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By Root 1763 0

by that same misbegotten act. The Bureau, of course, knew well enough that few, if any, of those projects made economic sense, and at least one of its officials, in private, was willing to admit it. In 1955, future commissioner Floyd Dominy, then chief of the Irrigation Division, received an angry letter from two old farmer friends from Nebraska, Claire and Donald Hanna. The Hannas were dryland farmers, and they were incensed that the Bureau’s Ainsworth Project—one of the Pick-Sloan bunch—might literally force them into irrigation farming. “I am really not happy about the Ainsworth Project,” Dominy confessed in his letter of reply of April 15, 1955. “... My views about the impropriety and damn foolishness involved in the construction of irrigation projects in relatively good dry land areas at the present have been repeatedly expressed.... As dear and honored friends I am troubled as to how to advise you,” Dominy went on. “The local towns and businessmen wanted it [the Ainsworth Project]. They could see themselves growing fat on large-scale construction payrolls. They could see something to be gained by increasing the number of farm families in their service area. Like the usual selfish citizen they were willing to accept this increase to their personal larder without thought as to the burden to be placed on the Federal tax payer.”

Predictably, Dominy managed to overcome such scruples after he was appointed commissioner. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Bureau launched a mighty effort to push forward the Garrison and Oahe projects, enormous diversions from Lake Sacajawea and Oahe Reservoir to compensate North and South Dakota (if not the dispossessed tribes) for the land drowned by the Corps. But the irrigation canals and local storage reservoirs would have consumed nearly as much productive farmland as the irrigation water would have created—in the case of the Garrison Diversion Project, 220,000 acres for canals and reservoirs versus 250,000 new acres irrigated. In addition, Garrison, in its original version, would have converted some 73,000 more acres of superb waterfowl habitat—prairie marshes and potholes used by hundreds of thousands of migrating ducks—into farm fields. Not only that, but it could easily have introduced parasites and competitive trash fish from the Missouri into streams emptying into Lakes Winnipeg and Manitoba, threatening very productive pike and lake trout fisheries. The Canadians, in fact, had been screaming objections into the deaf ear of the Bureau for years, and even sent a series of stern diplomatic protests to the State Department.

In the late 1970s, the Oahe Diversion Project, after reigning for years as the biggest political issue in South Dakota, was defeated by the very same farmers for whose alleged benefit it was to be built, and one of its principal champions, former Senator George McGovern, saw his political career buried with it. McGovern’s surprising loss, according to local political insiders, had as much to do with his unwavering support for a suddenly unpopular Oahe Project as it did with the campaign mounted against him by the ultraconservative Right. Garrison, in 1985, was partly completed and still alive, and a bobtailed version of the project seems likely to be built, irrigating perhaps 130,000 acres (devoted mainly to surplus crops) at a cost of $1,650,000 per farm. Energy requirements for pumping, which totaled 288,000 kilowatts under the original plan, would also be reduced, but how the dams can pump water to 130,000 acres and sell power at market rates to subsidize the water costs is a question that no one, least of all the Bureau, can answer.

As for the other dozens of projects assigned to the Bureau, few have been built, but the Corps, despite the antipathy of the local citizenry, has tried to steal away even these. On May 9, 1963, Dominy’s regional chief in Billings, Bruce Johnson, reported that the Corps “is not dismayed by the opposition” to two newly proposed dams on the Missouri, Fort Benton and High Cow Creek—nor, Johnson said, would “the highly preliminary stage of