Earth, Sweat, and Prairie:

The Construction of Fort Peck Dam

There are places where geography reads like a ledger of human ambition: rivers that insist on a course, plains that hold the wind like a secret, and the machines and hands that try—often clumsily, sometimes brilliantly—to bend nature into service. Fort Peck Dam, rising across the upper Missouri River in northeastern Montana, is one of those places. Built in the depths of the Great Depression, it is at once an engineering monument, a social experiment, and an emblem of an era when public works were meant to reorder economies as much as landscapes. Its story is one of ambition and improvisation: hydraulic fills, diversion tunnels, photojournalists on cliffs, boomtowns sprouting overnight, and the steady, grinding advance of earth and stone against the force of water.¹

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the Fort Peck project in 1933, the country was desperate for work and hope. The dam was one of the signature undertakings of the New Deal, principally administered through the Public Works Administration and executed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. What began as an effort to control floods and generate power quickly became one of the largest earth-filled dams ever attempted—an audacious answer to both economic despair and the practical need to tame the Missouri’s caprice.²

The site itself is stubborn and particular. The Missouri at Fort Peck flows from south to north, meandering across deep alluvial deposits—layers of sands, gravels, and clays—sitting atop a thick bed of Bear Paw shale. Engineers could not trust shallow soils to carry a massive structure, so they removed the uppermost soft clays and drove a continuous steel sheet pile wall down to the firmer shale to form a reliable cutoff. The main dam was designed as a hydraulically filled earthwork: enormous volumes of dredged or pumped material placed carefully in controlled layers, compacted by the sheer weight of water and gravity rather than by rolling tampers alone.³

Hydraulic fill allowed rapid placement of unprecedented volumes of material, but it came with risks. In the autumn of 1938, Fort Peck experienced a notorious and dramatic “earth slide” on the downstream face—an episode that captured public attention and tested the limits of geotechnical understanding at the time. The problem was not mere engineering hubris so much as a lesson learned about the heterogeneity of natural deposits, of seepage pressures, and of constructing colossal structures in conditions that often changed with seasons and water levels. Engineers responded with vigilance and adaptation, reinforcing sections, adjusting drainage and compaction procedures, and continuing the slow task of finishing a dam that had become, in so many ways, a living apprenticeship in hydraulic earthwork.⁴

The human dimension of Fort Peck is as vivid as its technical narrative. At its peak, the construction camps swelled with more than 10,000 workers—men who came from disparate parts of the country seeking steady pay and the odd camaraderie of frontier labor. Temporary towns—Fort Peck (the government town), Wheeler, McCone City and others—sprouted to house families, managers, and men in the field. The federal government constructed housing, theaters, hospitals, and recreation facilities; the New Deal’s social architecture was as tangible as its concrete. These communities were microcosms of the 1930s, where labor organization, racial and ethnic mixing, and the rhythms of seasonal work forged unexpected solidarities and tensions. For many, the months spent on the Missouri’s banks were formative—a salvage of dignity in a decade of dispossession.⁵

For the wider public, Fort Peck entered the American imagination most potently through images. Margaret Bourke-White, one of the first and most daring of photojournalists, climbed the scaffolds and cliffs to frame the dam’s jagged scales and the tiny human figures scurrying across it. Her photographs—published on the inaugural cover of LIFE magazine in 1936—made Fort Peck a national icon of industrial modernity. Those stark, high-contrast images captured a paradox: the machine age’s capacity to dwarf humanity while also gathering it into a purpose. Her lens turned the dam into a stage on which the New Deal’s narrative of rescue and reinvention could be clearly seen.⁶

Technically, Fort Peck’s accomplishments are immense. The completed dam stretches more than 21,000 feet in length and rises roughly 220–250 feet above the cleared riverbed, forming one of the largest reservoirs in the United States. It is—or was—described as the largest hydraulically filled dam in the nation, and its spillway and outlet works were designed to handle enormous volumes of floodwater. Hydropower followed as a later but significant benefit: generating capacity was added over the decades, with powerhouses and turbines producing energy that stitched the Missouri into regional economic life.⁷

Yet the dam’s timeline also speaks to the tensions between haste and permanence. The initial project, begun in 1933, saw the river closed in June 1937 and reservoir filling initiated that November. The dam’s closure was dramatic—an epochal moment when landscape and river were effectively reconstituted—but the work did not end when the gates were shut. Power generation was phased in later; the first hydropower units began producing electricity in the early 1940s. Even after completion, maintenance, monitoring, and occasional remediation have been part of Fort Peck’s life, a reminder that civil works are ongoing conversations with nature rather than single declarative acts.⁸

Fort Peck’s story is also a story of place-making. The rural plains and river valleys around the dam were transformed: new roads, bridges, and towns; changes in irrigation and land use; and the creation of what became Fort Peck Lake—a recreation and wildlife resource that reshaped local economies. Indigenous communities, ranchers, and local residents experienced this transformation in different, often painful ways. Federal reclamation projects sometimes produced benefits and sometimes created displacement or environmental change; the Fort Peck Project’s historical record includes both progress and contestation.⁹

If there is nostalgia to be felt in the tale of Fort Peck, it is the particular kind that recognizes both the dignity and the contradictions of large public works. The dam is a monument to the notion that collective action—organized labor, public funding, engineers and photographers, cooks and clerks—can reshape a region. It is also a reminder that such reshaping is not without cost and that the expertise of successive generations is needed to steward the legacies we inherit. In the photographs, in the surviving houses of the original government town, and in the quieter testimony of the spillway’s buttresses, Fort Peck remains an artifact of an era when the nation chose to spend itself on infrastructure that would outlast the crisis that inspired it.¹⁰

Today, Fort Peck still stands: an earthen spine across the Missouri, a resource for power and recreation, and a chapter in the long and often ambivalent American conversation about development, democracy, and the environment. Standing on its rim—literally or in memory—one can sense the echo of wheel loaders and the smell of diesel, the laughter at a makeshift dance in a barracks, and the whir of turbines that, decades after the last shovel of earth, still spin the river’s will into light. It is a monument that remembers both the hands that built it and the very human need that built it: to make work, to make power, and to imagine the future amid the ruin of the present.¹¹

Notes

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Historical Vignette: Fort Peck Dam,” Omaha District, January 26, 2015, https://www.nwo.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheet-Article-View/Article/562344/historical-vignette-fort-peck-dam/

Corps Lakes Gateway, “Fort Peck Project,” U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, https://corpslakes.erdc.dren.mil/visitors/projects.cfm?Id=G606230

“Fort Peck Dam,” Wikipedia, last modified 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Peck_Dam

“Fort Peck Dam, Fort Peck, MT—Earth Slide Aerial View,” Wikimedia Commons, image and caption collection for Fort Peck (historical photographs), https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A-MONTANA-A-0009-_Fort_Peck_Dam_%2850934751207%29.jpg

“Fort Peck Original Houses Historic District,” The Clio, July 27, 2020, https://theclio.com/entry/110831

“LIFE’s First-Ever Cover Story: Building the Fort Peck Dam, 1936,” LIFE (archive) / Time, November 23, 1936 / retrospective, https://www.life.com/history/lifes-first-ever-cover-story-building-the-fort-peck-dam-1936/; see also Margaret Bourke-White entries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum collections.

Life, November 23, 1936

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “Fort Peck Project Statistics,” Omaha District, July 30, 2012, https://www.nwo.usace.army.mil/Media/Fact-Sheets/Fact-Sheet-Article-View/Article/487625/fort-peck-project-statistics/

Ibid.; U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, “Indian Projects: Fort Peck Project” (historical PDF), https://www.usbr.gov/history/ProjectHistories/INDIAN%20PROJECTS%20FORT%20PECK%20PROJECT.pdf

Montana Memory Project, “Fort Peck Dam and Lake,” Montana Historical Society collections, https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/14798

“Taming the Missouri: Fort Peck Dam,” Civil Engineering (ASCE), December 2012, https://www.civilengineering-digital.com/civilengineering/201212/MobilePagedArticle.action?articleId=238040

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District official pages and image galleries; Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (autobiography), and later retrospectives on LIFE’s early issues (see Time and Life online retrospectives).