Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [118]
The Corps’ success in bouncing the Bureau of Reclamation off a project it had already been authorized to build, and three other projects where it should have been the one to build, had the effect Ickes foresaw. An effort was immediately launched by the state’s growers to repeal all the constraining features of the Reclamation Act—the acreage limitation, the prohibition on leasing, the requirement that farmers must live within fifty miles of their land—as it applied to the Central Valley Project. (Naturally, all the subsidies were to be retained.) Even though the campaign failed, the Corps’ record in California made the irrigation lobby throughout the entire West sit up and take notice. The Bureau of Reclamation was a good thing, but the Corps—the Corps of Engineers was a dream come true.
At the same time the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation were fighting over the rivers of the southern Sierra Nevada, they were engaged in a battle of more epic proportions over the Missouri River. The historical significance of that battle would be greater, too—not only because the Missouri is a much bigger and more important river than the Kings or the Kern, but because, in defiance of common sense, economics, and even simple hydrology, the Missouri was an instance where both agencies managed to win.
The Missouri River is, after the Columbia, the biggest river in the American West, though it takes it a long time to grow to size. The Columbia, rising prodigiously out of the rain forests of the Purcell Mountains in Canada, is like a Clydesdale horse, big and powerful at birth. The Missouri, still small after going a distance in which the Columbia becomes huge, is a scavenger of a river, struggling to attain size. It isn’t until the North Dakota border, nearly a thousand miles from its source, where the Yellowstone River adds a surge out of the Absaroka and Big Horn Mountains, that the Missouri begins to look impressive. The river turns south, capturing the Platte and the Niobrara and the Kansas and the James, and then east again. By the time it has gone two and a half thousand miles and joined the Mississippi, it is the twelfth-longest river in the world; however, because of the aridity of the basin it drains, the Missouri is only the seventh-ranking river in the country in terms of annual flow.
Meager for its huge watershed and length, the virgin Missouri also flowed erratic in the extreme. At Hermann, Missouri, the discharge to the Mississippi has been measured as low as forty-two hundred cubic feet per second and, in June of 1944, as high as 892,000 cubic feet per second, enough water in a day to satisfy New York City for a year. Its course was as unpredictable as its volume. Flowing across the glacial outwash of the plains, the Missouri is unconfined by a true canyon; it is held in check, more or less, by low bluffs as far apart as ten miles. Even these bluffs, in the river’s days of freedom, existed pretty much at the Missouri’s whim. Within its wide and crumbly confinement, the virgin Missouri writhed like a captive snake. Seemingly permanent islands and bottomlands covered by meadows and trees would seduce farmers down to the river; then they would disappear, never to return, when the river made a lateral migration of a half mile in a single day. Boats often marooned on what had been the main channel the day before; whole neighborhoods on the river bluff sometimes dropped in when the Missouri chewed its banks.
Until 1940, when the Corps of Engineers finished Fort Peck Dam and created, for reasons that were and still are less than obvious, a 140-mile-long flood-control reservoir in the arid heart of Montana, the Missouri River was almost completely uncontrolled. There were two reasons for this. One was that the river didn’t show promise of carrying much barge