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By Root 1746 0

traffic—at least compared to other big rivers like the Mississippi and the Illinois—so the Corps of Engineers didn’t have a good reason to improve it for navigation. Even if it had wanted to, the task of making such an erratic, muddy, unconfined river suitable for navigation was overwhelming. The Missouri habitually flooded Kansas City and other towns along its course, but until a major federal flood-control act was passed in 1937—and until the Corps abandoned the doctrine, which it had held to with Ptolomeic rigidity, that reservoirs don’t control floods—the Army Engineers had little interest in doing much about it.

The Bureau hadn’t built much in the upper Missouri Basin, either, for the same reason that it hadn’t built much along the upper Colorado and its tributaries: irrigation farming in cold, high-altitude terrain was usually a losing proposition. It had investigated the basin thoroughly, and by 1907 it had nine projects underway there, mainly for political reasons: the Missouri Basin states contributed a lot of money to the Reclamation Fund. But of the nine projects, not a single one was going to pay for itself within the forty-year term required by the amended Reclamation Act. The nine projects together owed the Treasury and the Reclamation Fund $55,755,000, but had repaid only $17,518,000, even though they were exempted from paying interest. At the rate that revenues—which depended more than anything else on the irrigators’ meager ability to pay—were dribbling in, the projects wouldn’t be repaid within two hundred years, if ever.

The only way to steer reclamation away from utter financial disaster in the Missouri Basin was to subsidize it with hydropower revenues. Hydroelectric output being a function of two variables—volume of water and height of drop—it made good sense, from the Bureau’s point of view, to build high dams along the upper tributaries to generate as much power as possible. The stored water could then be used to irrigate adjacent agricultural land, and hydropower revenues would cover the inevitable losses. Glenn Sloan, an assistant engineer in the Billings office, had begun to draw the outlines of such a basinwide project in the late 1930s, and was reasonably close to finishing his report in 1943, when the Missouri decided to go on a rampage. It produced three big floods—in March, May, and June—and during the last one Omaha and Kansas City were navigable by boat. The Corps’ regional office happened to be in Omaha, and its petulant director, Lewis Pick, who would later become the Chief of Engineers, was nearly chased by the river to higher ground. To a military man like Pick, it was an unforgivable insult. “I want control of the Missouri River!” he is said to have barked at his subordinates. Before the end of the year, Pick had dispatched to Washington a twelve-page report on harnessing the Missouri, which was to become known as the Pick Plan.

The trouble with the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan—which was frantically completed after the Bureau learned about the Pick Plan—was that you could logically build one or the other, but not both. The Corps wanted to build a few dams on upriver tributaries, although, in locating them, it paid no attention at all to irrigation. It also wanted to erect fifteen hundred miles of new levees. All of that was dwarfed, however, by what the Corps planned to do to the river between Fort Peck Reservoir and Yankton, South Dakota. The plan called for five dams and reservoirs, all of them of monstrous size. Garrison Dam, in western North Dakota, was the largest, and would, as the Corps took pains to point out, contain twenty-five times as much material as the Great Pyramid of Cheops. Two and a half miles long, 210 feet high, the dam would be the second-biggest structure on earth (Fort Peck Dam was larger). The Washington Monument would stick out of it like a spike in a railroad tie. The other dams—Oahe, Gavins Point, Big Bend, Fort Randall—would be smaller, but large enough to dwarf almost anything else around. Eight hundred miles of the Missouri would be transformed