Cadillac Desert_ The American West and Its Disappearing Water - Marc Reisner [124]
To eliminate any possibility that Congress or the President might succumb to a tender conscience and eliminate Garrison Dam from the Pick-Sloan Plan, the Corps had already begun work on it in 1945, three years before the agreement with the Indians was signed. In fact, it would spend $60 million on ambiguously authorized “preliminary” work on the dam between 1945 and 1948. A number of members of Congress protested that such work was, if not outright illegal, then certainly a moral wrong. But the one party that might have gone to court for a ruling—the Fort Berthold tribes—had been forbidden to spend any of their compensatory money on attorneys.
The Fort Berthold Indians have never recovered from the trauma they underwent. Their whole sense of cohesiveness was lost, and they adjusted badly to life on the arid plains and in the white towns. But no humiliation could have been greater than for them to see the signs that were erected around the reservoir as it slowly filled, submerging the dying cottonwoods and drowning the land they had occupied for at least four hundred years. In what looked to the Indians like a stroke of malevolent inspiration, the Corps of Engineers had decided to call the giant, turbid pool of water Lake Sacajawea.
As is the case with most schemes that involve a dazzling transmogrification of nature, this is a story without an end, and a later chapter will say something about the likely consequences of trapping most of the Missouri’s silt behind six great dams. For now, it is worth looking briefly at what the Pick-Sloan plan has wrought.
The Corps’ six Missouri River reservoirs, which cost $1.2 billion to build even then, have undoubtedly lowered the flood crests all the way down to New Orleans—though they did not prevent a disastrous flood in the early 1970s, when the Mississippi widened by several miles and caused tens of millions of dollars in damage. Barge traffic hasn’t come close to the Corps’ projections; in 1984, traffic on the entire navigable stretch of the Missouri amounted to only 2.9 million tons, an infinitesimal percentage of the 590 million tons carried by the Mississippi system. The small port of Lorain, Ohio, handled nearly five times as much. The worst natural damage was the flooding of some of the best riparian waterfowl habitat in the world. A former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, John Gottschalk, remembers walking along the undammed middle Missouri for five miles and flushing countless flocks of pheasants and migrating ducks; today, one would be lucky to see anything at all. The birds thrived in the spacious, secluded bottomlands and oxbow pools and marshes, and those are almost entirely gone.
Had the Missouri been left to the Bureau of Reclamation exclusively, things wouldn’t necessarily have turned out much better. However, because the projects would, for the most part, have been well upriver, the Fort Berthold Reservation wouldn’t have been drowned, a lot of riparian waterfowl habitat in the heart of the Central Flyway wouldn’t have been inundated, and the dams, being high rather than wide, would likely have produced a lot more hydroelectricity for their size. The irrigation projects the Bureau planned might have been losers in an economic sense, but the Missouri, if it had to be intensively developed, might have been more useful irrigating crops than providing free transit—at enormous public expense—for a handful of barges.
The Bureau, of course, was not to be denied, either, if it could help it. Ever since the 1950s, it has been trying, without too much success, to build the irrigation projects authorized by the Pick-Sloan Plan—the “then-and-later” dams over which the Corps’ reservoirs took precedence. The O’Neill Project on the Niobrara River in Nebraska, the Narrows Dam on the South Platte in Colorado, the Garrison and Oahe projects in the Dakotas—projects that have become some of the most controversial in the nation—were all authorized