The Missouri River & Siouxland – Part 3
Welcome back to our discussion on the Missouri River! In our previous part, we started to get into the long and tumultuous history of how and why we’ve changed the Missouri River from its original wide, slow crawling self into the precises narrowed channel that it is today. There isn’t much conjecture to add here, so without further ado, lets get to speaking more about the Missouri River.
Picking Up Where We Left Off
Last time we left off, the Missouri River Channelization project was in a rough place. The Great Depression was starting to hit the United States, crippling America’s economy, and the Dust Bowl was looming on the horizon. Finding funding for the channelization project was difficult, and for three full years, the project went unfunded. It wasn’t until Franklin D. Roosevelt, with Congress’ approval of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), could approve funding for the Fort Peck Dam in 1933 that the project started gaining traction again (Schneider, p. 341, 1996). This would push progress primarily on the southern legs of the river, from Kansas City to Omaha. At the same time, thanks for President Roosevelt’s funding push, the first major hydroelectric dam on the Missouri River could start construction at Fort Peck in Montana (Goodin, 2018).
Post 1933, work progressed smoothly. Sills were made, tributaries were cut off and made into ponds or run off streams, and the channel was being trawled and dug wider and deeper. The banks were stabilized and finished successfully all the way from Kansas City to Omaha, but this is where the project hit another problem. North of Omaha was where the river far more problematic in part because it was dramatically wider and had much greater extremes for bank and soil erosion (Schneider, p. 341, 1996). This stretch of the river was not nearly as confined by geological formations which allowed the river to stretch out dramatically, with the narrower portions north of Omaha being around 2 – 5 miles across. The widest portions were almost 15 miles across (Schneider, p. 342, 1996). The entire stretch was also shallow, being better described as a high current wetland full of unstable islands, sandbars, and shifting currents which cut unpredictable patterns constantly. And this portion of the river still flooded twice a year. The USACE did not have the funding to handle this part of the river, nor were previous techniques effective.
But the USACE still tried, and by 1941 they made slow but gradual progress. But time was not on their side, as 1941 was a very daunting year in world history. On December 8th, 1941, shortly after the attack on pearl harbor, the United States entered World War 2. Effective nearly immediately, all funding for all projects not considered critical for national security was halted, and at that moment that included the Missouri River Navigation and Channelization Project (Schneider, p. 343, 1996). Worse still for the project, the work was 80% done, which was close but not enough, especially for the north stretch of the river where constant maintenance was needed until the river could be fully stabilized. The work needed to be completed across the whole stretch at the same time, and not left undone at any point from start to finish.
The reason for this is that because the river was so wide here, and the banks so unstable, narrowing the channel would dramatically increase the flow rate of the river. This in turn ate at the unstable banks quickly, increasing the silt load downstream. In a few short years after the pausing of the work, the increased flow of the river washed out all the work that had been done north of Omaha, and 1943 did not make it any easier. April 1943 saw record high snow falls which brought the spring floods higher than previous years (Department of Natural Resources, p. 2, 2008). Because the work wasn’t finished, the shored-up banks pushed the deluge of water up and over the unfinished banks which had promised communities near by stability up until that point.
The 1943 flood was a tragedy, made worse by the unfinished work and the promises that those places had been stabilized. The river was rapidly undoing all the work the USACE had done, returning to its previous state. The unexpected tragedy and destruction these floods wrought showed Congress that the work can’t just be ignored nor set down and left until the war was over. Congress resumed discussion of the river in 1943 shortly after the flooding, and into 1944, seeking thoughts and ideas from the USACE and other various sources to drum up ideas on an actual permanent solution.
The USACE had been aware of many of these issues prior to the 1943 flood, and already been making plans. In 1938 they’d begun strategizing plans on proper longer term flood control. They’d assigned Colonel Lewis Pick, who’d already been in charge of the channelization project prior to that for several years, to this task. In 1943 when Congress began discussing the flood, Colonel Pick was the person the USACE sent forth with the plan. Congress assigned Colonel Pick to create a new plan with the word he’d already done to tame the Missouri and its flooding (Schneider, p. 344, 1996). By this point, Congress and the United States had poured millions of dollars into this project which had been going on for over a century now, and thanks to World War 2 funding freezes and the flooding, it was all being undone in a matter of years.
Colonel Pick had already come up with a bold and ambitious idea, suggest an series of damns and levees, and other forms of flow control that be constructed not just on the Missouri but also its tributary rivers, controlling the flow from as many places as possible (Lawson, 1982). He called for 5 dams to be constructed on the Missouri itself, with several smaller dams on the side rivers, and levees near every major city on the banks to help divert flood waters to the surrounding farm fields so as to save major city infrastructure from the flood waters.
This plan was by no means perfect. It was pragmatic, aggressive, and expensive, with no real return on investment especially because it was diverting water into farm fields during flooding. It also was designed entirely for downstream river basins, ignoring much of the Upper Missouri River Basin and instead prioritizing the Central and Lower Basin states. Thus, the initial proposal was denied and at the same time Upper Basin states pushed for a second opinion, which is where another major figure to this history enters the picture, William Glenn Sloan. Sloan had an extensive history with projects like this, originally working for the United States Department of Agriculture as a drainage engineer, and worked with the US Army Corps of Engineers in World War 1. After the war he also served under the United States Bureau of Reclamation. For this specific assignment, he moved to Montana and served as a second opinion for how to best utilize the Missouri River specifically with the upper basin states in mind.
Sloan’s plan was less focused on maintenance, downstream flow, or importantly environmental impact. According to the amazing work of Bert Schneider, which you’ve seen me use all throughout this work, “Sloan’s plan Instead focused much more directly on the idea of using the channel for transportation, irrigation, and hydroelectric power,” (Schneider, p. 345, 1996). Both men provided plans, and when Congress reconvened to discuss the idea after both have had ample time to plan and assess, they began to talk. Congress like parts of both plans. Sloan ignored a lot of the impacts on the river, instead seeing it as an economic powerhouse. Colonel Pick ignored the economic impacts, and focused on impacts of the river and the people that live by the river. They weren’t perfect compliments to each other, but Congress liked the idea of combining them. Thus, the 1944 Flood Control Act was created from a combination of the plans, which is better known today as the Pick-Sloan Missouri River Basin Plan.
But before things could get better, they would get worse. The primary linchpin for both parts of the plans was dams. The flow and the flooding needed to be controlled to prevent floods like the one from 1943. So, the first steps for the Pick-Sloan plan were the construction of large-scale water retention and hydroelectric dams north of Sioux City, starting with the Fort Randall and Garrison Dams. The channel south of the projects now needed to survive until the construction could be finished. Tragically, the flooding wouldn’t stop, with major floods hitting in 1947, 1949, 1951 and the most notable in 1952 (US Army Corps of Engineer, 2018, pp. A-1 – A-17). The floods destroyed the work done by the Channelization Project and the Missouri River Commission. The 1952 flood was devastating to communities all along the river, and all the flooding was deteriorating trust in the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is something that will be spoken about in greater detail in the next part.
For an example of how badly the floods undid the work, there is a quote from James McQueen, the Council Bluffs city commissioner in the year 1954 that puts into perspective the scope of the damage: “At one time this bank stabilization between Council Bluffs, Omaha, and Sioux City was better than 80 percent completed, it has now drifted back so that only 30 percent of the work remains,” (Sioux City Journal, 1954). However, throughout this time period, the Dams would begin to be finished, and this would start controlling the Missouri River. The river slowed down, reduced the silt load, and critically, it reduced the flooding.
With the dams in place and the levees being built, the river channelization started making rapid progress. New equipment from the booming post war economy and the concentrated effort of a nation finally brought the Missouri River under control, and the Pick-Sloan Channelization Plan was declared finished in 1969. Over 100 years of effort poured into this channel had resulted in a 300-foot wide, 9-foot-deep channel from St. Louis to Sioux City, with the tributaries, bends, shallows, islands, and snags removed. The river was now moving faster and clearer, more like any other river you’d find in North America, (Schneider, p. 348, 1996). From this point onward, little change would be made, and this is the river we’d come to know in modern times, for better and for worse.
Afterword
Thankfully, no extra parts are being added this time! As much as I wanted to keep doing extremely in-depth research and continue finding sources, (Especially more firsthand sources or alternative sources such as indigenous sources), the scope of this project has already gotten so large that I need to not. The next part is going to conclude this little historical deep dive and be where we speak about a lot of the nuance that went through this entire project. This obviously has been a project that has expanded so much beyond where I thought it would be, and when I look back at my very original first draft, I laugh a bit because it is staggering how many things I learned.
I want to speak once again about the amazing resources that I have found and the only reason I could find them was through all the help and resources available through the South Sioux City Public Library. Both our reference librarian Dan Nieman, and all the resources we have on the shelves have helped tremendously with this project, especially the databases we have access to through NebraskAccess.
I look forward to seeing you all in the next part of this blog series! Thank you very much!
Work Cited
Schneiders, B. (1996). The Myth of Environmental Management: The Corps, the Missouri River, and the Channelization Project. Agricultural History, 70(2), 337–350. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3744541
Goodin, Art; Missouri River – PUB2018 – Water Protection Program Fact Sheet (2018), Missouri Department of Natural Resources.gov, Retrieved February 19, 2026 from https://oembed-dnr.mo.gov/document-search/missouri-river-pub2018/pub2018
US Department of Natural Resources, Historic Floods on the Missouri River, Retrieved February 21st, 2026 from https://semspub.epa.gov/work/07/30022840.pdf
Lawson, Michael L. Jr. (1982). Dammed Indians : the Pick-Sloan plan and the Missouri River Sioux, 1944–1980 (1st ed.). Norman: University of Oklahoma press. ISBN 978-0806116570. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/dammedindianspic0000laws/mode/2up
US Army Corps of Engineers. (2018). Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System Master Water Control Manual Missouri River Basin. Appendix A – Extreme Events: Historic Floods and Droughts with Regulation Examples (pp. A-1 – A-48). US Army Corps of Engineers.
Sioux City Journal, 21 February 1954,31 December 1952