ject with its reprehensible distortion of the legislative process needs to
be understood.

The Tellico Dam had its hypothetical conception as early as 1936, when
the TVA identified all the potentially dammable sites in the Tennessee Valley
system. It did so on the basis of the original 1933 mandate for the TVA to
maintain and operate properties then owned by the United States in the
vicinity of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the interest of national defense, for
agricultural and industrial development, and to improve navigation and
flood control on the Tennessee and Mississippi River basins. ¹ Until 1966,
however, the Tellico site received low priority as the TVA proceeded to
build hydroelectric dams and flood-control structures among some sev-
enty other originally identified locations throughout the Tennessee Valley.
But by 1960, with more than sixty dams built, the TVA fastened onto the
only remaining area of the Little Tennessee River that still flowed unim-
peded for some thirty-three miles at its mouth into the Big Tennessee. As
anticipated, the TVA acquired 38,000 acres for the Tellico project. More than
16,000 acres were eventually inundated by the dam, and the remaining
acreage was slated for development having industrial, commercial, resi-
dential, and recreational applications. The project, however, would sacri-
fice more than seven hundred farms of some of the most fertile, prime
growing land in the entire country and restrain the last stretch of free-flow-
ing river favored by regional fishermen and canoeists. In addition, the
impounded water, projected as a vast recreational lake and shoreland
development by the TVA, would submerge Chota, the ancient Cherokee
capital, along with the historic Cherokee villages of Citico, Toqua, Tomotley,
Mialaquo, Tuskegee--the birthplace of Sequoyah, and Tanasee, from which
the state of Tennessee derived its name. Although Cherokee villages once
covered the Southern Appalachians with hunting grounds extending across
Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, and Georgia, one of the densest concen-
trations of Cherokee life and culture had flourished in these and other
villages now slated for submersion. Moreover, given the Cherokee cus-
tom of burying the dead near the places where they had lived, the entire
16,000 acres to be flooded contained the grave sites of thousands of Chero-
kee ancestors.

Local resistance by those whose historical roots and way of life would
be destroyed by the Tellico project were not enough to stop the powerful
linkage between the TVA, the pork-barrel congressional committees, local
politicians, and land speculators. Congress appropriated funds for the
project in 1966, and the concrete portion of the dam was completed by
1968. But before earthen dikes could be positioned for the actual impound-
ment of the river, a lawsuit was initiated by the Environmental Defense

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