9 September 2016

Recommended books on the history of big dams in the Dakotas

Garrison Dam, one of several environmentally destructive federal boondoggles, and one of the worst U.S. Army Corps of Engineers projects ever, which is saying something given the competition for that honor, flooded 155,000 acres of prime Missouri River bottomland running through the Fort Berthold Reservation.

In the famous photograph below, reproduced in Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Tribal Council Chairman George Gillette breaks into tears on 20 May 1948 as Secretary of the Interior Krug signs the contract, negotiated under legal threat, with the tribes.

In addition to Cadillac Desert, the books below provide detailed accounts of the dam wars in the Dakotas that provide the historical context for the current Standing Rock standoff.

• Uphill against Water: The Great Dakota Water War (Our Sustainable Future), by Peter Carrels, University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Available used for one cent through Amazon.


• Dammed Indians: The Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944-1980, by Michael L. Lawson, University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Available as a used paperback for $16 through Amazon — and as a new paperback for $631.56 (no, I did not misplace the decimal point).


• Dammed Indians Revisited: The Continuing History of the Pick-Sloan Plan and the Missouri River Sioux, by Michael L. Lawson, forward by George McGovern, South Dakota State Historical Society, 2009. Available used through Amazon for as little as five dollars.


• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water, Revised Edition, by Marc Reisner, Penguin Books, 1993. Available in Kindle for $14, and as a used paperback at prices starting at just under three dollars. This elegantly written book should be in the library of every environmentalist and student of the American West.