Pick-Sloan Plan of 1944

The Missouri River, often called the Big Muddy, the longest in North America, flooded in the spring of 1943 inundating more than 1.5 million acres of fertile land, causing more than $47 million in damages and claiming six lives. Previous floods and droughts of immense proportions, particularly during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, called for a solution to the problems of too much water or not enough water for the farmers of North and South Dakota and states farther down the river.

In the fall of 1943, an attempt to control the flooding by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers resulted in a plan, called the Pick Plan, to build a series of main stem dams in North and South Dakota. According to Reber (1943), Colonel Lewis Pick (later lieutenant general and chief of the Army Corps of Engineers), the corps’ Missouri River engineer, speaking at the Missouri River States Commission (MRSC) on May 21,1943, said,

Pick's plan emphasized flood control and navigation for barges and boats. In the spring of 1944, the Bureau of Reclamation released its own plan, developed by W. Glenn Sloan, the assistant regional director in the Billings, Montana, office. Sloan's plan would control flooding by building dams on the tributaries, not the main stem of the river, and emphasized irrigation, hydropower, fish and wildlife habitats, and recreational facilities. He stated that “man cannot control the weather, but through engineering he can modify flood damages and diminish the effects of aridity.”

Supporters of both plans maneuvered for funding in Congress. In October of 1944, under pressure from President Roosevelt, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation agreed to merge their plans into the Pick-Sloan Plan, keeping the major provisions of both plans. The downstream states of the Missouri Basin were to receive relief from the flooding of the river and the upper-basin states would be supplied with much-needed irrigation. Congress approved the plan as part of the Flood Control Act of 1944. The act allowed the secretary of the interior to sell power produced by corps projects and authorized the massive civil works projects envisioned by the Pick-Sloan Plan. Six major dams would be built by the corps on the main stem of the river, with many smaller dams erected on the tributaries by the bureau, creating more than 100 reservoirs and canals for irrigation. Over the course of the next 60 years, more than 50 new dams and lakes would be created on the Missouri and [Page 539]its tributaries. Nebraska, as an example, has more than 10 lakes across the state as a result of Pick-Sloan construction. The project tamed the river which, now, rarely threatens to overflow.

Like most large projects and like many compromise plans, Pick-Sloan has its critics. Farmers are disappointed that while 3 million acres actually receive water, these acres compose only 10 percent of the planned irrigable acres. Environmentalists decry the loss of habitats for wildlife that were destroyed by the flooding. Recreational users complain about silt filling up the reservoirs. Perhaps the most legitimate complaints come from Native Americans, who saw many of their sacred tribal grounds flooded and at the bottom of the new lakes.

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