Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

The Corps had, of course, taken extraordinary care not to inundate any of the white towns that were situated along the river. The reservoir behind Oahe Dam, which would be more than 150 miles long, would stop just shy of Bismarck, North Dakota. Pierre, the capital of South Dakota, would sit safely inside a small reservoir-free zone between the tail end of Lake Francis Case and the upper end of Lake Oahe; were it not for the town, the two reservoirs would have virtually touched, nose to tail. Chamberlain, South Dakota, nestled between the reservoirs formed by Big Bend and Fort Randall Dams, was similarly spared. The height of Garrison Dam was reduced by twenty feet so that the surface level of the reservoir would be 1,830 feet above sea level, not 1,850 feet as originally planned. It was a loss of several million acre-feet of storage exclusively for the benefit of Williston, North Dakota, a small part of which could have been subject to inundation during wet years.