Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1997
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 237-49.
Abstract
In December 1944 the United States Congress passed a Rivers and Harbors Bill that authorized the construction of the Pick-Sloan plan for Missouri River development. From 1946 to 1966, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, with the assistance of private contractors, implemented much of that plan in the Missouri River Valley. In that twenty-year period, five of the world's largest earthen dams were built across the main-stem of the Missouri River in North and South Dakota. The size of these structures defies the imagination. Fort Randall Dam in southeast South Dakota is 160 feet high and 10,700 feet long. The reservoir behind it stretches 140 miles north-northwest along the Missouri Valley. Oahe Dam, near Pierre, South Dakota, surpasses even Fort Randall Dam at 242 feet high and 9300 feet long.1 Oahe's reservoir stretches 250 miles upstream. The completion of Garrison Dam in North Dakota, and Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavin's Point dams in South Dakota resulted in the innundation of nearly 700 miles of the Missouri Valley from Yankton, South Dakota, to Williston, North Dakota.2
The inundation of such a vast stretch of the Missouri River Valley caused tremendous changes in the lifestyles of the people who lived within or near the valley. Many European- American ranchers and farmers had to relocate their families and reestablish agricultural enterprises in other areas. The residents of Niobrara, Nebraska, and Pollock, South Dakota, moved their homes and businesses after two Pick-Sloan dams flooded the towns.
Indians in the Dakotas and Nebraska were affected by the inundation of their reservation lands-all of the Missouri Valley bottomlands located on the Crow Creek, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River Sioux, Standing Rock, and Fort Berthold reservations. Indians on these reservations, and on the Yankton, Rosebud, and Santee reservations, lost a total of 353,313 acres for reservoir water storage.3 In addition, the Indian towns of Fort Thompson (Crow Creek Reservation), Lower Brule (Lower Brule Reservation), Cheyenne River Agency (Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation), and nine towns on the Fort Berthold Reservation were inundated. Approximately 3538 Indians were forced to relocate from the valley lands to the uplands or to off-reservation towns.4 Another 6900 Indians were affected in varying degrees of severity.5
Comments
Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln