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
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