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
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