Though the river is a powerful stream with a most spectacular cataract, it was 1925 before a power plant was opened at Grand Falls. This plant, together with the development of industry higher up at Edmundston, changed the economy of the upper stream, but to this day there are people living lower down who regret that a pleasant village was converted into a factory town with wide streets and a moviehouse. The engineers installed fish ladders for the salmon swimming up to the spawning beds on the Tobique, but salmon cannot so easily be guided back the same way and some of them are pretty sure to perish in the turbines. I was therefore not surprised to encounter some negative reactions to Beechwood along the river last spring. For the same reason the Egyptians and the Burmese want to build dams where dams never were.
Dams are fashionable.
Some people can't live unless they're fashionable. The St. John River people can. Their ancestors were driven out of the eastern American states because they were unimpressed by the fashionable politics of Mr. Jefferson. They are proud of the dignity of their own past, and they are proud of the dignity of this river they have so carefully preserved. The American general knew what he was talking about when he said that this country is an earlier America preserved.