On the heights of the Continental Divide the first snow is falling. Soon the snow packs will form, and a thousand rivulets, streaming down to the outstretched finger rivers of the Missouri, will freeze over. Across the lonely badlands and treeless plains, the rain is mild and gentle, and the Big Muddy and its tributaries are snug in their beds. In Iowa and Nebraska, in Montana and the Dakotas, all but the latest crops are in. For the farmers and ranchers of the Missouri Valley, one year of risk and struggle is ending, another will soon begin.
No longer do rancher and farmer struggle alone against flood and drought in, one of the most formidable regions of a formidable continent. For seven years, the Missouri Valley has been the scene of one of the greatest land and water control and development projects ever attempted, a spectacular 35-year, $15 billion state & federal public works program designed to tame the huge watershed, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Great Divide. Since August 1945, when the ten valley states and six federal agencies joined in an informal, voluntary federation (the Interagency Committee) to put the Missouri Valley development program into effect, engineers have:
¶ Spent more than $1,396,000,000 in the basin (compared with $855,751,165 in the first seven years of the Tennessee Valley Authority).
¶ Built 17 huge multiple-purpose dams and reservoirs.
¶ Constructed facilities for the generation of 966,228,000 kw-h of electric power annually.
¶ Strung more than 3,000 miles of power transmission lines.
¶ Built canals, tunnels and pumping stations to irrigate more than 750,000 acres of land.
¶ Finished 400 miles of new levees on the Missouri and three-fourths of a 9-ft.-deep, 760-mile navigation channel.
River of Gold
The nub of this development program is the turbulent Missouri River, longest on the continent, stretching 2,465 miles from Three Forks, Mont. to the silt-choked mouth which empties into the Mississippi River, ten miles above St. Louis. Besides other names, many unprintable, the Missouri has been called "the most useless river there is." Government engineers, pointing up their hopes of a harnessed watershed, call it the River of Gold. Farmers who live by its banks and have fought its silt-laden flood tide year after year call it the Big Muddy.
The Missouri begins its long run 4,000 feet above sea level in a green, fertile Montana valley; three clear, sparkling rivers—the Madison, Gallatin and Jefferson—flowing down from the Continental Divide, come together at Three Forks to form it.
As it sweeps along, the Missouri gathers the waters of one tributary after another: the Sun, Teton, Judith, Marias, Musselshell, Milk, Yellowstone (fed, in turn, by the Bighorn, Greybull, Shoshone, Tongue and Powder), the Little Missouri, Knife, Heart, Cannonball, Grand, Moreau, Belle Fourche, Cheyenne, Bad, White, Big Sioux, James, Niobrara, Elkhorn, Platte, Little Sioux, Nishnabotna, Kansas (made up of the Republican, Solomon, Saline, Smoky Hill and Blue), the Grand, Chariton, Osage and Gasconade.