(uplifting music) - Buffalo Bill Dam, near Cody, was the tallest dam in the world when it opened in 1910.

This year marks two other historic milestones for this spectacular piece of Wyoming construction, infrastructure, and history.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is Wyoming Chronicle.

(uplifting music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities.

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- 2023 was the year for marking a couple of historic occasions at Buffalo Bill Dam in Park County.

Now more than 100 years old, the huge V-shaped obstacle that blocks the Shoshone River west of Cody remains, indisputably, one of the most arresting sights in Wyoming.

30 years ago this year, the dam's height was raised significantly.

Bill McCormick was the project manager for that very big job.

One of the reasons we're here today is because this year is the 30th anniversary of an improvement, an enlargement of the dam, which raised the height of it by how much, Bill?

- Structure itself came up 25 feet, but the active pool came up 30 since we controlled the spillway.

- And 50 years ago this year, the dam was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark.

Beryl Churchill wrote the definitive history of the Buffalo Bill Dam.

We're joined now by Beryl Churchill, a historic authority on the Buffalo Bill Dam, and we're here at Buffalo Bill Dam Day.

In fact, you could say she wrote the book.

The colorfully titled, "The Dam Book," was something, Beryl, that you wrote when?

- [Beryl] At least 20 years ago.

At least.

- We're talking to you now in a year that happens to be the 30th anniversary of the raising of the dam from its original height by 25 feet.

The dam itself was dedicated and opened in what year?

- The original dam was 1910, it was completed.

- So this was 1993 then that the expanded dam was opened.

And also, it's now been 50 years since the dam was added to a national register- - Yes.

- Of engineering marvels and significant structures, as well.

And it's also, of course, a member, part of the National Register of Historic Places, just for all of that.

So there's a lot to this dam.

What's so, in addition just to the local significance of it, as a piece of construction at the time, what's so significant about it?

- This was the first concrete arch dam that was built.

- Called the Shoshone Dam originally, the enormous tapered concrete monolith was renamed in 1946 for Buffalo Bill Cody, the area's most famous early resident.

Bob Richard was around for that and he still tells tales about older days at the dam, greeting visitors every summer at a crowd gathering event called Great Dam Day.

The dam was completed and opened in 1910.

Buffalo Bill was still around when the dam was being built, wasn't he?

- Lots of historians have different opinions, but he did promote it, but he had his own water rights that did not include the water rights that came from the dam, but he deeded them back and was a strong supporter of the dam and the irrigation.

- [Steve] You remember well the occasion of renaming the dam.

- At the end of World War II, they renamed it, and Congress did this, the Buffalo Bill Dam and Reservoir.

- What do you remember about that time and why that was done and what the response to it was?

- It was a wonderful response in Cody because Buffalo Bill was one of the mentors of the building of Cody, with Buffalo Bill promoting Cody all over Europe, his Wild West Shows, but it was natural to name this the Buffalo Bill Reservoir.

- These days as well, that you're talking about, were before the dam was raised, which happened 30 years ago this year.

That's one of the reasons we're here today.

How much different is it now, in your opinion?

Does it seem about the same kind of a place or has it changed it profoundly?

- We now have a visitor's center.

When they raised the dam, this was built.

The tunnel was changed.

That was very important to Cody and tourism because the old dam hill and the small tunnels, we had trouble getting a stock truck through the tunnels without- - You're talking about the highway tunnel, yeah.

- The highway tunnels.

The new tunnel now allows buses and large vehicles to go through, whereas on the old road we could barely get a cattle truck, a small ton-and-a-half, two-ton truck through, and we had to get out and line up so we didn't break our stock rack to get through the tunnel.

- [Steve] The highway and tunnel rebuild that accompanied the raising of the dam 30 years ago was mentioned more than once by all three Wyoming Chronicle guests.

Today, the modern highway tunnel is the longest in Wyoming.

Bill McCormick said planners came up with an ingenious and economical idea of removing rock from the canyon wall near what is now the Visitor Center in order to provide base construction material for widening the road, which is one of the primary entrance routes to Yellowstone.

McCormick calls it giving the canyon wall a haircut.

- In their planning, they had three dust abatement dikes and three miles of highway that they needed riprap for, and when you asked the question, "Well, where are you gonna get the riprap?"

"Well, from the spillway tunnel."

"And how much is that?"

"40,000 yards."

And I said, "We need 440,000."

And (gasps), "It will cost you $20 a yard," at that time, yeah, to get it hauled in and processed and placed.

And so they agreed, we'll give this a haircut and we got enough rock off.

If you look at the old pictures, the road was a pain.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- And they had that slide that took part of the roof off the power plant, and that kinda made the state's mind up.

And so by '57, they had this highway tunnel built and there was three tunnels down below that, one of them fell by itself, they other got a little nudge, (chuckles) and the other one we actually took out of there, just for safety.

And upstream here, and there was another tunnel and they thought those were great in the '20s.

(chuckles) - [Steve] So more than one thing got done when the dam was raised.

- [Bill] Right.

- I would imagine that the building, raising a dam and the construction techniques that you were able to use in the '80s there, into the early '90s, a lot easier to do than it would've been at the beginning, back in first decade- - Oh yeah.

- [Steve] Of the century.

- Their equipment was entirely different.

To build the road up here, to start with, they used hand drilling.

You hold the bar, the drizzle, a chisel, and I'll pound it.

You get a hold and then you blast and you do it over.

- You hopefully advance this much.

- Yeah.

And so that was done by hand and when they got up on top here, they built a steam plant and hauled coal and then their drills were operated with steam and those straw works on those cableways and everything operated with steam.

There was no electricity at that time.

Which turned in, the most expensive thing for those combination of contractors on the original was the price of coal.

- Price of coal.

Now, this is before the big coal mines in Wyoming were- - Well, they were hauling it in from Montana and from down there by Thermopolis.

- One of the things that is a reality of building a dam as innovative and as huge as this one was at the time, that we're not gonna dwell on, but the visitor's center and your history doesn't ignore either, this was dangerous work.

- Oh!

- People lost their lives building the dam, didn't they?

- Seven people lost their lives in the original dam.

I believe there were two fatalities when we raised the dam.

But these men were, number one, they had to work in the wintertime because the flows of the river were lower.

- [Steve] Just made it easier.

You had to do it.

- Yeah.

And it was brutal work.

Pick and shovel, dynamite.

So it was just amazing- - A lot of ways to get in trouble.

- [Beryl] Yes.

- Compared to building now, and of course we know the safety requirements of a work site like this in 1905, nothing like they are now.

- No, no.

Finally, towards the end of the construction, of 1905, 1910, they did have a sort of health insurance for workers, but they took 25 cents a week out of their pay.

- What would a worker make on the original project, do you know that?

- At that time, it was $1 a day.

Then there was a strike called by the workers.

First strike in the state of Wyoming.

- Really?

- And workers struck for $3 a day for a 10-hour day.

- Did they get it?

- Yes.

- They did?

- Yes.

- The history of the dam is full of details on specifications and construction methods, but Beryl Churchill's research led her to a breakthrough about a Georgia man who uprooted himself, his wife, and three school-aged children to move to Wyoming to supervise the dam project.

Their story led to her second book about Buffalo Bill titled, "Challenging the Canyon: A Family Man Builds a Dam."

Who was he and what lit your interest in him once you met him?

- D.W. Cole was the constructing engineer.

- [Steve] Cole.

Spell that for me.

- C-O-L-E. - [Steve] C-O-L-E. - And he came from Marietta, Georgia.

He had a high school education.

Before he retired, he had been involved in 15 of the major dams in the world, including India and then one in South America.

Then in 1986, when the dam was finished and Jean Cole Anderson came to see the dam her daddy built, and she was 80-some years old at that time, just a wonderful lady, and in our conversation she told me that she had letters that her father wrote and her siblings wrote back and forth to each other during construction of the dam and they had never been published.

- And you thought, "Hmm," light bulb.

- Yes.

We were going to collaborate and unfortunately she died before we did.

The family called me from Marietta, Georgia, said, "Come get these letters."

I took a briefcase, I had to borrow a suitcase to bring these beautiful letters, not only written by D.W. Cole about the construction and day-by-day work on how difficult it was, but his daughters and his wife also wrote letters that were kept by this family.

One of the things that really fascinated me then, talking with Mrs. Anderson, D.W. Cole brought his wife and three daughters to live with him at Buffalo Bill Dam when he was building it.

- [Steve] Is that so?

- Marietta, Georgia.

And they came- - So like moving to a different planet, almost.

- Yes, and they came from a fairly substantial family and Carolyn Cole was his wife.

She absolutely had more courage than I can imagine, bringing three little girls out here to live with her husband right, well, pretty close to where the Visitor Center is now.

- What do you know about their living circumstances at the time?

They built a house or was there... - Cole lived in a tent for at least a year of the first part of the construction.

Then they built a wood frame house, anyway, for them to live in.

Carolyn Cole took one look at this area and fell in love with it.

- Really?

- And their- - Now there's a break.

- Yes.

Yes.

- She could've had an opposite reaction.

(chuckles) - Yes.

And they were such a devoted couple that they wanted to be together and they followed, I think it said that the girls were in something like 15 different high schools when they were in school, just following their father to dam sites.

- Wow.

So when you heard this, you realized this is something that's worth writing about.

- Yes.

- Sort of the real people aspect of it.

It was probably pretty likely that the dam and the, undeniably, heroic and fantastic construction and engineering and design achievement was going to be documented, but here you found out about this family, what they had to go through, what was required to get the thing built.

- Yes, yes.

And there was a project history written by the engineers and construction people.

- Sure.

- But it, well, was pretty boring, paled to first-hand letters.

- You've touched on a topic that's, I think, dear to both of us.

I'm not saying that if this were happening now that you couldn't have written your book from emails.

(Beryl laughs) You could've, had you been able to find them, if they hadn't been deleted, if they could be located, but there's no beating- - A letter.

- Holding that handwritten object in your hand, is there?

- Absolutely, absolutely none at all.

And I keep encouraging people to save things now, even if they're emails, but the art of letter writing is almost dead.

How many times do you write a letter?

Yeah.

- [Steve] How many times do you?

- I do.

- Do you still do it?

You do it.

- Oh, I love to write letters.

- I don't say that I never do, but ah, I know, obviously I know what you mean.

And the worry, of course, is that where will those be, how many years later was it, this was in the '80s that you met the daughter of the builder?

So this is 75, 76 years after the fact, and 75 years from now, will the emails I send or receive be accessible and be somewhere?

I'm afraid not.

I don't know.

- There are beautiful letters from the little girls, when they wrote to their grandmother back in Georgia.

- And when you say beautiful, you don't just mean the words of the children, you mean the object.

- Yes.

- On the paper and envelope and their sample of their handwriting and the way it smells and the way it feels.

Where is all this material now?

- In the Buffalo Bill Historic Center Archive.

- Few would argue that the location of the dam is near perfect, both aesthetically and structurally, as both Beryl Churchill and Bill McCormick agree, if for slightly different reasons.

I know you appreciate this and I see it in your book as well, it's just this spectacular physical setting to put a dam, and I'm sure there are people who would look at it and think, "Well, it would be nice to look at the canyon without it."

You can look at the canyon without it, but seeing it there is sort of breathtaking, isn't it?

- Yes.

Yes.

After the dam was built, Carolyn Cole said, she was pregnant, so she had to leave a year before the dam was completed, and when she wrote after the completion of the dam, she said, "That is my dam too."

- "My dam too."

That's good.

- So she watched it go up.

- And you've seen that written in a letter?

- Yes.

- Yes.

- I've been to a lot of them that I had nothing to do with but this is probably one of the most ideal spots you can find, where the crest of the dam is shorter than the height of the dam.

- And the engineers called this the perfect wedge because it is just an ideal place to build a dam.

- I probably read it in your book, the final load of concrete was placed in January 10th or something.

- [Beryl] At 15 below zero.

- I didn't know you could work in concrete at that... And it's a wonder what they had to do to accommodate it.

- And that's why they had to heat, all of the last few feet of the dam was under tarps and steam heat.

Bill McCormick has been my go-to whenever I had to ask a technical question.

- They topped this dam out in January 1910 and it was cold, so they were putting new concrete that was cold on fairly cold (chuckles) subbase and it wasn't the best.

So we did take 18 inches off and we did put shear bars in there.

Most concrete dams have no rebar.

- [Steve] Really?

- Except around the outlet works or around a gate.

- So the dam has been standing here for more than 100 years in its base form.

Now, the addition is 30 years old, as of today.

What kind of shape is it in?

- We cored this dam and from the test that they made back when they built it, before 1910, they took test cylinders and they were aiming at 3,000 psi concrete and we had some 8,000.

- No kidding.

- Concrete, if you have clean aggregate- - Pretty darn good material, isn't it?

- It keeps hardening, strength-wise.

And those cores, some of them were 75 years old.

- You've maintained and held onto quite a bit of the original materials that you needed to work on the dam and contracts and plans and so forth, and you told me that from time to time you're still called upon to- - Yeah.

- Review the stuff and interpret it for them.

- Yeah, well... - And I don't just mean by us today.

- No, uh-uh.

I've always been slow on picking up on this new stuff.

I was raised where you had a phone like this and a 9-volt battery and everybody on the valley was on the phone.

"Get off the phone, Mabel, dammit!

I gotta get the doctor."

- Party line.

(Bill laughs) Do you mind telling us how old you are?

- 88.

- 88 years old.

- Yeah.

In my office, we had sometimes about 30 people there in the office and so we have these specs and so when whatever was active, I had a bookcase in my room, they're marked up, that I used and I kept them from every job (chuckles) that I worked.

And it's amazing.

Denver's gone through all of that, I think I mentioned, from the big reels and to the punch cards.

- Once in a while, it's good to still have this stuff.

It's a sort of a silly question for an engineer especially, but the day comes when you fill the lake again, allow it to fill to its capacity, and of course you've done it right, you have no idea, you have no worry that it's not gonna hold or anything, but it still must be a source of satisfaction, I guess, or pride to see that we raised the dam, here comes the water, it's holding just like it's supposed to.

- Yeah.

- And you did that.

- Yeah.

That was my business, was building dams and, no, I was happy with my life.

- Hired to do a job and did it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

Now, just as a matter of local color, your last name is Churchill and your husband's name is- - Winston.

- Winston.

So you're married to Winston Churchill.

- Yes.

- But you've pointed out to me that you knew him before the Winston Churchill that became globally and historically famous was really all that well known.

- Well, he, my Winston was born before the Winston was famous.

- [Steve] In more recent times, dam building has become something of a controversial topic in the West, behind the argument that the environment in and around some dam locations might be in better shape today had water been left to its natural course.

To Beryl Churchill, however, the benefits of Buffalo Bill Dam have outweighed any perceived detriments.

- The dams serve so many purposes and they, all dams are not bad.

Dams are vital to the economy of communities all over.

- And in some cases, the purpose and the functionality of those dams has now been called into question.

- Yeah.

- We don't see that here, do we?

- No, no, no.

This will be here, I hope, for a long time, or there aren't going to be very many people downstream that farm.

- I really enjoyed talking to you about this, learning more about the dam, glad you did what you did to make sure that this part of the history of it is preserved and maintained and shared, and thanks for being with us.

- It's been a labor of love.

- On Wyoming Chronicle.

- Good.

Keep laboring.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

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