Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

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.