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There are, however, some boom spots in the valley. In 1951, high-grade oil was struck near Tioga in the Williston Basin of western North Dakota. Last week Stanolind Oil & Gas Co.'s A. L. Solliday gave some estimate of Williston's exciting future. His eye-bugging observations: "You have an old-fashioned boom of major proportions on your hands. As of the first of this week, there [were] 69 rigs drilling, with 19 more locations staked [out]. Eventually there are going to be a lot more newcomers with this expanding oil play than most of you realize . . . Our economists figure that an oilfield requires one man for every 44 barrels of oil produced . . . Behind every man in the field, there are at least three in an office . . . All businesses will swell . . ."
Another, but less exciting, boom area is Denver (pop. 415,786), bustling commercial and financial center for the western plains. Rapid City, S. Dak. (pop. 25,310) has a big B-36 base and is in the midst of an $18 million program of housing construction. Also thriving are Omaha (pop. 251,117), with packinghouses and food-processing plants, and the Kansas City area (pop. 586,175), which has had an influx of light industry.
The Pick-Sloan Plan
To control and develop the land and water resources of the valley, Congress in 1944 authorized the Pick-Sloan plan, named for General Lewis A. Pick,* head of the Army Corps of Engineers, and W. Glenn Sloan of the Interior Department's Bureau of Reclamation. The next year the Missouri Basin Interagency Committee was formed to give representation to the Departments of Agriculture and Commerce, the Federal Power Commission and Federal Security Agency—and to the ten states in the valley. The committee meets about once a month and gives the agencies and states a chance to compare notes and to review the progress of the plan. The committee has no authority over the individual agencies, but by persuasion its skillful staff has managed to effect a high degree of coordination and cooperation.
Spread over 35 years, the control and development program will eventually spend $9.4 billion in U.S. Government funds , (including $3.4 billion earnestly hoped for by the Department of Agriculture, but still unauthorized by Congress), $428 million raised by the states, counties and towns, and $5 billion supplied by ranchers, farmers and landowners (for conservation measures). With this money, Government engineers (by 1980) will have built 138 major power, irrigation and flood-control projects. These include:
¶ Five dams on the Missouri which will be among the largest in the world, and which will transform the Big Muddy into a chain of clear, blue lakes.
¶ Several thousand smaller conservation dams to stop erosion and floods.
¶ Facilities to generate 13.7 billion kw-h of electric power a year.
¶ Eight thousand miles of power transmission lines.
¶ Canals, tunnels and pumping stations to irrigate 5,000,000 acres of farmland and supply additional water to 5,000,000 presently irrigated acres.
¶ Fifteen hundred miles of levees and a 760-mile navigation channel in the Missouri from Sioux City, Iowa to the river's mouth.