The first Europeans to discover the Missouri were the French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet and French missionary and explorer Jacques Marquette in 1673. Soon the lower reaches of the Missouri had become an important route for fur traders who gradually pressed northwards in search of more fur-bearing animals. Between 1804 and 1806, the Lewis and Clark Expedition became the first to thoroughly explore the length of the river. With the advent of steamboat travel on the Missouri in 1819, the river became increasingly congested with human and commercial traffic, as non-Indian settlers moved west and freight such as lumber, coal, fur and grain used the river as its main mode of transport until the railroads took over in popularity in the mid-1800s. Today, the lower river remains a major commercial route in the transportation by barge of agricultural products as well as oil and steel. As the nineteenth century drew to a close and tribes had been moved onto reservations bordering the Missouri River and its tributaries, white settlement along the river increased dramatically.
In April 1943, the Missouri flooded over 70,000 acres of fertile bottomland in southern South Dakota and Nebraska. A month later, 540,000 acres of land were inundated. In June, a further 960,000 acres of land were flooded by the Missouri. The following spring, 4.5 million acres of farmland along the Missouri were destroyed when the river jumped its banks again. The damage to property along the Missouri River totalled some $100 million for the two years.
Public pressure forced the government to order the US Army Corps of Engineers - officially in charge of combat engineering, mapmaking, topographical surveying, coastal fortification, and river and harbour improvements - to survey the Missouri River Basin and prepare an action plan. This was accomplished under the control of Colonel Lewis A. Pick. Three months later, the Pick Plan was presented at Washington.
The building of the massive dam at Fort Peck in Montana had already been authorised by Congress in 1933 as a means to control flooding, and by 1945, the Corps had spent some $300 million on deepening the river for easier navigation. In response to flooding in the Basin area, levees, reservoirs and dams began to appear in the wake of the 1936 Flood Control Act. The Army began to espouse the concept of multi-purpose dams - a philosophy that incorporated the use of power production, flood control, irrigation and recreation under its rubric. Pressure from upper Missouri residents led to irrigation being added to the Pick programme.
Since 1902, the US Bureau of Reclamation had been charged to stimulate settlement and economic development in the arid west, reclaiming land through irrigation. It also began to devote its efforts to dam by-products such as flood control, hydroelectric power and recreation. Such dams as the Hoover and Glen Canyon on the Colorado River were constructed by the Bureau and today it is estimated that some twenty-seven million acres of seventeen western states have been irrigated under Bureau projects. By 1944, eleven of its projects had been completed in the Missouri River Basin. Nine more were under construction. Its first multi-purpose structure in the Basin was begun in 1933 with the Kendrick Project.
The Corps' Pick Plan emphasised flood control and navigation. The Bureau of Reclamation's Missouri plan (the Sloan Plan) emphasised irrigation and power development. As the two plans were being argued and considered, tension heightened between those who promoted the economic benefits of farming and those who exhorted the benefits of navigation. In other words, there was a sharp split between upper and lower basin residents as to the purposes for which the river would be diverted. In 1944, compromise was achieved and the two plans were merged under the Pick-Sloan Plan The Plan became part of the Flood Control Act of 1944 and was officially known as the Missouri River Basin Development Program.
The plan involved 107 dams along the river, including five key Corps dams in the Dakotas: Garrison Dam in North Dakota, and the Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall and Gavins Point dams in South Dakota. In addition to flood protection, navigation and irrigation, the plan provided for extensive hydroelectric power to a total output of 1.6 million kilowatts. One-third of this power would be generated from the power plants at Fort Randall, Oahe and Garrison.
After the reservation period, the Sioux had, for the most part, maintained rights to the western shoreline of the Missouri. The Pick-Sloan Plan ultimately affected twenty-three reservations in the Missouri Basin, much of the damage being sustained by five Sioux reservations: Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, Yankton, Crow Creek and Lower Brule.
More than 202,000 acres of largely productive and fertile Sioux land were inundated by Army dams. Some 580 families were forcibly uprooted from the fertile and sheltered bottomlands of the river, as their homes, pastures, croplands, meadows, timber, wildlife and vegetation were all flooded. The agency headquarters for Cheyenne River (the 'old Eagle Butte' as residents today say), Lower Brule and Crow Creek were flooded and relocated, causing immense disruption of services and facilities. Tribal headquarters, BIA offices and public health venues became isolated from one another, causing immense hardship to those who had to do business in each but had no transportation. Medical facilities were often relocated to areas that made them virtually inaccessible from remote areas. Burial sites and other areas of sacred significance, such as areas used for collecting medicine, were destroyed along with prime grazing land and water, food and fuel resources. Severe psychological as well as physical hardship ensued as people were forced to leave ancestral land.
The Oahe Dam began construction in 1948. Located six miles northwest of the South Dakota capital, Pierre, and on the eastern edge of the Cheyenne River Reservation, the dam has produced a reservoir whose lake is deeper than the Eire and longer than the Ontario. The Oahe Reservoir is the biggest along the Missouri, and has produced the greatest output of power (595,000 kilowatts) of any army project. In his excellent book on the effects of the dams on the Sioux, Michael Lawson states:
"The Oahe Dam destroyed more Indian land than any other public works project in America. The Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux lost a total of 160,889 acres to this project, including their most valuable rangeland, most of their gardens and cultivated farm tracts, and nearly all of their timber, wild fruit, and wildlife resources. The inundation of more than 105,000 acres of choice grazing land affected 75 percent of the ranchers on the Cheyenne River Reservation and 60 percent of those at Standing Rock. Ninety percent of the timbered areas on both reservations were destroyed" (Lawson 1982: 50).1
Cheyenne River lost 104,420 acres. Its largest town, Cheyenne Agency, plus two other communities were submerged. The tribal and BIA headquarters at 'Old Eagle Butte' had to be moved some sixty miles inland. Some 30 percent of the reservation population were forced to relocate. 25 percent of Standing Rock Sioux were forced to move as a result of the Oahe deluge.
A total of 6 percent of Sioux tribal lands were lost to the three Pick-Sloan projects and over one-third of Sioux tribal members were forced to relocated due to their homes and lands being destroyed. Some 75 percent of wildlife (plants and animals) had been destroyed along with some 90 percent of timber areas (except for the Yankton Reservation).
A subsistence lifestyle that had been based on the hunting of such game as deer, beaver, rabbits, racoons and pheasants, on the gathering of such plants as the 'mouse bean' (wild pea), roots, berries, currants, plums and herbs, and on the utilisation of water for ceremony and survival, and of timber for fuel and lumber was completely obliterated in a short period of time. The primary economic activity, ranching, was also crippled as cattle no longer had the fertile and sheltered bottomlands to roam, graze and water freely. Soil on the open prairie made farming impractical (but not impossible). It is ironic that the Pick-Sloan dams inundated the most irrigable lands in Sioux Country.
The spiritual and psychological effects of this dramatic change in livelihood were as devastating to the Missouri River Sioux as the economic and social upheavals that ensued. They kept a keen eye on developments occurring on the Fort Berthold Reservation just north of them.
The Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota were the first Indian tribe to deal with the Corps of Engineers. The Garrison Dam had taken 152,360 acres of tribal land and had resulted in the relocation of 325 families, or 80 percent of the tribal population. The ranchers and farmers on the reservation lost 94 percent of their agricultural lands. They argued on the basis of the 1951 Fort Laramie Treaty that had stipulated that no Indian land could be taken unless consent of the Indian population had been obtained. The resultant compensation settlement in 1947 was abysmal, coming in at around $33 per lost acre. Further petitioning brought the total compensation in 1949 to $12,605,625, but the tribe lost their request for the rights to royalties on subsurface minerals in the reservoir area and for irrigation-development. Most farms and ranches were liquidated and unemployment rose to 79 percent.
Neither the 1944 Flood Control Act nor any subsequent legislation had authorised the Corps and the Reclamation Bureau to condemn tribal lands. Various Supreme Court cases had ruled that federal agencies could abrogate Indian treaties in order to exercise its eminent right of domain, but others had ruled that prior Congressional authorisation must be acquired beforehand. So, when the Corps condemned Yankton land between 1947 and 1948, without prior consent of Congress, they did so illegally. However, the Yankton Sioux received minimal compensation through the courts - barely enough to cover basic relocation costs for each affected family.
Subsequent negotiations with settlements for other Sioux tribes went the same way: the power of eminent domain was claimed by the Corps, no protest or litigation interfered with dam constructions, and no settlement offered satisfactory or 'just' monetary compensation with hydroelectric power rights and other provisions. In 1954, the Cheyenne River tribe was offered a cash settlement of $ 10,644,014, which they accepted, plus limited mineral, salvage and shoreline access rights, subject to the arbitrary regulations of the Corps. In 1958, the Standing Rock Sioux received their $12,346,553 settlement, with similar, though marginally better, additional rights to that which the Cheyenne River Sioux had obtained four years previously. The Crow Creek and Lower Brule tribes received meagre settlements long after families had been forcibly removed from their lands, and they were not offered any funds for rehabilitation until 1962.
The period of reconstruction was a painful one for the Sioux. Aside from the emotional and physical hardships that ensued with the uprootings, the settlements themselves caused practical problems. Except for the Cheyenne River Sioux who were permitted a much greater influence, tribal leaders were rarely allowed to handle any settlement monies, with the Bureau of Indian Affairs taking much of the control. Many of the affected families objected to the amount of money that had been calculated by the federal agency as sufficient to cover their expenses and property valuations, but legal fees prevented them from pressing for litigation. On Cheyenne River, for example, the tribal president during this time, Frank Ducheneaux, had owned 1,400 acres of ranch land in the Oahe area. Due largely to inflation, his settlement money allowed him to purchase only 200 acres. There were also often considerable delays in the distribution of the money.
Other problems included the increasing fragmentation of inherited land, whereby several heirs own single 'allotments'. This meant that compensation money was frequently divided up into ludicrous amounts. Michael Lawson gives the example of a 116-acre land tract in the Fort Randall reservoir area which had ninety-nine heirs. One heir's share of settlement income was worth $586 whilst another's share came to $0.37. In the Oahe reservoir area, one half section tract had 156 heirs, "29 of whom were found to be deceased, but whose interests in the estate had never been probated" (pg 141). As such, the settlement of settlement funds frequently became as chaotic as the land situation itself.
It was in the area of the Indian economy that the most serious effects of relocation were felt. Lawson:
"Ranchers, the most important economic group on the reservations, lost considerable income during the period needed to fence new lands, dig wells, and construct shelters to replace the natural features of bottomland pastures. Farmers also had difficulty finding fertile new plots and adequate water sources on the marginal reservation land that remained. Families that depended on their former land for game, wild fruit, and firewood had to search for alternative and usually more expensive sources of sustenance. All experienced higher living costs after moving because of inflated prices and the necessity of purchasing water, food, fuel, lumber, and other materials that previously had been easily accessible and free. Houses needed better weatherproofing on the open Plains and warmer clothing was required. Those who now found themselves far from federal facilities also had to allow for increased transportation expenses" (1982: 158-159).
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