The Hurricane Creek Massacre, page 5 Tom Bethell
photographs: four students from San Francisco State, pages 10-11
The Cowboy Steve Taylor Show, page 12 Guy Mendes
Captain Kentucky in poems and pictures, page 15 James Baker Hall
A surveillance report on said Captain, page 17 Percy P. Cassidy
music:  Dylan and his New Morning, page 18 Irving Washington
btf poor-mouth plea for money, page 20 Virgil Sturgil
cover:   photo by Eric Kronengold
The blue-tail fly is published monthly (when funds allow) by blue-tail fly, inc.,  P.O. Box 7304, Lexington, Kentucky 40506
Peabody goes West
"From the beginning the indigenous North Americans told the invading white man the Euro-american way of life was dangerous to all land and life on Earth. They were not heard-they were massacred. Now, all that they have warned us of has come to pass: the waters we drink are poisoned, the air we breath is poisoned, the food we eat is poisoned, our agricultural lands are dead and dying, the people in our cities have gone insane and the whole of the cycle of life is being destroyed by the way we live.. ."
"Committee for Traditional Indian Land &Life
PAGE, Arizona (LNS)-Peabody Coal Co., already responsible for devastation in Appalachia, is now going to strip-mine 100 square miles of sacred Indian land on the Navajo and Hopi reservations in northwestern Arizona. Peabody, wholly owned by the Kennecott Copper Company, will make over $775,000,000 while feeding the low-grade, dirty coal into one of the largest power complexes in the country.
Some of the coal ripped from Black Mesa will be sent 80 miles by rail to the Navajo Power Generating Station near Page, Arizona. The rest will be crushed, mixed with precious desert water and pushed 272 miles through an 18 inch pipeline to the Mojave Power Generating Station near Bullhead City, Nevada. These two plants are part of a grid called W.E.S.T. (Western Energy Supply and Transmission Associates), which officially involves 23 major state, municipal and federal power companies and agencies.
The complex sprawls over California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah, and it includes the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the Salt
River Project of Arizona, Southern California Edison, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Arizona Public Service Company. Other corporations involved in the project are Southern Pacific, Shell, Westinghouse and General Electric.
The conglomerate is in the process of creating a wasteland out of the Southwest, under the guise of the "Four Corners Development Project." The spread of devastation will be wide. The once-lush Imperial (Calif.) and Mexical (Mex.) Valleys could easily be rendered completely unproductive. An area extending from Southern California to the Rocky Mountains will be as smoggy as the Los Angeles Basin in a few years.
The government and Peabody claim that they got their property rights fair and square though an agreement signed with the Indian Tribal Council. The Council, set up in 193S, is made up of Indian men who are considered "progressive" enough for the white Bureau of Indian Affairs which appoints them.)
One month after the Peabody Coal Company was granted a 'drilling and exploration permit' by the Navajo and Hopi Tribal Councils, the Secretary of the Interior recommended enactment of legislation to sanction building of the Glen Canyon Dam. Construction of the dam and the formation of Lake Powell, which were actually early steps in the Four Corners Development, were begun only after, voters, taxpayers and consumers had been convinced the lake was "recreational." (There were already plans to build one large power station and one monstrously large power station almost on the shores across the lake from each other"plants that would pump vast tonnages of smog-producing chemicals and poisons into the air around the lake and that would dump pollutants, chemicals and hot and salinized water into the lake.)
Two years before the Navajo Tribal
blue-tail fly
number eleven
people: Guy Mendes, Darrell Rice, David Holwerk, Sue Anne Salmon, Julie Mendes, Irving Washington, Chuck the Trucker, Skip Taylor, Don Pratt, Jonathan Greene, Tony Urie, Rick Bell, Gretchen Brown, Dick "Dirk" Klausner, Gene Meatyard, John Polk, Harold Sherman, Diana Ryan, Harold Gage and that inseparable pair, Virgil Sturgil and King Creole. Invaluable As-sistance by The Venerable Bede and Colleen Bean,  the Dream Machine.
Council voted to permit the Salt River Project to build the Navajo station at Page, the turbine-generators ($100,000,000 worth) had already been ordered from General Electric. Waters from the Navajo Dam on the San Juan River, originally alloted to the "Navajo Irrigation Project" have been cut, and are now being alloted to large power stations in northwestern New Mexico.
During 1966, an estimate was made by federal government workers of the extent of damage done to fish and wildlife habitats by strip-mining. There had been 12,890 miles of streams damaged. Of our lakes and resevoirs, 145,000 acres had suffered damage from strip miner's digging. And wildlife habitats had been destroyed"more than V/i million acres. At least 39 states had miles of ruined streams and acres of ravaged land to add to the total.
When the Department of the Interior "warned" Peabody about the "dangers" of strip-mining, Peabody agreed to: exercise "diligence" in the mining operations; to carry on development and operations "in a workmanlike manner and to the fullest possible extent" and to surrender and return the premises on termination of the lease in as good condition as received "except for ordinary wear, tear and depletion incidental to mining operations and unavoidable accidents."
A represenative of the Peabody Coal Company has stated that the operation piping the coal from Black Mesa to Bullhead City "won't take much water." Another representative has even tried to claim the strip-mine line operation will improve the water table. Actually it requires a considerable amount of water to push six to ten tons of coal per minute through a 272 mile pipeline. Between 3,000,000 and 7,500,000 gallons of water will be pumped each day from beneath Black Mesa, not including water for on site-operations.
The water being removed is fossil
water, deposited eons ago when the Southwest was much wetter. It will not reaccumulate unless nature readjusts climatic conditions hi the region. Its reaccumulation now would depend directly upon the scant rainfall of the area"currently 6-15 inches a year.
Corn cultivation is the prime source of livelihood and food to the Hopi. If the natural equilibrium of the underground water is upset, the water from the crops supporting water table will be depleted, destroying the delicate balance of the arid desert environment. Hopi corn, as many desert-adapted plants, is short-rooted; a drop of only a few inches in the water table would be enough to end its cultivation.
When completed and fully operative, the five units of the two power stations receiving coal from Black Mesa will receive, consume, and convert over 38,000 tons of coal per day into smog and power.
It is well known that coal-burning power plants are dangerous sources of air pollution. Under current standards and projected plans, these power plants will daily emit more ash particulate matter than is released in Los Angeles and New York combined. (Southern Californians refused to permit the construction of similar plants in their cities because of the air pollution they would cause.)
The one plant now in operation near Farmington, New Mexico, is daily spewing forth hundreds of tons of fly ash and invisible poisonous gasses. Aerial tracking of the visible pollution shows that this single plant, not yet in full operation, daily soils the air, water, land and people over an area of 100,000 square miles. What will happen when this plant is joined by an identical plant, San Juan, and by those proposed in Utah, and the ones at Page and Mojave?
"/ only wish they could take into their hearts and souk what we see in the evening in our Hopi land; the mountains
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