Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [120]
There was almost nothing about the Corps’ plan that the Bureau liked. The dams were all too low or poorly situated to draw the power potential out of the river. (The Corps usually installed about as much public power as it felt the private power companies would tolerate, and it was no surprise to anyone that the Western Power Company became a champion of the Pick Plan, not the Sloan Plan.) The storage was, with a few exceptions, far downriver from the lands the Bureau wanted to irrigate, and a lot of it was in the middle of unirrigable wastelands, which made the Bureau furious. The Missouri’s potential as a navigable waterway—that was one of the main justifications of the Pick Plan—was, as far as the Bureau was concerned, shamelessly overstated; to spend more than half a billion dollars on a river channel that would never carry more than a few hundred barges a year was a criminal waste of scarce money and water. It was wasteful in other ways as well. One of the reservoirs, Garrison, would drown the best winter cattle range in North Dakota. Although the Bureau had flooded its share of productive river bottomlands, this was an instance where it was troubled by the idea. As for flood control, Glenn Sloan, who understood the hydrodynamics of the Missouri River as well as anyone alive, said in Congressional testimony that “the 1943 flood could have been regulated to a safe capacity ... at Sioux City, Omaha, and Kansas City with only two million acre-feet in storage.” But the Corps was talking about creating sixty million acre-feet of new reservoir storage.
The Corps of Engineers’ obsession with humbling the wild Missouri River seemed to derive mainly from the fact that Colonel Pick was mad at it. (Although, needless to say, in the wake of the war his agency, its staff swollen by the thousands, was eager for new work.) According to Henry Hart, a journalist and historian who covered the Pick-Sloan controversy in the 1940s and later wrote a book about the Missouri, the Corps “relied for justification entirely on the public sense of shock at the disruption caused by floods.” Nonetheless, the Pick Plan went through the House Rivers and Harbors Committee without a hitch, and passed the full House in the spring of 1944, while still under consideration in the Senate. It seemed only a matter of weeks before it became law.
The Bureau of Reclamation, meanwhile, felt so threatened by the Pick Plan that it had quickly produced a plan of its own that was equally ambitious, and only slightly more susceptible to logic. Reconnaissance studies of reservoir and irrigation sites were conducted with such haste that, even within the Bureau, they were referred to as “windshield reconnaissance”—an allusion to $30 million reservoirs being plotted from behind the windshields of moving cars. The Bureau spewed out project recommendations like popcorn. The final Sloan Plan was a catch basin of ninety dams and several hundred individual irrigation projects; among other things, it called for fifteen reservoirs on three meager tributaries in the Dakotas. The Sloan Plan, however, soon acquired some powerful supporters, too. By the end of 1943, the Congress had two irreconcilable plans before it. The lobbies behind them were about equally matched. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing to do: adopt them both.
The impetus came from FDR himself, though the result was not exactly what he intended. With the Bureau and the Corps stalemated, Roosevelt decided to break the impasse by sending Congress a strongly worded letter saying that the solution to developing the Missouri Basin was to create a regional authority, similar to the TVA, and take development out of both agencies’ hands. That was more than the Corps and the Bureau had bargained on. On