Garrison Dam and the Flooding of the Missouri Valley

Lake Sakakawea stretches nearly two hundred miles east of Williston, filling what was once the bottomland valley of the Missouri River. It is one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the United States, and its creation is one of the most contested acts of mid-twentieth-century water policy.

The Army Corps of Engineers built Garrison Dam between nineteen forty-seven and nineteen fifty-four as part of the Pick-Sloan Plan, a Depression-era and postwar program to tame the Missouri River with a series of large dams. The dam is an earthen structure, one of the largest of its type in the world: over two miles long and two hundred ten feet high at its crest. It created the reservoir for flood control downstream, hydroelectric power, and irrigation, though the irrigation component largely failed to materialize in western North Dakota.

What it also created was the destruction of the MHA Nation's homeland. The Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara people, known together as the Three Affiliated Tribes, had been concentrated onto the Fort Berthold Reservation since eighteen seventy. The bottomlands of the Missouri valley on that reservation were the most productive agricultural land the MHA people held, supporting communities, gardens, and the social geography of generations. Garrison Dam flooded about one hundred fifty-two thousand acres of reservation land, including the towns of Elbowoods, Sanish, Van Hook, Charging Eagle, and others. Hundreds of families, roughly one thousand seven hundred people, were relocated to higher land with little preparation and inadequate compensation.

Senator Milton Young of North Dakota and tribal chairman George Gillette tried to negotiate a better settlement. At the signing of the Taking Agreement in Washington in nineteen forty-nine, Gillette wept openly. A photograph captured the moment. He said, as the record shows, that the members of the Tribal Council sign this with heavy hearts.

The trauma of that relocation still defines Fort Berthold community life. Lake Sakakawea offers fishing and recreation to visitors from across the region. The people who lived in the valley it replaced were never fully compensated.