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Until it reaches the Yellowstone, the Missouri's waters run clear. In eastern Montana, behind Fort Peck's four-mile-long dam (completed in 1937), the river's 245,000-acre reservoir is a wide, blue lake. Near the North Dakota border, the Yellowstone dumps silt from the dry, brown plains of Wyoming and Montana into the Missouri. From that point on, as it receives the waters of other tributaries, the Missouri grows increasingly muddier. Through the open, windy plains of the Dakotas and past the yellow and brown farmland bluffs of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, the color of the river changes to a rich, deep brown. Some of the silt piles up in sand bars; the rest sweeps along with the river, through Missouri's humid, green farmland. At Missouri Point, where the Missouri empties into the Mississippi, the Big Muddy deposits more than 200 million tons of soil each year.
The Lean Pork Chop
The Missouri Valley is an enormous funnel (see map), shaped like a pork chop, ranging eastward from the Divide 800 miles across mountains, badlands, plains and prairies, and southward 700 miles from the Canadian border. (Tributaries of the Missouri also drain 9,715 square miles of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan.)
The basin encompasses all of Nebraska, most of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, and parts of Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa and Missouri. The third largest watershed on the continent (after the Mackenzie and St. Lawrence), it includes mountain ranges of majestic grandeur (the Absaroka, Big Horn, Wind River and Medicine Bow all have peaks above 11,000 feet); such tourist country as the Black Hills, the South Dakota Badlands, large areas of Yellowstone Park, Rocky Mountain National Park and Glacier Park; 17 million acres of national forest, 20 million acres of unclaimed public land arid 34,000 square miles of Indian reservations.
Development of the valley never kept pace with the rest of the U.S. Old maps used to include most of it in the area they called the "Great American Desert." Settlers bound for greener pastures in Oregon and California hurried across the plains as fast as they could go. When ranchers and farmers did settle in the valley, they were immediately faced with the natural hazards that have persisted to the present day: annual floods, cycles of two-to-three-year droughts, blizzards, tornadoes, extreme hot & cold temperatures.
The Missouri Valley of 1952 is a big land of small villages and towns. It has only four cities of over 100,000 population (the two Kansas Cities, Denver and Omaha), only five others with more than 50,000 (Lincoln, Topeka, Sioux City, St. Joseph and Sioux Falls). There are fewer than a dozen manufacturing centers in the valley and the area's population rose but 3%, against the national average of 14.4 during the last ten years. (In 1910, the valley sent 64 members to Congress, now only 51.) Today, 7½ million people live in an area as big as seven Western European countries, which have a population of 180 million.