Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing. (isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
December 30, 1999
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1999 Plains Folk
The story of irrigation on the plains from surface water is checkered at best. It always has been controversial. A century ago, when promoters and government engineers began boosting irrigation for the semiarid plains, another group of promoters--the believers in dry farming--hooted them down. They said the Great Plains was not a desert and required no irrigation, just good farming technique.
At places like Belle Fourche and Williston and a score of others, projects went ahead, and what usually doomed them was not politics but stubborn physical difficulties--things like unsuitable soils, poor drainage, salinity.
The plains does have a powerful culture of irrigation, but it is one of ground water irrigation. It is a hip-boot, siphon-tube, aluminum pipe, center-pivot culture, not a ditch culture. And it is an entrepreneurial culture, not the hierarchical type fostered by ditch irrigation.
Still, beginning in the 1950s, the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation got together to give it one last shot, once more to make tangible the vision of a green lattice of ditches on the northern plains. As part of the Pick-Sloan Plan for the upper Missouri River, they planned the Garrison Diversion in North Dakota and the Oahe Diversion in South Dakota.
The rise of opposition to Garrison, and its eventual stalemate, awaits its historian. Oahe now has its historian in the person of Peter Carrels, author of "Uphill Against Water: The Great Dakota Water War" (University of Nebraska Press).
This is not a balanced account. Carrels, a journalist and writer living in Aberdeen, mainly tells the story of the opposition to Oahe, which eventually prevailed. He does offer some fascinating views of how the Oahe project took shape--how Lew Pick and Glenn Sloan got together at the St. Charles Hotel in Pierre, how that city's Bob Hipple envisioned a regional prosperity based on Missouri River water, how George McGovern stuck by the idea even though he never understood it, how Gov. Bill Janklow injected his inimitable blend of persuasion and combustion into the struggle.
But Carrels' attention is focused on the opponents of the project: people like quiet George Piper, a farmer who stood to lose land to the project; John Elsing, a farmer who kept showing everybody a homemade colored map of soil types in the proposed irrigation area; the farmer-populist John Sieh, who gave the opposition movement its combative edge; and Curt Hohn, who quit Sen. McGovern's staff in order to run the opposition organization, called United Family Farmers.
There were great environmental problems with the Oahe project, of course. Canals and storage lakes would destroy wetlands as well as farmlands. Channelization of the James, which would receive drainage from the project, would wreak havoc with river-valley habitat. And, no one really knew what would be the effects of irrigation water on soils and ground water. Still, the important opposition to Oahe did not come from environmentalists in REI hiking shoes. It came from farmers in work boots.
The key breakthrough came when the farmer-opponents, through elections, captured control of the very machinery of the proposed project, the Oahe Sub-District Board. That did not end the struggle over the project, but it stalled it by demonstrating a lack of local support. It's embarrassing for politicians in Washington when they pack up a cargo of federal pork and the folks back home say, "Don't unload that here."
"The Great Dakota Water War" is an object lesson in what is possible on the plains and what is not. Democracy is a wonderful, frustrating fact of life in these parts.
###
Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable
for printing.
(isern.tif - 512KB b&w photo)
Click here to download a photo of Tom Isern suitable for printing.
(isern-h.tif - 426KB b&w photo)