Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

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 ...