Hermiston, Oregon didn’t even exist back then.
First they had to dig out the canal, 26 miles long, down from the Columbia River to the new Cold Springs Reservoir. They built a dam and from there laid in a web of smaller canals and outlet pipes for water to reach the crops.
Back in the early 1900s they came from all over to work on the Umatilla Project.
The money was good. Thanks to the 1902 Reclamation Act, Uncle Sam picked up the tab. Just before Christmas in 1905, Secretary of the Interior Ethan A. Hitchcock authorized one million dollars to build the Umatilla Project.
The hard part was building the Cold Springs Dam. After the construction camp opened in 1906, workers started to layer in dirt for the reservoir dam that would hold back 50,000 acre-feet of water.
They built a trestle across the canyon where the dam would go. They ran a train out onto it and dumped all the dirt. Down below they leveled it out and built up the dam with scrapers.
To keep water from seeping through the sides of the gorge, or under the dam, they built cutoff walls into the embankment. In the right abutment they put in an uncontrolled concrete overflow spillway and chute. They pierced a concrete conduit through the base for the outlet works controlled by a pair of slide gates.
Three separate floods rolled through that year. Work was delayed but they finished on time and the Cold Springs Dam was finished in June 1908.
Then with the water came the farmers and Hermiston, Oregon.
A little later, off in the wetlands northeast of town, the Cold Springs National Wildlife Refuge was established. It’s still protecting native birds and their breeding grounds.
Under willows and cottonwood trees western mule deer and desert elk roam through sagebrush and tall grass.
