Responding to Catastrophe with Concrete and Earth
The devastating floods of 1943, which inundated cities and farms from Sioux City to St. Louis, provided the final catalyst for Congress to authorize the Pick-Sloan Plan in 1944, a compromise between the Army Corps of Engineers' (Pick) focus on navigation and the Bureau of Reclamation's (Sloan) emphasis on irrigation and hydropower. The vision was audacious: to transform the wild, meandering Missouri into a stair-step series of slack-water reservoirs and a stabilized, channelized river. The plan authorized the construction of six massive mainstem dams—Fort Peck, Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavins Point—creating the largest reservoir system in North America. The Institute's research delves into the political, economic, and ideological forces that made such a project conceivable in the post-war era, a time of immense confidence in humanity's ability to reshape nature for progress.
Multifaceted Impacts: Power, Land, and Displacement
The promised benefits were substantial. Hydropower generated electricity for the growing Midwest, irrigation projects promised to green the arid High Plains, and a dependable, nine-foot-deep navigation channel from Sioux City to St. Louis aimed to boost barge traffic. Flood control, the primary justification, has largely succeeded in preventing major urban flooding downstream. However, the Institute's interdisciplinary work meticulously documents the staggering trade-offs. Over 550,000 acres of fertile bottomland, including the most agriculturally productive indigenous lands, were permanently inundated. Dozens of thriving communities, both white and Native American, were erased. The flooding of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, which displaced the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara from their remaining core homeland, is studied as a profound case of cultural and ecological trauma, a wound that continues to resonate today.
Ecologically, the dams were a catastrophe for the river's native ecosystem. They blocked the migration of the prehistoric pallid sturgeon, decimated the population of shovel-nosed sturgeon, and destroyed thousands of miles of sandbar and backwater habitat critical for fish reproduction and birdlife. The stabilized, channelized river downstream, lined with rock revetments (the "Missouri River Stabilization and Navigation Project"), accelerated water flow, increased erosion, and severed the river's natural connection with its floodplain. The Institute's environmental historians and restoration ecologists collaborate to quantify these losses, using historical aerial photographs, sediment core samples, and biological surveys to reconstruct the pre-dam riverine landscape, providing a baseline for understanding the scale of change.
- Mainstem Dams: Fort Peck, Garrison, Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavins Point.
- Promised Benefits: Hydropower, irrigation, navigation, and flood control.
- Human Cost: Displacement of communities, particularly the Three Affiliated Tribes at Fort Berthold.
- Ecological Cost: Destruction of native fish habitat and severing of the river-floodplain connection.
Reckoning and Managed Adaptation
Today, the Institute is deeply engaged in the complex reckoning with the Pick-Sloan legacy. Scholars analyze the ongoing legal and political battles over water allocation between upstream states, downstream states, and tribal nations. They study the contentious, multi-billion-dollar efforts to engineer partial ecosystem restoration, such as the controlled "spring rises" intended to mimic natural floods and create habitat for endangered species. The Pick-Sloan Plan stands as the definitive case study in the Institute's exploration of the Hydro-Political pillar, a monumental example of how 20th-century engineering ambitions can solve certain problems while creating a host of new, often more intractable, social and environmental challenges. The Institute's role is to provide the deep historical and scientific context necessary for current managers, policymakers, and citizens to make more informed, humble, and holistic decisions about the river's future.