The Missouri River Dams, What Went Under

The Missouri River moves through South Dakota from northwest to southeast, and for thousands of years it was the spine of the Lakota world: drinking water, fish, bottomland gardens, cottonwood groves, the richest habitat on the northern Plains. Then, in nineteen forty-four, Congress passed the Flood Control Act and authorized the Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program. The plan called for constructing a series of massive dams along the river. The primary stated goals were flood control for downstream cities and irrigation for non-Indian farms. The primary unstated cost would be paid by the people who lived in the river bottoms.

Four of the main-stem dams directly affected South Dakota. The Oahe Dam, completed in nineteen sixty-two above Pierre, created a reservoir stretching more than two hundred miles. Oahe alone flooded more than two hundred thousand acres of land on the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River Sioux reservations alone. That land was the river bottomland, ninety percent of the timber on those reservations, the best grazing, the gardens, the wild fruit, the places closest to the water. Many Native families were forced to relocate. They were compensated at rates far below the land's value. One account from the era noted that elders on the reservations seemed to die in unusual numbers in the years after displacement. When asked why, one resident said the old people had died of heartache.

Many of the communities that were submerged were never rebuilt. The reservoirs bear the names of their dams, not the names of what they covered.