Design was in a growing technological field, so expansions were likely. Design would generate hundreds of millions of dollars in one-time construction spending, Sacca told city officials, and the facility would produce hundreds of permanent jobs. He would say only that he worked for a company called Design LLC and that the company needed plenty of electricity and a connection to transcontinental fiber-optic cable. The agent, Chris Sacca, was circumspect from the start. Then, in 2004, four years after the aluminum smelter finally closed and 199 years after Lewis and Clark first visited the region, a tall man in shorts and an untucked shirt arrived in town and said he was looking for a large industrial tract for his employer. “We were desperate,” Mayor Richard Mays says. “Our town was dying,” city council member Darcy Long says. People remember those years here in negative superlatives. After several different owners, it closed for good in 2000. Like so many American factories, however, the smelter began to falter in the 1980s. Harvey became a serial polluter, but at its peak the smelter employed one in eight of the city’s adult population. In 1958, Harvey Aluminum had built a huge smelter in The Dalles. Unlike Hood River, it was still stuck in the old economy. With a climate and a landscape unfit for tourism, as the 20th century became the 21st The Dalles found itself on the wrong side of more than just green and brown Oregon. In wintertime, everything here-the scrub brush, the ground it grows from, and the volcanic rock that forms the Gorge’s walls-are all the same dull matte brown color of stale gingerbread.

Little more than scrub brush grows around The Dalles, and the Gorge’s constant west wind blows tumbleweed up against the fence lines in the industrial district. Two summers ago, the temperature reached 118 degrees.

Although the Columbia runs right past it and is filled with more than a million salmon, The Dalles gets only 14 inches of precipitation a year. The Dalles, however, sits in a high desert.

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