Cadillac Desert (34 page)

The Corps’ success in bouncing the Bureau of Reclamation off a project it had already been authorized to build, and three other projects where it should have been the one to build, had the effect Ickes foresaw. An effort was immediately launched by the state’s growers to repeal all the constraining features of the Reclamation Act—the acreage limitation, the prohibition on leasing, the requirement that farmers must live within fifty miles of their land—as it applied to the Central Valley Project. (Naturally, all the subsidies were to be retained.) Even though the campaign failed, the Corps’ record in California made the irrigation lobby throughout the entire West sit up and take notice. The Bureau of Reclamation was a good thing, but the
Corps
—the Corps of Engineers was a dream come true.

A
t the same time the Corps and the Bureau of Reclamation were fighting over the rivers of the southern Sierra Nevada, they were engaged in a battle of more epic proportions over the Missouri River. The historical significance of that battle would be greater, too—not only because the Missouri is a much bigger and more important river than the Kings or the Kern, but because, in defiance of common sense, economics, and even simple hydrology, the Missouri was an instance where
both
agencies managed to win.

The Missouri River is, after the Columbia, the biggest river in the American West, though it takes it a long time to grow to size. The Columbia, rising prodigiously out of the rain forests of the Purcell Mountains in Canada, is like a Clydesdale horse, big and powerful at birth. The Missouri, still small after going a distance in which the Columbia becomes huge, is a scavenger of a river, struggling to attain size. It isn’t until the North Dakota border, nearly a thousand miles from its source, where the Yellowstone River adds a surge out of the Absaroka and Big Horn Mountains, that the Missouri begins to look impressive. The river turns south, capturing the Platte and the Niobrara and the Kansas and the James, and then east again. By the time it has gone two and a half thousand miles and joined the Mississippi, it is the twelfth-longest river in the world; however, because of the aridity of the basin it drains, the Missouri is only the seventh-ranking river in the country in terms of annual flow.

Meager for its huge watershed and length, the virgin Missouri also flowed erratic in the extreme. At Hermann, Missouri, the discharge to the Mississippi has been measured as low as forty-two hundred cubic feet per second and, in June of 1944, as high as 892,000 cubic feet per second, enough water in a day to satisfy New York City for a year. Its course was as unpredictable as its volume. Flowing across the glacial outwash of the plains, the Missouri is unconfined by a true canyon; it is held in check, more or less, by low bluffs as far apart as ten miles. Even these bluffs, in the river’s days of freedom, existed pretty much at the Missouri’s whim. Within its wide and crumbly confinement, the virgin Missouri writhed like a captive snake. Seemingly permanent islands and bottomlands covered by meadows and trees would seduce farmers down to the river; then they would disappear, never to return, when the river made a lateral migration of a half mile in a single day. Boats often marooned on what had been the main channel the day before; whole neighborhoods on the river bluff sometimes dropped in when the Missouri chewed its banks.

Until 1940, when the Corps of Engineers finished Fort Peck Dam and created, for reasons that were and still are less than obvious, a 140-mile-long flood-control reservoir in the arid heart of Montana, the Missouri River was almost completely uncontrolled. There were two reasons for this. One was that the river didn’t show promise of carrying much barge 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 into a chain of huge, turbid reservoirs. The six main-stem dams would back up almost ninety million acre-feet of water, sufficient to turn Pennsylvania into a shallow lake. The whole scheme—if one believed the Corps’ figures, which have always been notoriously low—would cost $660 million, in 1944 dollars.

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 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.”

O
ne 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.