Mike Mansfield didn’t always do good things. One of his worst was supporting the Glacier View Dam, which would have plugged the North Fork Flathead River and flooded part of Glacier National Park. Proposed during World War II, the 400-foot-high structure attracted plenty of attention — and opposition, enough opposition to retire the project from serious consideration by 1949.
Nevertheless, Mansfield was unrepentant, and even introduced unsuccessful legislation to build the dam, arguing that it “…would not affect the beauty of the park in any way but would make it more beautiful by creating a large lake over ground that ... has no scenic attraction.”
Although the project died, the idea didn’t. Even a quarter-century ago, the Flathead Valley’s unreconstructed dam builders still argued in public meetings that the dam should be built.
Now there are two excellent web pages on the Glacier View Dam and its history, one added to the Wikipedia on 5 June 2011, and another as part of a historical overview of the Flathead National Forest on the www.foresthistory.org website.
The timing of the page on the Wikipedia is interesting. I don't know who wrote it (although I have a short list of suspects), but shortly before discovering it, quite by accident, I had remarked to a colleague that massive flooding in the Flathead this year, if it occurs, could revive interest in the Glacier View Dam and similar proposals from that era.