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By Root 1525 0

October 15, 1944, Glenn Sloan and a representative of Colonel Pick (who had since gone off to build the Ledo Road in Burma) sat down in a meeting which is probably historic for what it accomplished in a given amount of time. On October 17, two days later, they emerged to announce that the Pick Plan and the Sloan Plan had been “reconciled.” Had anyone taken a closer look—hardly anyone did—he would have seen that the reconciliation amounted to the adoption, virtually intact, of both agencies’ plans. With the single exception of a dam at Oak Creek, South Dakota, originally proposed by the Corps of Engineers, the Pick-Sloan “compromise” included every dam and project in the original and separate plans, plus some additions which the agencies had somehow managed to overlook. Critics such as James Patton, the president of the National Farmers’ Union, called it a “shameless shotgun wedding,” and calculated that instead of saving the taxpayers money, it would cost them at least $250 million in redundant features. Henry Hart acidly observed that “reconciliation meant chiefly that each agency became reconciled to the works of the other.”

The most significant aspect of the reconciliation was that the two agencies had agreed to spend $1.9 billion of the taxpayers’ money (an estimate which would, as usual, turn out to be much too low) on a whole whose parts, according to their earlier testimony, would cancel out each other’s usefulness. The second most significant aspect was that the Bureau agreed to let the Corps go ahead and build its huge main-stem reservoirs first: “The Corps got the here and now,” says David Weiman, a lobbyist who would later be hired to fight several of the Bureau’s projects by the same farmers who were supposed to benefit from their existence. “The Bureau got the then and there.”

One of the least-known consequences of water development in America is its impact on the Indians who hadn’t already succumbed to the U.S. Cavalry, smallpox, and social rot. Although many of the tribes had been sequestered on reservations that were far from the riverbottoms where they used to live, some tribes had been granted good riverbottom reservation land—either because the lands were prone to flooding, or because the government was occasionally in a generous mood.

The three tribes whom Lewis and Clark encountered along the Missouri River in North Dakota were the Mandan, the Hidatsa, and the Arikara. Perhaps because they were generally peaceful and had helped the explorers (Lewis and Clark spent their first winter with the Mandan, and their adopted Shoshone-Mandan interpreter, Sacajawea, probably saved their lives), the associated Three Tribes were later rewarded with some of the better reservation land in the West: miles of fertile bottoms along the serpentine Missouri, which they used mainly for raising cattle. These were the same lands that the Bureau of Reclamation considered the best winter cattle range in the state, and which it said ought never to be drowned by a reservoir. Under the Corps of Engineers plan, however, the Three Tribes’ reservation would sit directly under the reservoir behind Garrison Dam.

The Corps had, of course, taken extraordinary care not to inundate any of the white towns that were situated along the river. The reservoir behind Oahe Dam, which would be more than 150 miles long, would stop just shy of Bismarck, North Dakota. Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, would sit safely inside a small reservoir-free zone between the tail end of Lake Francis Case and the upper end of Lake Oahe; were it not for the town, the two reservoirs would have virtually touched, nose to tail. Chamberlain, South Dakota, nestled between the reservoirs formed by Big Bend and Fort Randall Dams, was similarly spared. The height of Garrison Dam was reduced by twenty feet so that the surface level of the reservoir would be 1,830 feet above sea level, not 1,850 feet as originally planned. It was a loss of several million acre-feet of storage exclusively for the benefit of Williston, North Dakota, a small part of which could