NO. 6 MISSOURI VALLEY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM WEDEL 7 



Turning now to the problem immediately at hand, present plans of 

 the Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior, and the Corps 

 of Engineers, War Department, propose the eventual construction of 

 more than lOO dams and reservoirs within the Missouri River Basin. 

 Many will include power and irrigation, as well as flood and silt con- 

 trol, facilities — in all, "hundreds of major engineering works, such as 

 dams and power plants, and thousands of important structures." Most 

 of the projects are designed for the tributary streams, but with five 

 huge earth-fill dams and two-thirds of the total reservoir capacity 

 proposed for the mainstem of the Missouri between Yankton, S. D., 

 and the mouth of Yellowstone River in eastern Montana. Except 

 along the mainstem, the aggregate area to be flooded is small in pro- 

 portion to the total valley area ; but with dams ranging up to 200 feet 

 or more in height, it is evident that considerable stretches of some of 

 the valleys selected will be inundated. 



It has been estimated, probably conservatively, that at least 80 per- 

 cent of the archeological remains in the United States occur along 

 the banks of rivers and creeks. In the Missouri River Basin, it is 

 already evident that the townsites, camp grounds, burial places, picto- 

 graphs, and other aboriginal remains occur mostly in the stream val- 

 leys near potable water, wood for fuel and building purposes, tillable 

 soil, and cover for hunting. Scores of large townsites, some num- 

 bering hundreds of house ruins and evidently with populations once 

 counted in the thousands, lie along the mainstem of the Missouri in 

 North and South Dakota. Many of these are situated on benches 30 

 to 75 feet above normal stream level and seem certain to disappear 

 beneath the rising waters of the projected reservoirs. Such tributary 

 projects as the Osceola in Missouri, Tuttle Creek and Kanopolis in 

 Kansas, Harlan County, Davis Creek, Boelus, and Medicine Creek in 

 Nebraska, to mention only a few of those in localities whose arche- 

 ology is partially known, will submerge additional unstudied historic 

 and prehistoric sites. Other units in Wyoming, Montana, and the 

 western portions of Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas will be in a 

 region that is disclosing an increasing number of less conspicuous 

 but equally important campsites belonging to early man — ^the Folsom 

 and perhaps other paleo-Indian groups. Here, too, paleontological 

 deposits of economic and scientific importance will be destroyed by 

 flooding. 



The ancient occupants of these diverse localities and periods have 

 left us no written records of their history and activities. Their habita- 

 tion and burial sites, with such objects of everyday and special use as 

 have survived passage of the years, are the sole documents from which 



