Plains Folk: Taming the Wild Missouri

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

This time, passing through Yankton, I finally stopped to photograph the double-decker Meridian Bridge across the Missouri River. Named for the Meridian Highway, this was the first highway bridge across the Missouri in South Dakota. It was built in 1920-24 with two decks, one atop the other. One was for vehicular traffic and the other for railroad tracks, but as the railroad deck never was used, it was converted to a second vehicular lane in 1953.

This bridge was a picturesque hazard for oversize vehicles and loads. Early custom harvesters, for instance, liked to load combines with 14-foot headers still attached onto their grain trucks, and more than a few, they say, tangled with the Meridian Bridge.

In my pack this day I also carried a new book about the modern history of the Missouri River -- "Unruly River," by Robert Kelley Schneiders (published by the University Press of Kansas). It's a fascinating, thought-provoking book for citizens of the Missouri River valley. Its subject is how the Missouri "has been transformed in the past 190 years through human action."

Schneiders begins by describing the river wild. For people who grew up in the late twentieth century, this is hard to imagine. The river was notable first for its "sinuosity" -- it meandered all over a wide bottom, ever re-sculpting the valley environment for a wonderful diversity of wildlife, including blue catfish bigger than my Labrador retriever.

The river was also notable, and feared, for its "extreme fluctuations in water volume," including its spectacular floods. Keelboat and steamboat navigation always was treacherous, and with the arrival of railroads, river transportation became unimportant.

Following the great flood of 1903 people on the lower Missouri got intensely interested in the river again. What they most wanted was flood and bank control, but they also promoted barge traffic, because that was a way to get the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers involved.

It's common for environmentalists to condemn the Corps for destroying the wide, wild Missouri, but the Corps just gave the people of the valley what they demanded. This was channelization of the river to support barge traffic, first up to Kansas City, then to Sioux City. Descriptions of early channelization methods -- pile-driving, hand-weaving of willow-sapling mats, and other homely techniques -- are compelling. The transformation of the Missouri was not done by some disembodied agency. It was a human story, full of blisters and dangers.

Difficulties with the process, particularly the lack of a dependable flow in the barge channel, gave impetus to dam construction on the upper Missouri, beginning with Fort Randall in 1952. Downstream flood control was an additional motive. These linked up with the desire of South Dakotans for hydroelectric and irrigation development. That marriage produced the Pick-Sloan Plan and the chain of main-stem dams on the upper reaches of the river.

Scheiders presents a sad and powerful description of the transformed river that contrasts starkly with that of the wild. The channelized river was poor wildlife habitat. Urban, agricultural, and recreational development pushed right down to the banks.

If there is a weakness in the book, it is that the work focuses on what has been lost, to the exclusion of what has been created. On the upper Missouri in particular, while we mourn the destruction the river and the loss of bottomland, we know also that something spectacular has been installed in its place. I don't care for walleye myself (fish for people who don't like fish, I call them), but the great lake culture of the Missouri valley ranks right up there with rural depopulation in the reshaping of life on the plains since the Second World War.

As I take to the ice this weekend, I'm going to give more thought to the still waters beneath my feet.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu

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