fletcher, Mitchell, Hillman and other dam removal advocates escalated their pressure campaign. They held a rally in Portland, boosted an anti-dam campaign in Brazil, and organized countless meetings between irrigators, tribal leaders, and elected officials. But nothing happened in Congress. When Senator Wyden introduced a Klamath bill in the Senate in early 2015, with just months to go until the settlement expired, it went nowhere, failing to secure even a hearing in the chamber’s energy committee.

“In my lifetime, I’ve seen moments where Congress could really do bipartisan stuff, and try to really solve problems,” said Chuck Bonham, who participated in Klamath negotiations first as a lawyer for the fish advocacy organization Trout Unlimited, and later as California’s top fish and wildlife official. “When the negotiations started, that was the prevailing theory. By the time we got there, that was impossible.”

X.

By the start of 2015, campaigners had been trying to pass the settlement for almost five years. Senior officials at the Department of the Interior, which had brought the deal together under the Bush administration, were desperate to get something through Congress before the uncertainty of the following year’s election.

That fall, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and longtime Interior lawyer John Bezdek decided to try a last-second gambit. They conveyed to Walden they would support a broader Klamath settlement bill without a dam removal provision. The bill would provide hundreds of millions of dollars to restore the river and settle the water conflict between the Klamath Tribes and the farmers, and it would even preserve the Klamath Tribes’ land restoration agreement — but it would allow the dam agreement to expire, leaving the basin with no guarantee that PacifiCorp’s dams would come down.

”We couldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” Jewell said. 

Meeting with Bezdek in a side room in the U.S. Capitol, Walden again sounded an optimistic note. If the dam removal mandate disappeared, he thought the rest of the settlement could pass, despite hesitance from other Republicans. But it took him until the final month of 2015 to introduce a settlement bill, and that bill stood no chance of passing — it opened up thousands of acres of federal forest land to new logging operations, a carve out that Democrats and Indigenous nations dismissed as unacceptable. The bill went nowhere. 

Walden said he didn’t remember the specific conversation with Bezdek, but said he thought his final bill had a chance of passing.

“This one got away,” he said. “I couldn’t figure out how to do it.”

With the settlement’s expiration imminent, the fragile coalition that had come together around the dams’ removal began to fall apart. Leaders from the Yurok, Karuk, and Klamath Tribes had put decades of work into the negotiations, and some tribal leaders, like Fletcher, had made removing the dams their life’s work. Watching all that progress vanish due to Congress’s inaction felt like an echo of previous betrayals.

“There was a sense of extreme frustration, because these agreements were very difficult to negotiate,” said Amy Cordalis, a Yurok Tribe member who came on as its lead counsel in 2014. Cordalis had decided to go to law school after witnessing the mass die-off of salmon on the river in 2002. Most of her work since then had led up to this moment, and now it was about to vanish.

In September of 2015, the leadership of the Yurok Tribe announced that it was withdrawing from the Klamath deal, essentially dooming the watered-down agreement. In a press release, the tribe said that the “benefits of the agreements have become unachievable.” The Karuk and Klamath tribes said they would follow suit by the end of the year if Congress didn’t act.

A few weeks after Yurok leadership announced they were pulling out of the deal, Yurok Tribe biologist Mike Belchik met up with Fletcher on a scorching day while the Yurok director was hitting golf balls. Belchik was frustrated with Fletcher for abandoning the deal, but Fletcher was adamant that the move was a strategic maneuver designed to bring everyone back to the table. 

“The dam removal deal won’t die,” he told Belchik. “It’s got too much life in it. It’s going to happen.” 

Two weeks later, during a meeting on Klamath water issues on the Yurok reservation, Fletcher suffered a fatal heart attack. His sudden death at age 53 was a blow not only to the Yurok Tribe but to the entire Klamath Basin: The breakthrough deal to restore the river was no more, and the man who had done so much to bring it together was gone.

“It was just such a terrible shock, it was awful,” said Belchik, who had spent countless hours with Fletcher — driving to and from PacifiCorp meetings, playing poker and golf, and strategizing about how to bring the dams down. 

“He really in a lot of ways gave his life to Klamath dam removal and to the river,” said Cordalis.

XI.

With Fletcher gone and Congress having failed to pass the settlement into law, it seemed like there was just one strategy left for the Klamath, albeit one that negotiators had rejected a decade earlier. 

PacifiCorp’s overriding priority was that some other entity — any other entity — take responsibility for demolition of its dams, allowing the company to avoid legal liability for the removal process. The Klamath settlement deal had come together around the appealing idea that the federal government would be that entity — having the Interior Department take the dams down had always made the most sense, given the federal government’s sheer size, expertise, and funding. 

As Congress stalled, longtime dam opponent and tribal counsel Richard Roos-Collins thought back to the early days of the settlement talks. He had been involved in Klamath negotiations for more than 10 years, and had been one of the tribes’ only representatives at the tense West Virginia talks back in 2008. He recalled that, during those early stages, before the Bush administration had signed on to the deal, environmental groups had proposed that PacifiCorp transfer the dams to a new corporation run by the tribes or by the states — essentially a holding company that would accept the dams only to destroy them using money from PacifiCorp and the states.

At the time, PacifiCorp had rejected the idea as ridiculous and unproven, and negotiators had given up on it, putting their hopes in the Interior Department. But Roos-Collins remembered that a group of environmentalists and local organizations in Maine had created a nonprofit trust to purchase two dams on the Penobscot River back in 2004. The trust had since destroyed those dams, reopening the river for fish migrations. He thought there might be a chance that the same idea could work with PacifiCorp: The utility would apply to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for permission to transfer the hydroelectric dams to a nonprofit entity, and that nonprofit would take them down, shielding PacifiCorp from liability and costs.

It was still an outlandish plan. The Klamath dams were several times the size of the ones in Maine, and far larger than any other dams that had ever come down in the United States. FERC had a history of support for hydropower, and there was no way to know if it would endorse the idea of demolishing an active power facility if the Interior Department wasn’t the one doing it. Neither the states, the tribes, nor the environmental groups wanted to take ownership of the dams, which meant the “removal entity” would have to be a bespoke nonprofit created for that express purpose. 

“There was resignation, and kind of a demoralization, that was, ‘Well, we only have one option left, and that is FERC,’” said Chuck Bonham, who had helped negotiate the original settlement at Trout Unlimited and was now the lead Klamath negotiator for the state of California. 

PacifiCorp executives worried the system was a Trojan horse to keep the utility involved: If the process cost more than projected, would the dam removal entity come back to the company for more money? If the sediment that got released from behind the dams turned out to be toxic enough to kill off downstream wildlife, would lawsuits drive the removal company into bankruptcy? Federal, state, and company negotiators went back and forth over the details for months toward the end of 2015 as the settlement fell apart in Congress. They made little progress.

Remembering his meeting with Fletcher back in 2008, when Fletcher demanded that the Bush administration bring PacifiCorp to the table on dam removal, Interior lawyer John Bezdek called another closed-door meeting at the same remote site in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Once again, he bartered with PacifiCorp official Andrea Kelly late into the night, pushing her to endorse the idea of transferring ownership of the dams. She refused to commit: The proposal left PacifiCorp too exposed to liability.

As Kelly and Bezdek debated utility law, they grew increasingly frustrated. After dinner one evening, the two got into an argument and stormed off to their respective dormitories, fed up with one another.

“I actually thought for sure it was done,” Bezdek said. “I went back to my room, and I called my wife, and I said, ‘I think it’s done. I don’t think we can get there.’”

Some time after midnight, Bezdek got a call from Kelly, who couldn’t sleep either. They threw on their coats, met on a bench outside the dormitories, and started talking again. Bezdek emphasized that the entire Klamath Basin, from the tribes to the farmers, had come together in the belief that the dams needed to go. It was time for PacifiCorp to do the same; the fight would never be over until the company let go.

By the time the sun came up, Kelly had agreed to the new plan. California and Oregon would endow a joint nonprofit dedicated to the dams’ removal, and PacifiCorp would apply to FERC for permission to transfer the dams to that nonprofit. Bezdek took the agreement to his boss at Interior, Sally Jewell, who approved it. There was no need, with this new arrangement, to get Congress involved.

Walden said he wishes he had known it was possible for the dam removal to take place without Congress’ involvement. If he had, he said, he would have pushed to pass the rest of the Klamath settlement and advocated for the FERC path toward dam removal, potentially saving the settlement and speeding up removal by several years. 

“Had I understood that, dam removal would never have been a federal issue, because it didn’t need to be, and we might have been able to find a different solution,” he said. “That’s my fault.” 

A few months after the second Shepherdstown summit, on a hot April day at the mouth of the Klamath River in Requa, California, tribal leaders gathered with Jewell, Bezdek, and the governors of California and Oregon to celebrate the revived dam removal agreement. They signed the documents on a traditional Yurok fish-cleaning table, a long white plank of stone that tribal members had cleaned for the occasion. Then the dam removal advocates took the group on a boat up to Blue Creek, the same part of the river where the devastating fish kill had occurred in 2002.

There was a notable absence: Jeff Mitchell of the Klamath Tribes was not part of the celebratory photo op at the fish table. There was still a path toward dam removal, but the broader Klamath settlement had died in Congress, dashing hopes for a water accord between the Klamath Tribes and the irrigators. The Klamath Tribes did not sign the amended dam removal agreement because it did not have the same protections for their treaty rights as the original deal.  

“I wish that we would’ve been able to work through that,” Mitchell said. “The price that we paid for that was pretty, pretty deep — pretty, pretty big price — because it took us away from the table.”

For the other tribal leaders who had been fighting for dam removal, the day felt momentous.

“I was naively stoked,” said Amy Cordalis. To her, the memory of the dead salmon was still fresh, even 15 years later — she could still smell the rotting flesh. It had been a moment of clarity of her life’s purpose.

“I felt like my great-grandmother, who had passed away when I was 6, came to me and was like, ‘You need to make sure that this never happens again,’” she said. Cordalis was part of a new generation of tribal leaders and their allies who were determined to carry on the fight. 

But neither Sally Jewell, nor the governors of California and Oregon, nor the tribal activists knew whether or not FERC, a government body that operates independently of the presidential administration, would accept the new transfer proposal. It would take years to refine the details of the new agreement, and it was far from certain that the coalition would hold together: Not only was Fletcher gone, but PacifiCorp’s Kelly was about to retire. Bezdek was about to leave the negotiations as well, since the Interior Department would no longer have direct involvement in the dam removal.

More than a decade after the fight to remove the Klamath dams began, none of the campaigners could have known that the new agreement would next have to survive a global pandemic.

XII.

Amy Cordalis was on maternity leave, but she spent her days on phone calls and in Zoom meetings. The deal to remove the four Klamath River dams, which had inspired her life’s work for nearly two decades, was falling apart. Again.

It was late summer 2020, just months after the COVID-19 pandemic forced massive shutdowns across the globe. Millions of people were out of work and more than 100,000 people in the United States alone had died from the novel coronavirus. On the Yurok Tribe’s reservation in northern California, the nation had closed all government offices and schools and barred nonessential visitors from entry. A record-setting wildfire season heightened the community’s challenges, as thick wildfire smoke turned the sky orange and made every hour feel like dusk. Swaths of forest in the Klamath Basin burned.

Cordalis’ days were a blur of blur of breastfeeding, interrupted sleep, and troubleshooting her newborn’s cries. But when she learned that the dams’ owner, PacifiCorp, was threatening to pull out of the agreement to transfer its dams to a state-backed entity for demolition, she knew she needed to return to her role as the tribe’s lawyer.

For four years, Cordalis and other tribal attorneys had been working on finalizing PacifiCorp’s dam removal plan with FERC, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. But the agency’s makeup had changed after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. The new commissioners decided that PacifiCorp, and the states that the Klamath ran through, needed to put up more money to fund dam removal on top of the $450 million they had already pledged. The commission also contended the company needed to keep its name on the dam licenses — a requirement PacifiCorp had long rejected, fearing it would subject the utility to potential lawsuits if anything went wrong during removal. 

“Here we go again,” Cordalis thought.

Without PacifiCorp, the tribes would have to restart the relicensing process they’d been pursuing in the early 2000s.   

The process had gone on so long that many of the people at PacifiCorp and in the federal government who had negotiated the original 2016 deal were no longer around. That left Richard Whitman and Chuck Bonham, the lead environmental officials for Oregon and California, to try to hold together the collapsing dam removal settlement. The two bureaucrats raced to come up with a new legal arrangement that would satisfy both FERC and PacifiCorp, even offering more money from their two states for dam removal if the company would match it. But PacifiCorp refused to give any more than the $200 million it had already promised. California Governor Gavin Newsom even wrote an open letter to Warren Buffett, head of Berkshire Hathaway, and urged him not to pull out of the deal, but the company’s position did not change.

In a last-ditch effort at diplomacy, leaders of the Yurok Tribe, Karuk Tribe, and Klamath Tribes emailed Buffett to invite him to the Yurok reservation to talk. Buffett declined, but he agreed to send a cadre of his top executives, including Greg Abel, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and former CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Bill Fehrman, the president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway Energy; Stefan Bird, the CEO of PacifiCorp’s power plant unit; and Scott Bolton, a PacifiCorp vice president. The Yurok Tribal Council passed a resolution to open the COVID locked-down reservation just for the executives.

Cordalis and the others came up with a plan for the meeting: They would take the executives up to Blue Creek — the southernmost cold-water tributary on the Klamath, the first stop for salmon heading upstream, and one of the most precious places on the river. There, they would persuade them to re-sign the deal. It would’ve been easier to meet at the reservation’s hotel, but they felt like they needed to do more to win over company officials. The executives needed to see the kind of ecosystem that the dams had destroyed.

The executives agreed to go up the river.

XIII.

Chook Chook Hillman, a Karuk Tribe citizen, knew Berkshire Hathaway well. He had been 23 years old when he confronted Warren Buffett at the 2008 Berkshire shareholders’ meeting in Omaha. Company representatives had come to his house in California and asked him to stay away from the annual gatherings while PacifiCorp hashed out the details of the dam settlement. 

Chook Chook and other activists had toned down their Omaha protests slightly after that. But they remained committed to their goal, forming a group called the Klamath Justice Coalition. “Direct action is the logical, consistent method of anarchism,” they wrote on their Facebook page, quoting the Lithuanian-born author and anarchist Emma Goldman, who embraced confronting injustice with uncompromising force.

While tribal officials negotiated with federal bureaucrats in conference rooms, Chook Chook and other activists trained youth in nonviolent direct action and spoke at public hearings about Klamath water issues. In 2014, several members even flew down to Brazil to show solidarity with Indigenous peoples of the Amazon fighting against the construction of a dam.

By 2020, Chook Chook was 35 with a family of his own, and had spent countless hours bringing his kids to meetings and protests over the years. He was not about to let the dam removal deal fall apart. Tribal leadership had not invited him and his fellow Klamath Justice activists to the meeting on the river, a move that Chook Chook saw as an attempt to appease Berkshire’s executives. But he knew when and where the meeting on the river would take place, and that was information enough. They decided to make their presence known, invitation or not.

“They’re not going to meet with us as people, then we’ve got to do what we got to do,” he said.

The executives’ planned tour of the river immediately went awry. Just a quarter-mile into their trip to Blue Creek, the boat carrying Cordalis and some of the masked-up Berkshire Hathaway executives broke down, right in front of Cordalis’ family fishing hole. Another boat carrying PacifiCorp executives Bird and Bolton as well as Yurok biologist Mike Belchik ran aground in shallow waters and started overheating.  Both groups had to hop in other Yurok tribe boats in order to continue up the river.

After another mile and a half, they were forced to stop again: The river was blockaded by protestors from the Klamath Justice Coalition who had draped a rope across it and stood in their boats holding signs saying, “Undam the Klamath.” Balanced defiantly on their boats, the activists put themselves face-to-face with Abel, Fehrman, and the other Berkshire and PacifiCorp executives.

Chook Chook’s son approached the executives first. The 11-year-old handed them a white flag. Chook Chook reminded them that his son had been just a week old when PacifiCorp executives first visited and promised to remove the dams. 

“We’ve kept up our end of the bargain, we’ve given you 11 years to do it,” Chook Chook said. “I don’t know what you guys are going to decide at your meeting, but what needs to happen, has to happen. We don’t have any more time.”

Activists handed Fehrman a jug filled with foul-smelling river water. “Take the lid off and smell it,” said Annelia Hillman, a Yurok Tribe citizen and Chook Chook’s wife at the time. The Berkshire executive opened the bottle and sniffed the algae-tainted water.

“Our fish are drinking that,” said Dania Rose Colegrove from the Hoopa Valley Tribe. “They have to swim in that.”

“We understand that’s a challenge,” one of the executives replied. Sammy Gensaw III, one of the Yurok youth activists, implored the executives to understand the stakes. 

“This isn’t just about the Klamath River. What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations,” Gensaw said. “The rest of history will look at the decisions that we make here today.”  

Gensaw’s younger brother, Jon Luke Gensaw, spoke next. “If this doesn’t end, you’re going to see more of us,” he said, surrounded by hundreds of people from all of the Klamath’s tribes. “I take my mask off because I want you to remember my face, because you’ll see me again.” 

Frankie Myers, the vice chairman of the Yurok Tribe, who was on the boat with the executives, reminded the younger activists that the tribal leaders shared their goals, and that they had a schedule to keep with the company. Myers’ father, Dickie, had been one of the original dam removal campaigners who had traveled to Scotland more than a decade earlier. Chook Chook and the others felt they had made their message clear, and decided to let the executives through. 

“We’re sorry we had to do this, but you know, this is what we do,” Colegrove said as they parted. “We didn’t get invited to the meeting, so we invited ourselves. You have to hear the people — it’s just how it is.” 

‘What goes down in the Klamath Basin will be echoed throughout generations.’ 

The executives and tribal leaders finally made their way to Blue Creek. Myers urged them not to abandon the deal, and Cordalis presented an offer from the states and tribes to provide additional insurance and funding. Abel and the other PacifiCorp executives agreed to take a term sheet from the tribal campaigners, and responded to their entreaties politely, but they did not commit to meeting FERC’s new demands. 

It was a beautiful day: Salmon were swimming in the cool waters, and a bald eagle flew over Abel as he defended the company’s position. Tribal leaders could not have picked a more serene place to make their case for what was at stake, but PacifiCorp didn’t concede. After lunch, the group drove their boats back to the reservation and thanked the executives for coming. At the Yurok Tribe’s debriefing meeting, the disappointment was so profound that some broke down in tears. 

But a few days later, Cordalis got a call from Bill Fehrman, the Berkshire Hathaway Energy executive who had gone to Blue Creek. The voice on the other end of the line said something that stopped her in her tracks. 

“Let’s talk, we need to get the dams out,” Fehrman said, according to Cordalis’ recollection. 

A few months later, PacifiCorp and the two states announced that they had come to an agreement: The company and the states would each provide an additional $15 million, helping meet FERC’s demand for backup cash, and California and Oregon would add their names to the dam licenses, resolving the company’s demands about liability. Those two moves were enough to appease FERC once and for all. 

For Cordalis, for Leaf Hillman, and for Jeff Mitchell, the fight was over at last. The dams were coming down.

XIV.

In January of 2024, almost a quarter-century after the dam removal campaign began in earnest, construction crews began draining the reservoir behind Iron Gate Dam, the southernmost dam on the Klamath River. The official dam removal had begun the previous year with the dismantling of Copco 2, which was by far the smallest of the four dams, but the emptying of Iron Gate marked the real beginning of the end.

Belchik arrived early to watch the moment with Cordalis, who had wanted to get there at sunrise to pray. As Belchik waited for the drawdown to proceed, he noticed the group of PacifiCorp executives standing nearby. He thought they looked a little forlorn. Belchik approached one of them and started a conversation.

The executive revealed to Belchik what had happened after the trip to Blue Creek, which many campaigners had seen as the final blow for dam removal. After the executives boarded their company jet and left the river behind, Greg Abel, the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, had turned to his employees and said that they needed to figure out how to get the dams off of the river. 

Belchik had never understood until that moment why the company had made such an abrupt about-face, but now it made sense to him. “Blue Creek changes people,” he said. At the start of the dam removal campaign, Ronnie Pierce had berated PacifiCorp executives for not knowing where the waterway was, and 20 years later, the company’s leaders had fallen under its spell.

In a statement, a representative for PacifiCorp said the company “remained steadfast in its goals to come to a resolution agreeable to all parties and reach the ultimate successful outcome.”

The dam removal process took the better part of last year. The first step was for engineers to drain all the reservoirs behind the Klamath dams, sending millions of tons of long-stagnant sediment downstream toward the Pacific. As crews opened these dams one by one, the river grew cloudy and brown before clearing up again. Demolition teams then used 800 pounds of dynamite to blast apart Copco 1, hauling away the wreckage with bulldozers. They carved apart the earthen mass of J.C. Boyle, the highest dam on the river and the closest to the Klamath Tribes, dismantling it one scoop of dirt at a time. They started to break apart Iron Gate, the downstream dam closest to the Yurok reservation and the last barrier to salmon passage.

Only then, in the fall of 2024, did tribal leaders get to watch the Klamath flow uninterrupted once more. The water tumbled downstream, from Upper Klamath Lake, where Jeff Mitchell had first joined his tribal government in 1975 and where the C’waam and Koptu suckerfish swam through placid water, to the forested mountainsides of the Yurok Tribe, where Cordalis had watched fish die in 2002 along the warm, weak waters of the lower river. From there, the Klamath wound to the vastness of the Pacific, where the salmon were waiting to come home.

XV.

Last November, two months after the final dam fell, Jeff Mitchell heard that salmon were spotted in Spencer Creek along the upper Klamath River in Oregon. He drove to the creek, which fed into the river just upstream from where the concrete behemoth of J.C. Boyle Dam had once stood.

Staring into the shallow Klamath River waters, Mitchell couldn’t see any salmon at first. Then he spotted a few carcasses resting on the bottom of the river. Anyone else might have been disappointed to find only dead fish. But to Mitchell, it felt like a glimpse of the salmon completing their life cycles after spawning, resting peacefully in an area that for so long had been denied to them. 

“They’re telling me that they have come home,” he said. “And they also told me that there is work to do.”

Here was a shift, a tangible correction, to more than a century of theft, injustice, and cultural and environmental harm. Just a few weeks after the dams came down, salmon arriving from the Pacific had pushed through the reconnected river and returned to the frigid upstream tributaries that had been closed to them for decades, navigating the same rills and rapids that their ancestors did. Yurok Tribe members captured videos of spotted gray fish dashing and flopping back and forth in the reopened waterways. The waters of the Klamath, which had been depleted and laden with algae and parasites, were now flowing free, replenishing their formerly barren channels. For the first time in more than a century, the fish were spawning their eggs in a reopened river.

The fight to undam the Klamath only succeeded thanks to the tenacity of the tribes in the Klamath Basin. But it took thousands of people to make it happen — everyone from fish scientists and Bush administration bureaucrats to utility executives and environmental activists.  

Many of these people may never be recognized for their roles in the campaign, but their contributions were essential. These were people like Kathy Hill, a Klamath Tribes citizen who coined the slogan, “Bring the salmon home,” that became the campaign’s rallying cry; Ron Reed, a Karuk Tribe member who had sought to persuade PacifiCorp executives of the cultural importance of salmon; and environmentalists like Kelly Catlett, who attended that first campaign meeting in Redding in 2004, and Glen Spain, who supported the agreement on behalf of deep-sea commercial fishermen. 

Countless staffers working behind the scenes in tribal, state, and federal governments, as well as environmental organizations like Trout Unlimited, helped ensure the dam removal agreement survived when politicians and executives threatened to kill it. Many people who were critical to the cause never lived to see the dams come down, like Howard McConnell, a Yurok Tribe chairman, and Elwood Miller of Klamath Tribes — or Ronnie Pierce and Troy Fletcher, who had started the campaign.

Today there is a new generation of tribal members — some of them the children and grandchildren of the original dam removal advocates — who are stepping up to be stewards of the river. They are drawing their inspiration from the success of the dam removal campaign, a victory as significant as the derailment of the Keystone XL pipeline proposal.

“It just wouldn’t have happened if the Indigenous people didn’t have that vision,” said Amy Cordalis of the Yurok Tribe.

But to Mitchell, now 67, the victory is bittersweet. Throughout the past 25 years, the Earth has grown warmer, and water is becoming scarcer. He isn’t sure how he feels about passing down the responsibility for protecting the fish to his children and grandchildren. He and his fellow campaigners freed the river from the PacifiCorp dams, but they weren’t able to protect it from the ravages of climate change and water scarcity. 

“Honestly, I just want them to enjoy this land and enjoy life,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to have them fight like I had to fight.”

The Klamath River Basin has no shortage of challenges, even with the dams down. The former reservoir land will have to be replanted and preserved, which will require years of stewardship by the Yurok and Karuk tribes. The waters of Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon are still contaminated with runoff from farms and ranches in the area, and the lake often sees toxic algal blooms like those that once occurred in the PacifiCorp reservoirs. Relationships between farmers and tribal communities are back to being “tenuous,” according to a lead advocate for the Klamath farmers, and the comity established between Troy Fletcher and Greg Addington has long since faded. 

The biggest remaining conflict on the river is over water, the same issue that supercharged the dam removal campaign after the 2002 fish kill. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation still controls a large dam and canal system at the top of the river, which it uses to deliver irrigation water to potato farmers in the Klamath. During dry years, the bureau must choose between leaving water in Upper Klamath Lake for C’waam and Koptu suckerfish, releasing it to the farmers, or letting it flow down the Klamath River for the salmon to swim in.

Dam removal took PacifiCorp out of the Klamath and opened up hundreds of miles of former salmon habitat, but it did not resolve the question of where the government should send water during years when there is not enough of it. That was the promise of the original Klamath settlement agreement, which died in Congress owing to inaction from former Oregon Representative Greg Walden and other Republican leaders. 

Neither farmers nor tribal nations are benefiting from this stalemate. Recent water shortages, which have been intensified by climate-fueled drought, have forced farms in the basin to downsize crop production. Populations of C’waam and Koptu have shrunk as well, despite restrictions on water deliveries to Klamath Basin farmers. Klamath Tribes and the Yurok Tribe are still in the middle of long-running fights over this water crisis. The Klamath Tribes want to protect rights to water from Upper Klamath Lake, and Cordalis and the Yurok Tribe are trying to compel the government to ensure endangered salmon always have enough water to swim upstream, even if it means cutting irrigation for farmers.

“We have been spending millions and millions and millions of dollars [on the lawsuits] and neglecting other areas that we need to be paying attention to to help our people,” said Mitchell. “But we understood and knew that if we didn’t fight this fight, we could lose all of our resources. Everything needs water. And all we wanted was enough water.” 

Mitchell isn’t sure how long it will take to resolve these cases, or whether he’ll live to see them come to a conclusion. As he sees it, the outlook for the river is grim: With Donald Trump in office again and already moving to gut the Endangered Species Act, it’s possible that the suckerfish in Upper Klamath Lake may fall even closer to extinction. Farmers and tribes reached an agreement under Joe Biden’s administration to restore degraded river ecosystems, but that agreement depends on funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that Trump may withhold.

But nothing, not even the Trump administration, can put the PacifiCorp dams back up on the Klamath, or take away the victory that the dam removal campaigners achieved. The precedent has been set: For more than a century, governments and private utilities built dams with impunity, blocking forest streams from the mountains of Appalachia to massive waterways like the Colorado River. Today, Indigenous youth are planning to paddle the full length of the Klamath River for the first time.

The dam removal is a victory in itself, but it also ensures that tribes will never stop fighting for the Klamath and other rivers like it, said Cordalis. That will be true no matter how many setbacks they face.

“Dam removal is just the beginning,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline How the Klamath Dams Came Down on Mar 19, 2025.

 Loading… How the Klamath Dams Came Down By Anita Hofschneider and Jake Bittle Illustrations by Jackie Fawn March 19, 2025 Last year, tribal nations in Oregon and California won a decades-long fight for the largest dam removal in U.S. history. This is their story. Part 1 Fish and Paper Part 2 A Business Decision Part Indigenous Affairs, Solutions Grist