Garrison Dam and Lake Sakakawea

Southeast of Minot, the Missouri River widens into one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the United States. Lake Sakakawea stretches for approximately one hundred seventy-eight miles behind Garrison Dam, a rolled-earth structure built by the Army Corps of Engineers and dedicated in nineteen fifty-three. The dam was one of the largest rolled-earth dams in the world at the time of its construction.

The reservoir it created holds enough water to cover the entire state of Pennsylvania about ten inches deep. Garrison Dam was part of the Pick-Sloan Plan, a federal flood control and irrigation program authorized after the catastrophic Missouri River floods of nineteen forty-three. It ended the flooding that had regularly devastated downstream cities but permanently inundated the homeland of the Three Affiliated Tribes, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, who lost most of their best agricultural land and the town of Elbowoods to the rising water.

The reservoir today is a major recreation destination, while the human cost of its creation remains a contested chapter in North Dakota history.