While neighbors looked on approvingly, bulldozers dragged the fertile topsoil from John Haussermann's farm near Alma, Neb. and dug deep into the subsoil. The draglines and scrapers were collecting fill for a dam across one of Big Muddy's most fractious tributaries, the Republican. After more than a century of periodic suspense and terror, men were harnessing their old enemy, the Missouri River.
Four times between 1941 and 1944, fed by the Republican and its sistersthe Plattes, the Yellowstone, the Niobrara, the Cheyenne, the Belle Fourchethe Missouri had jumped its unstable banks. Men watched in misery while people, barns, houses, hogs, cattle...
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