Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

by Marc Reisner

Until 1940, when the Corps of Engineers finished Fort Peck Dam and created, for reasons that were and still are less than obvious, a 140-mile-long flood-control reservoir in the arid heart of Montana, the Missouri River was almost completely uncontrolled. There were two reasons for this. One was that the river didn’t show promise of carrying much barge traffic—at least compared to other big rivers like the Mississippi and the Illinois—so the Corps of Engineers didn’t have a good reason to improve it for navigation. Even if it had wanted to, the task of making such an erratic, muddy, unconfined river suitable for navigation was overwhelming. The Missouri habitually flooded Kansas City and other towns along its course, but until a major federal flood-control act was passed in 1937—and until the Corps abandoned the doctrine, which it had held to with Ptolemaic rigidity, that reservoirs don’t control floods—the Army Engineers had little interest in doing much about it.