An Overview

The construction of Grand Coulee Dam created the town of Moses Lake, which incorporated in 1938. The dam brought a stable source of water to an arid region that settlers had struggled to farm since the early twentieth century. The dam not only altered the physical landscape and ended once prodigious salmon runs, but changed the area's social landscape as well.

Block 40, Columbia Basin Project, before irrigation, 1951, a few miles outside of Moses Lake. Photo courtesy of Bureau of Reclamation

Many welcomed the federal programs that provided irrigation water and cheap hydroelectric power, elements essential to the town's growth and prosperity. But the resulting inundation of the lands along the river fundamentally altered Native American communities that had existed for centuries as well as several small settlements that had grown up since the mid-1880s.

forward