oroughly than any other American stream.
Its intimacy with the national capital at Washington and with great
figures and events of our history have centered much American interest
on it. In many ways it is a classic Eastern river, copious and scenic,
that drains some 15,000 square miles of varied, historic, and often
striking landscape, from the green mountains along the Allegheny Front
to the sultry lowlands of the estuary's shores where the earliest
plantations were established among the Indian tribes. It has tributaries
large and small whose names echo with connotations for American
ears--the Shenandoah, the Monocacy, the Saint Mary's, Antietam Creek,
Bull Run....

And it has long been the subject for debate and discussion over how it
may best be handled to serve man's ends, for in common with other rivers
in civilized regions it has developed problems of pollution, of
landscape destruction, of occasional floods, of impending shortages of
water for its basin's increasing population. Out of the debates have
emerged studies and plans, some fragmentary and some whole, some
specialized and some general. This present report concerns the latest
study, made under the leadership of Secretary of the Interior Stewart L.
Udall according to a directive given him by President Johnson in 1965.
The report is "final" only in that it sums up this study. It is by no
means final in terms of the Potomac, for it points toward future action
and continuing study and planning, and an important part of its function
will be to show why a degree of inconclusiveness in such matters is
necessary and desirable.

Within a remarkably few years after Captain John Smith sailed up the
Potomac estuary in 1608 to assess its treasures and to make the
acquaintance of the Algonquian tribesmen whose villages flourished on
either shore, other vigorous white men came there to stay, on both the
Maryland and Virginia sides. In the century that followed they raced and
leapfrogged one another upriver, elbowing the Indians out, and with the
aid of indentured labor and later of African slaves they helped to shape
the Tidewater tobacco civilization that engendered so many future
leaders of the American republic. Near the head of navigation, shipping
centers grew up--among them Alexandria and Georgetown, forerunners of
the metropolis that bestrides the river at the Fall Line today. Above
there in the upper Piedmont, and then across the Blue Ridge in the Great
Valle